Maybe, if the abuse allegations are true, Mr. Schneiderman had two separate lives, totally alienating his abusive self from his feminist one, and maybe he lives every day with the shame of that cognitive dissonance. Or maybe his feminist self is part of the bigger power play and he simply enjoys getting one over on all of us. He saw career gains as he worked with progressive women’s groups over the years, and his prominence rose along with the current swell of a feminist-minded anti-Trump resistance, kicked off by the Women’s March and seguing into #MeToo. He rode that wave, and the women’s movements’ coattails, into much more fame than a state attorney general typically enjoys.

His work in the realm of reproductive rights — and the praise he garnered from it — is a stark example. Feminists push for reproductive freedoms so that women can have basic bodily autonomy and economic stability, but also so that we can be free to enjoy sex for pleasure’s sake. Mr. Schneiderman promoted the rights of women to choose what we do with our own bodies, and then is accused of personally turning sexual interactions into violent, degrading acts done to his female partners.

Mr. Schneiderman also seems to have used his feminist reputation as a tool to access the exact kind of women he apparently enjoyed breaking down, while his liberal bona fides made the women who say he mistreated them second-guess themselves, and stay quiet.

According to one woman quoted in The New Yorker piece, Mr. Schneiderman told her that high-powered professional women want to be sexually dominated, and said: “Yeah, you act a certain way and look a certain way, but I know that at heart you are a dirty little slut. You want to be my whore.” Then, she says, he slapped her across the face, twice. She didn’t report it because “He’s a good attorney general, he’s doing good things. I didn’t want to jeopardize that.”

So what are strong women to do if even the men who seem like good feminists might be misogynists, too? With right-wing men who oppose women’s rights, what you see is what you get. With these bogus male feminists, it can be crazy-making — especially since women are so often taught to subsume our own doubts and even our own experiences if men tell us we’re interpreting things incorrectly. Of course we want men to champion women’s rights, and we shouldn’t look skeptically on the men who stand up for all of us.

But we should pause when we sense that men are performing feminism for kudos or influence rather than simply doing the right thing. Harvey Weinstein attended a gala for Planned Parenthood, where Hillary Clinton was also present, bid $100,000 on a painting — and then reportedly never sent the money. Louis C.K. wrote some great feminist jokes, but never seemed willing to fully give up the misogynist ones.