When last we heard from @HugoSchwyzer in March, the disgraced professor promised to take “an extended hiatus” from writing:
As a quick glance will reveal, I haven’t updated my blog in many months. I am in the midst of what will be a very long break from public writing. The promise of an extended hiatus is one I made many times last summer, but invariably failed to keep. For some time now, however, I’ve been able to stay away from doing interviews, publishing articles and blogposts, and otherwise unhelpfully inserting myself into the conversation.
The April issue of Los Angeles Magazine includes a long article about my fall from grace. Written by Mona Gable, it’s based in part on interviews she did with me in late August of last year while I was staying with my mother in Carmel. These interviews were given during a time when I was in an emotional tailspin, fresh off a psychiatric hospitalization, and heavily medicated on a cluster of psychotropic drugs.
Let’s be clear: Hugo Schwyzer is mentally ill, he has been mentally ill for a long time, and it is highly unlikely that someone suffering from such a chronic psychiatric disorder will ever be completely sane again.
John Hinckley has better prospects for recovery.
“Almost all of the worst allegations about me made by my critics turned out to be true,” Schwyzer said last fall, after confessing that he had slept with many of his students at Pasadena City College. Shortly thereafter, Schwyzer seriously injured a young woman in a felony DUI car crash and admitted: “I am a danger to myself and others.”
Despite his promise of a “hiatus,” however, Schwyzer continues to be active on Twitter, thus exemplifying his basic problem — he is dishonest, irresponsible and untrustworthy, and cannot be expected to restrain his compulsive habits, rooted in a narcissistic craving for attention. Schwyzer’s fame as a “male feminist” was one of his most shameless lies; not only was his own behavior toward women characterized by sexual exploitation and violence, but he claimed to be a professor of “gender studies” (although his college offered no such course) despite the fact that he had taken only a couple of undergraduate classes in the field, having gotten his doctorate in British history. Schwyzer was an impostor, an unethical fraud, and if any of his former students were to sue Pasadena City College, I’d imagine the college’s lawyers would advise administrators to offer a generous settlement.
Schwyzer’s indefensible behavior should alert us to the problematic nature of feminism as an ideology, especially when that ideology is embraced by men. We can understand why disgruntled women would find an anti-male worldview appealing; feminism has the therapeutic value of presenting women with a rationalization for their unhappiness, scapegoating men for everything. But what kind of man is attracted to an ideology that treats his very existence as a sort of social disease?
University of Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen.
“[A] young professor of journalism, Robert Jensen . . . sent me several of his articles describing his transition from heterosexual, to homosexual, to celibate man now exploring impotence as the ultimate response to the apparent inescapability of ‘patriarchal sex,’ in whichever context sex is pursued. . . .
“Jensen gave up sex ‘with other people (including the people in pornography)’ after realizing that he could not have sex of any sort without recreating ‘patriarchal sex.’ He explains, ‘I was the man, and I was in control because men “naturally” take control of sex.’ Even converting to homosexuality did not save him from these dilemmas, for he found that gay sex, too, was contaminated by patriarchal values. . . .
“All men are raised with rapist ethics, he maintains, whether or not they are all rapists in legal terms.”
— Daphne Patai, Heterophobia (1998)
Stipulate that Professor Jensen’s interpretation of feminist theory is more accurate than Hugo Schwyzer’s. Obviously, a middle-age community college professor banging his teenage students is not a “feminist” by any definition. Yet to acknowledge the authenticity of Jensen’s feminism is not to recommend either feminism or Jensen.
Professor Jensen is absolutely correct that eschewing normal masculine sexuality — becoming an impotent gay celibate — is the only way short of castration or suicide that any man can become wholly acceptable within the context of feminist theory.
This is why most people reject feminism. Normal men refuse to accept the insulting anti-male rhetoric of feminism, and normal women — i.e., the kind of women who like normal men — have no enthusiasm for the pet theories of Marxist lesbians.
All feminists are insane, but “male feminists” are a special kind of crazy.
