Note for those who don’t read Feministe. Clarisse Thorn posted an interview with Hugo Schwyzer. People objected to Hugo Schwyzer being given this space on a feminist blog as he had, among other things, tried to kill his girlfriend a decade ago. Clarisse Thorn responded by closing comments on the interview thread and writing a post called On Change and Accountability. This post is primarily in response to that last post of Clarisse’s, which attempted to transfer the debate to a theoretical one about change and accountability. (Feministe has since offered this apology). This post will focus on the general not the particular – so you don’t have to have followed all the links to understand it. If you want to follow the wider discussion La Lubu’s post is my favourite (I also think there’s been some good stuff on Tumblr, but I can never find stuff there).
*******
Dear Clarisse
Towards the end of your post On Change and Accountability you asked:
Have you thought about these questions in your own life? I don’t mean abstractly, as an intellectual exercise. Concretely, and with intention. What would you do if, tomorrow, you found out that your best friend was a rapist? Your lover? What would you do if your sibling came to you to confess a terrible crime? To request absolution? To request accountability?
Did you expect your readers to answer no? Sometime this year, it’ll be a decade since a man tried to rape a woman in my house. They knew each other, and me, through left-wing political circles. Since then I’ve known more than ten left-wing men who used intimate violence against women. I’ve never been central to any collective response, all of which were ad hoc and some of which may have done more good than harm, or been particularly close to the men. I still have no idea on how to respond to intimate violence on the left in a positive way, but I do have quite a good idea of some of the ways individual and collective responses can do harm.
So yes, I have thought about your questions – my answers and my response to you is deeply intertwined in the experiences I’ve had, the conversations I’ve had about those experiences, and the reading I’ve done.* However, I am being a little bit more focused in my response than you were in your post. I am very suspicious of attempts to broaden discussions of intimate abuse and abuse of power, to a wider idea of bad things people have done. Men who use the power that our sexist and misogynist society gives them to hurt women generally find it easy to do so, and get a lot of support when they’re challenged. I believe that that social context is important. I am going to focus this post on responses to men who abuse women, because that was the situation that triggered your post and it’s what I have most experience with.
I will provide direct answers to your questions the end of the post. First, I want to outline the ways I disagree with the premise of your post, and why some parts of it I disagreed with so strongly that I felt driven to spend the last few days planning and writing this reply. You ask:
How can we create processes for accountability? Feminists often discuss crimes like partner violence and sexual assault. Our focus is on helping survivors of these crimes, just as it should be. I personally have been trained as a rape crisis counselor, and I have volunteered in that capacity (if you’re interested in feminist activism, then I really encourage you to look into doing the same). And the history of feminism includes convincing people to actually care about and recognize the trauma of rape: Rape Trauma Syndrome was first defined and discussed in the 1970s.
But perhaps because of our focus on helping and protecting survivors, I rarely see feminist discussions of how to deal with people who have committed crimes. In fact, I rarely see any discussions of how to deal with that, aside from sending people to jail. Let me just say that problems with the prison-industrial complex are their own thing—but even aside from those, the vast majority of rapes and assaults and other forms of gender-based violence go unprosecuted.
I think other people have already pointed out whose work you rendered invisible in this section, but I want to take it in a slightly different direction. Here you seem to suggest that responding to perpetrators and responding to survivors are two separate things and that feminists’ focus on survivors has left little space for dealing with perpetrators. My experience has been that the best response to perpetrators have been more survivor centred, and the worst have been entirely perpetrator-centred. Why? Because abuse is about power and control – and centring perpetrators is giving them power and control.
A basic assumption of your in the post is that good responses to perpetrators need to be centred around perpetrators. You barely mention survivors in your post, let alone other people who may have been hurt by similar behaviour and have boundaries and triggers and want to keep themselves safe. Men who use the power society gave them to hurt women can do so because their experiences are centred in society. I think centring perpetrators makes it harder for them to change, not easier.
“Accountability teams” are one way I’ve heard of for dealing with this: whether support groups of perpetrators who share their experiences with making amends and changing their ways, or groups of friends who assist a perpetrator with those processes. I would like to see more and larger discussions about those teams, and more acknowledgement that change is possible.
‘Accountability teams’ sound great – but I’m pretty sceptical of them. When I’ve known support groups set up formally around perpetrators, they have become advocacy groups for those perpetrators. One man I know, who was part of ‘support group’ for a perpetrator rang up individual members of a collective who had decided that the perpetrator was not welcome in their space; he attempted to pressure each individual member, and ignored a woman who repeatedly stated “I’m not comfortable with this” and kept trying to pressure her. Likewise, I’m reasonably familiar with government funded programmes which act broadly like the perpetrator groups you describe above. From what I know of the research, they’re not particularly effective, and there is some suggestion that they actually make people better abusers.
We live in a world with a profound level of ignorance about intimate abuse, and an awful lot of myths that many people believe. In my experience, perpetrators who don’t want to change have found it easy to surround themselves with friends who support their worldview in some way. This makes sense – if you’re someone who doesn’t want to be abusive, you are likely to have among your friends people who will support you in meaningful ways, but if you don’t want to change, then it’s very easy to find people who will act as your apologists. Those who surround themselves with apologists will generally be happy with presenting themselves as trying to change – and use any support group to bolster that claim.
This doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in support for perpetrators who are genuinely trying to change. I just have known far more perpetrators who were trying to persuade people that they were genuinely trying to change, than those who have genuinely tried to change. And those who are not trying to change have tended to use systems that have been set up to punish women they have abused.
I can imagine a time, or a circumstance, when I would have been excited about ‘accountability teams’. I think our disagreement there is just a sign about how many layers of abuse apologist bullshit I have found around every abusive man I have known. However, my disagreement to what you said next is more fundamental:
If we can’t create this kind of process, then how can we expect to create real change around these crimes? How can we expect perpetrators of violence to work on themselves if we can’t give them the space to work? Why should someone work for forgiveness if they know forgiveness can never come?
I want to untangle this, because there are a lot of different ideas here. First of all, when it comes to feminist blogs, there is no ‘we’, in fact when it comes to communities (which after all are informal sets of relationships with non-formalised power and decision making) there is no ‘we’. There can be no ‘we’ without a collective decision making process – just a false ‘we’ people talking on behalf of others.
I agree that perpetrators need space and resources to change, but the biggest barrier to that is generally that they are surrounded by apologists and cultural narratives that justify their behaviour. Outsiders can’t intentionally clear that away, they can only offer alternatives.
But what I really disagree with is the idea that abusive men should be working for forgiveness, let alone your conclusion that that means people need to forgive.
As others have pointed out forgiveness has a lot of religious overtones and baggage, it’s a narrow way to frame responses to abusive men, that will only speak to particular people. However, even if I translate it to language that resonates more with me, rather than forgiveness I would talk about ‘being OK with someone’, I still think you are talking about deeply personal decisions and boundaries that people can only draw for themselves. For example, seven years ago I stayed silent, when a woman with black eyes told me it was an accident, even though I knew that wasn’t true. I have realised, over the years, that I am never going to be OK with what I did. I also realised that that meant I was never going to be OK with this woman’s boyfriend, because I’m not going to hold myself responsible for my inaction around abuse, longer than I’m going to hold the man who did it (who has changed more than most men I know who have committed intimate violence – although he has behaved in deeply problematic ways much more recently than seven years ago).
Perpetrators should not be working for forgiveness, because forgiveness is deeply personal. But more than that I’m incredibly wary of the idea that abusers should be working on stopping hurting people, for any kind of reward, including changing the way people think of them.
One group response I saw from a distance used their silence over a rapist (and were generally very good at silencing other people) to try and get him to attend an anti-sexual-violence programme. They held out that they would keep his abuse from going too public and got him to take certain steps. It was, obviously, a disaster – change is fucking difficult and people have to really want to do it. If you try and use leverage you have over someone to make them change (particularly someone manipulative, as most successful abusers are) then you are going to be unsuccessful.
An easy path back to everything being OK, is often what abusive men who don’t take their abuse seriously (but don’t necessarily deny it) – want. I’ve known an abusive man demand this, and punish the survivor because he didn’t get it. He used all ll those subtle talking to friend of friends ways that it’s so easy for abusers to punish survirors particularly if other people let them. One group I know set the simple requirement “you tell us when you think you are ready to come back” and never heard from two different men again. I think it’s important not to offer short-cuts or a path to people being OK – learning to live with what you’ve done and other people’s reaction to what you’ve done is a perpetrator’s own messy work.
*********
However, none of that was why your post troubled me so much. You wrote it in response to people who were part of a feminist space and were outraged at the way you had centred in that space a man who had tried to murder his girlfriend. You were explicit both at feministe, and your place, that criticisms of that man bothered you, and shut that criticism down.
Then you wrote a post that is incredibly dismissive of people who disagree with you:
But I hope I can dim the flamewar into a lantern to illuminate issues that actually matter.
I believe that the politics of this situation are mostly a cheap distraction from truth and honor.
You go further, you go into some detail about why you think Hugo has changed and explicitly argue that your view of Hugo should be other’s view of Hugo:
Other feminists have been angrily emailing me, Tweeting at me, etc with things like “FUCK YOU FOR PROTECTING THIS WOLF IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING.” But I have seen no evidence that Hugo hasn’t made an honest and sustained effort at recovery and accountability.
Your entire post reads, to me, like an argument that people who who don’t agree with you about Hugo’s transformation, or the relevance of Hugo’s transformation about the way he has treated should not hold or express those views (partly because you don’t spend much time trying to persuade people on either of these points). You are demanding a ‘we’ without a collective decision making process.
To explain why I think this is the most anti-feminist position that I have ever read on Feministe I have to tell a story.
In 2006, a man named Ira hit his girlfriend when they were breaking up (he did this in a supposedly radical social centre – he was not the first man to assault his girlfriend in that social centre). After they broke up the girlfriend (who I will call Anne for the purposes of the post, although that’s not her name) named the abuse within the relationship. Ira had been emotionally, physically and sexually abusive.
Ira had many defenders, and responses to the abuse focused on him (in fact a lot of my caution about ideas like accountability teams, and my firmness that all responses have to be survivor centred come from this experience). He was exceptionally good at using mutual acquaintances (and there were many) to punish Anne. He never made amends with Anne, or anyone else. He did what most abusers who I’ve known who were seriously challenged do – he left town.
Apparently in this new place, he talked a good game. He admitted to some of what he’d done, and presented himself as a reformed man. He didn’t need to make meaningful change, he just needed to present himself as someone who had done so.
In 2009, about three years after they broke up he was part of organising climate camp. This was supposed to bring people from all around the country to Wellington, where Anne was living. Anne wanted to go to the camp, but she did not want to be around him. She wrote to various people, including the safer spaces team, outlining the situation and asking if he could not come. She got nothing back but vagueness and an argument that they could not do anything because the camp did not exist yet.
One of the arguments of the safer spaces team, which included people who claimed that they were feminists, was that they had talked to Ira and were convinced that he had changed. They believed, or at least acted as if it was true, that it was their belief about him was important. They ignored the view of one of the people he had abused, and many other women who felt unsafe around him.
It got messy from there. Ira left, but only after a protest. A woman who had been part of protesting Ira’s actions was kicked out of climate camp by the safer spaces committee for being ‘abusive’ because she yelled at a man for hugging her when she didn’t want to be hugged. Ira got someone connected with Climate Camp to harass Anne – like I said he was good at getting mutual acquaintances to punish her.
The safer spaces committee had made it clear where they stood when they decided that it was their view on whether or not Ira had changed that mattered.
*********
Your post read to me as taking exactly the same position as the climate camp safer spaces committee. You appeared to be arguing that your view that Hugo Schwyzer was reformed, and that his reforming mattered was important. Why?
Everything about your post oozes pressure. When you argue: “Why should someone work for forgiveness if they know forgiveness can never come?” You are arguing that people should forgive abusive men, because it’s necessary for them to change.
There is no space in your post for survivors. Either direct survivors of Hugo’s actions, or survivors of similar violence. There is no space for people to draw their own boundaries around an abusive man. Indeed nothing appears to matter in your post except the perpetrator, and his path to forgiveness. There is no way of getting a unified response – of promising survivors forgiveness – which doesn’t involve asking or demanding that some people ignore their own boundaries.
There is nothing new or transformative in arguing that survivors and those who care about their abuse, should not have boundaries because other people believe that the man has changed. Just a month ago I was in a meeting where someone argued that as far as we knew Omar Hamed hadn’t tried to rape anyone all year, and therefore it was divisive to argue that he should not be welcome at our political event.
I believe that part of being OK with an abusive man, has to be accepting that other people may not be OK and respecting their boundaries.
To pressure women to be OK, act OK, or pretend to be or act OK around a man who has been abusive towards woman, is a profoundly anti-feminist act. That pressure cannot be part of anything that is truly justice, or truly transformative.
