Once you learn to spot himpathy, it becomes difficult not to see it everywhere: in men such as the former editor of The New York Review of Books Ian Buruma, who published a self-indulgent essay by a former Canadian talk-show host accused of sexual assault and harassment by more than 20 women; in women like the five Republicans whom CNN convened recently to voice support for Judge Kavanaugh (“Tell me, what boy hasn’t done this in high school?” asked one, shrugging himpathetically). But we’re in a moment during which himpathy is so thoroughly on display, in such a public way, that the time is ripe to push for a mass moral reckoning.

What the Kavanaugh case has revealed this week is that himpathy can, at its most extreme, become full-blown gendered sociopathy: a pathological moral tendency to feel sorry exclusively for the alleged male perpetrator — it was too long ago; he was just a boy; it was a case of mistaken identity — while relentlessly casting suspicion upon the female accusers. It also reveals the far-ranging repercussions of this worldview: It’s no coincidence that many of those who himpathize with Judge Kavanaugh to the exclusion of Dr. Blasey are also avid abortion opponents, a position that requires a refusal to empathize with girls and women facing an unwanted pregnancy.

What makes himpathy so difficult to counter is that the mechanisms underlying it are partly moral in nature: Sympathy and empathy are pro-social moral emotions, which makes it especially hard to convince people that when they skew toward the powerful and against the vulnerable, they become a source of systemic injustice. So, for those for whom himpathy is a mental habit prompted by biased social forces, and not an entrenched moral outlook, the first step to solving the problem is simply learning to recognize when it’s at work, and to be wary of its biasing influence.

The second step to solving the problem of himpathy is listening to girls and women. Do you wonder why someone might not come forward to report sexual assault as an adolescent girl? Listen to Dr. Blasey, who told The Washington Post that at the time she was terrified that she would be in trouble if her parents realized she had been at a party where teenagers were drinking. She recalled thinking: “I’m not ever telling anyone this. This is nothing, it didn’t happen, and he didn’t rape me.” It wasn’t until years later, with the help of a therapist, that she emerged from this denial and recognized the episode as traumatic.

In other words, like many women, Dr. Blasey needed a long time to break a silence born out of society’s entrenched deference to privileged men. It’s a deference that Mr. Trump and Judge Kavanaugh’s other supporters are now demonstrating vividly.

Kate Manne is an assistant professor of philosophy at Cornell and the author of “Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny.”