Trigger warning for rape and abuse.
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 (hi Noah!). 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!
I had issues with Hugo from the first time I read his blog about a year ago. It started with his assumptions that every man who wanted to have sex with a person younger than he was by a few years was obviously a pedophile and a rapist, and directly equated power with age. Which is clearly not the truth. Apparently, an adult woman who wants to have consensual sex with an adult man who is more than a few years older than her is CLEARLY brainwashed! Being dominated and diminished as a person! Of course, I tell him about… Read more »
Look on the bright side L that means you can just come in and sift through the ashes to get the details (because this got someone ugly in, at least in other places).
But more importantly congrats on the wedding!
Well leave it to me to find out all about this far too late. That’s what I get for going on vacation and getting married, I suppose.
Anyways, I guess Hugo’s not so cool after all~
Congratulations, L! Do you and your husband play pokemon together? My wife and I do.
An update: owing to the recent internet storm, Hugo announced on his blog that he’s left a couple of other projects: Healthy Is the New Skinny and the Perfectly Unperfected Project (the resignation/firing line seems a little blurred at this point). I’ve been a fairly frequent critic of Hugo’s posts (less because of his single-minded devotion to a narrative of male moral culpability per se than because of the absurd reasoning this frequently led him into), but having read the newly-founded Facebook attack page he linked to I’m actually starting to have some sympathy. I’d completely understand anyone who felt… Read more »
So I started writing a comment here but was so long I just turned it into a blog post. I’m not trolling for readers, it’s just a blog post that is directly about NSWATM, and I quote a few comments.
http://toastedtofu.blogspot.com/2012/01/hugo-schwyzer.html
I’ve never understood what was the big deal about Hugo Schwyzer. He has good sides and bad sides, like everybody else. I disagree with some of what he says, and find some of the other stuff really insightful, bringing up subjects I hadn’t thought about before. I guess the controversy is that the bad stuff is really aggravating for those it mostly targets (usually men), while the good stuff can really hit the mark, for both sexes. So opinions are likely to be polarised depending on what people take the most note of. But then again, I’ve seen equally polarised… Read more »
Oh rest assured Tamen its because of stuff like this that I say whether or not I’ll agree with HS on a given topic is the equivalent of a dice roll (where rolling the dice equates to reading any given piece of his material), you just don’t know how it will land. For example the fact that the same man that wrote that piece you quote from also did a piece about how some men may want to give women facials not as a way to humiliate them but as affirmation that men aren’t dirty when it comes to sex… Read more »
Here’s an recent example of why I am leery of Schwyzer. I can’t see how his former addictions have anything to do with the conscious choice he makes on the subject of male rape victims in this article: He reminded her (they’d known each other for a while) that intercourse was off limits. But at one point, she suddenly straddled Ian, grabbed his erection, and slid his penis inside of her. He ejaculated within seconds. … Rape is, as we were reminded by the FBI this month, a word with a specific but evolving meaning. I’m leery about applying the… Read more »
So I’ve marinated on it for a few days and at this point I’m all for trying to keep the criticism aimed at Hugo the damn near everything but the addict away from Hugo the addict.
(http://dannyscorneroftheuniverse.blogspot.com/2012/01/hugo-schwyzer-postor-this-ones-for-you.html)
There’s been a lot of this sort of MRA = gender terrorist thing going on in the threads lately and I’m wondering how this got established as an undisputed fact. I mean it’s sort of comes off sounding really weird. Sort of like a Republican saying, “okay, so Democrats are one sort of evil, but Communists and Nazis actually have a lot in common with the Atheists, so you have to treat all of them and the Democrats as fundamentally the same exact thing…”
@Protagoras: I actually disagree on the “evil is not a natural kind” thing. In my view all hates go together (like Ozy’s Law but more general) and so a TERF actually has a surprising amount in common with an MRA; only the specifics of the hate are different, and not always even that. There’s not much difference in thinking that Men and Women are fundamentally seperate kinds of people and Women are better than there is in thinking that Men and Women are fundamentally seperate kinds of people and Men are better. This is yet another reason why I think… Read more »
“Cis privilege” too, probably. But privilege is a troublesome term, because most of the time it means “not oppressed when others are”, which is not a thing, rather, it’s the lack of a thing. It makes it very difficult to evaluate whether particular groups are privileged or not, because it’s not clear exactly which ways of not being oppressed count as “privilege”.
