Hugo Schwyzer has been very unpopular lately.
A quick summary for those of us who don’t follow giant Internet slapfights while giggling: it started with Feministe, where the fabulous Clarisse Thorn cross-posted her interview with Hugo Schwyzer from Role/Reboot. The Feministe commenters dislike him because of his history of abuse and consent violations and because he keeps talking about feminism while being a straight white male.
Then someone (I am unsure on the timeline on this, but both Tumblr and the Feministe comment section mentioned it) brought up that Hugo Schwyzer tried to kill his girlfriend.
Feministe’s consensus was roughly “what the fuck? Why is a confessed attempted murderer allowed to comment about feminism?” Comments were closed on the thread! Clarisse Thorn wrote smart things about change and accountability! Maia wrote other smart things about change and accountability, completely disagreeing with Clarisse! Feministe issued an apology and that thread spawned a thousand comments that I don’t have time to read, but I presume that if it turns out somewhere in there that Hugo secretly murders puppies someone will tell me!
Meanwhile! Hugo Schwyzer leaves the Good Men Project because Tom Matlack wrote some pieces critical of feminism and was apparently shitty at Amanda Marcotte on Twitter! I bring this up only to note that, through all of this drama, Hugo has managed to achieve a feat no one thought he could achieve before: MRAs and radfems, masculists and feminists, standing side by side, united in their hatred for Hugo Schwyzer. It’s almost Fred-Phelpsian.
I don’t have final conclusive thoughts about any of the issues the various Schwyzer-backlashes have wrought: a lot of it is me working through the various issues myself, so I fully expect to change my mind. (I mean, more than I already fully expect to change my mind. Because I’m not a Republican presidential candidate, my positions are allowed to evolve.)
One of the core issues, I think, that both Maia and Clarisse addressed, was “what is the role of abusers in gender egalitarianism?” A full assessment of Hugo Schwyzer must include that he has done some fascinating work: his “Of Never Feeling Hot: the missing narrative of desire in the lives of straight men” was foundational to my concept of the Myth Of Men Not Being Hot and Figleaf’s Two Rules of Desire.
Similarly, one doesn’t want to make an abusive history an automatic cause of exclusion from the feminist community. Recovering abusers have things to teach us about the process of ending abuse: the psychology of abusers, the causes of abuse, the best techniques for teaching abusers how to have healthy relationships. Worse, if ostracism is the consequence of admitting abuse, recovering abusers will be less likely to come forward, which will make it far more difficult to take precautions to make a safer space; survivors may even feel even more pressure not to say who abused them, because they don’t want to lose their abusers from the movement.
On the other hand, I believe firmly in the feminist community as a safe space for survivors of rape and abuse; I’ve tried my hardest (although I have failed before and will fail again) to make NSWATM a space with zero tolerance for victim-blaming bullshit. Given what we know of the abuse-apology cycle and the recidivism rate of abusers, is it really the message we want to send to have a former abuser as a major spokesperson of the movement? Maia discusses in her article– and is quite right about– the horrific pressure on abuse survivors to make nice with their abusers for the sake of the movement, because the abuser is a community leader, because the abuser has “reformed” and their contributions are so invaluable and we can’t live without them.
And are the abusers really irreplaceable? The nice thing about concepts is that they can be developed by multiple people: if Hugo Schwyzer hadn’t written about men not feeling hot, someone else would have. Is that contribution so invaluable that we’ll excuse his attempted murder?
It’s also interesting, in the light of Schwyzer’s abuse history, to look at a few of the tendencies people have criticized in his writing. The tendency to white-knight and pedestalize women. His pride in being RateMyProfessor.com’s hottest professor (particularly troubling given that his history includes (consensual) sex with students). His apparent belief that all professors want sex with students (troubling in the light of the studies that show that rapists vastly overrate the number of rapists in the population). The focus, in many of his stories about his recovery, on how his actions affected himself, and not on how his actions affected his victims. How many of these are consequences of his abusive personality? Having been an abuser may have made his gender analysis far worse than it could have been.
The other major issue around Schwyzer, as far as I can see, is his position in the feminist movement. He was the Straight Middle-Class Cis White Man who was here to explain feminism to everyone. To be clear: there are a lot of straight middle-class abled cis white men who are awesome feminists and have great insight into how gender works [citation needed]. It is short-sighted in the extreme to say that straight middle-class cis white men shouldn’t talk about gender, just like it’s short-sighted in the extreme to say queer poor disabled trans women of color shouldn’t talk about gender.
