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January 19, 2012 Update | Hugo Schwyzer has taken down the two blogposts mentioned in this essay. The original confession can, for the moment, still be found at this cache, and the followup post is cached here and duplicated here.
January 23, 2012 Update | More on the Schwyzer controversy, and on the harm he’s still inflicting on the feminist movement, can be found here.
August 2, 2013 Update | Nothing more from me on Schwyzer for a while. Some final thoughts here.
Male feminist blogger and professor Hugo Schwyzer has been taking a lot of heat recently, much of it precipitated by a blogpost in which he detailed what he describes as “a binge episode that ended with my attempt to kill myself and my ex-girlfriend with gas.” (The incident took place in 1998, and he disclosed it publicly for the first time early last year.)
Schwyzer has put up a new post this morning expressing additional regret for the murder-suicide attempt, and apologizing for certain elements of the original piece. But his apologies evade many of his critics’ core complaints.
First, there’s the incident itself. The woman, his sometime lover, came to him for help after being tied up, raped, and abused by her drug dealer. They went back to his apartment, took more drugs, and had “desperately hot, desperately heartbreaking sex.” Then, when she passed out, he decided to kill them both. He turned on the gas on his oven, aimed its flow at his girlfriend, took some booze and pills, and lay down to die beside her.
Schwyzer now describes this act as one of “sheer monstrousness,” and it certainly is that. But it’s also something else. It’s a crime he construed and justified as an act of caretaking:
I looked at her emaciated, broken body that I loved so much. I looked at my own, studying some of my more recent scars. (I’d had a binge of self-mutilation earlier in the week, and had cigarette burns on both arms and my torso.) And then it came to me: I needed to do for her and for myself the one thing I was strong enough still to do. I couldn’t save her, I couldn’t save me, but I could bring an end to our pain. My poor fragile ex would never have to wake up again, and we could be at peace in the next life. As drunk and high as I was, the thought came with incredible clarity. I remember it perfectly now.
She was “fragile.” She was “broken.” But he was “strong enough” to do what she needed, what she didn’t have the strength to do for herself. He would bring her peace, a peace they would share forever.
It’s not enough for a feminist to describe this crime as horrific, though it is. It’s not enough to describe it as “something truly awful,” as he does. This was an act of a very particular kind, and Schwyzer never calls it by its name.
Because it’s not just the fact that Schwyzer committed an act of violence that’s of such concern, or even the fact that he committed an act of intimate partner violence. It’s that he committed an act of gendered violence, the nature of which he still hasn’t come to terms with.
Murder-suicide is a crime committed almost exclusively by men, with their intimate partners their typical victims. In the post he wrote this morning, though, Schwyzer refers to the woman he tried to kill as “another human being” twice, as “another person” once, as his “ex” six times, but never as his lover, his girlfriend, a woman.
In all his writing about this act he has never addressed its implications for his feminism — the feminism he professed when he committed the crime, or the feminism he professes today. And though he construes the story as the final dramatic act of his old life of addiction and irresponsibility, it’s a story that resonates powerfully with his current public presence.
Here’s how Schwyzer described his relationship to his students not long ago:
Go ahead, call me paternalistic. I’ll wear that title with pride, thank you. I see my students not merely as independent, autonomous agents whom I need to empower, but as vulnerable young people whom I — and others around me — need to protect. And I still have the nerve to call myself a feminist.
This notion that feminism calls him to protect the weak — to save them from themselves, to guide them to the right path — recurs again and again in his writing. As the co-organizer of the LA Slutwalk earlier this year, he referred to his role as “Herding sluts. In the best and most responsible way.” His students say he’s an electrifying lecturer, but complain that he severely restricts class discussion. And he frequently conceptualizes moral behavior as a matter of denial and restriction. (He has, for instance, described feminism as a “cold pool” in which “none of us can fully immerse ourselves forever.”)
