Jordan Peterson’s rhetoric in 12 Rules for Life weaponizes evolutionary metaphors—like female chimpanzees’ mate rejection—to claim women inherently shame men, ignoring systemic factors like patriarchy or his selective moral framing. He misuses studies (e.g., Marry Your Like, 2014) to push traditional gender roles and deflect on wage gaps, blaming traits over discrimination. Red lipstick becomes "provocative" in his harassment critiques, reinforcing blame-shifting. By equating self-consciousness with female rejection and validating incel narratives without addressing violence, Peterson’s arguments undermine mutual respect, framing women as the root of men’s suffering while dodging accountability for his misogynistic patterns. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have more episodes if I wasn't busy working so much.
I'm Spencer, your host.
Before I get into the episode topic today, I just want to remind people that any questions, comments, concerns, complaints, commentaries can be sent to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
With that, we need to get right into it.
Just me today, no guest.
The topic of this podcast is Jordan Peterson's misogyny.
For anyone who's been hiding under a rock, Jordan Peterson is a Canadian psychologist who's made a name for himself by being a right-wing polemicist.
He has a podcast wherein he discusses every topic that would achieve his goal of having every country he cares about having a conservative government.
I won't be covering every topic he covers here today because that would take far too much time.
Just hitting the high points of the misogyny.
Before I get into the content, I need to set the stage a little bit and give a content warning.
Some people have very strong feelings about Jordan Peterson and have developed strong reactions to the sound of Peterson's voice.
This episode will feature several clips from other podcasts and YouTube videos that include Jordan Peterson's voice.
If that's the sort of thing that you need to avoid in order to preserve your mental health, then now is the time to skip the remainder of this podcast episode.
Also note that this episode will refer to several other episodes of this podcast.
You will likely be able to understand this episode without having heard those others, but I think the references will have more meaning if you have heard them.
As I refer to each, I will name them, and all those episodes will be linked in the notes for this episode.
I need to talk about Jordan Peterson's rhetorical style before I talk about his content.
Episode 19 of this podcast was called The Two Selves, in which I articulated the idea that each person has a version of themselves that they want other people to see.
The version of Jordan Peterson that Jordan Peterson wants other people to see is a complicated person who's ultimately not understandable.
He wants his thoughts to be too deep for anyone else to comprehend.
He constantly squirms away when anyone suggests the notion that they have understood him or understood what he's been trying to say.
Constant are the examples of people trying to translate his words into their own words in order to demonstrate that they've understood, only to have him say, yes and no, or yes, but there's so much more.
Episode 79 of this podcast was called Schrödinger's Meaning.
The idea that a speaker might have two meanings that they intend to have communicated from something that they say.
Jordan Peterson tries to get at least two meanings out of everything he says.
He constantly flips back and forth between the metaphorical and the actual to blur the lines between these things.
He wants to complicate the subject he's currently discussing to the point where no one understands it.
He wants people to think that he still understands it.
And in his mind, this makes him some level of, I don't know, word champion.
I've said before on this podcast that Jordan Peterson is the reigning champion of word salad, and I still think that's true now.
Decoding the Gurus is a podcast about revealing the rhetorical styles and subject matter of some of the more prominent talking heads on the internet.
The hosts are very good at what they do.
If you're into listening to academics break down the often complicated ideas of other academics, or just gurus, who have strayed outside the lanes of academia, then it's a highly recommended podcast.
Here's a clip from Decoding the Gurus, episode 18.
It features the hosts struggling to understand one of Jordan Peterson's more verbose utterances.
Yeah, okay, so let me let me hit you again with some knowledge.
And that actually exists in our imagination as a latent religious symbol.
And then that's filled up by narrative, constantly refilled and filled.
And the ultimate exemplar of that has religious power.
And the awe that that inspires is, if you're thinking about it biologically, is the manifestation of the instinct to imitate.
And then you think, okay, then you can take that one step farther.
If that's true, that ideal does, in fact, end up being the most effective way to live in the broadest possible sense.
And so it's valid.
And then you might ask, well, is it objectively valid?
And that's a very difficult thing to say because generally we're not very good at looking at complex patterns as objective reality.
We tend to have to reduce things to their material substrate and we can get a grip on what's materially true as we become more and more reductionistic.
But at those higher levels of abstraction, you know, like hierarchies have been around for a very, very long time.
It's not unreasonable to assume that there's a characteristic pattern of behavior that moves you up or down a hierarchy.
Ah, and Fincine, yes.
That's Jordan Peterson that is most Jordan Peterson-esque, isn't it?
My God, it hurts my brain just figuring out what the hell he's actually saying.
You know, sometimes people try to argue with us to some extent that Jordan is not a theological figure.
His content is inherently political and stuff, which it is.
But when you listen to this and the passion with which he speaks, it's such a mishmash of evolutionary psychology and religious belief and like psychology and political values as well.
It's all mixed in there.
But isn't this what makes him appealing?
Isn't this why he's a more interesting character than someone like Brett?
Because he has this unique synthesis in a way.
Like, yes, he is just reporting conservative values or whatever, but most people couldn't dress up their admiration for Christ and Christianity in this kind of heady mix of secular gods.
Yeah, heady mix of cryptic mysticism.
Yeah, I agree.
It's quite amazing.
But, well, look, it is a mishmash of all those things, but does he do it well?
Because I'm really trying to understand what he's talking about, but I'm struggling and failing to figure out how any of it makes sense.
