I stopped reading Hugo Schwyzer years ago after everything he wrote started to ring false to me.
Still, that doesn’t change the fact that he wrote some good things once upon a time. The speaker isn’t the message. Evolution is still true even if Hitler says it is.
I hate that now after Schwyzer any male who identifies as a feminist is automatically assumed to be doing so in an attempt to get laid. Yeah, no, that doesn’t really work except for people like Hugo who are likely sociopaths.
Where I grew up, identifying as a male feminist was likely to get your ass kicked is all. I’ve never even once been in a place where identifying as a male feminist makes you more attractive to anyone. That I know of, anyway.
I could tell what Hugo was – a sociopath – because I have some of the same tendencies. Perhaps even more so than he does. Who knows. I’ve tried and I think succeeding into channeling my shortcomings to good. Perhaps he tried too, but still he chose another path. I don’t buy the illness shtick. That’s a cop-out, in my opinion.
I don’t know Hugo, but I do know me. My ethics aren’t built on something I feel, unlike most people’s. Because it’s always been true that I don’t feel much emotion either way about things that most people do. My conscious and chosen morality and my life is built on the idea of maximizing happiness in the world, among the people that I care about and among those I don’t even know.
Because I was from a very young age smarter than most people, it was easy to see them as and to use them as instruments. To manipulate them if I chose to do so.
I chose another way, because I considered it and its possibilities and realized it was wrong. It’s more complicated than that, but that is the two-step chronology.
Who do you trust more, the person who does everything from feeling only, or the person who has realized there is a choice, and then made it?
I’m honest with my partners. There are no secrets. I simply do not have much capacity for mourning, for jealousy, for loneliness or for other similar things. Empathy I don’t possess to any great degree. I know people cannot believe it, but those parts just aren’t there. They aren’t and never have been.
My partner and I were talking one day and clowning around while making dinner. I don’t remember the exact exchange because it was very light, but one of us made a joke about accidental decapitation (that’s what passes for light banter around these parts!) and I observed that, “If your head falls off I’m stepping away from the blood and am going to finish my food before I call the coroner over.”
And she said, “I know.”
Because she does know.
As for Hugo, fuck that guy.