Hugo Schwyzer, for the blissfully uninitiated, is a self-proclaimed male feminist and professor of gender and sexuality who recently had a very public manic episode on twitter after vowing to ‘quit’ the internet.

Schwyzer has always been a controversial figure in the femi-sphere. On one hand, he wrote for Jezebel, the Atlantic, and Salon on feminist issues. He was big on the lecture circuit. On the other hand, he’s also confessed to having had sex with his college students, having attempted to murder an ex-girlfriend, and has on more than one occasion shared extremely private sexual stories about his former partners without their consent.

So the question is: why did he persist so long as a prominent public intellectual in the arenas of feminism, gender, and sexuality? 

As always, there are probably a number of contributing answers to that question. I don’t doubt that white male buffoons have more staying power than their counterparts of other races and genders. I’m sure part of it was just clickbait/page view inertia: Schwyzer was willing to write salacious, controversial stuff that seemed vaguely intellectual, and when you’re willing to do that, somebody will publish you somewhere.

Still, I suspect another major part of the problem is that we, as a community of feminists, were unwilling or unable to lay into him where it really would’ve damaged his mainstream credibility: in his professional authority. I think we were unwilling to do that because of our general suspicion of the ‘academic industrial complex’s hold on feminism, and because of the sacral place of the personal narrative in our discourse.

Consider the anatomy of Schwyzer’s damages and repeated comebacks. Inevitably, it would go like this: Schwyzer would publish some reprehensible piece of garbage about some current event or controversial topic — like this Jezebel piece arguing that men really only want to give women ‘facials’ because they need love and acceptance for their penises; or this post on his blog arguing that ‘Middle Eastern’ and ‘Latin’ men and women more readily associate controlling jealousy with love — framed as a personal narrative. Then, people would react, many of them angrily. But the major media outlets wouldn’t respond — they’d just keep publishing him.

In the case of the (frankly crude and tasteless) Jezebel piece, Schwyzer was accused of: harboring latent misogyny and a secret agenda to goad women into male-fantasy-based sex acts under the guise of empowerment; advocating rape culture and rabid heteronormativity; and of intentionally downplaying women’s experience of particular sex acts. In the case of the blog post, he was mostly accused of racism.

Those are all good and likely true criticisms. Yet they’re also difficult to prove — especially in the case of latent misogyny, racism, secret agendas and the like, which require a reader to accept speculation on his mindset based on a particular piece of writing — and in many cases, they’re criticisms specific to the particular essays themselves. In other words, few of them aim at questioning the the authority and/or truth value of his claims. Instead of asking whether he’s right or wrong, they ask whether he’s good or bad. (In fact, even the defenses of Schwyzer by feminists don’t usually relate to his scholarship; instead, they invoke his humanity and recommend decency.)

Even within feminist circles, opinions on whether a person is good or bad vary wildly; one woman’s ‘sex positive’ is another woman’s ‘advocacy of rape culture.’ Meanwhile, picking apart the veracity of a person’s claims is usually pretty easy, if you’re willing to go that route.

For instance, Schwyzer claims:

I mention the ethnicity of the folks involved because there seems to be such a clear cultural component to seeing jealousy as acceptable. No, I’m not trying to reinforce a stereotype of Latins or Middle Easterners as particularly “hot-blooded” and thus more prone to misogynstic fits of green-eyed rage than “calm” WASPs. But it’s clear that certain ethnic groups — in this case, Armenians and Salvadorans — are more willing than others to associate male jealousy with evidence of love and care.

Emphasis mine. Schwyzer is basing this very specific sociological claim on a sample of an undisclosed number of students and their tales of bad boyfriends. This isn’t data. It’s not sociology, and it’s certainly not any kind of cultural anthropology. There’s nothing remotely resembling a survey, poll, or even a qualitative interview involved here. There’s no analysis of other variables: age, income, family structure, religion, nothing. It’s the worst kind of off-the-cuff, sounds-good-to-me, intellectually bankrupt nonsense. Is it racist? It appears to betray a certain suspicion of men and women of color, yes. But a sympathetic reader could take Schwyzer at his word when he says he doesn’t intend to advance a stereotype. No reader, however, could argue that there’s real scholarship at work here.

