Look like we may need to get through the felony DUI phase first. (Link is to Google cache of his now taken down blog post on it.)
I feel kind of bad that my main takeaway from everything I've read about HS is that my (and everyone else's, I'm not anything like alone in this) sense that there's something not right about that dude is pretty reliable. Not that I ever had much bad to say about him, but he did always give the clear impression of, despite saying mostly fairly unexceptionable things about feminism, being from another planet.
How are you that big of an asshole and married four times without getting at least one "Vows" column in the NYT?
It speaks ill of somebody (men, I guess) that feminists thought themselves so short of, and so in need of, allies that they indulged that wanker so extensively.
In seriously injuring someone in a car accident while impaired he is laying the groundwork for a truly transcendental one.
As the lady says, the man is mentally ill and a douche. But, as far as
It's hard to put your faith in Schwyzer about the mental illness
Seconding 2.
I encountered HS back in maybe 2005, and something about him seemed off even then. At the time I didn't think much of it, since as far as I knew he was just "some guy who shows up in comment threads all the time".
I was surprised at his subsequent rise in online feminist circles, especially since he got steadily worse re: the creepy vibe of his writing.
Was he the one who was really into Kabbalah?
7 - I'm pretty sure that you banging your community college students is a fireable offense regardless of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
A guy less than six months older than me just had a *fourth* marriage crumble? Four!? That's... kind of impressive, in a certain way.
8: Willingness to self-promote and capacity to produce a lot of writing of acceptable quality will do a lot to raise your profile.
11 -- Hey shut up. Where are my medieval church history books?
Was it alameida or somebody else who summarized everything HS wrote as "Seriously, I got so much tail. So much! But don't you ever!"?
And from that interesting Hairpin interview with the two white guys he credits with driving away from Twitter [dramatic pause] forever, this reminds me of what Belle Waring was writing over on Crooked Timber about Roth and Updike and Franzen: "I think it's clear he views women as a kind of social problem that confronts men."
15: No, I think I quoted it a couple of times.
I have extremely reliable second-hand information about how truly awful HS in person, fwiw. Al makes an important point about his illness not excusing his reprehensible behavior.
Also, his repulsive preening about his Christianity offended me. He was like a California-flavored megachurch assistant pastor.*
* Not a compliment in any respect.
12: yeah. HS was part of a whole cohort of people who were really active in the blogosphere circa 2003-2005 and who able to parlay their early adopter advantage into paid writing gigs.
14: I'm thinking it was oumeida. But googling 'so much tail' on this site should find it.
(Carry the one, and... oops) Eighteen months older than me, not six. Still.
21: Seriously, I googled so much tail. So much! But don't you ever!
So you've got time, if you get right on it.
yeah, there was always something...it was partly the preening, that he was so concerned about his physical appearance. the other thing was that he just managed to insert himself into every single feminist thread/car crash/blogfight whatever and make it be all about him. (not real car-crash, I just mean like RACEFAIL or whatever.) I don't wish him ill, exactly...it's just amazing that he's still giving interviews and tweeting and blogging about stuff, you're just like--'dude! put the internet down on the ground, slowly, and then raise both hands over your head and stand up.' if I were his friend I'd be telling him to shut up.
He got the job by misrepresenting his qualifications, which conduct was a symptom of his mental illness, and now he wants them to pay him because he's not mentally ill enough to continue the charade?
I'm happy never to have heard of this man before 2013. You people need to get out less often . . .
if I were his friend I'd be telling him to shut up.
His twitter feed is full of people telling him to do just that. It's easy to believe that he has a serious problem with compulsive behavior, just from watching brief bits of the online meltdown.
I mean, based on my limited experience with friends who are genuinely mentally ill, he's probably genuinely mentally ill, and mentally ill people who are not getting treated properly tend to make bad life decisions that alienate everyone. That doesn't mean he's not additionally an enormous fuck who deserves precisely no one's sympathy.
There are people - Niall Ferguson is another who comes to mind - about whom people say, "Well, yeah, he's a transparent douche now, but there was a time when he wasn't so transparent." Then they utterly fail to come up with an example of non-transparent douchiness.
How are you that big of an asshole and married four times without getting at least one "Vows" column in the NYT?
This is a very good question, and it suggests he's likely to try again. Beware, ladies!