It sounds like a word salad of things that aren't really connected.
He is an interesting figure, definitely, but it's Deepak Shopra with some evolutionary psychology mixed in.
When those guys can't understand what you're talking about, then you have likely miscommunicated.
This emperor's new clothes routine has been going on for a long time.
Jordan Peterson speaks in overly flourishing language about things that could be expressed much more simply and usually aren't all that deep or meaningful or even original.
And the grifters on stage with him nod along because they're all in the same club of people pretending to be pushing back against a tyrannical force.
What exactly that tyrannical force is and how anyone else can independently verify its existence is the question they've been waffling on and avoiding for eight years now.
Just for fun.
Here's another example of both the word salad and the strange need to overly complicate something while denying that someone has understood what he said, when, in fact, they absolutely have understood it.
This is from an interview with British GQ from October of 2018.
The interviewer was a woman named Helen Lewis.
Well, that's what knowing your stance on.
But having a coherent ideology does mean that it is predictable because this is one logical thing that flows from another and that all those pieces tessellate together.
So what I find very interesting about your thinking, I find it quite slightly baffling, is that I don't really see how all the pieces fit together.
You know, you say that you believe in God, but there's a lot of emphasis about going back to...
No, I actually say act as if God exists.
Right.
Right.
Which is actually my definition of belief.
Right.
So I'm not sure how much explanation that needs, but I'll go ahead with it anyway.
Helen Lewis says that Jordan Peterson believes in God.
Jordan Peterson attempts to squirm away from that with some strange need to, you know, ooh, don't understand me somehow.
In squirming away, he changes the phrasing to acting as though God exists and then, hilariously, states that this is how he defines belief.
Well, okay, Mysterio, how is that different than just a belief in God exactly?
Moving on.
So it's time to get down to the actual content.
I wanted to make this episode because while I have looked, I haven't found a comprehensive debunk and pushback on these particular topics that Jordan Peterson underlined mostly in his earlier work.
Maybe they exist and I miss them, but I thought it'd be a good idea to put them all together in one place.
Jordan Peterson first clawed his way to the right-wing popularity around 2017 or so when he took issue with Bill C-16, a piece of legislation from the province of Ontario that proposed to add transgender as a protected category of person.
This would mean that attacking a transgender person because they were transgender would be a hate crime, as was already the case with race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.
Jordan Peterson doesn't believe that transgender people are a category of any kind.
He has, in the past, refused to call transgender people by their preferred pronouns, only to later sometimes claim that he would use their preferred pronouns if requested.
And in contrast to that, he claims that treating transgender people with this simple courtesy is compelled speech.
This is a gross distortion of the situation.
To say that using someone's preferred pronouns is compelled speech is quite literally saying that you prefer to call them something other than what they prefer to be called.
If Peterson preferred to use racial slurs when referring to people of color, and we insist that he use more polite terms, would this be compelled speech?
No one is forcing Jordan Peterson to say that he likes something that he does not like.
No one is making him say good things about government officials or to participate in propaganda.
These things would be compelled speech.
Using preferred pronouns is about politeness.
Being polite in society to minorities is about removing at least one overt layer of social segregation and can reduce the idea that it's okay to target them.
It isn't a complete solution to the problem of bigotry, but it's a solid start.
The fact that Jordan Peterson calls Bill C-16 the onset of compelled speech is exactly the reason why we need Bill C-16.
Also worth noting, Bill C-16 doesn't make any commandments about pronoun use.
It applies more to discrimination from jobs and protection from violent offenses.
This is by no means the last time we will hear about Jordan Peterson misrepresenting the facts so that he can press a political point.
Let's go back to the start.
The first time I heard Jordan Peterson speak was on the Waking Up podcast with Sam Harris in 2017.
I don't really recommend that anyone go back and listen to this episode, even though I will include it in the show notes.
It's more than two hours of two highly educated men arguing about epistemology, literally.
If that's your jam, have at it.
I'll give you a brief summary here because I can't find a coherent clip of Jordan Peterson expressing his ideas.
And to be perfectly honest, if it weren't for Sam Harris' ability to understand and guide the conversation, I likely would never have understood anything of what Jordan Peterson was talking about.
Jordan Peterson believes that moral truth should be reliant on the outcome.
Specifically, human moral truth should rely on an outcome in which humans survive.
This sort of thing sounds silly, but innocuous, until you come to understand that Jordan Peterson also wants to be the arbiter of which things will allow humans to survive and which things will lead to our destruction, and thereby backdoor his way into becoming the interpreter of moral truth itself.
It's also fairly handy for a person that doesn't want to be encumbered by the constraints of objective reality.
Having a guideline for how to vilify all the human outcomes that don't lead to cisgendered husbands and wives in the suburbs with white picket fences seems like a bonus.
The conversation on the Waking Up podcast was terrible, stilted, confusing, and unnecessary.
Still, there was one moment that at the time stood out to me.
Here's the clip.
That happens all the time.
Of course, but it doesn't happen on the basis of a single variable, which is whether or not enough people survive.
I mean, forget about the fact that this Darwinian criterion...
No, we're willing to rewrite the history of what's true based on far less evidence than that.
And that's a good thing.
But, you know, you say yourself, well, science is always prone to correction by the discovery of errors in the future.
So I don't see why that's any more radical than what I'm claiming.
The errors have to be relevant and causally connected to the thing you're talking about.
