This annoying thing happens every time I open my Chrome browser. At least four times a day I have to get up from my desk and go find my phone so I can verify my identity by opening YouTube and clicking “Yes, it’s me,” followed by a special code.
I don’t know how or why I got enrolled in two-factor authentication against my will. My IT guy must have enabled it on my computer as part of some safety protocol for my business. I pay $150/month for the privilege of his services. Sandra, my primary support person in business, says I’m not allowed to stop paying him but I keep forgetting why.
Picking up my phone means there is a 95% likelihood I’m going to forget what I’m doing and waste a minimum of seventeen minutes on TikTok before I remember what I was supposed to be doing and then forget again and waste nine more minutes on Instagram which is how long it takes me to remember I don’t like Instagram and then after three rounds of Cooking Madness (the only iPhone game worth playing) maybe by the grace of God I remember once again that I am also in the midst of playing the identity verification game and open YouTube.
That is when the real trouble begins.
YouTube has figured out that I’m an aspiring canoeist so, underneath the sponsored video featuring a quote from Ray Dalio warning of the pending economic collapse that may lead to my bank account getting shut down in the next thirty days, there’s a helpful video teaching me how to self-rescue if my canoe tips on a lake and the correct way to swing a canoe over my head for a portage.
[Thank Jesus for my cushy writing career that makes all of this possible. I give thanks to the 1.4 million subscribers who read my emails so faithfully, plus all the writers I had to plagiarise to keep things interesting. (Especially Alex Dobrenko of Both Are True). Please consider converting to paid so that I can spend more time on my iPhone and participate more fully in the Procrastinator Thirst Trap also known as YouTube.]
Today, under yet another sponsored video featuring Elon Musk telling the CBC how wonderful he is and how important his work is for the future of mankind (one thing I really love about him is his humility), I catch the disconcerting face of Jordan Peterson.
JORDAN PETERSON MAKES FEMINIST BOW HER HEAD, the bright yellow caption reads.
I’m feeling super sadistic and I can’t resist; I click the video.
It’s a 45-second YouTube short, meaning it automagically plays on a loop so that I can rewatch it again and again, my jaw hanging open. He is explaining why it’s appropriate for men to earn more than women, since they work more hours according to him and also “they work outside,” among other justifications. He is giving this loathsome feminist a verbal dressing down, explaining how the top 1% of aggressive people are all men, and that’s why there are more men in prison. “Do you want to equalise that?” he asks. (No, Jordan. Actually that is a separate issue from the gender pay gap, and frankly, it’s a weird segue.)
The host is visibly cowering. I feel so uncomfortable for her.
I know exactly what it feels like to be disarmed and shredded in precisely this way, and be so thrown off balance that it is impossible to retrieve a single valuable counterargument from even the sharpest brain.
It takes watching the video at least six times before I realise that what he’s saying doesn’t actually make sense. He throws out numbers without context and draws parallels between things that aren’t actually related, confusing people with rhetoric that is very difficult to follow let alone respond to. It’s beguiling and also weirdly enchanting, a tactic I know well from my history with cults and coercive control. Cult leaders, which I am not saying Jordan is, are masters of confusing rants that sound smart but are actually just word salad.
I click on the comments, expecting to see at least one person poke a few holes, ask him to clarify what he means by STEM fields being more scalable, or maybe point out that even though men average an extra 84 minutes of paid work per day, women put in an extra 106 minutes of unpaid labour, meaning they not only make less money but also work more hours. (I looked at dozens of different reports and while the numbers vary, they all tell the same basic story.)
Or maybe, if we’re going to play Peterson’s game, someone will point out that those studies measure time not productivity and what if women are working less hours because efficiency is a necessary survival skill when you are working full time while simultaneously absorbing the majority of both household labour and childcare?
At least one person is going to point out that this guy is being a bit of an asshole, aren’t they? Or that every single one of his questions is rhetorical and mocking? Or that it’s impossible to engage with him being that he doesn’t so much as take a breath?
He has her cornered and he knows it.
It makes me squirm. I feel like I’m watching the love child of my dad plus my ex-husband plus Keith Raniere, all masters of disarmament with a vocabulary made up largely of thought-terminating clichés. It is unbearable to watch.
