Confessions of sexist man | Hugo Schwyzer

Confessions of sexist man | Hugo Schwyzer

October 31, 2012 - 7:46AM

Hugo Schwyzer is an author, speaker and professor of history and gender studies at Pasadena City College.

I was raised by a single mother, a Second Wave feminist who had gone to an all-women’s college before earning a doctorate in philosophy. A college professor as well as an activist, my mum raised my younger brother and me to believe that women were our equals. We grew up with feminist magazines on the coffee table, and with League of Women Voters meetings in our living room on Friday afternoons. My mother taught her sons that boys and girls could be friends, and that with a very few exceptions (like giving birth) men’s and women’s roles were interchangeable and flexible.  All of that excellent education, however, was little match for the socialisation I got from my peers, who taught me that signs of weakness were loathsome – and that boys and girls were far more different than my mother had insisted.

At the risk of hyperbole, I grew up to be a bit of a fraud. I intellectually assented to my mother’s feminism, eventually taking university courses in women’s studies. But in my private life, beneath the ever-more sophisticated patter of egalitarian ideals, I was very much a sexist.   As a teen, I wanted to live out the ideals with which I’d been raised. At the same time, my libido and my ego wanted release and validation.   Though promiscuity isn’t incompatible with a belief in women’s equality, chronic dishonesty to the women you claim to love is.  I wanted the reassuring comforts of a relationship - and endless sexual variety with different people. I wanted to be validated for being hot, sexy, masculine - and that validation only seemed to work with “new skin.” It was the late 1980s; I didn’t know that polyamory was a possibility. I doubt I’d have had the courage to ask for it if I had.

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