Schala, it is difficult to know where to begin with your question, as it involves so many dubious assumptions. Women are not, on the whole, a privileged group. If it makes any sense at all to speak of female privilege, radfems are not, on the whole, defenders of it. The radfems’ exclusionary attitude toward transwomen is an extension of their attitude toward men, which is based on male privilege. Even if it is granted for the sake of argument that the attitudes of TERFs toward transwomen are as morally objectionable as the attitudes of MRAs toward women, evil is not… Read more »
The vast majority of drug addicts these days are prescription drug addicts, 15 year old kids who break into their grandfather’s medicine cabinet to crush up and snort some pills is something I saw a lot of kids at my high school do. Granted, you are right, but at the same time I don’t think it means exactly what you say it does. In fact, a teenage friend of mine who died of a drug overdose did it using one of his parent’s prescription medicines. He didn’t die from the weed or the MDMA or everything else he would rather… Read more »
Who becomes a trans-exclusionary radfem? I’m curious, since it’s loser men who becomes MRAs and loser whites who become neo-Nazis.
Then who is there to defend womanhood’s privilege the most vehemently, the TERF. Where does she come from?
“By the way, MRAs with their theories of how women are evil are not a counter-example; the vocal defenders of privilege are consistently the marginal members of the privileged class, not the genuine rulers. It’s overwhelmingly loser men who become MRAs, loser whites who become neo-Nazis, etc”
And if we accept following your reasoning, re the motivation and statu of MRAs and Nazi’s, what would we infer about vocal feminists, Protagoras? Nothing you’d be happy with I expect.
Also, Godwin.
Cara, I didn’t say being privileged was being objective, I said being privileged made it easier to be objective. Obviously, that something is easy for someone doesn’t mean they automatically do it. As Sagredo suggested with his example of how victims of racism perceive the motives of members of the dominant racial group, being oppressed encourages an extremely pessimistic attitude toward the dominant class, not an extremely accurate one; misplaced trust is much more dangerous than misplaced suspicion, so it’s safer to be suspicious all the time, to assume that the dominant class always has hostile intent. This is usually… Read more »
Schwyzer’s always come off as a little… sleazy to me. Even before I knew about the student-fucking and attempted murder.
Word of God would like to point out that the contributors are all feminists (except Cheradenine) but that the blog is about men, not about feminism. Also we don’t ban people for dissenting opinions, so the opinions of the commenters should not be taken as the opinions of the contributors.
Men’s rights: The radical notion that men are human too!
I am both serious and mocking here.
Cara: “… the crap about rape being a sexual response” The human brain is not hardwired so that sexual drive and dominance/aggression feelings and behaviors are mutually exclusive. Neither is it hardwired so that sexual drive and caring/empathy/respect necessarily go together, even if it does for most of us. Some rape is mainly an act to achieve or strengthen position and feelings of power over the victim, and making the victim submissive. Sometimes there is a clear component of sexual drive in that, sometimes there is not. Some rape is mainly done to sadistically inflict pain and hurt (which overlaps… Read more »
I think I misunderstood what “No, Seriously, WATM” really means on this blog. I was under the impression that it was a way to express understanding of men’s feelings about feminism without encouraging the MRA garbage. I’m sorry; I think I was in error there. This blog is not, strictly speaking, about feminism at all. The bloggers are all feminists but that’s not relevant to the blog. “No, Seriously, What About The Men” may be a pun but it’s to be taken literally; the topic of this blog is men and men’s issues and if feminism appears it’s as incidental… Read more »
I think I misunderstood what “No, Seriously, WATM” really means on this blog. I was under the impression that it was a way to express understanding of men’s feelings about feminism without encouraging the MRA garbage. I’m sorry; I think I was in error there. I thought the purpose was to allow men (and others, for that matter) to talk about gender issues in a much broader and freer way than the “feminist blogosphere” seems to typically allow for. And if that includes some tolerance for “MRA bullshit”, so be it. From what I see, accusations of MRAism can refer… Read more »
bell hooks once wrote that she would continuously tell her partner to his express his feelings, and when he finally did, she became upset and realized that she wasn’t read to actually hear about his feelings.
That’s how I feel sometimes about feminism and men. *Some* feminists just want a Men’s Auxiliary to back them up when they need it, but keep quiet when they don’t. I think it’s great that Ozy has a space where this is challenged.
I thought it was more a place to talk about issues that effect men. Obviously that’s going to touch on feminism inevitably, but feminism is not the main subject of discussion (unless you take the view that feminism covers all gender-related issues).