*********
I don’t have a generic answer about how I’d act if someone I cared about had raped someone. There are too many variables. Obviously if anyone came to me seeking absolution, I would tell them that is not something I can give. But, if I decided that I was OK continuing the relationship then I would tell him that he needed to respect people’s boundaries around him, that some people would never be OK with him, and that he needed to find a way of being that wouldn’t pressure other people and their boundaries (and he would have to be on board with that for me to continue the relationship). I would respect other people’s boundaries around him, and try to ensure that I didn’t put direct or indirect pressure on them.
I feel incredibly lucky, ten years down the track, that I have never had to respond to intimate violence from a man I cared about. But I have seen the harm that women do to survivors of violence in defence of men they care about. I’ve seen manipulative men get women to do their dirty work. I’ve seen the way ‘he’s changed’ has been used by other women to pressure both direct survivors, and women who are uncomfortable with abusive men more generally. I hope I have learned enough to recognise those roles and refuse them.
Do we actually believe that people can change? If so, how do we want them to show us they’ve changed? Is absolution possible? Who decides the answers to these questions?
In reverse order, groups that have genuine collective decision making processes can make group answers to these questions. Otherwise the decisions can only be individual.
Absolution is a religious idea that is not compatible with liberation. Whatever we have done, we have done. Nothing and no-one can stop us from being the person who has done the worst actions we have taken.
Abusive men show me that they’ve changed when they stop hurting women and don’t use intimediaries to do their dirty work. If an abusive man was OK with people talking about their abuse, was OK with people not being OK with it, and understood that responses to their abuse cannot be all about them, but about the people they hurt, then I’d probably be willing to believe that he’d changed.
And yes – I do think people can change. I think feminists have to believe in the possibility of abusive men changing otherwise there’s no hope but a separatist commune.
But I won’t stake anything on that belief, not anyone’s safety, or comfort, or boundaries. I don’t like the odds. Nobody knows how to stop someone from abusing their power, and most attempts to do so are failures (that’s from friends who have worked in the field and reviewed the research).
I know this post sounds despairing. Believe me when I say none of the ways that abusive men I’ve known have responded to being challenged has given me any reason to hope.
But still I hope. And it is that hope that lead me to write this post. That hope that makes me believe that it is worth writing about my experiences and more and less harmful ways of dealing with abusive men.
In recognition that we are part of the same struggle,
Maia
* I haven’t read the book The Revolution Starts at Home yet, but I have read the zine (warning that link is a pdf) and recommend it, even though as this post probably shows I am deeply unsure about any way forward. I should point out that one of the problems with the post I am responding to that other people have discussed is the way it renders invisible the work of WoC dealing with issues that you say feminists don’t deal with.
Awesome, awesome post. Thank you.
Thanks so much for writing this, Maia. I’ve been puzzling over why Clarisse’s post has been deeply unsettling for me, and this helps broaden my perspective a great deal.
It’s so true- you have to live with the things you have done, large or small. If you’re still trying to get people to move and on and forget something you’re not proud of, then you’re still in the business of controlling people, not personal rehabilitation.
> Believe me when I say none of the ways that abusive men I’ve known have responded to being challenged has given me any reason to hope. <
absolutely . believe . you .
my . experience as . well . of the past 30+ years .
(apart from my abusive mother as well.
"red flags" all over with men like H.S. as well. no need for some-such ever in my remaining life, whether online or IRL)
thank you Maia for summarizing, analyzing and putting into words what i couldn't.
Thanks for this post, Maia. I will never forgive anyone except on my own timeline, and that’s as it should be.
You say that you think abusers can change, but within 4 sentences admit that the vast bulk of experience and research shows that attempts to do so almost invariably fail.
Why is it necessary to think they can change? Perhaps a few can, and perhaps newer methods can meet with greater success, but the current failure rate suggests that most either can’t or won’t. Those aren’t good odds. Effectively exiling a former abuser (when jail isn’t possible) isn’t vindictive, mean or anything but facing the reality of probable recidivism.
Show me one “reformed” abuser who has confessed to the police, pled guilty, and willingly went to jail. Then, and only then, will I believe they are genuinely sorry.
This is a remarkable post, Maia. Thanks!
Seconding and thirding everyone else, Maia. This is a very impressive and insightful post. Thanks so much.
—Myca
I agree with everything you said. I just want to add something on the topic of forgiveness, because what Clarisse is talking about is not forgiveness at all, at least not from the viewpoint I was taught.
I was taught that forgiveness is about the person being hurt carrying on with the healing process. It has nothing to do with the person who caused the hurt. As I have been taught, “I forgive you, but I do not trust you and do not wish to have you in my life anymore” is a perfectly legitimate statement.
A truly reformed abuser will understand this. They will understand that sometimes, “making amends” means saying “I’m sorry” and then staying away, quite possibly forever. They understand that in terms of renewed friendship or any other contact, their victims owe them nothing and have every right to refuse them anything. Anything else is, as you suggest, an attempt to use “but you’re supposed to forgive me” to manipulate another person into giving one something one is not entitled to, which is in itself a form of abuse.
I have been reading Alas for years, and I have been reading Hugo’s blog for years. While agree that Clarisse’s post has many problems and is, in many ways, someone defending a friend instead of engaging in a logical discussion, I respect Hugo as a member of the feminist community. I think that his posts reveal a lot about him and the process he has gone through to grow into the person he is today. I also think that he has a lot of courage to write about his past when it could do so much to discredit him within the community he works with.
I am not condoning his past behavior or Clarisse’s post. I also do not take the suffering of others lightly, nor do I wish to discredit the effects violence and victimization have on women long after the acts are over. I just hope that members of this blogging community, whom I respect, take into account all of Hugo’s work over the past few years before branding him a lost cause and victimizer.
Thank, Maia. I think we all know that there is a fine and wavering web of lines weaved around all this that are hard for us to walk without crossing, but I think this does, and thank you for the fantastic further links as well.
This is my favorite of your posts, Maia. Thanks for writing it.
I’m reading The Revolution Starts at Home (the book version) and was thinking about it during your excellent, excellent post. It’s astounding how much the behavior of the safer spaces committee in the story you told clashes with the work of organizations like MataHari and UBUNTU, which center survivors and their needs absolutely. You’re right about Clarisse’s post — there’s no space for survivors.
Wendy, the point isn’t how individuals within a community are “branding” Hugo. The point is how his continued presence and lionization within these communities is harming real survivors, right now.
This is a really fantastic post, and has really helped me in my struggle to figure out how to deal with abusers in various of my social circles. Thank you.
Great post, Maia.
Wendy @9: I think it’s pretty fair to “brand” Hugo as a victimizer based on his freely admitted actions in the past, don’t you? Or are you saying he didn’t actually victimize anybody?
But the point of Maia’s post is not “nobody is allowed to decide they personally respect Hugo”. It’s that he is not owed forgiveness. Nobody is obligated to say “Oh hey, he’s paid off his backlog of shittiness so he’s entitled to be treated as if he never did those things.”
This is why Thorn’s post was so offensive. It treats the ultimate goal that a perpetrator should achieve as forgiveness, and not as becoming a better person who recognizes their actions were wrong would never again do those things.
This. I don’t think forgiveness means an obligation to allow people to hurt you. Arguing that forgiving an abuser means you should let them back into your life, or trust them in ways they’ve proven they can’t be trusted, is like arguing that if the person who broke into your car and stole stuff apologizes, you should park the car, unlocked, in front of their house on a regular basis.
This is actually a great time of year to be thinking about this, Maia, because (at least in the West) it’s when we’re supposed to be thinking about Resolutions for the New Year. Which is invariably accompanied by evergreen ruminations on how resolutions never work.
You said “We live in a world with a profound level of ignorance about intimate abuse, and an awful lot of myths that many people believe. In my experience, perpetrators who don’t want to change have found it easy to surround themselves with friends who support their worldview in some way.”
This, I think, is true as much about resolutions not to be abusive as about exercise or ironing one’s sheets: the world we live in isn’t so much profoundly ignorant of intimate abuse, or ignorant of best ways to exercise, or to really open up the issue, ignorant of best ways to make and keep resolutions, period.
So here’s the rub, at least for me: given that we pretty much never hear anyone say “how can I ever trust your word: you said you were going to read one book a week this year,” and given further that we’d tend to avoid anyone who took accountability to that degree, it’s somewhere between disingenuousness and denial to say we’re prepared to hold perpetrators of physical or sexual abuse accountable.
The examples you cite of abusers surrounding themselves with people willing to acknowledge that they’re “nice guys” or “good gals.” Well, yeah. Society lets that happen — I’m sure you have, I’ve come to realize I have — because for better or worse (actually, just worse) we see it as sitting on the same continuum as being “a great person” even if one doesn’t follow through on a commitment to floss daily.
Trick question that highlights the problem I’m talking about: which is worse, the neat, useful person who commits abuse or the one who drives home drunk from parties? What is our relationship to them? What is our responsibility for or to them? Remember, it’s a trick question.
What I’m hearing Clarisse say when she talks about shifting focus to perpetrators isn’t about “supporting” them. Whatever that even means in contemporary society! Instead I’m thinking, and I think she’s thinking, of something a lot closer to outreach and recovery groups for perpetrators.
Those recovery people, for all their 12-step and 12-step-like dependencies, seem to understand the difference between support and accountability in a way that society in general does. not. at. all. The impression I get is when someone stands up in, say, an AA group and says “I haven’t had a drink for 35 years” the universal understanding is “yeah, but I could still fall off the wagon tomorrow.” They don’t say “I’m cured.” They don’t say “I’m recovered.” The best they seem to say is “I’m healthier now, I’m happier now, but I’m still working on it.”
Getting to the question of Hugo, I think it’s significant that he’s been in recovery groups for drugs and alcohol. I wouldn’t be surprised if he still isn’t. Further, since he’s himself (as most perpetrators are, incidentally) a survivor of sexual abuse and it’s consequences I’d go further and say that if he hasn’t he might benefit from attending sexual assault and sex and/or love “addiction” recovery groups as well. If he hasn’t already. If he isn’t still!
If he’s still in it, and I get the impression he is, then two things can be simultaneously true as they can be for anyone in recovery: he can successfully advocate — from experience! — for non-abuse; he can and might still fall “off the wagon.” The trick is to be able to trust him, or anyone in recovery, to do both. And to remind him (and anyone else who’s in his shoes) daily that he’s accountable not for one or the other but for both. And to remind those around him of the same thing. And to expect him to remind others around him as well.
Which is why “accountability” for perpetrators of all sorts great and small seems both realistic and productive whereas the tradition of “support” absolutely does not.
I mention all this because I think it’s a missing element in a lot of the responses both to Hugo in general and Clarisse in particular. There are simply too many perpetrators, large and small, who need not forgiveness or shunning but accountability to continue leaving that option unexamined.
You’ll notice, incidentally, that on a superficial level I too am “ignoring” survivors in this comment. That would be correct if and only if my overwhelming commitment was not to a reduction in the number of survivors. I think the same can be said of Clarisse in her posts. To address the requirements of perpetrators in order to limit and (however many generations it takes to end the cycle) eliminate them isn’t to make those who survive them invisible. It’s to stop making them survivors! (Given how many survivors in turn become perpetrators, a focus on holding perpetrators accountable does double duty to survivors.)
—
I’d just like to add that Clarisse’s post has come at a very good time for me as well. Evolutions in my neighborhood have left me sort of plunged into the periphery of a number of recovery groups. And in the process of accompanying friends, family, and neighbors to various meetings (particularly “codependency” meetings such as AlAnon but also an alphabet soup of AA, NA, SA, EA, and SLA meetings) I’ve had cause for considerable introspection into my own unstudied assumptions about my upbringing, which included a great deal of violence (which I’d always acknowledged) but also, I’m realizing, an appalling amount of direct and indirect sexual assault, abuse, and intimidation at the hands of others. With the result that I can’t see how any of my relationships since the 1970s(!) could have gone uncompromised by abuse. My first peer relationship certainly included assault and emotional abuse. Many of the people who influenced my later dating/relationship/hookup experiences I realize in retrospect were past survivors of sexual abuse who, again in retrospect, had been groomed and gaslighted to “perfection,” and some of the adult advisers and chaperones were subtle, smooth, but unmitigated sexual predators, with the result that what I took to be simple peer relationship behavior, even non-sexual behavior, needs to all be unbundled and re-examined for tricks, traps, and back doors. (Call this another variation on Will Rogers: it’s not what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you know for a fact that just ain’t true.)
To the extent people have perpetrated against me I don’t want them forgiven or shunned, I want them to be willingly held accountable moving forward. To the extent I’ve perpetrated against others I don’t want to be forgiven or shunned, I willingly want to be held accountable moving forward. Same with the people who condone, encourage, merely overlook, or, worst, “support” perpetrators rather than holding them to account. They need to be held accountable as well — because they’re part of the culture of abuse as well.
At this point the only people I think can be considered trustworthy are the negotiation/narration fetishists in the kink community who strive to leave no assumption unturned, no step unplanned, and no improvisation tolerated. That’s not so say others aren’t trust worthy, just that no one should make that assumption.