Our mere survival.
And again, there are vagaries here.
Then the question is, as I said before, survival for what?
If you're surviving only to be immiserated, we could call that into question.
But then there's the question of whether enough people survive, right?
So like how many deaths would begin to erode our confidence in the primeness of a given number, right?
500 years ago.
You're forced to rewrite our intellectual history based on a single criterion, whether it terminates in bliss or death.
That just doesn't make any sense.
I mean, we're going around and around on this.
I don't really see how that's any different than your claim that science should be nested inside the search for well-being.
Now, we will move on to that because I think I know you want to get there, but I just need to plant a flag here.
I think many people listening to this, I'll be interested to see what if people have a similar reaction here, but I would expect many people will share my frustration that you're not granting what seemed to be just fairly obvious and undeniable facts.
And now we're having to use this concept of truth in a pretty inconvenient way, right?
Because it's, I don't see how anyone's going to think that it makes sense that- No, look, fine.
Of course it's going to be, it's going to be, it's going to be controversial.
I mean, the claim I'm making is that scientific truth is nested inside moral truth.
And moral truth is the final adjudicator.
And your claim is no, moral truth is nested inside scientific truth, and scientific truth is the final adjudicator.
It's like, fine, you know, those are both coherent positions.
But yours actually isn't coherent because you're then having to, once we get into the fine print, you're having to say, well, of course, all of those micro instances, the billions upon billions of which can be cited, don't get changed based on whether or not we survive.
You seem to be having it both ways.
I point you to a micro instance.
You say, well, that's just a micro instance isolated from everything else.
But the moment I connected to everything else, you seem to suggest that it's going to change.
But the mechanism by which it would change, I mean, there is no causal connection between...
Well, let's look at it this way.
Look at it this way.
So let's take the Irish elk as an example.
So one of the things that happened to the Irish elk, we think, because he went extinct, was that sexual selection sort of got out of control and the females fixated on antler width and the poor damn elk ended up with like a 12-foot rack.
And that didn't, you know, this is obviously a post-hoc theory, but sexual selection can account for runaway transformations like that.
And the poor elk got a rack so big that it really wasn't commensurate with his survival.
Although then we might say, well, I guess there was something wrong with what the female elk decided to focus on, but we didn't really know that till we went extinct.
And I see that as precisely analogous to the point that I'm making right now.
We're concentrating on certain things in a certain way.
And it's a scientific way, let's say, which is flawed and insufficient, although very powerful.
And it needs to be subordinated to something else.
It must be, or it will be fatal.
Now, at the moment I heard that, I had very little idea what Peterson was really all about or how big he was going to eventually become.
This example stood out to me because it didn't illustrate his point about moral truth very well, but it did highlight something else.
Elk, or moose, as we call them here in Canada, don't really act in the way Peterson describes them here.
For a time, it was postulated that sexual selection could have been related to the extinction of the Irish elk.
But this is a diminishing idea among evolutionary biologists who study this.
And I think it was a long shot, even when it was first proposed.
Female elk do not line up the males and talk amongst themselves while giggling about which one looks the best for a romp.
The males drive off all the other competing males to become the dominant mating partner.
Once there's only one male left, the choice is very simple.
Peterson places the blame for the extinction of this subspecies of elk on the supposed choice of the females in choosing mates based on maladaptive properties.
He does this in the middle of a conversation about how ideas can only be morally true if they lead to the survival of the members of the species that had those ideas.
He's saying that it was morally wrong for the female elk to have chosen mates based on antler size, if, as I say, that's even what they were doing.
This rhetoric is echoed in many other conversations and appearances Peterson has had since then.
And it's a big reason why he's popular with the incel community.
Quick explainer.
Incel is short for involuntarily celibate.
It's a set of ideas from men, mostly younger men, who wish to blame women for the fact that they, the men, are single, involuntarily celibate, in that they are only celibate due to circumstance, not choice.
To incels, women should be making, quote-unquote, better choices by choosing them rather than the men those women are choosing instead.
The incel community is where we got the term Chad from.
Chad is a term for a fictional character archetype.
Chads played football in high school and were popular with the high school girls and went out on a lot of dates.
To the math-minded, if Chads have sex with many women and those women each only have sex with one guy, Chad, then this leads to a lot of single men left over who can't find a sexual partner.
This is quite literally how they think.
Jordan Peterson, working in examples of moments in the animal kingdom, where the females of a species made four mating choices, which caused the extinction of that species, is big-time dog whistling to incels.
Including it in a conversation in which Peterson claims that all of moral truth is determined by choices that avoid extinction is a way of telling the incel community that they are perfectly justified in their egregious ideology.
So after hearing that episode of the Waking Up podcast, I knew I was listening to a strange individual.
Highly intelligent, bigoted, very religious, very conservative, and has a desire to appeal to the incel community.
One could only hope that he would fade into the background way back in 2017 and be ignored by the world after that point.
Alas, that was not to be.
In January of 2018, Jordan Peterson published a book called 12 Rules for Life.
Peterson has said that this book is intended for young men, even though nothing in the title would lead anyone to think that, unless you include the subtitle that appears on the book jacket.
The full title is called 12 Rules for Life, an Antidote to Chaos.
Peterson claims there is a crisis of masculinity and that young men are suffering and lashing out violently as they are expected to, in Peterson's words, take on more feminine traits.
He also claims that this is wrapped up in something he calls cultural Marxism, but I'm not going to get into that.