In general, in our culture, we tend to view straight middle-class abled cis white men as knowing more than other people do. In particular, in gender issues, they tend to be viewed as more objective. Where a woman would be a man-hating feminazi, a man could be an outside observer who has seriously considered the issues. Tim Wise can say America is a racist society and still be considered a serious thinker; a person of color who says the same thing probably hates America and freedom and apple pie.
I’m not sure if there’s a solution to this, except ending the kyriarchy. However, Schwyzer’s fall does leave a vast gaping hole crying out for the Straight White Cis Abled Male Feminist Who Explains Things. I vote Noah in the position! While he is an atheist instead of a Christian, and hence less privileged than Schwyzer, he has many sterling qualifications. For instance, he is six feet tall! He’s a snarky bastard! He has schnazzy hats! He has never tried to murder any of his girlfriends!
There are some others who may be suited for the position: Charlie Glickman; Robert Jensen; David Futrelle. We will have to figure out how to decide which candidate is the most superior! I say a cagefight to the death. Typewriters at dawn!
Thing of Things 
Sigh, it’s too bad he turned out to be a racist narcissist. It actually kinda pisses me off because:
1. It makes some feminists more irrationally suspicious of white men.
2. That article on never feeling hot is awesome, and now I feel like I cannot site it anymore because the well has been poisoned.
3. It makes people more suspicious of reformed sexists.
So, Ozy, who do you think is the new Straight White Cis Abled Male Feminist Who Explains Things these days?
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… Why?
Are you making a representation argument? That we need white men represented in feminism, for their perspective and so that we can effectively signal “Hey, you, white guy! You might fit in here, come check us out?”
Do you think that some measure of Schwyzers influence was because he was a white man, and someone needs to take up that mantle so that it can be used for good without the murder-y bother?
I’ve never felt short of “white dude who explains thing” (to be fair, I’ve never felt short of any demographic explaining things).
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I think the idea here is that straight cis etc. white men, due to their privilege, are completely unable to understand feminism unless some other straight cis etc. white man explains it to them. When a woman is talking, all they hear is “wah wah wah” like in those Charlie Brown cartoons.
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Or that they simply are less likely to pay attention. It doesn’t have to go all the way to trombones.
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Tautology? If no white male can understand feminism, how did one such man gain the knowledge in order to pass it on? Or perhaps you’re being facetious.
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If that’s the case, Schwyzer failed. Most of his writing was published in forums that were frequented by people who were already feminist. The number of straight white men who were previously ignorant or hostile to feminism who changed their mind because of his writing is pretty much zero.
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This was a joke.
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The whole Schwyzer saga weirds me out because I knew his father (he taught me a lot about Kant).
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Men can make feminist arguments without being written off as “feminazis” for the same reason that women can talk about the MRM without being written off as virgin misogynists. Similarly, white people can talk about racism without being written off whiny race baiters for the same reason that Chris Rock can perform a skit about the difference between “black people” and “niggers” without having to beg for forgiveness on television.
So I’m not entirely sure the kyriarchy model is really the best fit here – it seems more about Nixon going to China than anything else.
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Among the many reasons that people do things, two prominent ones are self-interest and a concern for justice. The more people your movement contains who don’t obviously stand to benefit from it, the more plausible it is that it’s actually about justice.
Obviously, this is a very imperfect heuristic. But it’s better than a lot of other heuristics that people commonly use.
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“Male feminists are just cucks hoping to have their cages taken off for good behaviour,” or some variation thereof is a common attack made against male feminists that makes more sense within your model than the kyriarchy model – or at least it makes sense in a much simpler way.
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@ Somebody
A kyriarchy model of the motivation: “Although these men look like fellow Straight Middle-Class Cis White Men, they have secret low-status qualities*, so we don’t have to listen to them after all”.
* e.g., being sexually subordinate to women
Seems pretty simple to me?