It’s the same story in the ‘facials’ article. Schwyzer writes:

The sheer amount of porn featuring facial cumshots is so vast that it’s impossible to imagine an exhaustive analysis of all of it. But two things seem clear. First, as Megan Andelloux (founder and director of Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health) noted in an interview with me, questions from college students about facials have risen dramatically in recent years. This isn’t something people are just watching porn stars do; it’s something a lot of young men (and some young women) want to try themselves. Second, as Glickman — a former adult film reviewer —pointed out, a lot more straight porn features women happily accepting facials than reacting with disgust and evident humiliation. That acceptance may be feigned, but it suggests that the primary turn-on about facials for men isn’t the desire to degrade women.

Ugh, I feel like I just had my legroom crowded by a handsy creep on the T. But more importantly, check out the scholarship here: unquoted interviews; secondhand use of other scholars’ work without citation; unavailable data; and blanket assertions that certain data sets are just flat unattainable. In some cases that’s true, but there’s a reason we use samples when massive quantities of a particular subject exist, and, by the way, studies based on that kind of analysis have been published, and are freely available. The remainder of Schwyzer’s essay is based on the same kind of baseless bull: I talked to this person, I chatted with that person, I sense my students feel this, one class of kids agreed on that.

None of this should be surprising. Take it from Schwyzer himself:

In graduate school, however, my goals shifted.  Though I liked research well enough, I loved my time as a teaching assistant…I quickly realized that it was teaching that turned me on, not research.  I didn’t like musty old archives, and I sure as hell didn’t like working on long papers.  I enjoyed discussing ideas in seminars, but nothing was as “fun” as interacting with students in the classroom.

Put simply, Schwyzer doesn’t like the nuts and bolts of academia, just the attention and adulation. Fair enough; a lot of people probably feel that way about archives and long papers. Schwyzer doesn’t appear to have published anything since his dissertation, which was not in the field of women’s or gender studies; the last mention I could find of him in academia was in a record of conference proceedings on Medieval Europe from 1997.

To sum it all up, Schwyzer’s academic work was roundly and repeatedly poor, but he was rarely excoriated on those grounds, though they are the grounds that are most accessible to public reason. We may debate on the harms or benefits of particular procedures in discourse  — whether or not a white male voice should be privileged or included in women’s spaces, how to frame the arguments of a confessed abuser — but those matters will ultimately come down to a person’s persuasion. In other words, those who would already have disagreed with Schwyzer on those grounds would still disagree; those who would never be moved by those kinds of arguments would still be unmoved. But the quality and validity of a person’s scholarship is much easier to dissect publicly with people of many different ideological backgrounds.

So why weren’t we willing to take Schwyzer to task as thoroughly and routinely over his bad scholarship as we were over his bad personal traits?

Well, part of it likely has to do with a certain resistance to the ‘academic industrial complex‘ among feminists. It’s a fair point that engaging only in academic discourse when it comes to feminism/gender/sexuality studies excludes a certain portion of the population from the conversation for reasons that are likely the result of systemic disadvantages, e.g. poor people having less exposure to collegiate discourse, and so on. I would return in response to my point about public reason, and add that if Schwyzer presents his authority as rooted in his profession — and he did, after all, earn the moniker ‘Professor Feminism’ — then we’re obligated to get at the root of his authority by examining his expertise and ability in that arena, even if it requires a specialized skill set.

I think our reluctance to call Schwyzer out on his inexcusably bad scholarship was also related to the form he used to argue his points. I’ve already explained that I’m not the biggest fan of the narrative-focused culture of much of the left for a number of reasons, and the Schwyzer situation is a good example of why. Schwyzer framed much of his argumentation in personal narratives, e.g., ‘I experienced this and came to understand that’, which is, incidentally, how a good chunk of feminist writers argue their points. So it would’ve been impossible to call him out with criticisms to the effect of ‘that’s likely a made up or misremembered story you’re conforming to your current argumentative needs that is unsupported by any research or data’ when so many of our own writers utilize basically the same style of argument. Moreover, it’s nearly impossible to argue narrative versus narrative; instead we are reduced to arguing procedural points over who has the right to share a narrative in a particular space. Those debates are of zero interest to people who don’t already buy the assumptions of intersectional feminism, so again, it’s difficult to bring them to bear on major media outlets like Salon, the Atlantic, Jezebel and so on.

In short, I hope we can avoid a meltdown like this in the future. Schwyzer seems unwell, and I hope he recovers. But moving forward, I hope that members of the feminist circles ‘on the ground’ will be more willing to tap into public reason when unmasking charlatans who claim scholarly authority as the basis for their nonsense-spewing. It may not be a perfect tool, but in some cases, it may be the best we’ve got.