For a sufficiently deep dive on Peterson's erroneous beliefs about cultural Marxism, I will happily direct you to the excellent Some Dare Call It Conspiracy podcast, whose second episode was devoted to this specifically.
The links will be in the notes for this episode.
In 12 Rules for Life, an Antidote to Chaos, Peterson claims that the world can be looked at metaphorically, or, in his words, symbolically, as a struggle between order and chaos, and that these two opposites are cast onto a yin and yang, the ancient Chinese symbol with the black and white swirls inside a circle that are appearing to chase each other.
That's all well and fine if Peterson doesn't additionally cast these opposite aspects directly onto masculinity and femininity.
For those who haven't read it, I dare you to guess right now which you think he calls order and which you think he calls chaos.
12 Rules for Life made some waves.
Jordan Peterson arranged his words in a fashion that led some people to accuse him of misogyny.
Herein lies some of the work that led to Peterson achieving his black belt status in communicating multiple disparate meanings from solitary statements.
And also we have the constant and deliberate confusions that are meant to allow Peterson to slip the yoke of judgment for what are otherwise deeply misogynistic beliefs.
What exactly are we meant to make of a book that casts femininity as chaos, which, presumably, is poison, which requires an antidote.
Regular listeners might recall a previous episode of this podcast, episode 55, called Gender Yin-Yangism.
The idea that male and female roles are often cast erroneously as being definitively opposite, as though on a yin and yang, with never anything between them.
In fact, males and females of any species are far more alike than different.
As we learn more about human and animal biology, our findings heavily support this idea and create further distance between gender yin-yangism and objective reality.
Jordan Peterson's stance against transgender people is the cornerstone of his initial year of popularity.
It's the reason anyone came to know who he was at all.
Peterson has been relatively quiet about abortion and gay marriage, only commenting on these issues when directly asked.
On those occasions, he falls so closely to the exact line of the Canadian electorate, one would be forgiven for thinking he might be looking to run for prime minister someday.
But if his definition of moral truth is dependent on survival of the human species, then shouldn't he fall on the side that produces more children?
If his followers aren't holding his feet to those standards, then his followers either don't understand his collection of stated positions or don't care about their hypocrisy.
I'm willing to bet it's the former.
Most Peterson fans I ran into are very proud that they have one of the wordy guys on their side and generally can't articulate a single one of his ideas.
Peterson's central conceit is found in the overture, ordinarily the prologue, of 12 Rules for Life.
There is a lot about 12 Rules for Life that could be criticized.
What I'm criticizing here is only samples of the bits that highlight Peterson's inherent misogyny, with maybe a light sampling of why he won't admit that the transgender experience is real.
Here are the two paragraphs that describe the premise that is referenced throughout the book.
From 12 Rules of Life, The Overture, page 22.
Order is where the people around you act according to well-understood social norms and remain predictable and cooperative.
It's the world of social structure, explored territory, and familiarity.
The state of order is typically portrayed symbolically, imaginatively, as masculine.
It's the wise king and the tyrant, forever bound together, as society is simultaneously structure and oppression.
Chaos, by contrast, is where or when something unexpected happens.
Chaos emerges, in trivial form, when you tell a joke at a party with people you think you know, and a silent and embarrassing chill falls over the gathering.
Chaos is what emerges more catastrophically when you suddenly find yourself without employment or are betrayed by a lover.
As the antithesis of symbolically masculine order, it's presented imaginatively as feminine.
It's the new and unpredictable suddenly emerging in the midst of a commonplace familiar.
It's creation and destruction, the source of new things, and the destination of the dead.
As nature, as opposed to culture, is simultaneously birth and demise.
So Peterson makes clear, in his initial statement here, that these are symbolic, imaginative representations.
One might look a little askance at the examples given for chaos, though.
How many times has he told a joke in a room full of people that he thinks he knows, only to find them uncomfortably silent afterwards?
Why is the betrayal of a lover cast with the feminine side of this dichotomy?
Ah, it's just a metaphor, right?
Just symbolism.
It's only meant to be an imaginative portrayal of these aspects, as the man said, right?
Okay, let's move on.
Chapter 2 is where Peterson gets deeper into the weeds on the order and chaos, masculine and feminine cast, and how it relates to his greater ideas.
From 12 Rules of Life, Chapter 2, page 67, order, the unknown, appears symbolically associated with masculinity, as illustrated in the aforementioned Yang of the Taoist Yin-Yang symbol.
This is perhaps because the primary hierarchical structure of human society is masculine, as it is among animals, including the chimpanzees, who are our closest genetic and arguably behavioral match.
It is because men are, and throughout history have been, the builders of towns and cities, the engineers, stonemasons, bricklayers, and lumberjacks, the operators of heavy machinery.
Order is God the Father, the eternal judge, ledger keeper, and dispenser of rewards and punishments.
Order is the peacetime army of policemen and soldiers.
It's the political culture, the corporate environment, and the system.
It's the they in you know what they say.
It's credit cards, classrooms, supermarket checkout lineups, turn-taking, traffic lights, and the familiar roots of daily commuters.
Order, when pushed too far, when imbalanced, can also manifest itself destructively and terribly.
It does so as forced migration, the concentration camp, and the soul-devouring uniformity of the goose step.
Chaos, the unknown, is symbolically associated with the feminine.
This is partly because all the things we have come to know were born originally of the unknown, just as all beings we encounter were born of mothers.