Anyway, at least for me Clarisse’s post about Hugo feels like another turning point in a process of questioning perpetration and figuring out what to do about it. A previous turning point, at least for me, came with Rachel Hill’s confidence-shaking 2010 post, “But women don’t rape!”: sexual pressure, rejection and the male sex drive discourse”. Has Clarisse hit the nail on the head with her first post, however hard she tried? Definitely not. But she’s asking what I think is a really important question: without forgiving or forgetting anything, what path (if any) can we create for moving unconscious and/or unrepentant perpetrators towards conscious, repentant and (ideally) productive and permanent recovery?
I don’t know the answer but I bitterly wish the conversation had started roughly 8 years before I was born (I was first abused at age 4 by a 12-year-old) instead of more than 50 years after!
figleaf
Oof! Sorry that was so long! I should have posted it at my place. My apologies.
figleaf
figleaf @16: The really important question at the end of your post is indeed important, but that’s not what Thorn was asking. “Why should someone work for forgiveness if they know forgiveness can never come?” is a much different question, and one that focuses not on recovery, but on reward. Thorn is, in essence, saying that survivors and their supporters owe perpetrators a goddamn cookie, because without the promise of a cookie there’s no reason for them to stop being assholes.
Good stuff, Maia. Very well thought out, very well explained.
It resonates with me especially because I have had to confront this kind of issue lately. For the first time in my 20 years as an adult in Scouting I had to recommend that an adult be separated from Scouting. Permanently. No, it wasn’t sexual assault. But it was still necessary. I was challenged on this due to the negative effect it will have on the perpetrator (who does have some things going on in their life that truly call for compassion and that I thank God I don’t have to deal with). I was specifically challenged “I thought you believed in forgiveness.”
My response was “I can forgive a thief, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to make them treasurer.” As noted, forgiveness is a process that is personal to the offended. It is as much for their benefit as it is for the offender. No one has a right to demand it. As was also said above, that doesn’t mean that the offense goes away as if it never existed. For the offender to truly accept forgiveness they have to accept that there are still consequences to what they did; their lives are still going to change.
@Mythago: Agreed. Although I’m basing this on a brief in-person conversation at dinner with Clarisse I suspect she’d be comfortable either clarifying or reconsidering her use of the term “forgiveness.”
I don’t know if or where she sits in terms of various theories and practices of recovery, so I don’t know if she’s using the “forgiveness” in a technical, system-based sense. But I am confident she isn’t intending it in the socially common-place sense of “whatever, dude, let bygones be bygones.”
Finally, I’m aware that I could just be projecting. But if so I’m projecting on ideas she’s brought to my attention.
figleaf
p.s. Also, what RonF #19 said about forgiveness.
I appreciate this post a lot, and I’ll get it cross-posted at Feministe if I can (I don’t know if it’ll fly but I’ll do my best). I particularly appreciate its measured clarity and its personal resonance.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to say everything I want to say, because I have a lot to think about and I’m pretty snowed under with work right now. But here are some thoughts. My motives will feature heavily here. I feel misrepresented by a lot of what’s going around right now, and while I would like to focus primarily on the issues, I’m also the only one who can say what I meant to do.
The reason I closed comments on the original interview was that they were incredibly aggressive, so much so that they were scaring readers off commenting — and I was receiving email as a result. An incredibly hostile environment was being created. I have closed other comment threads for the same reason in the past, both at my personal blog and at Feministe, and I had permission from Jill (main moderator at Feministe) to do it on the original post. Although I did feel personally uncomfortable with some of the attacks against Hugo, particularly armchair-and-extreme diagnoses like “sociopath”, my main motive was to head off what I saw as an unproductive flamewar that was alienating readers. I have said this multiple times (and Jill has pointed out that she gave consent multiple times). In fact I outlined it explicitly in my followup post: Pretty soon, the comments had nothing to do with the interview at all. Some commenters were making amateur psychological diagnoses of Hugo, and other readers were emailing me privately to express shock at how ugly the discussion had gotten.
So I’m bothered by the fact that others continue to say things like: You were explicit both at feministe, and your place, that criticisms of that man bothered you, and shut that criticism down.
I get that “tone arguments” are widely considered unacceptable. But I have a problem with that. As someone who frequently and consistently facilitates discussions both in real life and online, I’ve found that there really is a point past which people simply aren’t communicating, and the fight just makes everyone miserable. The discussion I closed was not productive, measured criticism. (Later comments that were moderated on my blog included allegations that were inflammatory and subjective — and, by the way, I published all but one of those comments anyway, including a link to someone I really have a lot of problems with, so that people would have that information and could draw their own conclusions; only after publishing that stuff did I ask people to focus on the other questions.)
If people want flamewars, and to make lots of unsubstantiated allegations, well, okay … but I really have no interest in moderating that. It’s less about Hugo than it is about trying to make a space that feels like a real discussion for most readers, and one that I actually want to be responsible for.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because there have been assertions that I shouldn’t start conversations that might turn into that kind of thing if I don’t want to moderate that kind of thing. Maybe that’s true. But it’s not easy to predict what’s going in that direction. As it happens, I didn’t know from the beginning that Schwyzer was such a controversial figure; I mean, I knew he was somewhat controversial, but not to that extent.
After I started receiving extremely personal attacks and threats and demands and was told that I was an MRA and a rape apologist with some nice slut-shaming thrown in, that’s when it became a political problem that felt like a cheap distraction. And you know, maybe in order to be a blogger I should be able to just let it roll off my back when I get comments like the one in Caperton’s official Feministe followup where I’m told that it’s amazing that I can even talk given that Hugo’s dick is in my mouth? (I believe that comment is still available for viewing, which is why I’m citing it.) But I’m not inclined to open discussions where I have to deal with that. I moved the comments from the Feministe version of “Change and Accountability” to Role/Reboot because I don’t moderate Role/Reboot and so I don’t have to deal with that. And I don’t have to deal with it on the relevant thread on my own blog, which is why comments are still open there. If I started getting shit like that on my personal blog, then I would close comments (which, again, I have done in the past).
So, again, maybe if I can’t deal with that then I shouldn’t be a blogger. It’s possible. I reacted defensively. I propose that most people would react at least somewhat defensively to that kind of thing. I have received different suggestions about how I could have dealt with these moderation problems. Some of them have been useful. None of those suggestions were available to me when I acted.
* * *
In the followup post, I was partly defending Hugo, sure — but I highlighted the fact that I have never seen or heard any evidence that he continues misconduct in an effort to get at what kind of steps should be required of abusers — as one commenter at my place described: an honest and sustained effort at recovery and accountability (which I interpret as “I did it and won’t do it again”), done without dishonesty (repeat from above, could instead read “done for the right reasons”), and maintained over time.
I recognize that my followup post came off as both patronizing and naive. Part of it was that I felt attacked and part of it was that my experience of feminism really has lacked these accountability and transformative justice resources and discussions that, it turns out, are apparently common? When one of my close teenage friends was revealed as a rapist, for example, I certainly didn’t have the first idea where to find any of that stuff. I wish I had. When I was certified as a rape crisis counselor (which involved something like 60 hours of training), all the resources I was offered for dealing with abusers were legal: Civil No Contact Orders are about the most community-ish thing I can think of that I learned about, and they’re not very community-ish. I will suggest a unit on transformative justice to the relevant organization.
Nothing in my post was intended to slight survivors and, more importantly, nothing in it was intended to make demands that survivors compromise their boundaries or offer “forgiveness” on someone else’s demand. I wasn’t thinking of forgiveness so much as something that survivors would feel required to offer, more as a kind of community process. I agree with you that I should have created more space for survivors to draw boundaries in my post. But honestly — and I know this will sound thin — but honestly, it never occurred to me that anyone would read me as demanding that survivors give their abusers anything at all. That never crossed my mind, because it is so antithetical to what I believe. This whole thing is a lesson learned for a lot of reasons, but that’s the biggest one.
I desperately need to sleep now. I hope this doesn’t sound too defensive, although it is obviously somewhat defensive. But I didn’t know how to respond to your post without weaving in the threads of my original intentions.
I should say — I will request it for cross-post at Feministe if I can. You are obviously free to refuse the cross-post request, if I can get one.
A lot of people have already mentioned one of the big disconnects between forgiveness and trust–ie, that forgiving a person doesn’t necessarily mean trusting them. There’s something else bothering me in the Feministe conversation, and to a lesser extent here, and that’s the idea that I could possibly forgive Hugo. I am not one of the women he abused–it is their choice whether to forgive him or not, and I don’t want to interfere with that choice.
My choice is whether to *trust* him or not. That’s different from whether to forgive him. Trust is complicated, and deciding to trust a person not to steal your money doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with trusting them to keep a particular promise, or with trusting them to respect your boundaries. I’m not coming within arms’ length of Hugo, because he’s in California. I suspect that’s true for most of us. What kind of trust are we talking about, in this case?
(I’ve seen some concern that, as a women’s studies professor, he could be in a position to sexually harass his students. Is this more of a problem in women’s studies than history? I’ve been out of academia for 15 years, but my impression from way over in the engineering school was that fields like sociology or women’s studies are more likely to be alert to problems of that nature.)
I’ve been puzzling over why Clarisse’s post has been deeply unsettling for me, and this helps broaden my perspective a great deal.
Because she tried to make people feel guilty about pointing out that the guy tried to murder his girlfriend? Because people keep minimizing it? Because people are talking about everything but the fact that he tried to kill his girlfriend and now enablers are making it all about him? He’s been coddling MRAs his whole career, in addition to preying on his students, and despite his protests, I don’t think mocking his detractors adds up ‘remorse’.
Nobody’s dealing flat out with the fact that Schwyzer is an attempted murderer who even now is deflecting attention and trying to wriggle away from it. There’s lots of talk about mistakes forgiveness what have you—-but the actual murder attempt—-and the way he jumped from dog to woman and just had to share details about the sex he had with his ex—gets left out. This wasn’t a mistake. This wasn’t an error. He undertook at least four different actions to accomplish his goal of ending her life and getting away with it and that alone ought to be enough to entitle people to be suspicious.
His whole schtick is that he’s reformed and so he has something to offer, but he made sure with his lawyers he couldn’t get nailed for that attempted murder. What he’s got to offer is exploiting feminists some more and patting himself on the back for all the things he got away with.
As for calling those comments aggressive, well, were they as aggressive as trying to kill somebody—-but not before you made sure the cops would brush her off completely? Making sure she was passed out before you tried to gas her death, having decided that she needed to be put down like a dog?
We get angry at people for victimizing others, even though we’re not the victim. We take offense at things which weren’t aimed at us, even though we weren’t the target. And we can fairly forgive that same anger and offense if we choose, even though the victim/target may feel quite differently.
We CAN’T forgive for someone else; Maia’s and Clarrise’s forgiveness are theirs alone to give or withhold. But the flip side of the coin is that we CAN forgive our own feelings of anger or offense, on our own dime. Those internal responses belong to us, not the victim and certainly not the perp.
I have no problem refusing to forgive Hugo. I dislike the little that I know of him, and I also don’t know him past a random Internet post or two. That’s an easy one.
But although Hugo may not be a good place to discuss it, I question the suggestion that it’s always so simple to go 100% supportive in favor of one side of ANY dispute–or even that this is normal. A lot of people who are NOT default “_____ apologists” will still selectively support their close friends and family. (Rape is an example, but it’s a universal phenomenon which is by no means limited to rape.)
It’s easy to say I don’t like Hugo, or a person I don’t know. And it’s doable (though harder) to take a side where you know both people; I’ve done it and it sucks but sometimes the right thing is obvious.
It’s a hell of a lot harder and conflicting when the general meets the specific. I haven’t run into it thank god but it’s troubling enough to imagine: What do you do when your best friend/brother/father/sister/mother gets accused of something? What about when–not if–you believe them when they swear innocence? When–not if–you believe them when they swear that they’ve changed? When–not if–you think they’re being unfairly judged, be it by the court system or by other folks you know?
I think the honest and brutal reality is that the two sides will always exist, in conflict. It’s ridiculous to expect a victim to suddenly change their tune because the perp’s best friend forgives him. But it doesn’t seem any more reasonable to expect an emotional flip from the perp’s best friend.
So I don’t think Clarisse was out of line for deciding (on her own) to defend Hugo–though I disagree with her conclusion. Neither was anyone out of line for taking the “Hugo is evil” position. I can’t easily picture a society where only one view would exist.
But it does seem a bit harsh to suggest that Clarisse should be tossed off the feminist bus, just because Hugo happened to be in her “close friend” category and not her “person it’s simple to despise” category as he is for me and most of us here.
Can we be so certain we wouldn’t do the same thing? I’m sure there are some people who would really stick to their guns on social policy, and who, in every circumstance, would treat their good friends and family just like they’d treat Hugo, or me, or whoever. But I suspect those folks are damn rare, and it’s way easier to repeat a slogan than to apply it to your sister.
Clarisse,
I would very strongly suggest that yes, you should not be a blogger *at Feministe* at the very least. It sounds to me that Feministe’s comment culture and your ideas of an ideal comment culture are very much at odds, and if you continue to blog there you’ll continue to run into these problems. If you question the tone argument, if you’re put off by “aggressive” comments and armchair diagnoses, you can certainly still participate in Internet culture, but maybe your goals and temperament are better served elsewhere.
