{"id":16407,"date":"2013-08-01T06:00:55","date_gmt":"2013-08-01T10:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=16407"},"modified":"2013-08-03T19:36:05","modified_gmt":"2013-08-03T23:36:05","slug":"schwyzer-quits-the-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2013\/08\/01\/schwyzer-quits-the-internet\/","title":{"rendered":"Hugo Schwyzer Quits The Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was halfway through what I thought was going to be today\u2019s post, and then Hugo Schwyzer up and quit the internet<\/a> (so, you\u2019re gonna have to wait till next week to get that post about Magna Carta Holy Grail & the kinds of social relations music facilitates when it is packaged or formatted as an app). I assume that Schwyzer\u2019s retirement will likely follow the Jay Z or Bret Farve model, but, while it lasts, it\u2019s a good opportunity to open out conversations about privilege, oppression, and the media, about the role of men in feminism, and about allies more generally.\u00a0\"\"<\/p>\n

Hugo Schwyzer is a professor<\/a> of history and gender studies at Pasedena City College, and he has been a sort of male feminist superstar, writing for widely-read mainstream venues like Jezebel<\/em> and The Atlantic<\/em>. So, he\u2019s a very, very public male \u201cface\u201d of and for feminism. And for a lot of reasons, he\u2019s been the subject of vehement criticism, trolling, and plenty of ad hominem<\/a> attacks, too, much of it from feminists (male, female, trans, queer, and otherwise) on the left. (And let me just say, if I was influential enough to make Malcolm Harris<\/a> bring out his A-game trolling, well, I\u2019d be pretty happy about that, even if it meant I was wrong about something.)<\/p>\n

I want this post to be a place where we can discuss the issues following from Schwyzer\u2019s retirement. Less mansplaining, more feminist pedagogy. In this spirit, I\u2019ve identified some of the issues below, and I\u2019d love it if we could help one another think them through.<\/p>\n

1. If he needs to take a break for health reasons, then he should. There\u2019s nothing wrong with taking time off from work to focus on your health (or caring for family and friends). (I\u2019d also buy the argument that he needed to take a break to intellectually and politically regroup and rethink his approach.) However, it seems like this breakup with the internet is of the \u201cit\u2019s not me, it\u2019s you\u201d type. Schwyzer names<\/a> his personal health as the second reason he\u2019s quitting. The first reason he cites is \u201cthe toxicity of take-down culture,\u201d which he finds \u201cexhausting and dispiriting.\u201d He continues:<\/p>\n

\n

The cheapest and easiest tweets and articles to compose are snarky and clever dismantlings of what someone else has worked hard to create. The defenders of this culture of fierceness call it intellectual honesty, but it is an honesty too often edged in cruelty. I\u2019ll admit It: I\u2019m a most imperfect man. I have an absolutely dreadful past, one for which I continue to make quiet amends. I\u2019m also frequently a smug and sloppy writer. But despite that past and my glib prose, I don\u2019t think I\u2019m wrong that when it comes to a concerted effort to drive me off the internet, I\u2019ve been more sinned against than sinning.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cMore sinned against than sinning\u201d–Really? If we\u2019re keeping score here, then it seems like a hard sell to argue that a white straight cis-dude is so sinned against that he can justifiably quit his public feminist activism. In this sort of scorekeeping, how do we count the \u201csins\u201d of institutionalized white supremacist patriarchy? If we follow this calculus, then no oppressed person would ever have any motivation or obligation to engage the institutions that oppress them.<\/p>\n

Yes, people are mean to each other on the internet. But Schwyzer doesn\u2019t experience the specifically gendered, racialized, sexualized threats that non-white-straight-cis-dudes regularly experience. His critics might be playing power games with him, but even so, they don\u2019t use the full force of patriarchy, white supremacy, and cis\/heteronormativity to reinforce their dominance and his vulnerability. (Lindy West has a great analysis<\/a> of this over on Jezebel.) He\u2019s not put in his place in a way that emphasizes his gendered vulnerability vis-a-vis a male critic and patriarchal institutions like rape culture. For example, in this<\/a> interview he cites the following as an example of the worst of what he experienced:<\/p>\n

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All of us who write online want validation to some degree. We\u2019re ready to take criticism when it\u2019s balanced by affirmation. I just felt that it was very one-sided. After I wrote about Manic Pixie Dream Girls, this guy Chris tweeted, \u201cthe number one job of male feminists is to never let Hugo Schwyzer get another freelancing gig.\u201d It got 120 retweets and 140 favorites in an hour. I mean, that wildly overestimates the job, right? And it was just really hurtful. I was like, I don\u2019t want to go through this anymore.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If this is the worst, well…His critics don\u2019t frame their objections in language that is also (and sometimes even primarily) sexual harassment. He\u2019s not being threatened with rape or lynching, being called a c-word or n-word. This happens all the time to women, even and especially female academics. As this<\/a> well-known study argues, sexual harassment is so pervasive that it \u201cimpedes women\u2019s full participation in online life, often driving them offline.\u201d For all the ways Schwyzer can be called out for being wrong, these call-outs can never be framed in ways that make him as vulnerable as someone who isn\u2019t a white straight cis-dude.<\/p>\n

And this is why I think there\u2019s a massive, astronomically large, qualitatively incalculable difference between Schwyzer\u2019s \u201cGoodbye\u201d and something like Keguro Macharia\u2019s \u201cOn Quitting<\/a>.\u201d Macharia left the American academy because it was harming him in ways that, frankly, are just incomparable to Schwyzer\u2019s discomfort.<\/p>\n

