To recap, series regular Hanna Rosen gives prospective producer Lina Misitzis an assignment: turn her interview with former incel Jack Peterson into a typical Invisibilia piece. Misitzis balks. We first hear Rosen's side of things, in which Peterson relates an odd altercation with a girlfriend (M) he had when he was a teenager. That experience, in his telling, drove him into the arms of incel culture. Violent acts by self-identified incels drove him out of that culture, and he relates that he's in a better place now.
Then we hear Misitzis's version, which highlights how alarming, abusive, and scary Peterson's behavior was. Rosen's (and Invisibilia's) empathy-for-Peterson approach, in Misitzis's view, gives too much uncritical spotlight to Peterson's self-serving version of events. This "himpathy" replicates larger patterns of sidelining female victims of male abuse and stalking.
This is a legitimate point. Peterson's story, even in Rosen's version, is thoroughly messed up. Obsessed with this woman who has told him she's not interested in him (and who, as Misitzis underlines, has no voice in this narrative), Peterson flies across the country to show up unannounced at her house. She makes him strip to his undies to make sure he has no weapons. She's afraid of him. And Peterson, even now, paints himself as the victim of abuse.
And yet. Misitzis does a thing that I have significant problems with. She replays Peterson's taped account, interspersing it with another voice, a woman's voice. The woman's voice describes her side of being the victim of extreme stalking behavior by a man. Misitzis turns Peterson's monologue into a duologue. They aren't exactly interacting, but it sets up a tennis-match back-and-forth between the he said/she said.
Here's the problem, the woman's voice isn't M, Jack's former girlfriend. It's "J." Here's a snippet from the NPR transcript:
MISITZIS: I don't have the voice of Jack's ex, but I do have a whole choir of women's voices in my address book. And after just a few phone calls, I start feeling like their experiences are all interchangeable. One in particular stands out. She's a writer in California. I'll call her J. For many years, J dated someone volatile and abusive.
J: I mean, it was a lot of sexual assault, verbal assault, the whole nine yards.
MISITZIS: J's ex sounds a lot like Jack. And her story about him sounds so similar to the one that Jack tells, I'm going to just play the two beside each other. And by the way, we did get this verified.
PETERSON [JACK]: I actually broke up with her because she was just, like, bitchy all the time.
M: There was one day where he called me probably 40 or 50 times while I was at work.
PETERSON: Then a couple of days later, I was like, look. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have tried to break up with you. But she just wasn't listening, and she wasn't answering my calls.
M: He called 50 times and was threatening to hurt himself - which he had done before.
PETERSON: I would say like, I'm going to f***ing jump off the building tomorrow if you don't stay with me.
M: So eventually, I did pick up. And he said, I know you're dating someone. I know you're seeing someone. You don't understand. You can't do this. I'm coming now.
Do you see what happens? J's voice turns, in the transcript, into M's voice. But it's not M speaking; it's J. Of course this is a rush transcript, NPR includes disclaimers about mistakes and whatnot. But even as I listened to the episode, even with Misitzis's quick explanation at the start, I got a little mixed up about just who was interrupting Peterson's narrative with her own side of things. It seems like Misitzis got M's side of things. But she didn't. She got an account of a woman who had been abused in what Misitzis suggests is a similar way to what M had suffered.
I think the intent here is admirable: pointing out how Peterson's account is leaving out a hugely important perspective. But the tactic here strains journalistic ethics. J's voice replaces the absent M, making it seem like their experiences are identical. But we don't actually know that. I agree it's a reasonable guess, and I can see how the back-and-forth makes for compelling radio. But it sneaks in some facts that aren't facts. It is a fact ("we did get this verified"--what's the this? J's story?) that J suffered from a guy who called her "probably 40 or 50 times while I was at work." But we have no indication M suffered that same thing from Peterson. We have nothing beyond Misitzis's assertion that J's story "sounds so similar to the one that Jack tells, I'm just going to play the two beside each other." She felt that they were the same, so they became the same.
That's...shenanigans. It's taking the worst example of a guy's behavior (well, not the worst--but a very bad example) and cutting-and-pasting it to apply to a whole other person. It is at least uncareful.
The bit also glosses over some other facts about Peterson's situation, facts that--without exonerating his behavior (which, again, was abusive)--at least make the situation more complicated. There's the fact, for instance, that M began a relationship with Peterson when he was 12 and she was 17. It was online. He said he was 14. That's...extremely messed up. We do not generally exonerate the older person in this kind of relationship because they thought the person they were talking to was 14 instead of 12. It's slippery at best to do so here.
And frankly that's another thing that gets glossed over here. Peterson was a teenager when he did all this stuff (the hacking into M's account, the flying across the nation to see her). M was in her twenties. That doesn't make it right. That doesn't make it not-scary for M. Plenty of teenagers can be terrifying. But it does suggest that the whole situation was quite a bit messier than J's experience seems to have been. (Did J begin a romantic relationship with a child?)
The whole segment makes me feel yucky. I had considered using this episode for class. Now I'm not sure.
The worst part is that what I see as the iffy ethics of Misitzis's dramaturgical tactic here undercuts the really important point about how easily empathy gets used to privilege male abusers' feelings and perspectives. The story prompts me to root for the extremely messed-up guy who engaged in abusive behaviors. I feel like I'm tone-policing. Or sea-lioning. Or some other bit of nasty behavior men do to make excuses for men accused of abuse.
I'm frustrated. I think that, since M's account isn't available, maybe the better thing to do would have been not to share Peterson's story at all--or at least not in the way it was shared. I agree that his version of things shouldn't go unchallenged. But Peterson's being an abusive creep in this scenario does not excuse making him seem like a much scarier, more extreme version of abusive creep--at least not without substantiation, and not without also acknowledging the creepiness of the, well, pedophilia going on here from M's end.
I feel dirty, not thoughtful. And not empathetic.
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