[note: I’m definitely not an expert on kyriarchy — feel free to correct me]
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My experience is that men are taken even less seriously than women when talking about feminism in particular and social justice in general: http://33.media.tumblr.com/6eb331534c43444689fb80cdd78c4153/tumblr_nerldkuk5c1rc29i6o1_500.jpg
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Ah, what a lovely image. It delivers two arguments at once:
1. Feminist men (specifically, male feminist webcomic authors) are just weak beta white knights pretending to care about feminism in a desperate effort to get laid.
2. Your dreams of diversity are futile, ladies! Straight white (and Asian) males are the source of all the nice things in your life, including webcomics.
But note that they highlight the authors of several popular pro-feminist comics, all of whom happen to be men. So, who’s taken seriously depends on who’s doing the taking. I think the creator of that image wouldn’t listen to female feminists either.
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While that is an argument that is indeed made very often, you’ll notice that most of those authors were chosen very deliberately. Diaz and Dobson are less than stellar examples of male feminism
>Your dreams of diversity are futile, ladies! Straight white (and Asian) males are the source of all the nice things in your life, including webcomics.
I honestly don’t understand how you came to that interpretation
>I think the creator of that image wouldn’t listen to female feminists either.
I don’t think we can know that.
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Could you explain it to me? I don’t think I have enough background knowledge to understand what you mean.
Well, perhaps I’m wrong. Divining arguments from collages is an error-prone enterprise 🙂
They seem to imply that the only reason a “straight white male” could be a “defender of diversity” is sex (presumably, with feminists and other “social justice warriors”?). I don’t think that attitude is compatible with taking pro-diversity arguments seriously, no matter who’s making them.
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>Could you explain it to me? I don’t think I have enough background knowledge to understand what you mean.
From work I cannot access all the relevant information, but to make it short, Diaz is not a “practice what you preach” kind of guy. The others are a variety of creepy, crazy and just guilty of making dumb ideological comics (read, every ideological comic).
>Well, perhaps I’m wrong. Divining arguments from collages is an error-prone enterprise
I was actually hoping you’d explain to me how you came to this conclusion. As I said, we can’t know the true motives whoever made the picture, so all we’ve got are our own interpretations, I’ve seen this type of criticism coming from both people against SJ (“haha, what betas”) and for it (“don’t talk over us”/”thank you, but I don’t need a male/white savior”), but that angle is genuinely new to me.
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Wait, I thought this was about men being taken less seriously just because they’re men? If the image criticizes bad behaviour or bad comics, that seems like a different thing.
Maybe I’ve spent too much time on reddit? But OK, I’ll try to pin it down… The growing number of exclamation marks gave me the impression that they’re building up an inductive argument, i.e., “the author of this comic is a SWM, and this one, and this one, and this one… see, they’re pretty much all drawn by SWMs, except this one by an Asian dude, haha”.
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>From work I cannot access all the relevant information, but to make it short, Diaz is not a “practice what you preach” kind of guy.
In that he likes to write a lot about the evils of sexualization in media but then turns around and draws a comic about a cute transhumanist girl with a lot of focus on her ass and a suspicious amount of nudity or near-nudity? Fair point, but I don’t see hypocrisy in Diaz’s work, I just see a shallow understanding of his own espoused ideology. He’s a Strong Female Protagonist kind of guy, and he focuses more on content than framing. Does kind of clash with the the personality he’s trying to suggest for Kim (hyper-intellectual, uncomfortable with sexuality, dislikes fragile meat bodies), though.
And it makes his occasional thinkpieces a little (more) condescending, but I dropped them from my Tumblr feed years ago.
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I haven’t read the guy’s stuff, either his criticism or his comics. It is possible he is getting it wrong. That said, there is a difference between sexualization *in general* and sexualized material that is produced by-and-for the male gaze, which the latter seems to dominate much of our visual media, including comics.
Which, if you ask for bright lines or simple definitions of this stuff, you won’t get them. It is not like I can build a five node decision tree that lays this out. That said, there is art that reflects women’s perspectives along with queer perspectives, which both are noticeably different from by-and-for male gaze material.
One would expect that straight cis men would have a harder time producing material that “feels right” in this regard, but I would not want to categorically rule it out.
If the man’s material falls short, it should be criticized.
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I find it somewhat amusing that, in a movement that is almost overwhelmingly staffed by women, the idea of including more men is seen as something that would reduce diversity.