I don’t have any reason to believe that Hugo Schwyzer is likely to attempt another murder anytime soon. But the man who described his girlfriend as fragile and broken and in need of his sheltering strength as he plotted her death has not gone entirely away. The paternalistic impulse to save that young woman from herself — an impulse that came to him with “incredible clarity” then, one which he remembers “perfectly” today — is still in him, still driving him. It’s an impulse he’s redirected, but it remains unexamined, unchecked, and dangerous. (It particularly inflects and infects his writing about sexuality, about youth, and about people of color.)
Like Hugo Schwyzer, I’m a white male professor teaching history in an urban community college. Like Schwyzer, I consider myself a feminist. Like Schwyzer, I work with young people extensively outside of the classroom. And it’s from that perspective that I offer him this piece of advice:
You’re doing it wrong. You need to stop.
Update | An old blogpost has surfaced that calls into question Schwyzer’s claim that he called a friend to warn her about the murder-suicide attempt.
Second Update | Hi to all the folks finding this post via Tumblr and the Feminists Against Hugo Schwyzer Facebook page. I’ve included pointers to a lot of the discussion of this subject in the followup post I linked above, so if you’re interested in reading more, that’s a good place to start.
The things she knew, let her forget again —
The voices in the sky, the fear, the cold,
The gaping shepherds, and the queer old men
Piling their clumsy gifts of foreign gold.
Let her have laughter with her little one;
Teach her the needless, tuneless songs to sing;
Grant her her right to whisper to her son
The foolish names one dare not call a king.
Keep from her dreams the rumble of a crowd,
The smell of rough-cut wood, the trail of red,
The thick and chilly whiteness of the shroud
That wraps the strange new body of the dead.
Ah, let her go, kind Lord, where mothers go
And boast his pretty words and ways, and plan
The proud and happy years that they shall know
Together, when her son is grown a man.
–Dorothy Parker, 1928
Twitter has been blowing up today with reports that a Washington DC teen named Tyreek Amir Jacobs was killed in last night’s shopping frenzy over Nike’s new Air Jordan Concords. But as the Baltimore Sun has reported, no such murder is known to capital region police — and the image of “Jacobs” that’s been circulating is a stock photo. (Google searches on his name with keywords relating to this hoax don’t produce any hits either.)
Some tweets are now taking the story a step further, claiming multiple murders over the shoes, but those claims don’t seem to have any truth to them either. The Washington Post reports a police pepper-spray incident in Seattle in connection with the shoes’ launch, and arrests after scuffles in Michigan and Georgia, but that’s it.
I recently read A Rap on Race, the book-length transcript of a conversation between James Baldwin and Margaret Mead, recorded in
the summer of 1970. As I said two weeks ago, it’s a fascinating book, and I’m going to be posting excerpts each Wednesday for the next while. I put up the first last week — here’s the second, somewhat condensed from the original:
MEAD: This was, I suppose, twenty-five years ago. I was speaking in those days about three things we had to do: appreciate cultural differences, respect political and religious differences, and ignore race. Absolutely ignore race.
BALDWIN: Ignore race. That certainly seemed perfectly sound and true.
MEAD: Yes, but it isn’t anymore. You see, it really isn’t true. This was wrong, because —
BALDWIN: Because race cannot be ignored.
MEAD: Skin color can’t be ignored. It is real.
BALDWIN: It was a great revelation for me when I found myself finally in France among all kinds of very different people — I mean, at least different from anybody I had met in America. And I realized one day that somebody asked me about a friend of mine who, in fact, when I thought about it, is probably North African, but I really did not remember whether he was white or black. It simply had never occurred to me.
Three things jump out at me about this passage.
First, there’s the obvious fact that Baldwin and Mead, speaking forty years ago, regard the idea of racial “colorblindness” as a quaint relic of Jim Crow-era liberalism. It was something that seemed to make sense back in the fifties, they agree, but not anymore. Not in 1970. The fact that we’re still, as a culture, debating this in 2011 is striking.