@9:
I don’t get the feeling that he has gone through all that much, or has grown all that much. Certainly not morally. There’s something exhibitionistic about how he tells about the “bad” things he has done. I cannot imagine that someone who was in fact all that ashamed of the stuff he had done would so freely tell the world about it.
I haven’t read his post where he tells about the attempted murder, but I did read his article about shtupping his students. I did not get the feeling that he felt ashamed of what he did, only that at some point he decided it was “unethical.” And he insists that no one was harmed, so it’s OK. And shtupping students is still OK, as long as they’re not “his” students. For a supposed professor of feminism, he doesn’t have much of a grasp of what power inequalities are about.
There’s a reason why groups like Alcoholics Anonymous insists that their participants be anonymous when they discuss their involvement in public, and it’s not to protect the participants from stigma. It’s to keep them from making their “growth” something to brag about.
This gets back to the OP’s point: making a big deal about an abuser’s reform, and focussing on him (gender intentional) and telling him how wonderful he is for reforming does not benefit anyone, except maybe abusers who would rather stay abusers.
@25
Please drop the “tossed off the feminist bus” language. We’ve got enough hyperbole already.
Clarisse T. was criticized for (a) posting a puff piece about HS on a feminist blog and then (b) getting all offended when people posted comments critical of him, and then (c) posting a second article, the one that the OP (above) criticizes. I don’t think anyone would have gotten so worked up if she’d just hung out with him, or even posted said puff piece on her personal blog.
Sorry–I was thinking about the comments over at Feministe, not here. That’s not accurate for Alas though it is, in my opinion anyway, accurate for Feministe. I should have been more clear.
This is a great post. As for Clarisse’s response, I just don’t understand how her view of the original comments thread and that of the bulk of the Feministe community are so different. She keeps describing it as something that was overly aggressive and personal and long time commenters and other Feministe writers seem to think it was heated but well within typical community standards.
I love this post for making me think about the deeper issues, but the “controversy” strikes me as a moderation comfort zone mis-match between Feministe and Clarisse.
Thanks for this post. I became disillusioned with Hugo Schwyzer years ago (without even knowing about his disturbing past). I don’t understand why he receives so much positive attention from the feminist community. I also gave up reading Feministe because of the Clarisse Thornification of their site. Alas, nothing about this controversy surprises me.
I’m conflicted on this whole thing … I like and respect Clarisse and her writing a lot, but I’m not generally a fan of Hugo. I don’t see the “he hasn’t really reformed” that a lot of people see in him, but otoh, once you’ve attempted murder, I’m not sure personal, spiritual reformation is the order of the day any longer.
So yeah, conflicted.
In reference to the quote of Emily’s I grabbed above, I, too, find the commentariat at Feministe to be aggressive to the point of unreadability. Not always, and not on every topic, and certainly not every commenter … but regularly. I read Feministe, and I love Feministe, but there’s a reason I don’t comment there.
That’s not a condemnation of them, by any means. Different strokes and all. Let a thousand flowers bloom. A million points of light. Whatever. I’m just saying that I don’t think it’s utterly unreasonable for Clarisse to have a problem with it.
—Myca
That may or may not be true. But just because a person has “courage” to do something that risks negative consequences does not by itself mean that the person is entitled to be spared from those negative consequences. It may take “courage” for a criminal to confess to a crime and turn himself to face the music, but his brave disclosure should not excuse him from the consequences of his actions.
Incidentally, Schwyzer’s courage may not have extended to the point of risking criminal liability. He said,
http://www.hugoschwyzer.net/2011/01/03/what-you-need-to-remember-what-you-need-to-forget-on-self-acceptance-after-doing-something-truly-awful/
But he was “brave” enough to risk internet opprobrium. If Schwyzer was aware that such revelations about his past “could” discredit him, he and his supporters should not be surprised or taken aback now that he “is” discredited because of those revelations.
re: Figleaf @ 16
These are common misconceptions. The finding is that there is a disproportionately high number of people who are survivors of abuse among offender populations compared to the general population. However, this does not mean either A) that all or most offenders have a history of abuse (the proportion varies depending on the specific sample, and it’s not always a majority – even if the rate is only 20% in an offender sample, that’s still disproportionately high if the rate is 10% in the general population) or B) that all or most survivors become perpetrators (given the relative infrequency of offending behaviours, in fact, it’s simple probabilistic logic to see that most survivors do NOT become perpetrators because most people, survivors or otherwise, do not become offenders). Disproportionate rates should not be confused with absolute figures – one is comparative, the other is not.
This doesn’t mean that offending, abuse, or the relationship between them is insignificant or unimportant, but the common characterization that you reference is inaccurate and therefore not as helpful as information closer to the true state of affairs.
Clarisse Thornification?
You might want to leave here then, too; we’ve been publishing her and aren’t planning to stop.
AMM–when criticism includes hate mail, it’s no longer appropriate to minimize it by saying “well, it’s just criticism.”
Again, I don’t have a whole lot of time, but here are a couple of more general thoughts:
When I was originally writing “On Change and Accountability”, someone close to me who has survived multiple sexual assaults asked to see the draft. I showed it to her, and she thought it was awesome; she strongly encouraged me to publish it, because I was hesitant. Yes, I am saying this partly defensively, but my main goal here is to make the point that criticism stating that “On Change and Accountability” completely ignores survivors or is not useful to them will discount her experience. It will also ignore the experience of other survivors who have specifically thanked me for writing that piece, and who found it helpful in their own way, and who have specifically stated that they felt attacked in the followup discussions. As I already said, I do believe that I fucked up in how I wrote that post and that I could have done a better job making space for survivors and preserving survivors’ boundaries. But this whole thing points to a problem that I have heard before from other survivors, namely, that they do not feel represented by certain branches of feminist culture and that they feel as though certain branches of feminism create a kind of “survivor model” or “survivor culture” that they do not want to participate in. If anyone else has thought/written about this, then I would really appreciate thoughts/links.
On another note, another gender writer emailed me after the publication of “On Change and Accountability” to say that she sees this as a kind of fundamental clash between the survivor-centered ethics and language that are currently central to feminist thought, and the type of language that is widely used in the recovery communities she is familiar with. I don’t have any well-developed thoughts on this either, but again, I would really appreciate others’ thoughts/links.
Okay, I’ll leave. Funny thing is that I hadn’t read this site for at least a year and just stopped by to see if smug and condescending contributors like you were still around. And you are!
Best wishes for finding lots of like-minded sycophants to converse with in 2012. There don’t seem to be as many commenters on this site as there were in the past. I wonder why?
Yes, me and Mandolin and Ron and mythago and G&W and nojojo, it’s like someone set the community member machine on “clone” and just spammed the “go” button all day!
“People objected to Hugo Schwyzer being given this space on a feminist blog as he had, among other things, tried to kill his girlfriend a decade ago. ”
I strongly object to this idea and have, as a consequence, had a great deal of trouble engaging further with the evolving arguments.
If he had been invited on as a guest blogger, this argument would make more sense to me. He wasn’t; he was interviewed. So was Roissy.
So he was “given space” in that he was a subject in an article, not in that he was invited to be part of the composition of the space. It seems to me that therefore the argument that Clarisse was wrong to publish the interview is saying that Hugo is an inappropriate subject, or at any rate, that Hugo cannot be discussed except in a certain way–that the only thing about Hugo that we can discuss is that he is a rapist and attempted murderer, and moreover, that these things make non-existent anything else he’s done.
I feel like this is somehow an attempt to create a cosmic balance where none exists. Hugo doesn’t have a good/bad meter, and every good act chunks it up a bit, and every bad act chunks it back down, and something bad enough makes it all black forever.
People are multiple things at the same time; they’re Nazis and scientists; they’re anti-semites and brilliant musicians; they’re genius inventors and racist-fuck rapists; they’re feminist foremothers who cheerfully fuck over trans people.
Roman Polanski is a rapist and pedophile. He’s also, apparently, an inspired movie-maker. No matter what else he does in his life, he’s going to be a rapist and a pedophile *and* an inspired movie-maker. His life isn’t a balance sheet. There’s nothing he does that will ever get rid of “rapist and pedophile.” But nothing he does is going to get rid of “inspired movie-maker” either. They don’t exist on a single, reifiable scale.
People can react to that however they want to react to it. I listen to THE RING, but I have no desire to prioritize Dave Sim’s books over the hundred million other things I’d like to read. I don’t have a problem with people who choose not to watch ROSEMARY’S BABY; I *do* have a problem with people shaming those who do watch them.
If Hugo has something useful or interesting to say then personally I’m going to take that and use it. I didn’t read his blog for very long, but I occasionally find that a phrase he coined was a useful way for me to think about something.
People deal with these things differently, both on a social level (described above) and on a personal level. One of my aunts avoided her abusive fuck of a father until he died; one of my aunts chose to take what good she could from him. The idea that there’s only one way to handle these things in order to make space for survivors makes me growly. Survivors are different people with different interests.
I’d feel differently if Hugo’s actual victims were saying they wanted him to be taken out of the spaces where they frequent. Has this happened? I wasn’t under the impression it had. I might have missed something.
But if he’s just being used as an icon for “abuser”… meh. I don’t think sorting the world between victims and people-who-have-abused is going to work out very well. Choose who you want to associate with, sure, and if a reform narrative makes you nauseated, more power to. But if someone else draws their line differently from where you draw yours then they don’t get tainted by association.
Whoa, when/where was Roissy interviewed? I’ve never done that myself and I’m amazed that someone had the chutzpah.
I thought you had. Must be condensing something.
No, I just quote his blog a lot because he’s a really good example of how bad pickup artists can get. I wouldn’t feel safe being anywhere near him, let alone in a conversation with him.
Brief attempt to identify whatever it was my brain coded as “interview with Roissy” has failed.
I withdraw the specific example.
Oh, I bet it was the Neil Strauss interview.
mandolin-
is it possible that the difference between Hugo and Roissy is that Hugo is meant to be an ally and role model, rather than an interesting curio?
SC, is it possible that’s a disingenuous question?
Leaving that aside — If one were to publish an interview w/ me, I suppose I might be considered an ally–but a role model? Was that something someone explicitly said or something you’re inferring?
mandolin-
well, you know. there aren’t that many prominent male-feminist types. hugo schwyzer, jackson katz, jay smooth… it’s a small little community. for people like me- well-meaning, but not formally educated and thus not really in a community with decent, well-read feminist men, prominent feministy-academicy men like hugo schwyzer are examples of Dudes Who Get It.
but it seems like hugo doesn’t get it, which is the annoying part. dude mansplains like crazy, has to be the center of everything (the picture of him front-and-center at slutwalk LA speaks volumes), is kinda smarmy-patronizing and dismissive, etc. the behaviors which would mark me as kind of a dickhead are just fine from him, though, because he’s a professor with all kind of bona-fides.
i expect my betters to be actually better, you know?
This is a far more nuanced discussion than the one happening at Feministe. Clarisse, I don’t know what the political situation is there for you now, but would you please consider posting your well-written explanation over there?
I have no idea if it would help or hurt the discourse at this point, but I believe it would provide more clarity.
No, it really doesn’t.
Does this problem exist? Sure; and feminist orthodoxy isn’t limited to survivors (try bringing up sex work sometime). But you getting negative comments because you made a clueless argument ain’t it, unless you are really truly trying to say that a) nobody who criticized you is a survivor, b) even if anybody criticizing you was a survivor, s/he is someone who subscribes to the belief that there is only one proper way to ‘be’ a survivor, and c) that I Had This One Friend Who Said It’s Cool So Y’all Are Wrong is an argument that really does negate criticism.
(I think it goes without saying that serious personal attacks and ‘hurrr you suck cock’ comments are wholly unjustified, and the shitty moderation of comments is a sign of a bad blog; another of the many reasons I quit reading Feministe ages ago.)
BTW, as far as Hugo’s liability goes, my lawyer-sense starts tingling any time someone says they ‘checked with an attorney friend’ and are told there’s ‘no legal risk’. Were Hugo’s attorney friends lawyers who practice criminal defense in the state where this happened, or at least prosecutors? I’m an attorney and I sure as hell wouldn’t be comfortable telling a friend “Shyeah, that was years ago, go ahead and post about how you tried to kill your girlfriend.” Some cursory research suggests that there may not be a statute of limitations on attempted murder, if it’s a degree that carries a potential penalty of life in prison. I really wonder whether Hugo’s “attorney friends” told him what he thought he heard.
Funnily enough, Hugo said he’d like to interview Roissy.
Thanks for all the kind comments and interesting ideas. This response may be a little scattered and a lot of people have said interesting htings I’m not responding to (This blog refuses to load from home, but I get e-mailed the comments so I’ve been able to read but not respond for a few days).