(yes, yes, I realize that the term “diversity” here means “the ratio of underprivileged individuals to privileged ones” and not “the number of distinct demographic clusters”, I just find the ambiguity amusing)
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@Bugmaster — Are you aware of *why* feminism is like this, like the actual history?
It goes like this: the women who make the core of the second wave emerge as figures in the 1970’s, largely as veterans of the antiwar movement and in general the 1960’s counterculture movement.
About which, they approached these movements with the same wide-eyed hope as man of the men, a new oppression-free paradise of peace, love, and drugs.
So yeah, a bit naïve, but at the time many people were naïve.
One thing about which they were naïve was this: the moral caliber of the men. See, it turns out that to many men in the peace movement, the involvement of women was quite welcome. After all, someone needed to wash clothes in the commune, someone needed to make the coffee, and when the men were speaking up in the circle, the women could sit behind them and rub their backs.
In other words, there was not much difference between a right wing sexist creep and a left wing sexist creep. The women in fact found they were there to serve the men. Their voices were largely unwanted.
Over time a theory develops, this: under patriarchy, men speak over women. And it is true. In fact, we can measure it (in business meetings, in classrooms, on and on). This is a real thing. *Most* men are distinctly uncomfortable listening to *most* women in *most* circumstances. (The various exceptions are interesting.) Men get annoyed. They perceive even a small amount of speech by women as too much speech. When surveyed, they overestimate the amount of time women took up compared with men. They overestimate the number of women who spoke versus men. They will describe events where women have about 20% participation as “woman dominated.” Women are socially punished for taking leadership roles.
This is the context under which feminism has decided to make itself largely a *women’s movement*, by women and for women and run by women.
The involvement of men has always been complex.
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@veronica d:
Believe it or not, I have no problem with feminism being a movement “by women and for women and run by women”; I believe I’ve said so several times in the past. I’m not sure whom you’re arguing with, but it’s not me.
In fact, I believe that any activist movement that tries to improve the living conditions of group X cannot possibly succeed (by which I mean, gain public recognition) unless it excludes everyone who does not belong to group X, for multiple reasons. That is to say, there’s nothing unique about feminism in this regard; the same reasoning applies to LGBTQ activists, atheists, people of various specific races, emacs users, vi users, take your pick.
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“*Most* men are distinctly uncomfortable listening to *most* women in *most* circumstances.”
Veronica, I think that the inverse is also true, and patriarchy just *forces* women to listen to men too much and self-sacrifice too much. Wherever a liberated, feminist space for women and by women arises, women can attain their potential to become just as insular and prejudiced as men are. And there’s nothing wrong with that. People should be free to be their authentic asshole selves. I’m a selfish asshole, you’re a selfish asshole, most everyone is. Yet that’s still no reason to endorse bigoted, harmful asshole *behavior*.
Which, incidentally, is why we have TERFs. This one-sided view is PRECISELY the thing that enables TERF logic. “Male socialization” is such Kryptonite to True Long-Suffering Womyn that anything is acceptable in order to quarantine those contaminated by it! You probably got plenty of that from cis feminists in your time, haven’t you? I sure have!
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My subjective observations as a male feminist:
Most anti-feminist ideologues (a category I suspect whoever made this graphic falls into) won’t take anything said by a feminist seriously, regardless of the sex of the feminist. The form of the dismissal may be different – women are more likely to be dismissed as man-haters, and much more likely to just get abusive messages and “who’d want to rape you?” comments, while men are much more likely to get “magina” and “you’re just trying to get laid” – but it’s a dismissal in both cases.
There are some radfems who simply won’t take anything about feminism said by a man (feminist or not) seriously.
And there are some people, between those two extremes, who DO seem to be more ready to listen to certain opinions when they come from a man (for instance, when talking about the problem of sexist street harassment). Not to the exclusion of all other considerations, but as one factor among others that feeds into their “do I take what this person is saying seriously?” subroutine.
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I have nothing to say about the Hugo Schwyzer thing, since I didn’t follow it and lack any grounds for an opinion. But I have a more general comment on:
Similarly, one doesn’t want to make an abusive history an automatic cause of exclusion from the feminist community….On the other hand, I believe firmly in the feminist community as a safe space for survivors of rape and abuse…
This seems to fall into the trap of assuming that the world can be modeled neatly as divided between abusers and abuse victims (and perhaps lucky people who are neither). But the world clearly doesn’t work that way; some people have both done very harmful things to others and suffered great harm themselves.