I don't think I have any idea who Hugo Schwyzer is, and it sounds like that's just as well, but this:
Not that I ever had much bad to say about him, but he did always give the clear impression of ... being from another planet.
...given the number of times you've said exactly that about me, I wonder if should give me pause? I didn't think too much of it, but now I'm worried it means you think I'm a douchecanoe with probable mental illness.
If his arguments had merit, wouldn't they have merit independent of his personal failings and/or mental illness?
oumeida
apoggtropher, rob half-chalk, HelpyCarp, heebie-breath, peeple, Boring Nevermind.
Was he a big part of feminist circles for a long time? I read feminist blogs irregularly, but his name seemed to pop up a bunch for a year, and then that was it.
33: It's an entirely different other planet. I'm not sure what Hugo's is like, but I picture yours more like this.
33: There's no comparison. HS always struck me as a genuine lunatic. You get the big SANE stamp on your hand.
"This video contains content from SACEM, PRS CS, UMG and UMPI Prime. It is not available in your galactic sector."
I think the consensus here is correct in its disinclination to be much interested in the insane vs. asshole debate. Every asshole is an asshole because that's the way their brain works.
Huh. I think in practice you shouldn't break your heart over trying to tease apart the different reasons for someone's behavior, but in my limited interactions with mentally ill people, interacting with someone behaving badly as a result of some illness feels very different from someone behaving badly by choice.
43: Borderline personalities straddle that border.
44:So coarse a description
We BDL's prefer "rollerblading the high wire" or "navigating the hyperdimensional terrain."
I love you. I love you NOT. I used to love you, but it's all over now. Why don't you love me? I could never love someone like you.
Watashi ga Motenai no wa dō Kangaetemo Omaera ga Warui
Did I kill the thread? Is everybody googling the Japanese?
Fascinating series, really edgy and challenging. I checked out Daria for comparison, having never watched a single episode, but Daria was completely visually uninteresting.
Re:Schwyzer or whatever. Never heard of the guy until 2013. But this story troubles me. Can ohh, let's say someone, be a little bit feminist and a little bit sexist pig? Sometimes, but not other times? Tolerating some degree of horrible misogyny for the sake of art, or art that may or may not promote some forms of female empowerment? I point to the cross-dressing tutu wearing bassist, who is role-playing a K-On character design? I am not sure why. Why I am pointing.
I lurk the episode discussion groups late late at night and feel guilty, confused and disgusted. It's so complicated.
If this inner turmoil over my anime interest does not ease, I may have to give up the feminism.
38: It's an entirely different other planet. ..., but I picture yours more like this.
Having just finished reading, Ready Player One*, I'm sure that somewhere in OASIS there is a Planet Urple with appropriate plumbing, food, farms for old dogs, bird life, and whatnot.
*A fun read (and I saw that it was mentioned as such by peep in TFA) of potential interest to folks here, but some big cautions if you are,
1) unwilling to indulge in some serious suspension of disbelief, or
2) overly invested in your own narrative of pop and internet history, or
3) wary of derivativeness pushed to its limit.
But fast and fun otherwise.
43: I don't think we disagree. (I don't think I'm disagreeing with anyone here.) There's an important distinction to be made between being an asshole and being mentally ill, but in the case at hand, the difference isn't really relevant. To the extent that he's worth pondering, Schwyzer is interesting because he's an asshole, and his mental illness doesn't, from what I can tell, mitigate that at all.
||
Just got someone's out of office message that reminded me to "Live life to discover". I assumed it was some motivational thing, but upon googling I see that it is a hotel chain branding that has apparently not taken hold very well.
|>
The other thing is that the stuff he was writing that sounded feminist was feminist. He may have been insincere, he certainly is both mentally ill and an asshole, but something that's right when a sane person was saying it is still right if it's coming from someone who's just mouthing the words to make himself look good.
I haven't ever paid enough attention to his writing to have a strong sense of how much of his stuff was straightforwardly sensibly feminist, and how much partook of his unique brand of self-aggrandizing annoyingness. But the bits that made sense on first reading aren't discredited by having come from someone generally unreliable.
Bitch PHd is the one who was busting on that dude from the beginning.
He is a trainwreck.