Chaos is mater, origin, source, mother, materia, the substance from which all things are made.
It is also what matters, or what is the matter, the very subject matter of thought and communication.
In its positive guise, chaos is possibility itself, the source of ideas, the mysterious realm of gestation and birth.
As a negative force, it's the impenetrable darkness of a cave, and the accident by the side of the road.
It's the mother grizzly, all compassion to her cubs, who marks you as a potential predator and tears you to pieces.
Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing of sexual selection.
Women are choosy maters, unlike female chimps, their closest animal counterparts.
Most men do not meet female human standards.
It is for this reason that women on dating sites rate 85% of men as below average in attractiveness.
It is for this reason that we all have twice as many female ancestors as male.
Imagine that all women who have ever lived average one child.
Now imagine that half of men who have ever lived fathered two children, if they had any, while the other half fathered none.
It is woman as nature who looks at half of all men and says no.
For the men, that's a direct encounter with chaos.
And it occurs with devastating force every time they are turned down for a date.
Human female choosiness is also why we are very different from the common ancestor we shared with our chimpanzee cousins, while the latter are very much the same.
Editor's note here, I have no idea how he knows what kind of society our common ancestor with chimpanzees had.
Back to his show.
Women's proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrial, upright, large-brained, competitive, aggressive, domineering creatures that we are.
It is nature as woman who says, well, Bucko, you're good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation.
So that was a lot.
First, that ended again with the barely subtle dog whistles to the incel narrative.
It's the women saying no that creates your despair and lack of fulfillment.
But the bigger point here is that he repeatedly crosses the line from the metaphorical into the actual.
He wants both meanings at once.
Schrödinger's meaning.
Men were actually building the world to create order, not symbolically or imaginatively, as is meant to be the case for his yin-yang metaphor.
Women were actually cheating on their spouses and rejecting potential mates to create chaos.
At the beginning of each mention, he said again that these were symbolic representations, but then immediately swerved away from the symbolism into the actual.
Jordan Peterson's intent with 12 Rules of Life, plainly stated by him on many occasions, is to help men, specifically men, not people, not anyone who symbolically suffers from a lack of order in their life, men.
And he has done so here by casting them onto a teeter-totter on which, in order to raise the esteems of men, he has to trash those of women.
His problem is in his own dual-meaning rhetorical style.
He cannot cast men as the actual builders of society without breaking through the fourth wall of his symbolism.
The suspension of disbelief that this is only a metaphor is shattered.
And then, what does he do with women at the same time?
Well, they're a bunch of overly picky maters.
Aren't men also mating here?
Why is it that the women are the maters?
Anyway, maters who won't play fair by pairing up nicely at a one-to-one ratio.
And this cast, again, from the perspective of how this behavior affects men.
Never is it portrayed in how it may benefit women or the species or nature.
A slight nod is given to the fact that chimpanzees are not quote-unquote choosy maters.
And this only serves to highlight that this is a defect in the female population of the human species.
Women are not to blame for the fact that a greater burden of the consequences of sexual discourse fall to them.
That they should be more choosy due to this seems only rational.
And as a footnote, his mention of how female chimpanzees are not such quote-unquote choosy maters has a reference to a study called Male Coercion and the Costs of Female Promiscuous Mating for Female Chimpanzees.
It's about how male chimpanzees use aggression as a strategy for coercing female chimpanzees to mate.
Not exactly what he's talking about here, but an interesting time to reference how it was unlikely that our primitive ancestors went, oh, shucks, better luck next time when turned down for a chance to mate with a female.
Fun stuff.
This whole thing strikes me as a really smart guy who came up with what he thought was a very good metaphor to use for a self-help book and can't get past the fact that it's not actually very good.
He could have done this in a lot of other ways that didn't push a yin-yang masculine feminine past the symbolic and into the real.
He probably could have done it without this metaphor at all.
He knows the potential consequences of how this looks and has done a lot of work attempting to avoid those consequences.
But his words are his words and now in print form, they'll be with us forever.
May we ever remember them as they are and skewer him with their meanings at every opportunity.
This next bit is from the tail end of chapter 2.
Some context here, so I don't have to extend the size of the quote.
Peterson is discussing the mythical story of Adam and Eve to wrap this idea into his Order Chaos slash masculine feminine narrative.
Rules for Life, Chapter 2, pages 73-74.
In any case, the serpent tells Eve that if she eats the forbidden fruit, she won't die.
Instead, her eyes will be opened.
She will become like God, knowing good from evil.
Of course, the serpent doesn't let her know she will be like God only in one way, but he is a serpent after all.
Being human and wanting to know more, Eve decides to eat the fruit.
Poof.
She wakes up, she's conscious, or perhaps self-conscious, for the first time.
Now, no clear-seeing, conscious woman is going to tolerate an unawakened man.
So Eve immediately shares the fruit with Adam.
That makes him self-conscious.
Little has changed.
Women have been making men self-conscious since the beginning of time.
They do this primarily by rejecting them, but they also do it by shaming them if men do not take responsibility.
Since women bear the primary burden of reproduction, it's no wonder.
It is very hard to see how it could be otherwise, but the capacity of women to shame men and render them self-conscious is still a primal force of nature.
Jordan Peterson is by no means being original in attempting to underline the fact that it was Eve who ate the forbidden fruit and ended the joyous time in paradise for Adam.