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Which is also relevant to the fact that Schwyzer tried to kill both his girlfriend *and himself*. This was not a predetermined sociopathic plot; it was a deeply ailing person doing fucked-up things.
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I have always been struck by how rarely people note that. Or that he was high at the time.
Which is not to say that it’s remotely fucking acceptable, or that he’s not, in fact, currently a terrible person (I honestly don’t know, and don’t much care). But one should be honest, even about bad people.
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Most sociopaths are not Hannibal Lecter. Quite the opposite, in many respects: they tend to be impulsive, reckless, aggressive, and — when not making an effort to be charming — openly cruel. Substance abuse is a very common indicator, especially when accompanied by violence.
Just from reading Ozy’s account and Schwyzer’s Wikipedia entry, I’d assign a very high probability that he has some form of antisocial personality disorder.
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Please do not diagnose strangers on my blog.
Schwyzer has been diagnosed with a personality disorder– borderline, the same one I have.
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I think what sometimes gets missed is that an awful lot, quite possibly the majority, of Schwyzer’s commentary on gender was about those whom, in a purely identity sense (*), people could hardly object to him discussing, namely men.
Anyway, with that in mind, I’d suggest Ally Fogg as a far better alternative.
(*) Not that there weren’t plenty of other reasons to have problems with much of what he said about men.
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Re: The Role of abusers in the feminist movement–
Hugo’s actions don’t mean that we need to discard his body of work. Good arguments are good arguments, even if the people who make them are bad.
However, I think that it seems like it would be a good idea to not invite him to conferences and other in-person feminist meetups (because he seems to be a fairly predatory person, and we don’t have much credible evidence that he’s actually changed), and definitely should be kept away from being a college professor (since he uses that position in an especially exploitative and predatory way).
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In an ironic splash added to the coda: Assuming this is the same Noah (large, cueball-headed, lives/d in Portland, good taste in suits), he is also probably an abuser. At least, he stopped being invited to the parties where I’d met him after his girlfriend broke up with him, and while I didn’t know them well, my understanding was that he had been abusive to her over a long period.
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His tactics at NSWATM were abuserish as hell.
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What tactics are those? Genuinely curious, not trying to call you out.
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I presume Ozy’s endorsement of Noah is one of the many things they would no longer defend about this article
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Really?
I’m assuming you’re talking about the same Noah who used to co-run NSWATM.
I increasingly grew to dislike him over the course of that blog, after initially giving him the benefit of the doubt for even helping to start a blog called NSWATM in the first place. But this is serious news. If he’s guilty, I hope he faces the appropriate consequences, but if it’s stemming from as much mental unwellness as Schwyzer’s actions were, I hope he can get help.
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Dark Triad types are drawn to communities in which one is presumed to be a good person merely for saying the “right” things loudly and repeatedly. It’s easy for them to fake. If they can say those things in apparent defiance of self-interest, that’s a bonus.
The same thing happens in fundamentalist religious communities. The worst human being I have ever personally met was the pastor of an independent church in my hometown in rural Appalachia. It was incredible what he got away with, until enough victims came forward to make his guilt indisputable. I always found it ironic that this same man had loudly castigated himself as a worthless sinner countless times from the pulpit.
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Two thoughts spring to mind after reading this, both general rather than specific to the situation, about which I know nothing. Firstly, when it comes to forgiveness, secular society can learn a lot from Christian thought. I’m an atheist, but there’s some very good and interesting Christian writing on forgiveness. Secondly, if we are doing the role call of straight cis white dudes in the movement, I’d like to give Ally Fogg a shoutout, as he has always impressed me with his writing.
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I am shocked that you would consider Futrelle good for anything. Maybe his M.O. wasn’t clear at the time of writing?
(For reference, his M.O. is to dumpster dive comment sections for the worst idiots, then pretend that, say, a reddit comment voted down into the “don’t show by default” category is representative of $ENEMY. It’s basically all strawmen, all the time.)
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Over time Futrelle has become increasingly mindkilled. Likewise, he has become increasingly *personally involved in bitter disputes*, which seldom brings out the best in people.