49: I got a hotel manager's voicemail a couple of hours ago which exhorted me to "have an AMAZING day!" at the end. Umm...it's Monday, I'm at work, trying to book some rooms in your podunk hotel. Maybe I'm just not working on keeping up my sense of wonder as I age, but if I'm amazed at anything (besides the 13.2% room rate discount we get for being associated with a local business) it might be a sign that something is very wrong.
Also, more on-topic, the contractor I work with who has serious mental health problems is apparently having some kind of paranoid episode and won't be working with us for awhile. Which sucks as, when his meds are working, he's such a talented, friendly, pleasant, gentle person. Very sad.
It speaks ill of somebody (men, I guess) that feminists thought themselves so short of, and so in need of, allies that they indulged that wanker so extensively.
What struck me about the guys' writing was his absence of defensiveness. Almost everyone, when writing from a point of view like "Feminist man who knows his comments section is going to be filled with both men and women with strongly negative views of the opposite sex", tends to equivocate and fill his writing with "to be sure" and "of course, there are plenty of counterexamples" statements.
Not Hugo Schwyzer. He just went on and on about how bad men ought to feel about everything. There must be SOMEONE who can do that sincerely, since it turns out he wasn't sincere in the least.
He just went on and on about how bad men ought to feel about everything.
In that, he was exactly as effective as women polemicists who do the same.
55: In getting mad pussy? Possibly.
re: 31
FWIW, I know/knew people he taught at Oxford and people who had him as a tutor spoke well of him as a generous hard-working teacher. This was before he became really famous, though, although he was already an academic celeb and minor media figure. He's still a gigantic dick, though.
urple, you're not in any way from schwyzer 1, orbiting a dwarf star near eta carinae. you're from a wacky, cool planet where everyone who lives there makes us say, "wow" and "woah" and "you ate that?!?"
The urple/schwyzer mash up would be pretty sweet.
The only time I want to encounter the words "mad pussy" is in a discussion of Grumpy Cat's inevitable descent into Caligula-esque insanity.
A while ago I was trolling a PUA site and claimed that Hugo Schwyzer was the 'ultimate alpha', since he was using internet feminism to create a cult of worshipful younger women around him, while the sites posters were the 'ultimate betas' since they were all so angry at women they were spending their time whining to other men about them on the internet, a highly unattractive behavior. A very cheap troll but I sort of suspected I was actually right -- even at that time Schwyzer had been elected which doesn't happen to someone who isn't working it. (Quote from one of his female students in article -- "Hugo is that man you never thought existed. He's passionate, sensitive, enthusiastic, and real. No wonder he won hottest teacher. He's everything on the inside all girls want.").
But I didn't guess he was so genuinely nutty and troubled. I thought he was kind of a knowing con artist. But he seems pretty genuinely fucked up . His confessional tirades have been surprisingly self aware. I think he's sincere in that sense. He has breathtaking chutzpah and charm when he's 'on', maybe he'll come back as a recovery guru of some sort. It's always dangerous for a type like that to be a guru, but he's clearly born for modern microcelebrity of some kind.
argh, what did I do:
even at that time Schwyzer had been elected America's hottest professor .
Then the quote is from the linked article.
The only time I want to encounter the words "mad pussy"
What about in this context?
Ha, that thread contains the best Unfogged comment on Mr. Schwyzer.
I can't believe I spelled "surveiller et punir" right. I must have googled.
You've always been our Latin spitfire, Moby.
With people like Schwyzer, I don't think you can separate being a douche from his mental illness.
But, you protest "Being mentally ill means not being responsible for your shitty behavior, and being a douche means you are responsible for your shitty behavior."
Normally, yes. But I think there are some kinds of mental illness that amount to "Douchebag behavior that doesn't respond to ordinary guilt, shame, or any other negative consequence." In these cases, you really have to say that the illness is the cause of the action. If they weren't ill, you wouldn't have anything like this behavior. But, there is not point in calling the action voluntary because all our typical responses to voluntary wrongdoing are going to fail.
In any case, if Schwyzer were banned from social media, it would improve both his mental health and the quality of social media.
I don't actually speak Spanish very well at all.
The link in 51 is missing the key phrase "bashful offering."
69: In the video linked in 61 Schwyzer specifically says that his mental illness is a cause but not a justification or excuse for his behavior.
And yet being a douchecanoe isn't the same as being disabled
Exactly. He should take that disability claim and stick it in the oven along with his head.
