Tag / sociology

by Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig

Hugo Schwyzer: On Feminism’s Gods and Monsters

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.

 

 

by Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig

Rules of Engagement: Can Science Deliver the Benefits of Religion?

Tania Lombrozo recently wrote this beautiful piece meditating on the push/pull factors that encourage or discourage Americans’ belief in human evolution. Her conclusion is that human evolution as it’s usually presented does not necessarily offer the existential benefits of religion, so it is a less attractive choice psychologically speaking, and since it’s in competition with religious belief in some cases, religious belief periodically wins out for its benefits. She then suggests that the presentation of evolution to the average person could be tailored to better emphasize the elements which offer existential benefits similar to those of religious belief.

I deeply appreciate Lombrozo’s work here because it is so carefully researched and because it plays up the potential for beauty in the story of nature, which is sometimes thread of the scientific tapestry that is neglected. She is also quite careful in her presentation of religion: unlike in most general discussions of religion as a category, Lombrozo does not present religion as content neutral. Like science, she submits, religions are not all equal in their capacity to comfort or suggest order. I think this is quite true, and I think it’s a part of the conversation about religion that is usually excluded from discussion, because it requires a great deal of certitude to begin comparing religions on that front.

Her work seems another in an interesting tradition of investigating the ideologies that touch what William Connolly called the “visceral register” of human experience in his book Why I Am Not A Secularist. Sociologists have found ideologies mirroring religious belief in everything from Star Trek to sports, and in The Faith of the Faithless Simon Critchley finds parallels and possibilities in certain types of politics.

Here I mean only to further some of her discussion. So, I’ll take up her question: can science deliver the benefits of religion? If so, would those benefits be enough to draw a person toward belief in human evolution, and/or away from religious belief? In imagining the benefits of science as a superior substitute for religious belief, Lombrozo writes:

There is something deeply satisfying in broadening the scope of what we understand. And that is part of the seductive grandeur of science.

I wonder if this is a stone left unturned by Lombrozo. She is very much focused (as one has to be, as articles do have word limits and must come to some conclusion at some point) on a particular aspect of the attraction of religion. The explanations and meaning that give rise to feelings of order and control and human exceptionalism are no doubt among the psychological benefits of religion, but could it not also be the case that the mysteries of religion — those ‘black box’ areas which defy and resist full excavation — also be among the attractions of religious belief?

In his very famous ‘Science as a Vocation’, Max Weber borrows the term ‘disenchantment’ from Friedrich Schiller, and describes it thus:

“… it
 means
 that
 principally
 there
 are
 no
 mysterious
 incalculable
 forces
 that
 come
 into
 play,
 but
 rather
 that
 one
 can,
 in
 principle,
 master
 all
 things
 by
 calculation.
 This
 means
 that
 the
 world
 is
 disenchanted.
 One
 need
 no
 longer
 have
 recourse
 to
 magical
 means
 in
 order
 to
 master
 or
 implore
 the
 spirits,
 as
 did
 the
 savage,
 for
 whom
 such
 mysterious
 powers
 existed.
 Technical
 means
 and
 calculations
 perform
 the
 service.
”

Weber acknowledges that disenchantment is usually correlated with progress, and that it is attractive in that way. Yet he also points out that science is, by its very nature, an association of methods that tend to destabilize truth, and to constantly demand more unsteady progress toward understanding. In that way, he argues, science can uproot a person’s ability to feel settled, as it were, with the elements of life that are and remain mysterious to her. Comfort with mystery and enchantment, he points out, have been relegated instead to the realm of personal interaction and mysticism, the realms of the dogmatic, inscrutable, and private. When it comes to constructing new spheres to support engagement with and peace in enchantment, Weber warns:

“And
 academic
 prophecy,
 finally,
 will
 create
 only
 fanatical
 sects 
but
 never 
a
 genuine
 community.
”

So if Weber is correct and there is some satisfaction to be gained by drawing a perimeter around some questions and taking pleasure in their wonder and eternal mystery, then science can by its very nature never provide benefits of that sort. Science ruthlessly questions, investigates, and interrogates its own conclusions. Its truth values are neither private nor intimate and its valor relies upon its capacity to be reproduced ad infinitum, without relation to the individuals involved in the reproduction, or their experiences of it. Science may be able to provide some peace — Lombrozo provides studies to this effect — but parameters exist around those situations: subjects being asked to contemplate the comfort of science in one situation, e.g. the experience of pain or illness, are likely different than subjects living with unending destabilization of beliefs on a day-to-day basis.

But to investigate particular benefits of religion — and many have been proposed outside the somewhat murky category of establishing a sense of control or order; a 1991 paper by Chris Ellison titled ‘Religious Involvement and Subjective Well-Being’ ran through a litany of them, from the social to the individual, as have many studies on prayer and certitude of belief to follow — is to accept the notion that people gravitate toward religion based on the benefits it offers for them.

This is a widely disputed aspect of the ‘rational choice’ theory of religion, which seems quite attractive at first glance. Religions must be attractive to gain adherents, because if religions added no quality to people’s lives and/or subtracted from them, then people would either find different religions to adhere to, or would depart from religion altogether in favor of some other similarly beneficial ideology. Were this the case, we would expect to see competition between religious groups for adherents, e.g., ‘supply side’ religious pluralism, with different sects competing to offer the best ‘packages’ to converts. And, if the diversity of religious options really did result in more attractive packages of belief, we would expect to see strengthening of religious vitality correlate with religious pluralism. But does it?