Mok – You ask why I think it’s necessary to believe that abusers can change. Partly that’s just my worldview – I do think that people are fundamentally awesome and even awful people can become less awful. But also it’s just a cynical analysis of the numbers. One of the bleakest moments, for me, involved a guy called Pete, who had raped his girlfriend when she was passed out. A man, who claimed to be feminist (and who I thought was one of the more onto it guys I knew at the time), objected to some of the ways people were responding claiming: “He hasn’t done anything that every man in our community hasn’t done.” I don’t actually believe that that was true. But I do believe that the actual figure of rapists is much higher than the 6% who will admit it when asked certain questions, and the 1 in 5 women who experience domestic violence are experiencing it from a significant portion of men. The way I see it the only alternative to believing men can change is withdrawing to an island somewhere with very strict entry criteria. And that’s not the sort of politics I’m interested in. But, as I made clear, I don’t think that requires any obligation to believe that someone has changed, and I’m not prepared to risk anything on that possibility.
Julie – I’m really hoping to be able to read the book of Revolution Begins at Home. In my experience, there are real limits to survivor centred responses (the most important is that they require an awful lot of work from the survivor and open survivors up to backlash and victimisation), so I’m really keen to read about other’s experiences to broaden my analysis.
figleaf – I may have missed the point of your comment entirely – but I cannot respond to your discussion of abuse which compares it to not flossing and not abusing to ironing the sheets. I actually don’t understand what you could possibly mean here:
I don’t see the connection at all (and I don’t know that anyone has said ‘that we’re prepared to hold perpetrators of physical or sexual abuse accountable’ – I just don’t think ‘prepared’ is the appropriate verb at all – the questions are about are people willing and are they capable. One of the things I have realised is how important it is to recognise that we have no power over abusers – we cannot hold them in any way – least of all accountable. Any response that doesn’t recognise this profound lack of power has, in my experience, done real harm).
I disagree about the relevance of Hugo’s addictions and/or program attending to the way we consider his past actions. However, the more important argument in my post wasn’t exactly how we should think of Hugo – but the importance of not pressuring a single response. You can think Hugo’s addiction and recovery is relevant, but that’s very different from demanding a unitary response from other people based on that addiction and recovery.
And I think it’s important that we acknowledge that the answer is ‘we don’t know’. These are not just theoretical philosophical questions, but things people have done research on – and particularly domestic violence perpetrators – nobody has a clue how to do it. At least in NZ, outreach and recovery groups for perpetrators of domestic violence exist – and there’s no evidence that they help, and a suggestion that they can make things worse.
It makes sense that we don’t know how to transform perpetrators into not perpetrators – transformation is not something you know how to do until you’ve done it. If we did know then society would look very different.
But I think this ignorance has important implications – I think if you don’t know if the means are going to achieve the ends – then the means have to be worthwhile in themselves, or at least non-harmful and something everyone involved actively wants to do. I have ideas, obviously, and I think a lot of people do – but it’s the principle of recognising the implication of our ignorance that is the point that most relates to what I wsa trying to say in this post.
Mandolin – I think your point about whether or not an interview is centring is a really interesting one that I hadn’t really thought of. My experience of interviews is oral history – which tend towards a desire to centre interviewees. I disagree that interviewees are only the subjects of interviews – not its creators. But I think that that balance does depend on the genre. I think Hugo Schwyzer was partly an author of that interview, as well as being its subject – but would need to think about it more to parse out hte fine details.
My summary description was just intended to give a brief rundown of the situation for an audience that doesn’t necessarily read American feminist blogs (and I would have taken it off the verison I posted on Alas if I’d thought about it). I’m happy for people to talk specifically about Hugo in the comments, but that wasn’t my intention in the post (although I found it hard towards the end to explain what I meant without referencing the specific situation a lot).
“People can react to that however they want to react to it. I listen to THE RING, but I have no desire to prioritize Dave Sim’s books over the hundred million other things I’d like to read. I don’t have a problem with people who choose not to watch ROSEMARY’S BABY; I *do* have a problem with people shaming those who do watch them. […] People deal with these things differently, both on a social level (described above) and on a personal level.”
That was one of the points I was trying to make in the post. What I objected to so strongly about Clarisse’s post was that it read as shaming those who reacted to Hugo with anger. I acknowledge that the flip side of my argument is that people are fine to be OK with Hugo – and I’ll freely acknowledge that I’m much more the person who responds with anger and boundaries and who can struggle with other people being OK (I often respond to a suggestion of a movie with “[person who directed it] signed hte Polanski petition”). But I think the principle of letting people decide their own levels of OKness has to include both being OK and being not OK (there are all sorts of complications to this idea, but I do want to finish this comment tonight so I’ll leave it there).
The question is how people with different levels of OKness come together. I’d suggest that in feminist spaces erring towards respecting not OKness is really important. I think a similar style interview with Polanski would be as problematic for Feministe.
I disagree with some of your conclusions towards the end of your comment as I do think there are lots of important differences between the way we appreciate art work, and the role of a public feminist. I think this is a huge claim about people’s response to Hugo: “But if he’s just being used as an icon for “abuser”… meh.” And I don’t think that’s what’s going on.
Clarisse – I understand that you feel under attack and that this must be a really shitty situation for you. I tried to make this a response to your ideas, because that’s what bothered me – and I’m going to continue to engage about ideas – rather than either actions or intentions. I could understand if that’s not something you can respond to at the moment. I’m not going to respond here to the wider questions about the nature of blog arguments – and the implications of different views about whether a thread is ‘incredibly aggressive’ – or ways of responding to horrific comments. I may write a response about that later – but I wanted to acknowledge that of course that’s a huge issue for you.
I just want to make it clear that I referred to your closing of the thread, not as a statement on the rightness or wrongness of that action, but because it did effect the way I read the post. I’d feel hypocritical criticising someone from disengaging from a comments thread (I am either on or off – either I’m reading and replying obsessively or I’m ignoring).
I’m disturbed by your use of ‘unsubstantiated allegations’ in this context: “If people want flamewars, and to make lots of unsubstantiated allegations, well, okay” And I’m unclear what you mean. Because the phrase is such a huge red flag to me that I don’t know that I can respond coherently. Should the WoC who have been shut down by Hugo in the past be required to find the links (and I have been around long enough to remember and recognise the pattern other people have described)? Should the person Hugo Schwyzer harassed on facebook be required to present screencaps?
I think your use of the passive voice here is really problematic; the political implications of the passive voice is one of my obsessions – but I think the phrase ‘should be required of abusers’ demonstrates why. There’s no subject in that sentence – so it’s not clear who you think should be doing the requiring – and why they should be doing the sort of requiring you have set out – rather than the requiring that they would be doing on their own. I think it’s important to argue these things explicitly – rather than imply them passively. I think a lot of why your post came across to me as trying to pressure people into forgiveness is because of your use of indirect language and rhetorical questions. “This is what I think” is ultimate less pressuring than “abusers should be required to”.
Oh ‘process’. The most fucked-up response to an abusive man I ever knew about in an activist community (the one I discuss as using silence as power over) was called ‘process’. People talked about going to ‘process’ meetings – and later in other cases, people would say that we needed a ‘process’ and one man even demanded ‘a process’ so people would be OK with him. At this point I’m seriously uncomfortable with the term and my experience creates images of processing people in all sorts of ways.
But I have another point – I don’t think you can have a ‘community process’. A community is an informal network of individuals and that informality extends to its power structures and decision making. A group, or collective can have a process, because it can have decision making structures. Individuals can go through a process – but I’ve no idea how a community could have a process without people speaking on behalf of other people. I don’t think a community can ‘forgive’ without over-riding some individuals desires not to ‘forgive’ (and I think that’s true if you replace ‘forgive’ with a different idea which is part of a process).
I want to clarify that I said “There is no space in your post for survivors” – which is not the same thing as saying that no-one would find it useful or ignoring the experience of those who did. I was talking about the discussion within your post – not the way it would be received.
I agree that there is a problem sometimes with the discourse of ‘survivor’ (even the word makes me uncomfortable on many levels). There was a time when I was terribly excited by ‘survivor centred support’ – but later experiences have made me think about that in different ways (I may write a follow-up post about that). I certainly acknowledge that it’s important not to create a single ‘survivor response’. However, like Mythago, I don’t see the connection to this (in the broadest sense of this).
Maia –
just commenting to say that, based on this post, I’d be very much interested in your thoughts about the “wider question”. :)
Oh, dear God, not the argument that people can be good and bad both. We’re not talking about people in general, frankly; if we are, we shouldn’t be. We should be talking about Schwyzer specifically and how he’s a manipulative user who even now is whining on his facebook about how mean people are about a trivial little matter like trying to kill his girlfriend like a dog. (He literally jumped from sorrow over a lost dog to that infuriating tale about how more-suffering-than-thou he was, like he was in a competition. And leaping from dog to woman…..yeah, that’s not revealing at all.) That doesn’t smell ‘reformed’ to me. Neither does making snotty little remarks about his detractors. Forgiveness may be a wonderful topic to discuss, but who cares about it now, really? He’s not remorseful; he’s not repentant, and he’s still not listening to women. He doesn’t regret trying to kill his ex; if anything I’d bet he feels angry about how people just won’t suck up to him the way others are doing. At least, his comments have indicated that he has no clue what he would be if he were a real ally. He could shut up and listen and take notes. He could turn himself in. He could even just stop making snarky remarks. He’s doing none of those things. He’s not listening. He still has that same, amused, “I’m-better-than-you” attitude, as feminists argue over whether an unrepentant predator should be granted a place at a table where there are already too few seats for talented feminist writers who get shoved aside.
Forgiveness is a great thing to talk about. Just not in this specific case. He’s doing everything in his power to indicate his contempt and the way he doesn’t take seriously any criticism of him at all. He hasn’t recanted any of his previous revealing comments about feminism: be a player now and sexxor up those hawt girls, then be a feminist later; oh, wait, feminism is like a cold lake from which one has to surface now and then, and God only knows how many I missed when his sucking up to MRAs got to be a little too heavy to bear.
He’s a rich white guy who doesn’t even have a degree in what he’s teaching. And he’s the one this battle is over? He’s the one that feminists are having this huge complicated discussion over? This guy can buy all the forgiveness he could ever want, just like his privilege enabled him to discredit and gaslight that poor young woman he tried to kill.
He doesn’t exhibit any signs of wanting forgiveness. Call me a vengeful this-or-this, but whatever you call forgiveness, I’d say giving it to someone who’s so unrepentant is just tactically, logically, intellectually, and practically stupid, if nothing else. It may be a great and moral thing to do, but he doesn’t care whether you do or not, because what we think and feel—-outside of admiring him and his specialness—-has never really mattered, as near as I can see. When he talks to men about women he sounds just like an MRA. If that’s what we’ve got for allies, thanks but no thanks.
Elsewhere, people are brushing this off as Oh noes he was high, it was a MISTAKE, YOU HEAR ME!! and so on. It doesn’t matter if he was high or not; if he was, he was not impaired in any way which thwarted his ability to plan and execute nearly perfectly a murder, he didn’t make any mistakes because he nearly got away with it, and finally…..If we can’t agree that this guy is an abuser and needs to be tossed out till he actually does something more than protest too much then there’s no hope at all. He says he’s sorry, and I guess that’s enough for some contingents.
Schwyzer’s the kind of ally who says he’s an ally before it’s a status granted to him, who says he’s an ally while he blames his preying on women on outside forces, who says he’s an ally while he makes sure he’s the spokescritter while he listens, it appears, more to fans and MRAs than women.
Holy balls, Ginmar just made a post that I agree with 100%.
I can’t and won’t speak to the specifics of Hugo’s sexual and/or criminal past life, partially because I am not as well versed in the details of it as the other people here, but mostly because they’ve already spoken to them better than I would.
But Hugo’s public writings simply scream ‘manipulator’ and ‘narcissist’ and ‘I bet I can fool you into thinking I am better than you’. I won’t even post examples; just read his blog casually (and with a hostile eye) and the contradictions start jumping out at you.
Since to ginmar to be male is to be bad, there is no forgiveness to be had from her and thus why anyone should listen to her on this topic I don’t know.
She also doesn’t deign to mention that Hugos attempt to kill his girlfriend (which is disgusting I have no problem with someone NOT forgiving him for that, I don’t like the man anyway but hey, I’m not a feminist) was part of a suicide attempt. Reading her comments you’d think it was just typical male privilege oriented domestic violence. Because being in such a crazy place that you feel you must end your own life is the exact same spot as having the agents of the patriarchy cheer you on while you bash the “little woman” around.
Oh lord above, clarence. The old murder-suicide trick is overwhelmingly pulled on women by men. Plenty of people get suicidal for whatever reason; it’s totally a dude thing to take your girlfriend/former gf with you when you go.
Clarence,
Your comment is so, so very wrongheaded.
If your claim about ginmar’s motives is true, who better to listen to on the topic of forgiveness from the side of not forgiving? Your ad hom gives no support to your point.
I was previously unaware that attempted murder is a component of suicide. That’s just a turrrhible defense of Hugo. I assure you that when I commit suicide I will consciously and pointedly not attempt to murder anybody else.
Clarence, this isn’t my thread, and your moderation is up to Maia, but I think the smart move here to to apologize to Ginmar, stop trying to make the thread about her, and (if you have it) post something on-topic.
I’d agree that the difference between attempted murder and attempted murder-suicide is worth discussing, but considering that 90+% of perpetrators of murder-suicides are male, I’m not sure why on earth you think this is unrelated to gender violence, privilege, and the patriarchy.