In fact, I think the latter is his real failure. If he could have stayed detached and (kinda-sorta) objective, I think his site would be better.
That said, I am glad his site was there, even if I do not like what it has become. You say he grabs obscure comments, but actually that seems not to be true. Certainly there is plenty to mine from the AVFM staff and other biggish names in the manosphere.
Right now his top article is about some shit Vox Day said. The next two are about the recent GH article on that men’s rights convention, about which, the article is hardly *balanced*, but I suspect it is *true*. Certainly Elam is an MRA figure of prominence. After that is one about some fuckwit on Heartiste’s blog. Again, maybe this is a bad sample of *humanity*, but it is not a cherry-picked sample from a random on Reddit.
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“However, Schwyzer’s fall does leave a vast gaping hole crying out for the Straight White Cis Abled Male Feminist Who Explains Things. I vote Noah in the position! ”
Ozy, I love your sense of humor! I also respect your honesty in reprinting this. That took guts.
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Thank you.
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I think I missed enough of the drama that I can’t make sense of the specifics of this post (or many of the comments, especially around Noah), but a person’s story does not begin or end with the label “abuser”. I’ve run into this problem when trying to describe what my mother did to my sister and I: The moment I use the term “abuse”, my audience melts into puddles of sympathy, and they close their ears to the nuance I’m trying to convey.
Just last week I was meeting with a psychotherapist-in-training who was paying me to be a practice subject to interview and run tests on, and she asked me about my family history. When I got to the part about my mother, she immediately started offering her condolences and thanking me for sharing something so personal. I have secrets that it would take real bravery to confess, but being abused as a teenager is not one of them, and it annoys me that I can’t include it as a routine housekeeping matter because abuse is assumed to be this all-encompassing thing that defines both the abuser and the abused.
If we were talking about my mother’s potential inclusion in, say, a feminist group, I would advise against it because she’s psychologically unstable and – frankly – not very bright. If her abuse should enter into it at all then it would be as an example of her instability, not something damning in itself.
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“In general, in our culture, we tend to view straight middle-class abled cis white men as knowing more than other people do.”
Okay, sure.
“In particular, in gender issues, they tend to be viewed as more objective. Where a woman would be a man-hating feminazi, a man could be an outside observer who has seriously considered the issues. Tim Wise can say America is a racist society and still be considered a serious thinker; a person of color who says the same thing probably hates America and freedom and apple pie.”
Wait, what? Gender and race issues are one of the few areas where white males are given less credibility than everyone else. One of us has perceptions which are seriously skewed.
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Credibility on gender issues is function of both gender and position. If I’m a man and say “Our culture is biased against women” I have more credibility than a woman who presents an identical argument because I don’t materially benefit. Going the other way, if I’m a woman who says “Our culture has largely resolved gender issues; things like the pay gap only persists as a historical artifact (because feminism hasn’t been around long enough to get women into high-paying positions which take a long time to get into). Running with the pay gap example, if we push feminism until it goes away, it’ll be because women in the younger generations are outearning men of the same age to counterbalance the men in the older generations who outearn the women, and that’s fair to nobody,” then I have more credibility than a man who says the same thing for the same reason.
If you restrict “people who talk about gender issues” to “people who are on the feminist side of gender issues,” then the men will appear more objective because they don’t gain materially from feminism’s success*, and so will appear less biased.
So, if you hang around exclusively in feminist circles, you’ll probably see men be viewed as more objective because of the only side you see them on. If you spend a lot of time in anti-feminist circles, you probably notice the opposite effect. And then availability heuristic happens, and you believe “men viewed as more/less credible re. gender issues” is a fact about the world, even though it only looks that way because of where you hang out.
*At least, they don’t gain from being men. They’re probably better of as *people* who supported the winning side
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When Schwytzer had his last blow-up, a lot was made of the fact that he abused prominent black feminists – brownfemipower, black amazon, Mikki Kendall, etc.
Now looking for what he actually said and did, all I can find is commentary on how terrible he is toward black feminists without any actual quotes from him. As best I can tell, their beef is that he was getting speaking engagements that they thought belonged to them … standard oppression olympics stuff with the occasional bankshot against “white feminism” for giving him a platform.
So what did he actually do or say to these people? It seems like I’m missing something here. Don’t get me wrong, he dug his own grave career-wise, but there’s more to this.
