And
In that article, Hugo states how he has faced accountability and consequences for his actions and has stepped down from “leadership” positions in feminist organizations as a result of those actions …
He was FORCED out of those roles. He’s ONLY no longer in them because WOMEN, the same women he talks shit about, raised a big enough stink to push him out, to force him to resign. Very, very recently.
He did not say to himself “hey, I just tried to kill my ex, I really have no right taking on this kind of role,” because he didn’t take on those roles until long AFTER he fucking did that.
And saw no conflict of interest for YEARS until it was very, very loudly pointed out.
He did not “resign” as a result of his own ethical position and principles.
Hugo has NEVER acted out of his own sense of accountability and ethics. EVER. He has only responded very belatedly, with much whining, to other people attempting to hold him accountable.
AND THEN TAKEN CREDIT FOR THEIR FUCKING ACTIONS.
Here’s the other thing. I know I reblogged this before, but I’m having thoughts and I want to get them down, so here’s the other thing.
All of these transgressions against women that he’s supposedly faced accountability for… they all came out in his writing. He wrote about them in ways that were both off-hand and masturbatory, in the way that the tampon story that’s giving him another 15 minutes right now is.
He went into his most lurid description of his attempted murder in a story about how he understood how his friend felt about letting a dog get out. Yeah. It was his “topper” story about how He Knows What It Is To Do Something Maybe Irrevocable.
He revealed that he’s had sex with people against their will in part of a piece about how he had to man up and take some of the blame for it.
And at every step of the way, all of these mentions of misbehavior were tied into this mythical construct of his, the “pre-sobriety past”, when he was a different person. He takes about taking responsibility, but what he’s done is taken all responsibility and stuffed it into a wastebasket labeled “well I was doing drugs then”.
And he has a core audience that eats it up because it’s secular intellectual redemption porn, it’s the kind of great “Come To Jesus” conversion story that evangelical preachers use to keep their audiences hanging on every word: Lord, oh Lord, I have sinned, but I am born again. Everyone loves a reformed sinner.
He didn’t put these stories out because he was taking responsibility for anything. He put them out because he saw a use for them. When they spread too widely beyond his intended audience and the backlash became too great to be ignored, he seemed surprised that anybody would hold these things against him.
And his response was to try to figure out the bare minimum response that would be acceptable, that would make it go away, that would allow him to continue his career as a feminist thinker and hang on to the respect of the white feminist world.
For him to take accountability for his actions, he’d need to show that he understands how his “pre-sobriety past” relates to his present instead of acting like there’s eighteen inches of reinforced concrete separating them.
yes!!!! Addicts who actually hold themselves accountable for their behaviour NEVER use the excuse “well, I was on drugs!!”
Also, do I even wanna know what the tampon story is?
I haven’t even read the tampon story. I don’t think I could.
It’s something he got published on xojane, it involves his ex-wife’s body in an intimate fashion, he has an erection at some point during it, and he reeeeally wrestled with the question of whether it was okay for him to tell this story without her permission but really it’s his story, too, and that’s just part of memoir writing.
