Pasadena City College professor Hugo Schwyzer had a highly discussed, highly publicized, epic and admittedly “psychotic” Twitter meltdown this week . This is the kind of rant you never really recover from, but to hear the good professor talk about it, that was kind of the point.
Professor Schwyzer is known in the media for his work on the subjects of feminism, self-image, sexual harassment, and the “myth of male weakness.” He has written for The Atlantic and Jezebel. Despite these progressive plaudits, he spent an hour last Friday posting more than 100 tweets tearing it all down.
He calls himself “morally fraudulent,” and “a monstrous hypocrite,” and admits to cheating on his wife with a 23-year-old and trading sexually explicit messages with a woman who is 27. The hypocrisy here, as he said, was that he recently wrote an article criticizing age-inappropriate relationships for The Atlantic.
“I cheated on my wife and pretended to be reformed,” he said during his Twitter meltdown. “I appropriated the language of redemption, I knew which buttons to push, I used sex and charm and whiteness and it usually worked.”
He also claimed to suffer from “bipolar disease with psychotic features” and said he struggles with alcoholism. “Yes I’m on a manic episode and feeling crazed,” he admitted.
But, holy crap, why would you do this? Ghandi said , “Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances,” and that seems to be sort of what Professor Schwyzer was going for. He’s sick of lying and being a hypocrite, and has reached that rare nadir where you’d rather burn down the house you built instead of waiting for the roof to cave in.
Oh, look, he uses a house metaphor too:
“One of the reasons I did that Twitter feed is that I want the truth to come out, all the truth, so I can scorch the earth,” he told the Daily Beast . “So that if I do rebuild, I don’t rebuild on any false foundation.”
Schwyzer’s Twitter description now reads “Disgraced,” and he gave up his password after being placed on suicide watch. None of his epic meltdown has been deleted, so go read it here if you like.