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Back when this shit happened, I’d read a bit of Hugo Schwyzer and I was a regular reader of Clarisse Thorn. Then shit hit the fan. It was a fairly large chain of events. People were REALLY ANGRY that Hugo had been given a platform to speak at Feministe. There were several camps. Some people thought Hugo shouldn’t be exiled. Some people said “Told you so; we could tell he sucked”, and some others said “Don’t blame people for being taken in by an abuser.” And then there was another divide between white feminists who had been supportive of Schwyzer until That Shit Happened, and various womanists/feminists who had said “SEE WE WERE TELLING YOU HE WAS BAD NEWS AND YOU IGNORED THIS BECAUSE HE WAS BAD TO WOC.”
There was a lot of focus on various things he’d done and written. He’d defended Jefferson fucking his slave, for example. (I think some might not call that a perfectly neutral characterization, but that is DEFINITELY how the people attacking him over it saw it.) And of course the big talking point was “He tried to kill himself and his girlfriend.” Various people said things about redemption or whatever; various people said that he shouldn’t be forgiven, or at least not without a lot more scrutiny and proof that he’d changed.
Anyway before this blew up I’d read a little Hugo. Linked by Clarisse probably, and since I really liked her blog I’d been inclined to be charitable. But he had… Annoyed me. I’ll try to describe. He felt a little arrogant. No, not in the swing-your-dick-around way that Amanda Marcotte is. It was subtler and so ticked me off more, or at least made me a little more uneasy. But arrogant isn’t really the word to describe it. It was… Fake authority. The way I’d put it to myself at the time was: “He writes about feminism as if he were a woman writing about feminism.” I’m not saying “Men can’t be feminists” or whatever, but… He really tried to speak with That Authority, as if he were, well… A woman. He wrote similarly to how women write about feminism. A perspective/authority thing. I mean perspective relating to authority, as in, he seemed to consider himself authoritative. This is a rambly description, but it needed to be to convey some of the nuances of what I thought at the time. His writing had just been a little offputting to me, a little smarmy and annoying. He had that implied authority that women writing about feminism did, and it felt really /weird/ to have that come from a man. I did like some of his articles, though, like the one about men not feeling desired. They took on a different light later, though I think I found them slightly whiney at the time. Oh, and at the top of his blog it says “Author, speaker, shattering gender myths”. Yeah, pompous.
But it was just that: A vague feeling.
So then That Shit happened. Not only was it about abusers and feminism, it was about race too. I think Clarisse basically disappeared from Feministe after that.
Though actually, I think I’m conflating incidents, because a year or two later there was the second thing where Hugo pulled his whole “I’m terrible and I’m going to shut up and blah blah” thing and I’ve no idea if he was Peter Molyneux* about that or if he actually disappeared. THAT might have been when race got brought up much more. Or maybe it was both? Anyway point is, there was the shit that happened after Clarisse’s interview with him, and then another thing later. Then maybe yet another? I wasn’t keeping track.
Also, it’s worth noting that when things blew up, I don’t think his admission of having tried to kill his ex was new. It just suddenly became a Big Deal because he got interviewed for a post at Feministe.
*Peter Molyneux is a game developer known for making grandiose claims about what will be in his games, claims the developers working under him haven’t heard before, and then failing to deliver on those claims. How I’m using his name here though is about his recent promise to stop doing interviews and talking to journalists, while at the same time doing loads of interviews.
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I remember having misgivings about Schwyzer from way back. In the early days of the feminist blogosphere I recall that whenever there was an argument between feminist bloggers, he tended to show up and insistently push himself into the center the discussion, even when it had nothing to do with him.*
Years later, a few years before his big meltdown, he adopted this schtick in which he held forth to young women about the deficiencies of Young Men These Days (e.g., all the young men are addicted to porn, all the young men just want to play video games and smoke pot all day & etc.). It struck me as very neo-Victorian: “Beware ladies! Men are brutes completely beholden to their beastial natures!”
I never paid close attention and didn’t know about the abuse/attempted murder until the feministe post, but something seemed off. I totally get what you mean about him seeming to speak with Authority that didn’t seem quite appropriate.
*This often consisted of him taking sides with a white mainstream feminist blogger against a less well known WOC blogger.
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