—Myca
I’m not sure about “I bet I can fool you into thinking I’m better than you” (because I never got the sense that it was conscious) but I’ve been saying the other two for *years* (and was always somewhat surprised no one else detected it). It’s not a revelation.
I think this is the crux?
Feministe can make this policy. People can argue for Feministe to make this a policy. Those are both reasonable arguments and possibly arguments I’d support.
I don’t support the idea that, in the absence of such a policy, it is okay to treat someone the way Clarisse has been treated for posting the interview. There may be other issues as well, but she is definitely *also* being shamed for having her boundaries set differently.
I’m sorry, the crux of what I was talking about, obvs not the crux of everything.
It seems to be a revelation for some people, Mandolin. Maybe you and I just have more highly attuned bullshit detectors.
I do get the sense that it’s conscious, from several months of trying to engage with Hugo, from the pattern of comments that would get approved or not approved. You could argue with him, even argue vociferously, even attack him viciously, and be approved but even mild statements that undermined his own “deserved, earned” superior moral status on an issue went straight to the memory hole. But I could be wrong.
Pingback: The Fifteen Most Popular “Alas” Posts of 2011 | Alas, a Blog
Well, since some of the discussion here has turned one more time to Hugo, I thought I’d point something out that might be telling. Out of curiosity, I compared his home page to Michael Kimmel’s. I just thought, given everything I have been reading about Hugo–whom I read only very rarely and about whom I therefore don’t have enough information to know if I agree with what people like Mandolin and Robert have been saying about him–I just thought it would be interesting to look at how he promotes himself as compared to how another academic male feminist “icon”–for want of a better word–does. And this I found telling, though precisely what I think it is telling of I am not entirely sure: Kimmel’s home page has a picture of him, a testimonial from one of the colleges where he’s given a presentation and then a column of news items about him and his work. Hugo’s carries a tag line: “Author, Speaker, Professor, Shattering Gender Myths”–which I find presumptuous, pretentious, self-aggrandizing in a really creepy way–given that this is taking place in a feminist context–and also, on some level, patently false, since there doesn’t seem to me to be anything in his online presentation or in his online writing that “shatters” gender myths. Questions? Sure. Undermines? Sure. But shatters? The language is more than a little too hyperbolic for me.
I’m not ready to jump from this observation to the condemnation that I hear people leveling at him, just because I still don’t know enough yet to know precisely what I think. And I am very purposely not saying anything about his history for the same reason: Like ginmar, I find it very disturbing that he used, without any irony or meta analysis, his friend’s question about a dog that almost got away as a jumping off point to write about his attempted murder of his girlfriend, but I just don’t have enough information from reading him long enough to know whether I think that is characteristic of him or a serious but uncharacteristic error of judgment.
Anyway, I just thought the comparison of home pages was worth mentioning.
@Richard
Both Hugo’s and Michael Kimmel’s front pages look disturbingly like Kyle Paine’s “blogger bio”.
http://kylepayne.wordpress.com/blogger-bio/
Clarence’s name vaguely rings a bell as a long-time troll who unwittingly illustrates another dilemma that women do face online and which might explain the reluctance to ditch ‘allies’ like Hugo: male allies are few and far between, while treatment of women who resist male bias is appalling—-and persistent—-that years later trolls will harass women.
Allies don’t scurry to put themselves in the leader position. Hugo’s basically appointed himself head of the NAACP and now he’s both boasting about he’s that special, and why aren’t those people grateful to him for letting his white maleness legitimizing their claims?
I could care less if he claims he tried to kill himself. I see no proof of that, just the overwhelming self pity that he confuses for sorrow. First, a guy talked about inadvertently letting his friend’s dog to an almost certain death. Then, there’s the fact that his ex asked him to come pick her up after some kind of experience w hich he hints was almost certainly sexually assault. Nevertheless, he describes it in the manner of a romance novelist. I’d say that’s kind of invasive, especially for a woman who’s experienced what he details. (In fact, all his writing reeks of boastfulness to me, and this piece nearly chokes you with it. “Look at me, look what I’ve done! I’ve got a story that tops yours.”) Then there’s the detailed account of the attempted murder, which gives the lie to the defense that the drugs made him do it. He was not so impaired that he couldn’t wait till she was unconscious, then think up excuses, then one by one: turn off the pilot lights, not once but at least five times, pull the stove out, turn the gas up high, and point it directly at her. Then he made the self pitying phone call to a friend. And finally, he decided to save himself from charges by attacking her again with his higher social status and saying that she’d tried to kill herself, that they’d had a suicide pact. And he did it once by saying he’d checked with lawyers. If he was really remorseful, he’d turn himself in. He wouldn’t be whining and sneering about it by turns on facebook.
Finally, this is what allies don’t do. They don’t use your cause, your life, your beliefs, as a vehicle for self aggrandizement. They don’t charge to the front of the line. They don’t shout you down and tell you that they know so much better than you about your life. They don’t talk down to you. They don’t surround themselves with people they can abuse—and then boast about how, you know, they could if they wanted to. Real allies fight alongside you, unbidden, which is where so many allies fail. I’ve lost track of the times I’ve seen some lone woman f ighting off trolls in a dogpile, and nobody comes to her aid. That’s what an ally would do. What I have seen, though, are numerous allies who stand by and make excuses for non participation. Hugo doesn’t even get to that point.
His whole story —about the attempted murder, about feminism, about everything—-is about him. The murder? Geez, it caused him so much angst, let him show you it. Let him talk about himself instead of womens’ issues, or his special perception of womens’ issue. God help us, let him talk about his sexual predations on students. He feels really bad about it, let him tell you.
Tell you. Not show you, because if you look at his actions, they’re almost devoid of any assistance at all. It’s all about Hugo and his publicity. When feminism stops working for his horn-tooting, I suspect it’s going to be MRA all the way, baby. We have such crappy excuses for allies that this is what we have to accept. I think some people are scared to face that and this is the result. For a lot of women, fighting men alone, by themselves, is a terrifying option. They can’t imagine it. Voila! Here we are.
He’s been telling women, not showing them, for ages. It’s a curious thing to me that people will say things and nobody will compare them to his actions. You get the feeling that he doesn’t do anything supposedly for feminists, without making damned good and sure they know about it—and without making sure he gets attention for it. It’s all like a Penthouse Letter to feminists.
I don’t see Thorn as ‘being shamed’ for her boundaries. I see it as people questioning why she’s able to accept Hugo’s explanations and yet utterly reject the feelings of victims and anybody who points out that he’s a victimizer who uses his actual predations as something on his resume. One can’t get away from the central fact that Schwyzer is a victimizer and that victims have every right to not just point that out, but ask why on earth he was picked over women who, for one thing, wouldn’t be so incredibly triggering.
Mandolin – I think it is an important question in how to balance the OK-ness and the not OK-ness. And obviously context is very important. I realised that there are huge differences in how we’re mapping this, which is why I struggled to say what I wanted to say in response to your comment. I am seeing Hugo as a political activist in political activist spaces. You appear to be thinking Hugo more as a creator.
Clarisse has made it clear that she has a much stronger relationship to Hugo than the relationship between a creator and someone who enjoys/uses their work. I think, as I said in that post, in that context, part of being OK with someone who has been abusive is realising that other people are not going to be OK with them and respecting the boundaries that other people draw (I would argue the same about creators actually – if you know that someone has a problem with a particular musician because he was violent towards his partner – then I don’t think you should put that music on when they come round).
This is the point that I think it becomes tricky to parse out the different things that are going on and the meanings that are given to them. It’s not clear which way you think Clarisse has been treated that are not OK. The blow-job comment on Caperton’s thread and abusive e-mails – nobody deserves to be treated like that.
But if we get away from the things that are not OK in any context – I’m not sure that I agree that ‘deserve’ is really the right way of looking at people’s anger.
One of the big problems with arguments on blogs – is that responses are given individually but experienced as a whole. A 935 page comment thread where at least 95% of comments are disagreeing with what you’ve done is full-on. But no-one makes a 935 comment thread, everyone just adds one comment at a time (or three depending on their commenting style). I don’t think ‘deserving’ is a useful way of looking at these responses.
I also disagree with your characterisation – the response has not just been about posting the interview. The interview comments were not shaming about her boundaries (although obviously I don’t know what her personal e-mails said). It was only after she wrote a post that was shaming about other people having boundaries with Hugo that the public discussion included her boundaries. Clarisse wrote a post which argued about where the boundaries should be – I think in that context it’s reasonable for people to assume she thinks that’s an acceptable topic for discussion. I don’t think that should be the focus of conversation – and therefore I don’t write about it.
Just a note about moderation – As I said I cannot get access to this site from home. So I can’t do much moderation. I see this thread as being pretty open for discussion of both the wide issues and the specific example. Clarence – what Myca said.
She also doesn’t deign to mention that Hugos attempt to kill his girlfriend (which is disgusting I have no problem with someone NOT forgiving him for that, I don’t like the man anyway but hey, I’m not a feminist) was part of a suicide attempt.
Hmmmm.
So this is a two part problem of why did he try to kill himself and why attempt to take her with him?
“. The interview comments were not shaming about her boundaries (although obviously I don’t know what her personal e-mails said).”
OK, we’re getting abstract to the point that I think communication is going to be weird/limited, but this is what I felt I saw and what I object to — I object to the implication that it’s obviously and unambiguously out of bounds for her to have posted the interview in that space, which is her using her judgment and her boundaries, which therefore suggests her boundaries are *wrong.* I don’t think it is obvious or unambiguous that one shouldn’t be able to have a dialogue in a public, feminist space with people who present as conflicted feminist figures (and yeah, I think Hugo is a conflicted feminist figure, not an unambiguously dark one). That’s not a useful approach to negotiating how a space should be used (which is a legitimate/necessary topic of discussion); that’s saying that one set of people’s approach to boundaries is inherently and obviously better than the other set’s.
I hear your separation of activism and art, but I think the two forms actually have some important things in common (this is, perhaps, not a surprising position for me to take since I see art as inherently political). Hugo is producing a body of work which can be abstracted from, interpreted, and used apart from his authorial intent.
tenter: I don’t see it, except in the most superficial, template kind of way. What’s your point?
Seeing as how the comments are still up at feministe and other places, it seems to me that the simplest way of finding out what commenters said would be to read them and verify what they said about Thorn. Those comments tend to fall on the, “Did she really say ‘tone’ to us?!” side, along with, “I can’t believe we’re being asked to tolerate a guy who tried to kill his girlfriend.”
Once again, being suicidal means being suicidal. I think he timed his attack a bit off; I think the whole point was killing that poor woman, given how very little regard he shows for her now. As others have mentioned murder suicides are almost entirely a male thing. It’s like the pharaohs slaughtering their servants to take them with them. Or it’s like family murderer John List, who decided to kill his whole family because he felt that his daughter’s interest in theater was going to inevitably lead to witchcraft. His mother he killed because he felt the whole thing—-his murder of his whole family—–would be too hard for her to bear. They weren’t doing what he wanted them to do, he feared that they wouldn’t turn out the way he wanted them to, and he took all choice away from them. What they wanted? He made all choices for them, over them. Schwyzer waited till his ex was unconscious and then—-according to his own words—-made the choice for her.
Aaeeeee! Ginmar, I beg you, stop making these posts. Every time I agree with you, an angel becomes addicted to oxycodone.
I do not understand why Hugo did not face prosecution. Well, not true; he was white, articulate, and from money, so I understand. But why isn’t he in the progressive pillory? As a nominal Republican he should be in our pillory too but I don’t think he ever hangs with any non-nominal GOPers.
Danny:
The point is, no one cares. It doesn’t fit their narrative and of course with murder suicides (mothers are more commonly the ones to kill children, there’s something of an effect where dads at work or whatever so she doesn’t kill him too skewing the numbers) there’s all sorts of reasons these things happen but if it doesn’t fit with patriarchy theory no one gives a shit. And of course murder suicides are very rare anyway, so its doubtful one can really draw that much information from them.
Hugo deserves to be treated like a man who had (and obviously still has) a bunch of problems, and people can come to their own conclusions.
On comments and emails: It is my experience that the email I receive about a given post or article is a reasonable proxy for the comments I receive, in terms of both topic and tone. Therefore, I felt sure that getting hate mail for a specific thread would presage getting hate comments for that thread. Therefore, opening a new thread on the topic would essentially mean opening a new channel for people to make comments like that to me.
In terms of how survivors are experiencing this debate: here is an example comment on what I’m talking about. I’ll repost it here; it was written by rox:
I have some thoughts and open questions as a survivor and enabler and forgiver of abusers myself. To be honest, I think there are a lot of abuse survivors who think more like the thoughts Clarrisse waas sharing (and that is how I think also) than with the anger than many of us survivors also feel post getting away. People stay with abusers because they want them to ahve chances and they see the good in the person.
