Doctors, psychotherapists, liars and butchers

[beastlyslumber]

This is really pretty good.

He (Peterson) is also heavily reliant on yet another kind of woo - a Jungian quasi-expressionist idea of mythic naturalism - which is just as unscientific as gender ideology, and in fact rests on quite silly foundations. I can’t see that as a positive force tbh - you don’t fight woo with woo.

The idea that if men only just behaved morally, feminism wouldn’t be needed just sounds to me like a rehashed version of the American Christian objections to abolition and women’s rights of the late 18thc., which went something like “oh black people /women wouldn’t need actual votes or emancipation if only white men were fully moral and did their Christian duty of treating everyone well and behaved properly!” A premise, unfortunately, that rests on a fantasy of heroic male superior rationality and morality, even as it apparently laments its absence.

Late 19thc I meant there rather than late 18thc (but it was around in the 18thc too tbh 😂)

The idea that if men only just behaved morally, feminism wouldn’t be needed just sounds to me like a rehashed version of the American Christian objections to abolition and women’s rights of the late 18thc

'Sounds like' is not really a strong argument that the two ideas have anything in common. Louise Perry is specifically saying, if men followed these specific pieces of advice, women would be better off. That's the claim that's being made. You can say that's not true, and make your case for why not. But 'sounds like something else' isn't really a strong argument.

Marxists and leftists are good at sophistry. But Peterson is really good at explaining things in a way that anyone can see the logic. That's a big part of what makes him so popular and influential.

I don’t think that follows, tbh - Marx hasn’t been taught in universities throughout most of the Anglosphere for 35-40 years at the minimum. There’s virtually no serious Marxist thought or even study going on, and hasn’t been for a very long time. Most of the modern so called left wouldn’t know Marxist thought from a kipper. It’s just nonexistent as a leftist idea in the contemporary discourse tbh, unless you’re in France. Look at Corbyn, Momentum et al - not a single genuine understanding of Marx among them!

@NecessaryScene

There's a sub-section in Chapter 11 of his book titled "Patriarchy: Help or Hindrance?" in which Peterson argues that the answer is that (what some/many define as) patriarchy in the historical records was really a way to help women to cope with the unfairness of nature in terms of menstruation, pregnancy, lactation, and child-rearing. So I don't think he dislikes the concept, as he sees it as mostly benevolent, though he does dislike the name 'patriarchy' for it. That is very clear from his videos.

I get the sense you would deny patriarchy rather than admit it can have a negative effect on men.

That's interesting! I must not have expressed myself very clearly, though, to be fair, I wasn't writing about my own general views but about the views in the book 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos where chaos is seen as the eternally feminine.

Hierarchical sex-and-age based pyramid-type arrangements of course have negative effects on many men, and one might argue that Peterson's book is all about how to fix them but without getting rid of the hierarchy itself.

But you can say that if men were nicer women would be better off, and that’s still not feminism in any way. That’s just a reversion to the “good patriarch” of right wing thought.

Just because right wing and centre-right ideologies are calling out genderism, that doesn’t make them morally right or virtuous. They have ideological capture of their own in a great many ways. And it’s possible to imagine a discourse without either.

I'm not sure what you're responding to there? I was countering your claim that Peterson isn't interested in how the state or capitalism props up trans ideology. I said that he clearly is, as are other centrist and centre-right people. Whereas the Marxists aren't doing anything.

You're saying there are no Marxists worth their salt (although not true - Marx is still taught to undergraduates). So does that mean that you think no one is interesting in looking at how capitalism props up ideology? Because - see my point above.

Well, what's feminism for? If men did their part, stopped rape and VAW, and supported women in their lives, what would we need feminism for?

Hierarchical sex-and-age based pyramid-type arrangements of course have negative effects on many men, and one might argue that Peterson's book is all about how to fix them but without getting rid of the hierarchy itself.

Well, yes, but he's a self-help guru, not a feminist. I don't think you should be expecting a feminist perspective from him, or structural rather than individual approaches. (But on the other hand I'm not sure if he's not missing a bit of his own education on the feminist front? It does seem like a blind spot)

I do feel a bit out of my depth here - I've not read any of his work, so you're ahead of me there. I've seen as much reaction to him as I have his actual video content. (And I think most of what I've seen is him in more general conversation or interviews with others rather than lecturing).

But back to "getting rid of the hierarchy" - what does that actually mean? It's almost pure abstraction. You need to be proposing something actually concrete. It's no good just criticising someone else for a lack of a complete solution, unless you have your own solution up for critique.

