Jordan and the crazy harpies
Jordan Peterson has the solution to all this sexual harassment everywhere.
With all the accusations of sex assault emerging (eg Louis CK) we are going to soon remember why sex was traditionally enshrined in marriage…
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) November 10, 2017
Ho yus, that will fix it. Women were never sexually harassed until…what year was it again? 1964? If only women could be permanently imprisoned by marriage, all would be well.
Rachel Giese is not quite convinced.
[C]onsider his recent conversation with fellow provocateur Camille Paglia. Expressing his frustrations with women who disagreed with him, Peterson said that men can’t control “crazy women” because men aren’t allowed to physically fight women. “I know how to stand up to a man who’s unfairly trespassed against me,” he said. “The parameters for my resistance are quite well-defined, which is: we talk, we argue, we push, and then it becomes physical. If we move beyond the boundaries of civil discourse, we know what the next step is.”
It’s like Peterson has been cribbing talking points from Fight Club’s Tyler Durden. He adds that men unwilling to throw a punch are contemptible. “If you’re talking to a man who wouldn’t fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you’re talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect.”
So does that also mean if you [“you” are obviously a man here] are talking to a woman then you’re talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect? I think it can be safely assumed of most women that they won’t voluntarily “fight with” a man in the sense of throwing punches, so in Peterson’s world that must mean they’re contemptible, yes?
Peterson has said elsewhere that socialization has a role to play in addressing aggression among boys and men. But talking to [Camille] Paglia, he laments that his own socialization prevents him from taking a swing at a lady. Referring to a woman who accused him of being a Nazi, he said, “I’m defenceless against that kind of female insanity because the techniques that I would use against a man who was employing those tactics are forbidden to me.” It’s hard to decide which is creepier: Is it the suggestion, in Peterson’s rueful tone, that he’s kind of bummed out about the fact that he can’t hit women? Or is it the implication, if you were to follow his argument to its conclusion, that because women can’t be hit, they shouldn’t be allowed to participate in civil discourse with men at all?
But there’s also the creepiness of his casual assumption that it’s just normal to throw punches at men who accuse you of being a Nazi. People are supposed to grow out of that assumption in the course of childhood and adolescence. Peterson is an adult academic and he apparently clings to it.
But maybe it’s just something he says. Maybe he doesn’t mean it.
Just a few weeks after he posted his conversation with Paglia, however, there was a surprise retreat from his latest attention-grabbing escapade. Over the weekend, Peterson announced he was shelving his plans to create a website warning university students away from “corrupt” courses in programs like ethnic studies, sociology, anthropology, English literature and women’s studies. After a group of University of Toronto faculty released a statement saying that Peterson’s proposed site “created a climate of fear and intimidation,” he capitulated, tweeting the project was on hiatus: “I talked it over with others and decided it might add excessively to current polarization.”
Why didn’t he just punch them all instead?
I’m imagining and it is not hard what Tony Benn might have said to such an idiot.
I can’t find an exact quote but it would have been along the lines of “I’ve never felt the need or seen the point of punching anyone in an attempt to settle an argument. My experience shows that debate is the best and the only way to settle anything worth arguing about in the first place”
By others, I suspect he means university administration. He may have been warned off. This sounds like the sort of statement someone wrote for him. Everything else I’ve heard about him suggests that he relishes adding to polarization.
“If you’re talking to a man who wouldn’t fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you’re talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect.”
Why? That strikes me as a sort of category error that sees physical violence as the extreme end of an argument, instead of an entirely different sort of thing with nothing to say about facts or opinions or persuasion. So what if you ‘beat’ me in a fight? What has that got to do with the thing you disagree with me about?
Re #3 – If respect flows from the expectation of the possibility of violence from the respectee, then I read it as based on fear. Without reason to fear someone, there’s no basis for respect.
Alternative conceptions of bases of respect include an estimation of inherent worth; of the capacity to suffer and the wrongness of that suffering; or of the value of someone’s potential contributions of whatever sort. These are the sorts of bases of respect common among psychologically healthy adult human beings, but they’re not ones authoritarians care for.
If you do cling to respect as a matter of fear, then it makes perfect sense not to respect people who are physically weaker and/or cowed by the threat of force by you and your class. When it comes out as “respect”, it even sounds like something appropriate: the plebs, the women, the ethnic minorities are wrong to get uppity, they’re out of their place. They need to be taught respect, with tear gasses, dogs, clubs, and fire hoses.
Usually when you drill down with these self-proclaimed tough guys, it turns out that there are all sorts of exceptions.
They won’t fight women, of course, because that would be unchivalrous.
They won’t fight the elderly or physically disabled, because that would make them look bad.
Ditto for any other man who appears to be much physically weaker.
Conversely, they won’t fight anyone who appears to be much physically stronger, because they don’t want to get their asses kicked.
Ideally, they’d like to (fantasize about) having a fight with someone who is sufficiently weaker than them that they can be confident of winning, but not so much so that they would lose face for doing so.
Oh, and also, the Internet Tough Guy also wants his fantasized fights to be consequence-free. Offer to meet him on the steps of your local police department, and suddenly he’s not interested!
If marriage did anything at all to restrain harassment, why is it that married men are also indicted in the growing sexual harassment revelations? The married President Pussygrabber comes to mind.
Since when did marriage stop assault. Who hasn’t met or heard of a victim of sexual domestic abuse?
The sex that was ‘enshrined’ in marriage was a property transaction. One which didn’t involve one of the participants.
If someone calls you a “Nazi” and the only way you can deal with that is by shoving or hitting them, haven’t you just earned that appellation?