I'm not going to get into all the layers of biblical misogyny because that's not what I'm here for.
And it's been talked to death elsewhere besides.
But Peterson adds his own unique twist of the knife here.
He says that not only did Eve inflict self-consciousness upon Adam, but women in general inflict self-consciousness upon men.
First, we have, again, the crossover from the metaphorical into the actual.
Second, narrow a word about men who make women feel self-conscious, which must come as a complete betrayal of reality.
Women are pushed to focus on their level of attractiveness from such early ages that for many it starts before they begin forming permanent memories.
Most women are so self-conscious about their looks that they think this is simply a natural state of being.
And the idea that the workings of the patriarchy haven't ground this wheel into its current state is to flatly deny the entire reality of history and our world.
As well claim the earth is flat.
This echoes other times when Peterson attempts to highlight the ways in which women inflict suffering upon men or women emotionally manipulate men without giving any thought to the idea that men do the same things to women and in many respects more often and more severely.
He empathizes only with the male experience in these scenarios.
All of this adds together to become a chorus of dog whistles to the incel community.
Tell the deranged that the idea that's deranging them is true and justified, and they will love you forever.
And that's what Peterson has done with incels.
Jordan Peterson has made a number of claims that are unfair to women and of questionable origin.
Another such claim made in 12 Rules for Life is a supposed problem with men and women pairing up.
Peterson has said many times in various conversations that women tend to marry across and up an economic dominance hierarchy, and that men tend to marry across and down that same economic dominance hierarchy.
On its face, this isn't entirely significant.
If your society has traditionally only valued the output of men and has organized the social forces that would be said to give someone dominance as entirely masculine properties, then of course you will have this effect.
But it's important to understand that it's an effect due to a cause.
Peterson takes this as a part of human nature and turns it into its own cause that, in his words, will have its own negative effect.
From 12 Rules for Life, chapter 11, page 303 The increasingly short supply of university-educated men poses a problem of increasing severity for women who want to marry as well as date.
First, women have a strong proclivity to marry across or up the economic dominance hierarchy.
They prefer a partner of equal or greater status.
This holds true cross-culturally.
The same does not hold, by the way, for men, who are perfectly willing to marry across or down, as the Pew data indicate, although they show a preference for somewhat younger mates.
Okay, once again, for those in the back, in the past, when men absolutely always made more money than women, it would be insanity to expect anything except for this result.
Not because the women all wanted to be trad wives, but because there were fewer other choices.
Also worth noting, Peterson cites a research paper to back this point up, and he has read it backward.
The paper is referenced in the footnotes of his book and is called Marry Your Like, Assortive Mating and Income Inequality from 2014.
I downloaded it for free and had a look for myself.
The research paper shows that income inequality in married couples has decreased continually over the past several decades.
This is not an indicator that women prefer men who are economically dominant.
It's an indication that As a wider variety of options become available, people in general take advantage of those options as ways in which they might arrange their lives.
Trying to tell people that they should prefer to have men be economically dominant over women is exactly the kind of tradwife bullshit that one might expect from Jordan Peterson at this point, and going against the science to boot.
The whole thing stinks of a preference for men over women.
To see this this way is to no longer wonder why Peterson so often rails against feminists and has no problem advocating against gender wage inequality.
He actively sees it as damaging to our ability to mate effectively.
I don't think that's a problem.
The birth rate in the Western world has declined, but it's done so because our children are much more likely to survive to adulthood.
We then put more time, energy, love, and investment into the fewer children we have to help them grow into better people.
It's not just about quantity.
So after 12 Rules for Life is released, Peterson goes on a press tour and does a series of interviews.
Given the content of the book, several of those interviews went viral.
His detractors wanted to see him flop, and his fans wanted to see him succeed.
What we saw was Jordan Peterson relying on the multiple meanings of his message to pivot away from any potential negative consequences while attempting to also reap the rewards from having said these edgy things in the first place.
And he mostly got that.
This clip was from January of 2018.
It's an interview on Channel 4 News in the UK with Kathy Newman.
My impression of the interview as a whole is that I think Kathy's producers failed to adequately prepare her for Jordan Peterson.
The biggest point of contention between them was gender wage gap.
She came to the interview with a single statistic that women got paid less than men.
This was like going to a gunfight armed with a pocket knife.
Here's the clip.
Let me put a quote to you from the book.
Where you say, there are whole disciplines in universities forthrightly hostile towards men.
These are the areas of study dominated by the postmodern stroke neo-Marxist claim that Western culture in particular is an oppressive structure created by white men to dominate and exclude women.
But then I want to put minorities too who dominate and exclude women.
But I want to put to you that here in the UK, for example, let's take that as an example, the gender pay gap stands at just over 9%.
You've got women at the BBC recently saying that the broadcaster is illegally paying them less than men to do the same job.
You've got only seven women running the top FTSE 100 companies.
So it seems to a lot of women that they're still being dominated and excluded, to quote your words back to you.
It does seem that way, but multivariate analysis of the pay gap indicate that it doesn't exist.
But that's just not true, is it?
I mean, that 9% pay gap, that's a gap between median hourly earnings between men and women.
But it's a little bit, yeah, but there's multiple reasons for that.
One of them is gender, but it's not the only reason.
Like, if you're a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis.
Like you say, well, women in aggregate are paid less than men.
Okay, well, then we break it down by age.
We break it down by occupation.
We break it down by interest.