Maybe women have autonomy and purpose as thinking, embodied beings apart from their enmeshment into a system of patriarchy or society with men, too?

It’s not an accident that the main persistence of genuine Marxist thought in the late 20thc. was in lesbian and communitarian feminism. Feminism is about women, not about men and how good or bad they are. In particular, feminism shows us that the fantasy of the “better” patriarch is not by any means the end of patriarchy.

I don’t know when you last saw an undergraduate course, but Marx hasn’t been taught to undergraduates just about anywhere in the U.K. (apart from maybe by a few zealots at Sussex) since the 1980s. I did all my reading in Marxism and the Frankfurt School as a graduate student in Continental philosophy in the 90s. You won’t find him in university courses nowadays. (For some reason he has recently appeared a bit recently in A-level courses like Ethics, so undergrads come up wanting to read more, but there’s nowhere to do so these days. The stereotypes of the 70s Marxist lecturers are all retired now, and - increasingly - dead. The last genuine self-described academic Marxist theorist I know is in his late 60s.)

(And when I say he isn’t taught I don’t mean that he doesn’t appear as the odd bite sized quote or make half an appearance in a lecture or two. I mean actual serious study and teaching of his thought. Not in economics ever, of course. Almost nowhere in History. Continental philosophy is majorly out of fashion in the U.K., and the bits that remain are largely Kantian and Hobbesian. Literature departments used to be where the Marxists hung out, but these days everyone’s a historicist and all the theorists do Postcolonialism instead…)

Materialism and class analysis is out of fashion and intersectionality is in…

I think patriarchy as a concept has really hobbled feminism tbh. It's a moving castle, and even when it's used carefully it adds nothing that couldn't have been more clearly explicated without reference to it. Most of the time it activly obscures clear discourse or acts as a distracting handwave when an idea is not well founded.

The problem with your explanation is that plenty of the people preaching this stuff explicitly believe they are following Marx, even if they are aware they are not being purists about it.

You can argue they are shitty Marxists, but that doesn't mean they aren't drinking from that well - thatwould be rather like Catholics saying Mormons have deeply misunderstood Christianity and therefore they have no connection to it. Meanwhile the Mormons are quite happily calling themselves Christians and followers of Christ, no matter how much you argue that their Trinitarian theology is wrong.

There's a sub-section in Chapter 11 of his book titled "Patriarchy: Help or Hindrance?" in which Peterson argues that the answer is that (what some/many define as) patriarchy in the historical records was really a way to help women to cope with the unfairness of nature in terms of menstruation, pregnancy, lactation, and child-rearing. So I don't think he dislikes the concept, as he sees it as mostly benevolent, though he does dislike the name 'patriarchy' for it. That is very clear from his videos.

What he is saying is that the fact that men and women have had different social roles is largely down to the realities of reproductive role. Where for most of history the idea that it would be common for people to just live alone was much less likely than it is now, and where women who were of childbearing age would, if they married, be pregnant or breastfeeding, or menstruating, or suffering the ongoing effects of pregnancy, much of the time.

Also a world without social welfare systems, often without much law enforcement and certainly no crime investigation in the modern sense, no DNA investigation, and one where both women and men were the vast majority of the time working flat out to get by.

In not a small number of places the group could be on the edge of population collapse at any time if maximum reproductive potential wasn't reached.

He doesn't want to call it patriarchy because its the shape so many societies took because in every case reproductive role was one of the greatest forces shaping society, and it's really only in the second half of the 20th century that began to change due to technology.

If tomorrow all the medical advances we use to get around that went the way of the dodo, we'd find that no matter how enlightened people were they would need to be adapting social roles to compensate.

He doesn't want to call it patriarchy because its the shape so many societies took because in every case reproductive role was one of the greatest forces shaping society

but that’s bullshit. Women weren’t free to opt out of being mothers, or to raise their children together in communes without men, or to keep their children with them in a matrilineal arrangement where the male role models are the mother’s brothers. Patriarchal social arrangements aren’t an inevitable consequence of reproductive roles, they emerge from men exploiting women for reproductive and other labour.

Sounds like Peterson can’t see patriarchy for the same reason fish can’t see water. Which is common enough of course, but he’s supposed to have some kind of reputation for insight.

Maybe women have autonomy and purpose as thinking, embodied beings apart from their enmeshment into a system of patriarchy or society with men, too?