There’s also Mead’s troubling use of the phrase “skin color” as a synonym for “race.” I know it’s a traditional synecdoche, but it’s weird and unfortunate in this context, because although race is real, it’s not “real” in the sense that skin color is.
Skin color doesn’t determine race — George Hamilton is darker than Colin Powell, after all. What makes race “real” isn’t its physicality, because race is a cultural, rather than a biological, fact. As I noted last week, the one-drop rule was created for social and economic reasons. Genetics didn’t, and don’t, enter into it.
Skin color, in other words, can be ignored. We ignore it all the time. I had to Google photos of George Hamilton and Colin Powell to make sure I was right about who was darker — I don’t carry that information around in my head. But I do carry around the knowledge that Hamilton is white and Powell is black. And it’s that knowledge which can’t be suppressed or wished away.
Which brings us to Baldwin’s comment about his own race-blindness in Paris. Earlier in the book, Mead had paraphrased his insight that “there are no ‘Negroes’ outside of America,” and it seems that this is what’s operating here. The racial categories carries with him are American racial categories, and French racial structures, differing as they do from the American, don’t resonate for him in the same way. And so although it may seem like a contradiction for Baldwin to say in one breath that “race cannot be ignored” and in the next that it had “never occurred to” him whether a friend was French or French North African, it’s actually completely consistent.
Skin color can be ignored. Race cannot.
Looking for evidence of young voters’ dissatisfaction with Obama? Look no further than MTV.
For decades the network’s election coverage has been titled “Choose or Lose.” Launched at the time of Bill Clinton’s 1992 run, the slogan reflected youth excitement around that candidacy, and encouraged the sense that young people had a personal stake in the outcome of the race.
MTV stuck with the slogan for five election cycles — through Gore and Kerry and their lackluster campaigns. It resonated particularly strongly in 2008, when a young, charismatic Barack Obama succeeded in building youth loyalty like no candidate since Bobby Kennedy in 1968.
But now it’s done. MTV is finished with “Choose or Lose,” and will introduce a new slogan for its election programming in 2012.
Here’s why, according to the New York Times: “While young people turned out in unusually high numbers to support Barack Obama in 2008, MTV’s research into ‘Choose or Lose’ found that many felt they had lost anyway.”
Youth voters haven’t abandoned Obama, not by a long shot. His approval ratings with young people are still consistently higher than any other age group, and a recent poll found them supporting the president over Mitt Romney by 26 points. But the enthusiasm of 2008 has been muted, and disappointment with Obama’s presidency is the primary cause.
When asked which president in their lifetime had “done the best job,” voters under 30 choose Democrats over Republicans by a 62-19 margin. But Bill Clinton is the choice of nearly half, with Obama getting the nod from just 14%. In fact, a higher percentage of young people now rank Bill Clinton as the greatest president of their lifetime than voted for him in 1992.
Obama has disappointed young voters again and again. Where the percentage of Americans who say they care strongly who is elected president next year has remained essentially stable since the last cycle, among young voters it’s dropped from 81% to 69%. And though, as noted above, Obama still retains relatively high approval ratings among young voters, his “very strongly approve” numbers among youth now match national averages exactly.
In the electorate as a whole, the percentage of voters saying they’re angry with Obama has risen by 21 points since the election. Among young voters, it’s risen by just 10 points. But where more than 80% of youth said Obama feel hopeful and proud in 2008, today fewer than half do, a far steeper decline than among other voters.
President Obama is going to sweep the youth vote in 2012, and that strength is going to be essential to his re-election victory if he wins. The values of the Republican establishment are simply alien to most young people, and that divergence is a serious and growing problem for the GOP.
But while young voters are still looking for dramatic change in how the country operates, their belief that an Obama presidency could be the vehicle for such change has evaporated. They’ll vote for him again, but they’re looking elsewhere for solutions.
studentactivism.net 
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