Douchecanoe and Tyler too!
Without HS, we wouldn't have this post. He provides so much entertainment. Good for us. Not so good for those people with actual contact with him.
In these cases, you really have to say that the illness is the cause of the action.
Any given mental state could be labeled the cause of any corresponding intentional act. I prefer to speak of la causa.
Sort of on topic, this was an interesting article. A pick up artist fails in Denmark, "Cockblocked by redistribution." Though I think the PUA is really being cockblocked by socio-cultural egalitarianism, which in turn creates a kind of virtuous circle of redistribution.
In any case I wonder if societies that are less inclined to Schwyzer's kind of preening self-promotion generally are also more feminist, generally.
77: That really is an interesting article. If no one else has frontpaged it by the time I get home, I might.
77:I liked it too
Most of the socialism + feminism work I have looked at comes from the 1970s, or 1st wave back before WWI, but then most has been in English and Anglo-American.
I've reminded myself of a wonderful line from some book I read in college, God knows from which author, which characterized the liberal revolution in Denmark in 1849 as (paraphrased) "The leading citizens informed the king that they should very much like to have a constitutional monarchy, and the king, thinking the idea meritorious, decided that they should have one at once."
I should wait til later, but that article excited me.
Read it again, because buried under the Ro/osh stuff was stuff I am very very interested in, particularly how economic systems co-determine social and interpersonal relations. The Denmark stuff was third level down, beneath Ro/osh and programs benefiting women, and that is why I try to read stuff by or about foreigners when I can. Anglo-American feminism has been weakened by methodological individualism and divisive group interest politics. This is why I am trying to get my head out of America and into well, Japan (Korea, ME, etc), because only understanding other cultures. down as close to the individual psychological level as I can, will let me even see my own.
Corey Robin has posted on Fear.
What about the workplace, and what about men? We get a vote, so the independence of women, perhaps unfortunately, is partially dependent on men. Until their elimination.
Yeah, Japan, that miserable fearful prosperous place, where 30-yr-old virginity approaches 50% and the birthrate is dropping like a rock. Based partly on small group and socialized expression and repression rather than individualism. Where I can't decide who is more miserable in aggregate, men or women. For mainly socio-economic reasons, I think. Failed neoliberalism, a few years ahead of us.
Why is it in Japanese entertainment, that women are the ones to take the initiative in romantic relationships, to "confess their feelings." Is it only male fantasies?
83:Each concrete contingent situation will require objective and independent assessment.
How exactly is the incrementalism doing in the US? Tea Party and Dixie gonna become all Denmark with some gentle nudges? Can we get it done before the oceans boil?
A 2011 government survey reported that 49 percent of Japanese women ages 18 to 34 don't have a boyfriend or husband, while 61 percent of heterosexual men are also single.
A single 30-yr-old man has hell getting a job or even an apartment. "Are you dependable?" is a ritualized phrase.
Written by an American feminist, so too focused on "because the men are beasts" without asking why the men are beasts. (No, it is not the women's or feminism's fault)
1) Losing a good job is a killer. Literally, suicide rates are horrific.
2) Japanese employers still will demand most good employees (M or F), somewhere around 30-35, move hundreds of miles to work at another site 80-100 hours a week for 2-3 years. It is about a lot of things, but proving loyalty before you move up the ladder is an important one. It is obviously hell on building a family.
...
Whatever, I have reading to do.
Maybe I should read about Denmark, whoa, let's get all that wonderful child leave...
...ain't gonna happen. Much more likely, extremely obviously, that the US will become much worse than that it will become better. And that Denmark gets worse.
Japan's our fucking future.
A pick up artist fails in Denmark, "Cockblocked by redistribution."
I remember the movie, Let's Talk About Sex contrasting sex education, and general societal norms about sex in the US vs at least one Northern European country, and it was remarkably different (and confirmed all the stereotypes). I'd guess that would have as much impact as redistributive policies.
Yeah, yeah, Bob, club us with your chubstuffed sexmeat.
Japan, that miserable fearful prosperous place, where 30-yr-old virginity approaches 50% and the birthrate is dropping like a rock.
The Japanese get laid, but not in a way that we can understand.
I really had fun really you articles! It was so amazing, and I can't it to stop reading your blog. Just keep it up!