When we slam someone who expresses exactly what Clarisse stated… that abusers might deserve second chances and forgiveness and an opportunity to rebuild trust, are we somewhat slamming all the women who have and and even currently loved and forgiven abusive people in their life? I’m not saying what’s right. A lot of people have to get angry at their former enabling tendancies (which includes forgiveness and second chances) in order to leave and get themselves away from the situation. What is really difficult to hash out though is that a lot of people who have been enablers to abusers have in fact participated in the dynamic. So how hard to we want to judge enablers if we are to be survivor advocates?
Clearly we don’t think enablers are the same as abusers, but if you leave a physically violent man and get to a place where you know you are genuinely safe, but then you go back with your kids, because you miss him— what sort of accountability needs to happen there?
Because many survivors have made poor decisions and enabling decisions like this, that put themselves and possible their kids in danger, they identify with being a bad person like their abuser more than being a good person like the general population. Which is why many survivors not only hope the abuser will be forgiven for the sake of the abuser, but because they hope as an enabler they will have a chance at forgiveness and redemption. I’m just sharing thoughts, I honestly don’t have answers to this complex topic.
Specific responses to Maia in a new comment.
@Maia — I’m disturbed by your use of ‘unsubstantiated allegations’ in this context: “If people want flamewars, and to make lots of unsubstantiated allegations, well, okay” And I’m unclear what you mean. Because the phrase is such a huge red flag to me that I don’t know that I can respond coherently. Should the WoC who have been shut down by Hugo in the past be required to find the links (and I have been around long enough to remember and recognise the pattern other people have described)? Should the person Hugo Schwyzer harassed on facebook be required to present screencaps?
I see what you’re saying. But firstly, it is really not okay with me for people to — for example — throw around amateur mental diagnoses like “sociopath”, assuming any of those people know what a sociopath even is, which they probably don’t. Secondly, what I responded to on my own blog — have you read Susan Walsh’s post about Hugo? Susan Walsh is a headliner antifeminist who has called a number of prominent feminist women “sluts”, etc. In her post about Hugo, she attacked both him and a former partner of his using language built on sex stigma and misogyny.
I do believe that feminism is about supporting women, especially in the face of being bullied by men, even antifeminist women. Language like “unsubstantiated allegations” was, I guess, not quite what I was going for. But I just don’t think it’s a particularly feminist act for me to approvingly moderate a thread that’s doing what I describe above.
I think a lot of why your post came across to me as trying to pressure people into forgiveness is because of your use of indirect language and rhetorical questions. “This is what I think” is ultimate less pressuring than “abusers should be required to”.
This is true and I appreciate what you’re saying. I will try to do better about this in the future.
I would also add, though, that I believe I was widely perceived as making blanket statements when I was talking about my experience. For example, I wrote “But perhaps because of our focus on helping and protecting survivors, I rarely see feminist discussions of how to deal with people who have committed crimes. In fact, I rarely see any discussions of how to deal with that, aside from sending people to jail.” This was perceived as a statement about the entirety of feminism and the feminist experiences of everyone in the world.
While I understand that a lot of work has been done on accountability and these processes in circles that I am not familiar with — I am also not unfamiliar with feminism, although my experience of it is obviously shaped by both my previous experiences and my privilege. My statements about feminism should not represent “all feminism”, but I never intended for them to do that. One thing I was trying to do was point out a flaw with the feminism that I am familiar with. I acknowledge that I could have done a better job pointing out the limits of my experience.
Oh ‘process’. The most fucked-up response to an abusive man I ever knew about in an activist community (the one I discuss as using silence as power over) was called ‘process’. People talked about going to ‘process’ meetings – and later in other cases, people would say that we needed a ‘process’ and one man even demanded ‘a process’ so people would be OK with him. At this point I’m seriously uncomfortable with the term and my experience creates images of processing people in all sorts of ways.
But I have another point – I don’t think you can have a ‘community process’. A community is an informal network of individuals and that informality extends to its power structures and decision making. A group, or collective can have a process, because it can have decision making structures. Individuals can go through a process – but I’ve no idea how a community could have a process without people speaking on behalf of other people. I don’t think a community can ‘forgive’ without over-riding some individuals desires not to ‘forgive’ (and I think that’s true if you replace ‘forgive’ with a different idea which is part of a process).
I have never experienced this — but you obviously have more experience with this than I do. While reading this, I want to respect your experience and I also want to learn more about what I can do to avoid the problems you outline. I’m trying to picture attempting to do accountability work while taking these questions into account, and I think more guidance would be helpful. I hope you do write the followup post you mentioned.
Clarisse, I think that when you say “it has not been my experience” what really comes through is that you haven’t done the reading. You could’ve easily done more research into a lot of the work done by WoC mentioned just by googling the terms. I think that would be a good start before engaging with the criticism you have received.
I really appreciate this post by Maia, I think it hits the nail on the head. I’m going to be doing some reading myself because of it.
I hate to step on the back-patting, but even people who have been in dialogue with Hugo have been pointing out his narcissism and petulance for a long time; it’s not just a few of the enlighterati who noticed. He’s changed his views and managed to admit he’s wrong at times, but his “often in error, never in doubt” kidding-on-the-square motto wears on the nerves after a while. I, too, was pretty appalled to make a visit to find that he’s now turned his advocacy into promoting himself as a speaker.
Clarisse @72, “but MRAs hate him too!” is not really much of a defense of Hugo. Particularly as he admitted a while back that he has tolerated MRAs on his blog (including one who wrote a passionate defense of Darren Mack) because he’s tried to “evangelize” to them; you know, their hatred and resentment of women is totally going to be cured by being lectured to by a feminist man, amirite?
mythago: I wasn’t trying to defend Hugo by citing Susan Walsh at all! I was explaining why I didn’t particularly trust her approach.
Ada: That’s part of my point though. It’s not like I’ve done a small amount of reading about rape and justice. I wasn’t reading in the right places to see what others can see very easily, apparently. Obviously, as I already stated, this is partly a function of my background and my privilege. Obviously, I will try to do a better job of seeking out this other material on transformative justice. But for Heaven’s sake, I’ve been certified as someone who counsels rape survivors, and I do that kind of work routinely as part of a government program. My point is not that “I am flawless and innocent because I didn’t know about these approaches to transformative justice.” My point is that “If I didn’t know about these approaches to transformative justice, then the feminism that I routinely participate in is flawed.”
But, since I seem to need to say it again: I am privileged, I have a narrow focus, I missed some stuff due to my privileged context, and I am sorry.
And as a followup — Yes, I get that I missed stuff not just because of my privileged context but also because I didn’t chase it down and research it. But no one can know everything and no one can be perfectly educated on everything. I do all the anti-rape work I do as a volunteer, and it does not take up a small amount of my time. I’ve done the reading I was assigned, and quite a lot more. A lot of people I know who do similar work to what I do see the same gaps that I do. We can approach this by saying “Well, all of you should be doing a better job of tracking down the work done by women of color on transformative justice.” And to some extent that would be correct. But we could also approach this by saying “How can we make that work more available/accessible to the people who are having trouble finding it?”
Clarisse Thorn says:
December 31, 2011 at 3:08 pm
“I see what you’re saying. But firstly, it is really not okay with me for people to — for example — throw around amateur mental diagnoses like “sociopath”, assuming any of those people know what a sociopath even is, which they probably don’t. Secondly, what I responded to on my own blog — have you read Susan Walsh’s post about Hugo? Susan Walsh is a headliner antifeminist who has called a number of prominent feminist women “sluts”, etc. In her post about Hugo, she attacked both him and a former partner of his using language built on sex stigma and misogyny.”
Firstly, the main diagnosis people were throwing around was narcissist, which as another commenter confirmed, Hugo even talks about having. Big armchair fail there huh?
Secondly I think it is incredibly offensive for you to make the statement I bolded.
Do you know whether those people know what a sociopath is? Do you know what a sociopath is? I don’t see where you provided any extensive credentials in psychology in the thread, so I don’t see how you think its okay to assume and claim that just because no one else prefaced their post with: “I am a PhD in Psychology”, they “don’t even know what a sociopath is.”
I don’t think Hugo qualifies as a sociopath, he doesn’t have a violent enough history afaik, but then he could have committed crimes that no one is aware of.
My point is that “If I didn’t know about these approaches to transformative justice, then the feminism that I routinely participate in is flawed.”
I can’t even. Clarisse, you control the feminism you participate in. You control your reading material. You’ve obviously got the vocabulary needed to begin looking in to this stuff. To say that your circle (or your rape crisis counseling training) isn’t educating you at a level you need is absurd. This is an easy piece to take responsibility for. Own it.
Mandolin – I agree that conversations about debates at this level of distraction get kind of abstract and hard to communicate about. I guess even in your summary (which is not quite how I saw the discussion) I see a huge distinction between “This is obviously out of bounds” “I think this should be obviously out of bounds” “I think this is obviously out of bounds” “I am arguing that this is obviously out of bounds” and so on. I don’t think the way we use language and frame debates in comment sections is usually precise enough about how the author is positioning themselves to the question – which means it’s often easy to read the same statement each of the different ways I describe. So I guess at that level it’s going to be hard to reach agreement about what sort of discussion it was and whether that sort of discussion was OK.
My point wasn’t really that art and activism were separate – but what we were mapping it onto. I would agree that Hugo has a body of work that is separate from him as a person. But how to deal with a person’s body of work when the person who wrote it is problematic is not the questions that Clarisse’s interview and hte discussion triggered to me. I linked it to the experiences I’ve had with dealing with abusive men in activist spaces – as themselves – not their work. Questions about a person’s body of work, for me, require an absense of them as people (obviously that leaves the question of whether people are absent or present as people on internet discussions wide open – which is why I think about it as a discussion of what we map things onto – rather than there being one approach).
Clarisse – Thanks for clearing up what you meant. The phrase ‘unsubstantiated allegation’ is obviously a huge red flag for me in this context. I’m not sure there’s any feminist space I think it’s appropriate – but definitely less so in a space where someone has described being harassed.
I do have some sympathy for your point about the lack of resources. Like I said I learned all this through experience myself, and at various points in my experience I would have agreed (or at least less strenuously disagreed) with lots of what you said. My reading generally came long after my experiences and I was comparing what I read with what I knew. But I think the reasons for this are actually really complex. Obviously part of that is the way WoC’s work has been ignored (which I talk about a bit more directly on the Feministe thread). But I’ve heard reference to enough other groups dealing with similar things, without leaving any record or discussion to think that that’s all of it.
Dealing with abusive men is really shattering, divisive, horrible work. Often people feel fall out from it in their lives and relationships for ages (this is mentioned in the introduction to the zine I linked to when so many people didn’t feel ready to write about their experiences). People aren’t necessarily able to share and write about what they’ve gone through. I feel really uncomfortable and anxious about the boundaries of the survivors in this post – and how to write a post that reflects my ideas about not being centred around perpetrators while at the same time not exposing their lives. For ages I hoped that some other group somewhere had *the answer* and I realised that part of the reason that there was so little written work is that no-one actually knows how to respond. There are group that have been more or less successful – but it’s not like say – organising a work-place – there aren’t enough successes to even really discuss templates.
I think in the face of that it’s amazing that we have the resources that we do, and not surprising that they’ve been created by marginalised communities that need them most (and I’ve now discovered the Revolution Starts at Home is available on e-book so I’m going to get that as soon as I get paid).
However, if I was going to give any advice to people thinking, writing, or dealing with perpetrators it’d be “first do no harm”. As I think I said in some form or other before – we don’t know how to do what we’re trying to do and therefore the means has to not be damaging.
Evil Fizz. Is there a way that I can say, “Clearly I am partly responsible for this problem, and I will try to do better, but simultaneously I would like to discuss the reasons why I didn’t feel like I had access to this work when I needed it, and look for ways to fix those reasons”? Or is that just not a possible statement in your world?
Maia, thank you for your thoughts. Again, I really appreciate the obvious effort you have put into communicating across our experience divide, and the generosity you have brought to the discussion. I’ve learned more from you in the last week than I did from everyone else I spoke to put together.
deleted on account that it may have been a private blog post.
I responded to Flavia’s comment on Feministe this afternoon, which was the first opportunity I had to do so.
Clarisse, I am going to speculate on one of the reasons why you do not know or have not come in contact with the work of WoC: Feministe is an extremely unfriendly place for non White women/ writers. I am not talking about Jill whom I know tries to find an array of guest bloggers to post and who has throughout the years invited many WoC. I am specifically talking about the commentariat. This is so much so that it is the reason I do not comment at Feministe at all. The thread in question which I used as an example of how you promoted hateful commentary towards me is a micro example of it. I was called an incompetent writer because I am South American. My abilities questioned because I couldn’t possibly be any good while also being a Spanish speaker, etc. And this is NOTHING compared to what other WoC have put up with at Feministe. Because I have my own little corner of the blogging world where I keep a tight moderation fist it is that I prefer not to participate at Feministe in any capacity. If my intellectual capability is going to be measured by my ethnicity, then you can imagine I have no interest whatsoever to be part of such community. And again, I have to insist, I have seen other WoC have it much worse.
