Why Feminists Shouldn’t Miss Hugo Schwyzer

Last week the internet was greeted with news of the departure of the feminist blogosphere’s leading man, Hugo Schwyzer. Why?

For one, the toxicity of take-down culture is exhausting and dispiriting…
… But despite [my] past and my glib prose, I don’t think I’m wrong that when it comes to a concerted effort to drive me off the internet, I’ve been more sinned against than sinning.

For those who can’t be bothered, I’ll summarize it for you: the internet hurt his feelings.

In case you don’t know him, Schwyzer was one of the most tireless advocates of male emasculation on the internet. I wrote most recently about his promotion of “pegging”, and his shaming of older men who choose to date younger women also stands in a long list of his anti-male diatribes.

In a way, however, Schwyzer’s departure is a victory for the feminist blogosphere. Why?

1. He was a raging hypocrite.

As I mentioned above, Hugo Schwyzer has been an outspoken opponent of men taking an interest in younger women.

This is awkward because, as I mentioned above, Schwyzer has had no problem fucking his students. He’s also had no problem sexting women nearly two decades his junior:

The details of this marital infidelity are not known, but in January 2013, Schwyzer, then 45, had a brief but torrid texting, telephonic and online fling with a 27 year old woman named Christina Parreira, also known is “sex worker activism’ circles as Christina Page.

…Parreira vacationed in Los Angeles from late January to mid-February, and had also planned to speak in Schwyzer’s class.

But wait! That’s not all. Schwyzer sought to go further than just the mere sext. Schwyzer wanted to fuck Christina Page…and his “son”:

Hugo Schwyzer engineered a media blitz in February after inviting popular porn performer and Lindsay Lohan co-star James Deen to address at Schwyzer’s “Navigating Pornography” class at Pasadena Community College…

…In private messages with her ex-boyfriend, Parreira claims that she and Schwyzer shared fantasies about having a three-way with Deen. Parreira also related that Schwyzer – a bisexual who reportedly told Parreira he was in a monogamous yet sexless relationship with his wife – claimed he “missed sucking cock.”

So, Hugo says this in his male-shaming articles:

If there’s one tangible thing that men can do to help end sexism—and create a healthier culture in which young people come of age—it’s to stop chasing after women young enough to be their biological daughters. As hyperbolic as it may sound, there are few more powerful actions that men can take to transform the culture than to date, mate, and stay with their approximate chronological peers.

Yes, Hugo, we’ll avoid dating women young enough to be our daughters…

…while you (a married man) run around looking for sex with women AND MEN young enough to be your children. Sounds legit.

Feminists have long been fighting the notion that they are hypocritical and illogical, prone to making demands of men that they don’t intend to apply to women. Given their likely desire not to promote this image, do they really need someone like this on their side?

On the contrary, such an “ally” can do more damage than even their most devoted enemies.

2. He was dishonest.

We in the manosphere are quite often portrayed as morally degenerate and/or misguided by our opponents, but Schwyzer did his level best to bring that characterization to his supposed feminist allies as well via his own conduct as a self-proclaimed “male feminist”.

This was a man who has openly admitted to possibly cuckolding another man and seemed to see nothing wrong with it. Instead of coming to terms with the fact that what he did was immoral, he rationalizes it in a way only a sociopath can, attempting to disassociate sperm provision from the concept of fatherhood in order to justify his probable role in deceiving other men into raising children that aren’t theirs:

Fourteen autumns ago, I was casually dating a woman I’ll call Jill*. We had unprotected intercourse a handful of times in late October and early November. And just before Thanksgiving, Jill discovered she was pregnant.
She didn’t tell me until after New Year’s Day. While Jill and I had been in a “friends with benefits” arrangement, she’d also been growing more serious about another man, Ted.*

Enter the unwitting beta into the inescapable trap…

She’d first slept with him for the first time two nights before she had last slept with me. It was that week that Jill got pregnant, and as she would later tell me, there was no way to know for sure which one of us was the father.
But there was no question which one of us was a better bet as a romantic partner. Jill had broken things off with me as soon as she and Ted had decided on an exclusive relationship (just before she found out she was pregnant.) Ted was several years older than I was, professionally and emotionally stable, and clearly falling in love with Jill. I was drinking, partying, with some time to go before I’d hit my rock bottom. Jill wanted to be a mom. Ted wanted to be a dad. I wasn’t sure what I wanted. In her mind, these facts settled it: the baby was Ted’s. Or it needed to be Ted’s.

Fathering has everything to do with being present after conception and after birth, and very little with providing the sperm to fertilize an egg. Regardless of what a paternity test would reveal, I am still my daughter’s dad – and in every meaningful sense, Ted is Alastair’s.

If the fact that he may not have actually fathered his supposed “son” is so meaningless (because sperm provision has no significance at all in Mr. Schwyzer’s World), then why not just let Ted know that he may not have fathered his “son” and may have been tricked into thinking otherwise?

I mean, that distinction is “meaningless”, right? So why hide it? If he’s as smart and “emotionally stable” as Schwyzer claimed, surely he’ll recognize how “meaningless” the distinction is and all will be well. What is there to fear from that which has no meaning?

The specifics of human reproduction mean that men may have children of whose existence they are unaware, and they may unwittingly raise as their own children conceived with another man’s sperm. But women have it harder, and not only in terms of pregnancy, labor, and delivery. It is Jill, not I, who carries the burden of an unresolved question through her relationship with her husband and her first-born son.
These uncertainties that I know many men share are part of the cost of a habit of unprotected heterosexual intercourse. But the solution to the problem isn’t suspicion or frantic demands for paternity tests, Jerry Springer style. The solution isn’t even the rigorous use of contraception (though that’s a very good idea.)
The solution is to remember that it is love, not sperm, that makes a great dad.

Summary: I met a whore who got around with multiple men at the same time. She met a good beta who didn’t know any better. She got knocked up and I may very well be the father. I ignored this because the whore’s rationalization hamster decreed that the beta was the father because she “needed it to be”. This man may have been deceived by me and this whore into raising a child that isn’t his, but that’s totally ok because it’s all about “love”.

Yeah, that sounds great. Forget about honesty, integrity, trust or fidelity. It’s great to be an unwitting cuckold, so long as you’ve got “love”!**

**:Whores and the disingenuous sociopathic pricks who impregnate them but don’t want to deal with the offspring approve this message.

3. He was an abusive predator.

Hugo Schwyzer was also a man who has been open about having acted in a manner that I think most feminists would consider “predatory”:

In the fall of 1996, I was 29. Three years into my teaching career, my reputation as an energetic lecturer was quickly being eclipsed by rumors of my sleeping with students. Most of the rumors were true. I was reckless to the point of stupidity, showing little interest in protecting the job I loved. I was trying to get sober and failing. I stashed drugs in the same file cabinets that held student papers, gave lectures with booze in my bloodstream. I had sex with students on my office desk.

And abusive:

The current backlash against him, set in motion by yet another article recounting this troubling history, took on unprecedented intensity after the resurfacing of a post, originally written a year ago, in which Schwyzer admitted to nearly killing a former girlfriend in a drug-fueled murder-suicide attempt.

Hugo Schwyzer was not a man equipped psychologically or intellectually to do feminists any real good. He represented everything that many consider wrong with feminism in one tidy package, a walking hypocrite with views too comically anti-male to come from anyone reasonable and worth listening to.

Long story short, feminists have won a tremendous victory by extricating a malignant, sociopathic cancer from their movement (or, in this case, having the cancer extricate itself). They still have plenty of tumors left, I’m sure, but every little bit helps.

Read Next: Hugo Schwyzer Pulls A Mark Minter