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At a required end-of-year meeting with my then department chair, I confessed that I was exhausted. I was tired of the banal and uncomprehending racism of white students who spoke of blacks as \u201cthey\u201d and \u201cthem\u201d and complained about \u201ctheir broken English\u201d and \u201cbad dialect\u201d; I was tired of a system that served black students badly, promising an education that it failed to deliver, condemning them to repeat classes, to drop out, to believe they were stupid; I was tired of colleagues who marveled when I produced an intelligible sentence; I was tired of attending conference panels where blackness was dismissed as \u201csimple,\u201d \u201creactive,\u201d \u201cirrelevant,\u201d \u201cdone\u201d; I was tired of being invited to be \u201cpost-black\u201d as the token African, so not \u201ctainted\u201d by the afterlife of slavery; I was tired of performing a psychic labor that left me too exhausted to do anything except go home, crawl into bed, try to recover, and prepare for the next series of assaults.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In light of Macharia\u2019s essay, Schwyzer\u2019s \u201cGoodbye\u201d seems, well, offensive in its comparative triviality. I think we could have a more productive conversation about feminism and quitting by turning our focus away from Schwyzer and towards Macharia\u2019s essay. I’d also like to talk about your thoughts on West’s proposal that, instead of ignoring trolls, women\/feminists\/oppressed people of all sorts “feed trolls until they explode<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

2. Laura Bates argues<\/a> that it\u2019s \u201cpretty offensive when people tell us…we should leave Facebook instead of making a fuss.\u201d Plenty of people far more vulnerable than Schwyzer have much thicker skin (and maybe this is related? Maybe this tolling seems overwhelmingly mean only to someone who\u2019s generally been protected from bullying and harassment by his privilege?), and continue to make a fuss in spite of the threats, the pain, and the fear. To be honest, my initial response to reading his goodbye post on his blog, and the above-cited interview about it, was, somewhat ironically, \u201cGeez, man, grow a fracking pair.\u201d Less glibly, to be an academic and\/or a public intellectual, you have to be able to take criticism, constructive or otherwise. If you have ideas, people are going to disagree with you. And that\u2019s OK. In fact, you probably haven\u2019t had any significant impact until someone has written a scathing takedown of your work. (Fiddy tol\u2019 me go \u2018head change yo style up\/An if they hate then let \u2018em hate and watch the money pile up, as they say. Or, read Marx’s thoughts on Hegel.) Moreover, as an academic, I was especially surprised that Schwyzer, as a fellow academic, hadn\u2019t gotten used to the scathing, nasty, soul-crushing critiques that are often delivered by peer reviewers for journals. But then, I\u2019m not sure that it\u2019s a good thing that academia is as bad or worse than the internet in this regard. I also worry that I may be so desensitized by my own experiences of harassment that, like a fraternity or sorority active, I dismiss as a normal part of the culture what I should otherwise recognize as hazing. So, I\u2019m very receptive to any attempts to argue me down from my \u201cboo-hoo\u201d response. If you had a similar response and wanted to make a case defending it, I\u2019d also be really interested in hearing that.<\/p>\n

3. Schwyzer has the option of quitting. I don\u2019t know about y\u2019all, but without the internet, without Cyborgology, Twitter, my personal blog, other professional blogs, I\u2019d be pretty disconnected from other scholars. I\u2019m not at an R1 (a big research university) and I\u2019m not in a city like NYC\/LA\/Chicago\/Boston with lots of universities and access to many other intellectuals in my field(s). Whatever networks, visibility, and influence I have, I have because of the internet. If I quit that, well, poof, it\u2019s gone. And moreover, I don\u2019t really have option of quitting this being a woman thing. Schwyzer can stop speaking about feminism in public, but I can\u2019t stop being a woman, and I can\u2019t stop being in public–I need to work, I need to buy groceries, walk my dogs, etc. For those of us without the option of quitting, what survival strategies help?<\/p>\n

4. Feminism is hard. Being a feminist is hard, not just for men, not just for white women, but for all feminists. As Sara Ahmed has argued, it means killing a lot of joy<\/a>, both for ourselves and for others. If your feminism is easy and makes you feel good all the time, well, then, you\u2019re probably doing it wrong. Perhaps one productive thing to come out of Schwyzer\u2019s erstwhile resignation is a serious conversation about how to support one another as we live with and work through the emotional pain, fragility, sadness, despair, melancholy, mourning, discomfort, awkwardness, and all the other difficult, unpleasant feelings that come with practicing feminism.<\/p>\n

5. Perhaps the bigger question begged by l\u2019affaire Schwyzer is about the role of men, especially cis-men, in feminism. As readers of Cyborgology should know, men can be awesome feminists. And men should care about feminism, because patriarchy affects us all (at least as far as globalized Western civilization reaches). \u00a0It\u2019s a system of social organization that affects everything and everyone. This means that men are gendered, and that they have a stake in feminism. They\u2019re not outsiders looking in, but deeply implicated in the gendered phenomena that feminism studies, critiques, and challenges. And it\u2019s this implication that shapes men\u2019s roles in feminism. I\u2019d like, if we can, to talk about the specifics of this in the comments. Given their various situations vis-a-vis white supremacist patriarchy, how can men do better by feminism, and as feminists, than Schwyzer?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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