This, of course, ends up being a problem because Feministe is, in many WoC feminist circles perceived as a White only space. People like you (and certainly not JUST you, but many who regularly participate as part of the community) end up believing that this is the only feminism that exists. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I am sure you are aware by now but the reason many of us absolutely DO NOT consider Schwyzer an ally has been his treatment of WoC bloggers. To me, it wasn’t that he sided with a White woman during a dispute. I could understand if he was friends with her and offered support in private. But no, he had to make public statements. Such statements were presented in his usual mansplainer way, putting down the work of WoC and “decreeing” that he and he alone had decided that they (collectively) were wrong. To me, the serious issue came from the fact that a guy, a White guy no less, had no business meddling in this dispute to begin with and to see him use his position and power to demean WoC was infuriating. The power deferential was two fold: 1) as a man (no matter how much of an ally he claimed to be), he has no business appointing himself the arbiter of a dispute between feminist women and 2) as a WHITE man, considering the long history of White men oppressing WoC and the legacy of such history, he used his privilege to reign over WoC. How is that a feminist act and worse so, how has White mainstream feminism allowed this to happen and still claim him as an ally? Does only sisterhood apply between members of the dominant culture? Don’t WoC count as part of such sisterhood?
Considering this history, you can perhaps imagine why, in this context, his abusive past becomes such an important issue for many of us. This is where his male, White, wealthy privilege plays such a big role and many of us are just floored that ANYONE with a modicum of knowledge of feminist recent history would willingly defend him. And in the case of my issue with your selective defense of him while you witnessed the way the Feministe commentariat treated me makes the whole situation quite upsetting. It reeks of, once again, defending people who are perceived as “one of your own”, while some of us are left to be called names and have our capabilities questioned. Given Schwyzer’s history with WoC, THIS particular context is just infuriating. And I am using myself as an example not because I feel particularly aggravated by those comments (I don’t) but because I hesitate to present anyone else’s example, especially when the people involved are not actively participating in this thread. However, if you check the archives of Feministe for guest bloggers you will see this pattern repeated again and again. And while these hostilities take place, we get to see Schwyzer elevated to the status of “feminist ally”.
Flavia, I am not very well-versed in a lot of feminist blogosphere etiquette/history, and I appreciate your explanation.
For what it’s worth, I don’t especially recall what was going through my head when I reposted that comment from the Feministe thread you’re mentioning to TBD. But I do seem to remember that it was an early comment in the thread, and that I didn’t read the whole thread, so I think I probably just didn’t see the later comments in the thread before passing on the link. As I’ve already mentioned on Feministe, I also had no mod power over that particular thread; I only have mod power over my threads.
I really liked that post, and I’m really sorry that I acted invasively by passing along the link and comment. I will be more careful about how I deal with that kind of intra-blog intercourse in the future.
Again, I’m grateful to you for the explanation of some relevant history and context.
As a side note, I think I should offer a comment that’s just an apology. I already wrote this in the F thread:
I’m sorry I didn’t work harder to respect the boundaries of abuse survivors in my posts.
I’m sorry I closed down comments at Feministe.
I have been doing my best to learn from the mistake. Part of that learning process included reposting Maia’s post above to Feministe, and I’m very grateful to her for allowing that.
I will continue to research transformative justice and other work that women of color in particular have done in this arena.
How about “I’m sorry I supported a man who tried to murder a woman whilst claiming to be a feminist”, Clarisse? Because that’s the real problem here, if you didn’t support him you wouldn’t have behaved like that.
There isn’t a space in feminism for men who have tried to kill women. It’s very simple. There isn’t a way back, there’s no way for atoning for that, justice can’t transform that behaviour.
Evil Fizz. Is there a way that I can say, “Clearly I am partly responsible for this problem, and I will try to do better, but simultaneously I would like to discuss the reasons why I didn’t feel like I had access to this work when I needed it, and look for ways to fix those reasons”? Or is that just not a possible statement in your world?
It’s possible, but I think it’s misguided. It’s very sobering to discover that what you previously thought was at least a semi-comprehensive education in a given area is deficient. And it can be worthwhile to sit back and think, “Okay, I thought I had a decent grounding in this, but clearly I am missing some big stuff, how did that happen?”
However, I think what you’re asking here is for other commenters to hold your hand. That’s certainly how I read “why didn’t I feel like I had access to this work?” I mean, it may be a question that’s interesting for you personally but isn’t really germane to what the overwhelming majority of the kerfuffle is about. If you’ve identified areas where you need to do some more reading, that’s awesome. (Quite sincerely.) If you think there may be some serious systemic issues in how white feminism marginalizes and/or ignores work by WOC (and oh, are there ever) and want to engage in those inquiries, that’s also great. But none of that really gets at the heart of criticisms.
And while I am not really inclined to make tone arguments, the language you’ve used here troubles me. By framing it as being only “partly responsible”, I think you really elide the fact that this was your show. You made choices that may have seemed like the best ones at the time, but it suggests that even in hindsight, you’re unwilling to genuinely own those missteps. And that’s what’s bugging me. There are pieces of this that are well beyond your control. But the pieces that you can control and own? Do it. Easy? No, but the only real way to fix things.
Has anyone touched on the stuff reported here?:
http://www.redlightpolitics.info/post/15124372757/my-comment-for-clarisse-thorn
Jenny, yes, I am the one who wrote that comment at Feministe and we have discussed it with Clarisse both there and here as well.
Pingback: Hugo Schwyzer! | No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz?
Brilliant post.
Pingback: A Response | Hugo Schwyzer
I’d like to thank all of the people who have posted here and in the threads at Feministe on the subject of a restorative justice process centering survivors. Please excuse some related questions: I understand the outrage at Hugo’s account of his attempted murder suicide. But in my reading, I have seen no woman come forward as the survivor of Hugo’s criminal act. We know of this woman only through Hugo’s words. Can we fashion a restorative justice process centered on a survivor who has not spoken for herself?
I also remember that Hugo has, as Flavia wrote made some pretty ugly attacks on racialized women bloggers. I noticed that at least one of these women posted in the long Feministe thread on accountability. Since the restorative justice process has survivors at the center, would it not make sense to consider starting with survivors who have come forward? I understand that the women Hugo harmed have no obligation to participate in a restorative justice process with him, but has anyone asked them if they would like the opportunity?
For the record, I don’t simply see this as a discussion about men and women, abusers and victims, feminists and non, etc etc, but also about judging practicing-addicts by the standards of non-addicts and never-addicts. I’d like to restrict this conversation to people in recovery, but too late for that now. I just don’t think people who have never sold their asses for a couple of pills, understand what that reality is like and never will.
At least, this fiasco has stopped me from writing the post I was intending to write, about my 30-years-sober anniversary. I was getting ready to tell all kinds of things… now I see how foolish and even dangerous that would have been. People are waiting to jump on you and tell you how bad you are, write all kinds of posts about you and trash you from here to eternity. (Even if what you are doing is confessing, which means, YOU ALREADY KNOW YOU FUCKED UP.)
My secrets will go to my grave with me. Hugo should have done the same.
After 3o years, it pains me to say: addicts are still greatly despised. Nothing has changed.
How do you know that all of the many people who criticized Schwyzer (here and on Feministe) have had no experience with addiction? And what is the difference between a “non-addict” and a “never-addict”? I thought that if a person becomes addicted, the addiction remains, whether or not the person uses?
But if the people in recovery are not currently using, does that mean that the “non-practicing-addicts” might be unfairly judging “practicing-addicts”?
If there is ever a discussion of gendered violence in which drug abuse played a role or was implicated, “non-addicts” and “never-addicts” should never comment or contribute? Even if they themselves are survivors of gendered violence?
Drug abuse may be a factor in a lot of violent crime, including domestic violence and gendered violence. When people hear of such incidents, are they always obliged to suspend their opinions and judgments because they are “non-addicts”? No matter how grave or serious the crime is? Most people probably judge differently between an addicted person pawning stolen stuff or prostituting himself/herself to get drugs versus an addicted person doing what John Evander Couey did while he was high. I’m sure almost everyone, addicted or not, would be repulsed by the latter.
Are you saying that Schwyzer is despised because he is an addict? Most of his readers and a lot of the Feministe readers knew about his addiction, and they did not hold that against him. Most started disliking him when they learned that he tried to murder a woman, during his addiction.
Delurking after years of barely reading and not commenting on feminist blogs:
I’m curious – did anyone who used to like Hugo come to dislike him based on the revelations? Put another way: suppose that, three months ago, we were told that a major male feminist blogger had a history of violent abuse, including having sexual relations with subordinate women and planning to murder-suicide his partner; and suppose that we were not told who it was. I believe that most people reading feminist blogs would have no problem guessing that it was Hugo, rather than Ampersand, or PZ Myers, or Thomas Macaulay Millar. I know I wouldn’t, and for the record I was neutral about him – I enjoyed his writings on the upper class, but not so much on gender issues.
For one, I remember sharp feminist criticism of his approach going back to at least 2006. The way he reacts now, and the way so many people are reacting toward him, is similar to years-old issues, only now the stakes are so much higher. Back then he did not excuse violence toward women, but he did make proclamations like “I’m a professional feminist” (in response to criticism that his admonition of a student who wanted to act like a PUA – “grant me continence but not yet” – was too turtleneck-y). And he got some flak for his desire to have his wife change her last name, among other issues. His approach was always very in-your-face Christian, for better and for worse: on the one hand, very much about personal reform, and on the other hand, about pride in the success of personal reform. He begged people to judge him, and complained whenever the judgment was not what he’d expected. On another blog comment thread, he’s being compared to a prison convert.
This approach to personal reform is why I think Daisy is off the mark. Hugo’s approach on the one hand contends that all men are sinners, and on the other hand praises his own redemption. Simultaneously, he keeps inviting judgment, as long as it’s the kind he likes. I’d be willing to live with just the personal pride, grudgingly. But the analogy between Hugo and someone who stole things and pawned them off to pay for cocaine breaks down because of the other issues; it’d be closer if the addict kept contending everyone else was also a thief, and developed an anarchist theory that property is theft in order to justify it. Personally I don’t know if this describes Hugo well, but if we view him as an addict, he’s not Bubbles on The Wire, or even Cutty; when he’s at his best he’s McNulty, and when he’s at his worst he’s McNulty without the unusual competence.
Mega, I think it is the behavior that is despised, and then the person that exhibits it.
I am shocked that everyone else is shocked. Is there someone who honestly didn’t know that active-junkies try to kill themselves and others? Really? THIS IS WHAT JUNKIES DO. Why the shock? I think the shock is that it is an educated, upper middle class white cis-male like Hugo, a professor who has published books and has a high-traffic blog. Although he tells people he is an addict, it still seems to shock people when he provides an actual example of past-junkie behavior. Why?
I ASSUME anyone who has found it necessary to holler uncle and go to recovery or ADMIT OUT LOUD that they are an addict, has come to this point. I assume all addicts have a story, or ten, like this in their repertoire. Of course they do. I do, too.
Why is everybody so shocked by this? Do people know what addiction IS?
Apparently not.
Not at all. It is this unbridled judgmental GLEE I am uncomfortable with. The critics are a little too happy with themselves and their moral superiority.
Let me put it this way: what if an autistic person was interviewed and some story like this came to light? Or any other emotional or psychological disability? Would we be as judgmental if we were talking about someone with schizophrenia? We would condemn the behavior, certainly, but wouldn’t we also attribute a lot of it to the condition itself?
Why are we not doing it in this case? Hm, let me guess.
As I said, nothing has changed.
Alon, how many 12-step groups have you been involved in? How many alcoholics or addicts have you personally sponsored, in recovery? I am talking from 30 years of experience, okay?
No, I am not off the mark… Hugo is. He writes confessions as if writing them for a sponsor or AA group. He needs to curb that, or figure out another way to do it. People are just too hostile to the topic, as I said above.
THIS is what he needs to stop doing. He needs to save this for his own comrades, local people or AA people or whatever. I have started communicating at different levels myself–there is the local Occupy blog, the radio show, Facebook, my blog, guest blogs… I tell different things in different places. Hugo needs to understand that a mass blog is not the place for confessions of that nature. (He could have written that for a recovery blog and that would have been fine.) The problem is that addicts in recovery have no boundaries, and Hugo being a professor and talking all the time (those of us with jobs as cashiers or janitors are not expected to talk all the time, by contrast) means he has not had to develop any. Now, he has an ongoing problem (you might say addiction) to people-pleasing and resultant approval. (He has already admitted to co-dependent behavior, in fact the story itself was strongly co-dependent.) BACK OFF HUGO and start crafting your message to certain readers/audiences. Everyone does not have to approve of you or like you. You should repeat that in a mirror, like an affirmation, every day for a year. It works wonders.
Hey, that was me! Glad to meet you, Alon.
You do realize that what you have described is fairly common? Have you ever talked to any homeless addicts on the street? (Since you live in NYC, I am sure you have many times, since I don’t even live there and I have, many times.) Addicts will often explain to you why they have stopped participating in mainstream society; some can actually justify everything they do, right up to the end.
I am sure I could have, which is the terrifying thing.
Imagine the kind of person who very much wants to be liked and loved, who chronically ends up homeless, rejected and alone. And you have the hell of addiction.
Hugo needs to stop trying to win political/feminist approval.