We break it down by personality.
But you're saying basically it doesn't matter if women aren't getting to the top, because that's what's skewing that gender pay gap, isn't it?
You're saying, well, that's just a factor of the fact that women aren't necessarily going to get to the top.
No, I'm not saying it doesn't matter either.
You're saying there are multiple reasons for it.
Yeah, but there's reasons.
Why should women put up with those reasons?
Why should women be content with that?
I'm not saying that they shouldn't put up with it.
I'm saying that the claim that the wage gap between men and women is only due to sex is wrong.
And it is wrong.
There's no doubt about that.
The multivariate analysis have been done.
So I can give you a message.
I'm saying that 9% pay gap exists.
That's a gap between men and women.
I'm not saying why it exists, but it exists.
Now, if you're a woman, that seems pretty unfair.
You have to say why it exists.
But do you agree that it's unfair, if you're a woman...
Not necessarily.
And on average, you're getting paid 9% less than a man.
That's not fair, is it?
It depends on why it's happening.
I can give you an example.
Okay.
There's a personality trait known as agreeableness.
Agreeable people are compassionate and polite.
And agreeable people get paid less than less agreeable people for the same job.
Women are more agreeable than men.
Again, a vast generalization.
Some women are not more agreeable than men.
That's true, but that's right.
And some women get paid more than men.
So you're saying that by and large, women are too agreeable to get the pay rises they deserve.
No, I'm saying that that's one component of a multivariate equation that predicts salary.
It accounts for maybe 5% of the variance, something like that.
So surely you need about another 18 factors, one of which is gender.
And there is prejudice, there's no doubt about that, but it accounts for a much smaller proportion of the variance in the pay gap than the radical feminists claim.
Okay, so rather than denying the pay gap exists, which is what you did at the beginning of this conversation, shouldn't you say to women, rather than being agreeable and not asking for a pay rise, go and ask for a pay rise.
Make yourself disagreeable with your boss.
Oh, definitely.
There's that.
But I also didn't deny it existed.
I denied it existed because of gender.
Okay.
See, because I'm very, very, very careful with my words.
So the pay gap exists.
You accept that.
But you're saying, I mean, the pay gap between men and women exists.
You're saying it's not because of gender.
It's because women are too agreeable to ask for pay rises.
That's one of the reasons.
Okay, one of the reasons.
So why not get them to ask for a pay rise?
Wouldn't that be fair away?
Many, many times in my career.
And they just don't.
Oh, they do it all the time.
So again, quite a lot of insistence on the specificity of his own language to avoid suffering a negative consequence, wiggling away to get away from a reading of his words that he absolutely would be fine with men cheering him on for.
But we need to get to the meat of this.
He says that disagreeableness accounts for a sizable portion of the gender wage gap.
And he also admits that women can easily learn to be more disagreeable.
Disagreeableness is not a biological trait, nor is it a primary aspect of one's psyche.
So then maybe we should ask the esteemed psychologist why men are so much more disagreeable.
Does it have to do with how we raise boys and girls?
Should we continue to raise them this way?
If one were to do a multi-variate analysis of disagreeableness, which properties would one find most strongly correlated with its presence or absence?
Sometimes I wonder who is more disappointed with how that interview turned out, me or Kathy Newman?
We have to talk about something that isn't actually Jordan Peterson's content for a moment.
Mostly because it comes up in a lot of conversations about this moment in Jordan Peterson's content cycle.
It actually gets a passing mention later in that interview with Kathy Newman, but they don't discuss it substantively.
In July of 2017, a man named James DeMoore was working at Google when he wrote a memo in response to some intra-company discourse about gender diversity in the tech field in general and also at Google.
Science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM fields, have been trying to change the extreme disparity in the male-female ratio for a long time.
Over this time, the gap has narrowed, but not nearly as close as the wage gap has.
For example, as heard in the Kathy Newman interview, the gender wage gap has narrowed to about 9% or so, and there are still a lot of factors that can be affecting this number, as Peterson is more than happy to point out.
Meanwhile, women in STEM fields occupy only about 23% of all technical roles as of 2023.
And that's after a significant effort to close both of those gaps over several decades.
James DeMoore suggested several things in his memo, but the primary and most controversial idea he put forward was that there were psychological differences between the genders that could cause a difference in interest in the types of careers a person pursues.
For the moment, let's put aside the fact that this idea alone could be true, but also not come anywhere close to accounting for the drastic disparity we're actually seeing.
The most often trotted out line of pseudo-wisdom from the James DeMoore memo is that women are interested in people and that men are interested in things.
This is used to explain one observation from one angle, the fact that there are more men in STEM careers than there are women.
But we must ask if this even makes sense.
So I ask myself a few questions.
If this is true, then does it predict any other measurable phenomenon in our world?
That is, are there other careers that should skew in one direction or the other due to this effect?
The bobbleheads who normally trot this out always have an answer.
There have always been more female nurses than male nurses, and by a very large margin.
Some even try to include doctors in this, but that's not actually true.
There are currently more female medical students than male, but not more practicing doctors as of yet.
But there are a lot more jobs of other varieties, right?
What about sales?
Shouldn't we expect men to be turned off at the idea of working in sales while women are attracted to this career due to their preference for people?
What about politics?
That's a job where a person is constantly dealing with people rather than things.
Shouldn't this axiom predict that our democracies and political positions are flooded with women while men have difficulty achieving parity?
