As I reported this story, Schwyzer suggested that I get a sympathetic perspective on his work from Zoe Nicholson, a feminist activist who fasted for 37 days in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. But even Nicholson argued that it is problematic for a man to have a visible, public role as a feminist leader. "I do believe that a man can be a contributor to empowering a disenfranchised group of women," she says. "I believe that it would be done by getting behind, by getting underneath, by doing fundraising, by stepping away." The question is not so much what a man thinks, but how he works within the community of feminists.

Schwyzer admits, "I haven't been always been able to see how my writing reflects my privilege as a cisgender white male," but he also says he's been quoted unfairly. "When you've got a large body of work," he says, "people can cherry-pick pretty easily." But many refuse to see his most controversial remarks as anomalies. A queer black feminist writer who goes by the name Grace, and who wrote a long essay sharply criticizing Schwyzer, wrote me in an email that for years "women of color repeatedly complained that his behavior towards them was misogynist and racist."

Either way, the response at Feministe has dwarfed earlier controversies. The interview that prompted the site to ban Schwyzer had been cross-posted from Role/Reboot, where Schwyzer writes frequently. Role/Reboot is typical of Schwyzer's venues -- a website about gender, sex, and relationships, but not necessarily from a feminist perspective. The site's homepage -- with headlines like "Sexpectations: Purity, Courtship, And Dating" and "An Open Letter to the Guy Who Molested Me" accompanied by photographs of half-naked models --places it halfway between a feminist magazine and Maxim.

Though the initial comments at Feministe were harsh, the fight only intensified after Clarisse Thorn, who conducted the interview, blocked comments two days after she posted it, citing in her explanatory post "email complaints about the ugliness of [the commenters'] tone." Within days, a Facebook cause called "Feminists Against Hugo Schwyzer" drew more than 600 "likes" and thousands of comments. Commenters expressed shock not just at Schwyzer's attempted murder-suicide, but also at the way he framed the act: as a response to his friend Bill, who was wracked with guilt after nearly killing a neighbor's dog. His admission contained oddly sexual details about the woman he'd tried to kill ("we ... shed our clothes and had the desperately hot, desperately heartbreaking sex we had had so often"), and Schwyzer focused on his own guilt and redemption -- not the suffering he'd caused.

Schwyzer admits, "I haven't been always been able to see how my writing reflects my privilege as a cisgender white male," but he also says he's been quoted unfairly.

Within days of shutting down comments on the December 17 interview, Feministe restored the comments, and two of its editors made clear that the site would not "link or promote Hugo's work" in the future. "We don't endorse him or invite him to find his redemption at our house and at the expense of our readers' well being," the editors wrote, "and we apologize that we implied otherwise."

But even as other feminists were condemning him, Schwyzer was breaking with The Good Men Project over what he saw as its anti-feminism. GMP has a tricky relationship with feminism. Lisa Hickey, the site's editor, explains that while it is "not anti-feminist by any stretch of the imagination," GMP is not explicitly feminist. "We're just coming at this from the perspective of men first." 

Indeed, Hickey has some reservations about feminism. "There are many forums for women to talk about things like this [gender roles]," she says. "In the process of looking for equality, feminists have been trying to get time for women's voices. I don't want to say men have been shut out -- but there hasn't been the openness to this sort of conversation." Some of GMP's content flirts with anti-feminism: In a currently popular post entitled "I Have Female Privilege" author Rachel Goodchild declares, "I am very aware that I no longer live in a man's world. This world is a woman's world. And us females are now the humans holding the privilege."

The day after GMP founder Tom Matlack posted his essay "Being a Dude is a Good Thing," he embarked on a testy exchange of tweets, using language that Schwyzer found sexist. One tweet read, "My point was that some men are afraid to speak up out of fear of female reprisals. Kind of being proven right here" and another, "I really thought the MRA [Men's Rights Advocates] guys were crazy until I engaged the wrath of the feminists. Insane."

Schwyzer (who had been active in GMP debates that fall) wrote an essay criticizing Matlack's language and tone. The piece was briefly posted by a GMP editor and then (after Matlack complained to Hickey) removed. Hickey says she was upset that Schwyzer had personally attacked GMP's founder and asked Schwyzer, "Can you tell me why this fits into the brand?" 

He took 24 hours to think it over, and then he left GMP, posting the piece on his own site. He explains now, in an interview, "I felt there was an increasing lack of accountability on the part of editorial staff for men's being the primary architects of this system. There was this sense that sexism causes suffering to both men and women -- and in equal ways. Sexism is a system designed and maintained primarily by men. ... They [the GMP staff] were interested in affirming men as they are, and I was interested in what men could do to improve."

Schwyzer's disagreements with GMP sound like disagreements that other feminists have with him. On January 14, Healthy Is the New Skinny announced a decision to "end all ties" with Schwyzer, and Schwyzer announced his resignation from Perfectly Unperfected, another feminist body-image group he helped lead. Around the same time, Scarleteen, a sex-education organization, removed Schwyzer's old pieces from its website, citing "previously unknown information about this writer and his history."

The details of his fall are telling. "Severing ties" (or, in the case of Feministe, denying links) is not about ideological critique, but social ostracism. Schwyzer is no longer part of the conversation. It's a poignant turn of events for a man who long considered himself one of feminism's most dedicated male advocates. But after years of defending feminism to other men, he became lost in the details of men's private journeys -- above all, his own.

Images: 1. alejandro dans neergaard/Shutterstock; 2. RLN/Shutterstock.