Sorry, I don't get this. It sounds fancy, but what does it actually mean? Aren't we all, men and women alike, enmeshed with society?

If women have equal rights and freedoms, then what is feminism for?

I agree with this. If you look at the dictionary definition of patriarchy, then it's clear that we in the west don't live in one. I've been an independent, autonomous individual my entire adult life and I'm massively grateful for that because women even in my mother's generation didn't have the freedoms I do. I don't live in a patriarchy and I'm glad about that all the time.

We don’t live in a patriarchy….? Let me just check those rape conviction statistics again…

So is the definition of patriarchy that women get raped? Or that rape happens in general?

If that's the definition of a patriarchy, then okay, we're living in a patriarchy. But I don't think that is the definition.

Dictionary definition (Websters):

social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line

By this definition, we in the UK don't live in a patriarchy.

People weren't in a position to opt out of many things at all, women or men. As a demand that's not in line with what the realities of life were.

The only social safety net in society was families and communities. There were in fact, in Europe at one time, large numbers of unmarried people who for one reason or another opted out of marriage and parenthood - a far far larger portion than do so today - living in mainly same sex communities. Living alone wasn't particularly practical for many, given the degree to which people had to be self-sufficient.

But do you really think the majority of adults would opt out, entirely, of relationships with the opposite sex? Most people don't do that now even when it's possible to have sex without children or commitment.

The modern view of sex is just very alien to many people in the pre-modern world - there is a reason the attempt to have a sexual revolution in the early modern period wasn't all that sucessful all it ended with was bad situations for women, and babies riddles with syphilis and other congenital STIs. It could not be divorced from pregnancy and it could not easily be divorced from disease in the time before antibiotics. A sexual ethic that said that sex should be containied within a monogomous commited and relationship where the father was responsible for his offspring, and the extended family if he dies, was overall a good thing for women and for children.

Women's communes where women just have babies with passing men and care for them communally aren't a feature of many societies largely because most people, including most women, prefer to have relationships with the opposite sex and with their own children. And also because losing the labour of fathers in these equations is not a small thing. Societies of men and women working together often failed because they couldn't do enough, dividing them is not going to make that better.

It's utopian stuff written in novels about prehistoric people based on someone's imagination, nothing we actually know about prehistoric people.

Exploitation by men because they have certain power advantages is something I think JP certainly would acknowledge existed and does exist now. We all know that some social structures can be exploitative, or can cease to be helpful when they were useful in the past. That's different than this abstraction "patriarchy" which pretty much gets invoked, outside of anthropology, to describe whatever someone wants it to describe. It's a bit like gender as a concept, it functions as a ready-made conclusion.

Rape convictions are difficult because the principles of our justice system make it especially difficult to deal with, and increasinly because technology works agsinst such convictions too, despite early hopes that the opposite would be the case. That's not patriarchy unless you think those principles were set up specifically to favour men over women.

I don’t know when you last saw an undergraduate course, but Marx hasn’t been taught to undergraduates just about anywhere in the U.K. (apart from maybe by a few zealots at Sussex) since the 1980s. I did all my reading in Marxism and the Frankfurt School as a graduate student in Continental philosophy in the 90s. You won’t find him in university courses nowadays. (For some reason he has recently appeared a bit recently in A-level courses like Ethics,

I don't want to crash this conversation, which is at the far reaches of my intellectual capacities (but fascinating and provoking, so thank you), but having taught A level literature I can assure you that we cover Marxist theory in relation to literature. I was always amused when I taught it that the students, many of whom were from privileged backgrounds, blurted out "this is all true - Marx was right!" Of course, we were looking primarily at economics and class.

@Oestrogelsmuggler yes exactly! - students often come up having got interested in Marx at A-level, especially in English or Ethics/RE; but then find there’s nowhere really to go with it in university humanities courses any more. The courses that universities believe put bums on seats are all film/PoCo/graphic novels/gender/performance poetry etc. etc. and anything perceived as old-fashioned or too historical is definitely out!

It’s a shame as many students are actually keen to study classic political and aesthetic writings precisely in order to learn more about history, but it isn’t fashionable to do the “great thinkers” right now.

Yes, it's a huge shame that universities steer clear of those big ideas because some might make the students feel unsafe or challenged. Most really bright A level students I've taught REVEL in those big ideas - no matter how provocative or counter-intuitive.

I suppose courses that are all about subjective experience means everyone gets to feel right and validated and safe. It's pathetic.