Turns out that none of that is true, and this axiom isn't worth the computing power it took to email it.
While there are psychological differences that might cause some minor difference, the amount of difference we're seeing in STEM fields isn't only a few percentage points, it's extreme, and we need to figure out what's going on there.
Anyway, back to the Jordan Peterson stuff.
This episode is just about long enough, so I'm going to make this the last reference, but it's a doozy.
Jordan Peterson has expressed this particular idea several times, and I've chosen an interview he did on vice as the most representative.
Jordan Peterson said afterwards that he was annoyed during this interview, and for anyone who has listened to a lot of Jordan Peterson's content, it can be heard in his voice.
That's one reason I like this interview so much.
I'm not even sure who this guy is doing the interview, but he gives no indication whatsoever that he's intimidated by Peterson's agitation.
And I think he drilled into some really good content because of it.
Have a listen.
I don't understand.
I guess I don't understand the question exactly.
Well, my question is essentially that, like, when you think.
Is there sexual harassment in the workplace?
Yes.
Should it stop?
That'd be good.
If it did.
That'd be good.
Will it?
Well, not at the moment.
It won't because we don't know what the rules are.
Do you think men and women can work in the workplace together?
I don't know.
Without sexual harassment?
We'll see.
We'll see.
How many years will it take for men and women working in the workplace together?
More than 40.
More than 40.
We're new at this.
We're new at this.
Absolutely.
We're completely new at it.
It's only been a couple of generations.
That's part of the problem, right?
Is that we don't know what the rules are.
Like, here's a rule.
How about no makeup in the workplace?
Why would that be a rule?
Why should you wear makeup in the workplace?
Isn't that sexually provocative?
No.
It's not?
No.
What is it then?
What's the purpose of makeup?
Some people would like to just put on makeup.
Why?
I don't know.
Why do you make your lips red?
Because they turn red during sexual arousal.
That's why.
Why do you put rouge on your cheeks?
Same reason.
So they're talking about sexual harassment in the workplace.
And Jordan Peterson drags up the idea of women wearing makeup in the workplace.
First, in the context given, it's gross.
This is adjacent to the terrible notion that women who dress in a sexual fashion deserve the sexual harassment or worse that they might receive.
Not exactly at the same point on the ruler, but right up next to it.
Peterson uses the examples of red lipstick and rouge specifically for his point because, in his words, this is meant to mimic a bodily response to sexual arousal.
Okay.
But of course, these aren't the only colors of these makeup items available on the market.
Why would a woman wear brown lipstick or wear eyeliner of any color or paint their eyebrows or pluck their eyebrows into specific shapes?
Which parts of simulated sexual arousal are those things meant to mimic?
They're not.
This entire idea is a distraction from the larger point.
When this topic comes up, Peterson has used a lot of very silly and exaggerated examples of this that all seem more like the way a kindergartner argues a point by taking it to a ridiculous extreme rather than an esteemed psychologist who specializes in Jungian archetypes, whatever the hell those are.
Women wear makeup because of social pressures that create expectations of attractiveness.
They wear makeup because they're self-conscious.
They wear makeup because they began to be judged for their looks usually before they began forming permanent memories.
And after that point, sadly, many were not valued for very much else.
Makeup is an example of why we need a greater level of societal equality for women.
So they don't feel the pressure to look as attractive as possible at all times.
So they can be judged primarily for the products of their minds and the content of their characters, rather than how they make men feel when men look at them and imagine being with them.
Makeup is not the cause of an ill in society.
It's a symptom of one.
Treating the symptom is a poor method of saving the patient.
In summation, Jordan Peterson has difficulty empathizing with women or seeing any gender disparity in a way that it affects women.
His rhetoric, both conversationally and editorially, is rife with examples of how he fails to see any gender issue from the perspective of women.
Every one of the examples I've given cast women on the negative side and only looked at how that negatively affected men.
His primary metaphor in 12 Rules of Life casts masculinity and femininity onto a yin and yang opposing horse's wheel that excludes the possibility that a person could be somewhere in between.
He repeatedly reminds the reader that this metaphor is only symbolic and then, also repeatedly, breaks past that symbolism to compare his masculine-feminine dynamic to real actual items, ideas, and events, so as to mock the idea that they were only symbols.
When confronted with the misogyny this exposes, he circles back to the symbolism defense, but he doesn't turn aside his legions of fans who cheer at that same misogyny.
Jordan Peterson's definition of moral truth is built to bolster the conservative ideology he has chosen, rather than being a standalone, independently discoverable idea built on base principles.
And last but certainly not least, Peterson is the high priest of the incel movement.
He scoffs at this notion and insists that he's only here to help young men make their beds and straighten up and fly right.
But as I've shown, his content shows the opposite to be true.
Incel is the most dangerous set of ideas in the pantheon of unreal notions.
It has inspired young men to commit terrible acts of violence.
And if we don't put appropriate ideas into the information space to counter it, we'll inspire far worse.
Jordan Peterson would claim that he's helping these young men, that he's laying groundwork for them to pick themselves up and become better men.
But the method he chooses to boost them is built to drag women down in the eyes of those same young men that have already harbored deep resentment in their hearts.
Peterson's rhetoric serves to validate that resentment rather than show its foundational errors and replace it with something that could build into the mutual respect necessary for, example, a strong marriage.
I suppose to a person that's unable or unwilling to see any issue at all from the perspective of women, that's not a problem.