Some sociologists, like Roger Finke and Rodney Stark have argued that it does. But the data doesn’t support those claims. Here’s Mark Chaves and Phillip Gorski in a 2001 paper titled ‘Religious Pluralism and Religious Participation’, published in the Annual Review of Sociology:

“The empirical evidence does not support the claim that religious pluralism is positively associated with religious participation in any general sense. There may be times and places where increased religious pluralism produces increased levels of overall religious participation. But as Stark et al (1995, p. 436, emphasis in original) remind us, “the theory [including the proposition that pluralism increases overall levels of religious mobilization] is not about today, nor is it about the United States—it purports to be general.” This aspiration to generality is not sustained by a comprehensive and dispassionate review of the empirical evidence.”

That is to say, competing packages of belief, even when primed and sweetened to offer the benefits that religions should offer, don’t actually seem to increase religious participation in people in general. Why might this be? Gorski and Chaves suggest a number of reasons, but among the most compelling is the following:

“…in settings where religious membership is more like modern citizenship than like membership in a voluntary association, religion often becomes intertwined with political, social, and cultural conflict between states, classes, and national or ethnic groupings; religious allegiances become markers or signals of nonreligious allegiances; and religious competition means struggles over cultural, political, and territorial influence and power.”

Needless to say, this can be a wonderful or terrible thing. On one hand, religion can help a person fit her own narrative into a broader narrative about progress, hope, and the future. She can imagine herself in a web of relationships spanning back thousands of years, a member of a group that has strong and noble roots. But it also means that religion tends to become entwined — as in the terrible case of the Slavo-Christianity that so powerfully underpinned the genocide of Bosniak Muslims in the 1990s — with ethnic and cultural narratives whose significance cannot be replaced by the general themes of science. In this case, science may not be able to reproduce religion’s benefits or its harms. Moreover, even if it could — it wouldn’t necessarily mean that more people would adopt a belief in human evolution.

Lastly, it may also be the case that the selection of religions based on their benefits is a perilously external way to imagine religious belief/affiliation/participation. That is to say — is it fair to imagine that people move from truth-claim to truth-claim without any real investment in their truth? Religious people themselves cannot, by definition, adhere to their religion because it benefits them; this would be to directly contradict the truth claims of religion, and to render instrumental to people what people should, in theory, be instrumental to. As Chaves and Gorski point out, religion is far too complicated of an experience to be so easily boiled down to rational choices.

After all, even for Augustine, the moment of conversion is not a moment of successful argumentation, though he does frame his approach to Christianity from Manichaeanism in terms of debunking in many cases. Instead, he frames it in the mysterious and subjective terms of experience:

“…Suddenly I heard a voice from some nearby house, a boy’s voice or a girl’s voice, I do not know: but it was a sort of sing-song, repeated again and again, ‘take and read, take and read.’ I ceased weeping and immediately began to search my mind most carefully as to whether children were accustomed to chant these words in any kind of game, and I could not remember that I had ever heard such a thing…I arose, interpreting the incident as quite certainly a divine command to open my book of Scripture and read the passage at which I should open…in that instant, with the very ending of the sentence, it was as though a light of utter confidence shone in all my heart, and all the darkness of uncertainty vanished way.”

A cynical reading of Augustine would be that he simply tired of wondering and investigating and gave himself up to enchantment, willing to accept ignorance and mystery for a little peace, and, as Lombrozo may have it, a sense of order, uniqueness, and destiny in the world. Alternatively we could read him as having had a genuine moment of insight, and take his refusal to come to a ‘rational’ conclusion on the matter as entirely sincere. Because, as Lombrozo points out, science automatically imagines experiences of the inexplicable to be, in fact, explicable, this is yet another arena in which science and religion cannot be interchanged. Science may offer a comforting explanation, but may in its dissection painfully misconstrue the singular, intimate moment of experience.

Lastly, I wonder if the narrative momentum of religion — the ability of a religious community to frame a member as a meaningful, unique agent in an ongoing story with a particular endgame — is perhaps another arena in which religion differs considerably enough from evolution to occupy its own sort of authority. Religion and science may overlap in some of their work; religion may provide explanation and so may science, and their benefits may converge — but religion ultimately has a direction, a movement, a broader story, a motion toward a goal. Human evolution, on the other hand, continues on without an easily discernible goal in mind, and at punctuated paces. In How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker writes:

“Are we still evolving? Biologically, probably not much. Evolution has no momentum, so we will not turn into the creepy bloat-heads of science fiction. The modern human condition is not conducive to real evolution either. We infest the whole habitable and not-so-habitable earth, migrate at will, and zigzag from lifestyle to lifestyle. This makes us a nebulous, moving target for natural selection. If the species is evolving at all, it is happening too slowly and unpredictably for us to know the direction.”

Religion, on the other hand, brings with it a story, and a story with a punchline at that.

Yet because of this departure in movement, I can easily imagine a person happily and healthily adopting both religious beliefs and a belief in human evolution, so long as she understands that the one contains an understanding of where we’re going, and the other how we’re getting there. Like religion itself, human evolution is best understood and appreciated on its own terms, I think, without being expected to provide more than it’s really obligated to. What it provides in terms of benefits is distinctly beautiful and discretely valuable without parallel to or comparison with religion or any other ideology.