And yet the comments are uniformly encouraging. It’s beyond positive feedback; It’s hero worship (which is extremely culty—in cults you never ever question the leader).
These are real comments that I copy/pasted.
“THANK YOU FOR POINTING THESE THINGS OUT!!!!!!! Women cannot do the physical labour that men do simply because their bodies are made differently. Women react differently to weariness.”
(Girl, have you given birth lately?)
“FUCKING LEGEND”
“This man is so upfront with the truth - thank the Lord we are sharing our time on earth with him.”
(Umm, WHUT? It appears you are confusing Jordan Peterson with Jesus. #cultvibes)
“Dude spits nothing but facts.”
(Actually he is often wrong and even said himself on The Joe Rogan Show, "We're going to be wrong a bunch in this conversation,” which turned out to be the understatement of the year.)
I guess these commenters forgot that Jordan Peterson rose to fame after generating moral panic around Bill C-16, a bill that contained zero mentions of pronouns, the goal of which was to extend the same protections to transgender people that already exist for other marginalised groups? Do they not know that the bill passed by overwhelming majority and did not result in a single being charged with pronoun crimes as Peterson predicted? Has everyone forgotten that he turned out to be totally wrong, or that the only real things he accomplished were increased bigotry and more YouTube followers?
Sometimes I really just want to yell, “HOW DOES A PSYCHOLOGIST UNDERSTAND CLIMATE CHANGE BETTER THAN AN ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICIST, or law better than Canada’s top legal experts!? You don’t! You are drunk on the attention of the masses and you need to slow your roll, bro. You are not an expert in everything.”
When I picked up my phone to rewatch the YouTube short, it was impossible to find. But in its place were hundreds of other shorts all with the similar titles:
Jordan Peterson SHREDS FEMINIST
Jordan Peterson TERMINATES Feminism
JORDAN PETERSON Destroys Feminist Talking about Male Dominance
Jordan Peterson Battles Radical Feminist
Jordan Peterson Puts Feminist Person In Her Place
It’s hard not to feel attacked by the violence of those headlines. Like Peterson, they don’t leave much room for healthy debate.
It’s true that we need to talk about why prisons are filled with mostly men, and also why it is disproportionately Black and Latinx men who are being incarcerated (which bears mentioning even if Jordan didn’t). It’s also true that men are more likely to be victims of violent crimes.
Those are not made up facts.
But they are also not the issues that feminism seeks to address. That would be like asking the Black Lives Matter movement to shift its focus to reparations for victims of residential schools. That is very important work, and also it’s a different conversation.
And yet I have some idea why people can watch Jordan Peterson slander some of the most important social movements of the last hundred years and still call him brilliant. Men don’t have a lot of advocates talking about the many ways in which the world is a confusing and difficult place for them too, or even leaders who can set the example of right use of power. Men need advocates too, but they deserve way better than Jordan Peterson. Advocating for men does not have to come with a side of slander, misogyny, and transphobia. It needn’t be so violent.
Even with that in mind, I know a handful of smart, loving and compassionate men and it’s difficult for me to reconcile why so many of them are willing to sit at the feet of Jordan Peterson, a man so utterly lacking in compassion or tolerance, a man who wears his intolerance like a badge of honour.
That’s hard to reconcile.
In my years of being a writer and a pretty public person, I’ve grown enormously in my capacity to listen and be humble about what I don’t know. I am willing to be wrong about Jordan Peterson. I have a sense there may be something I’m missing here.
And also—
Part of my recovery from cults and coercive control has been learning that critical thinking isn’t just about discernment and making sense of things, it’s also recognizing when things don’t make sense. And Jordan Peterson does not make sense to me. An earlier version of me would’ve assumed I didn’t understand him because I’m not smart enough or as well-educated, and I wonder if a lot of his followers do as much.
This conversation isn’t over.
Instead of wrapping this up in a bow I’m going to share a question I’ve been grappling with in the comments, and *fingers crossed* open up a conversation. I’d love to see some of my readers offer their perspective. Feel free to start your own thread.
But before we get to that, here are a few follow-up notes on this writing:
Unfortunately there is no paid option for this newsletter just yet. Some Substack writers have a Patreon-esque “pay if you feel like it” option, but that has a bit of starving artist vibes for me. I’m doing okay financially and I like having a writing outlet that isn’t about making money. That said, my preferred currency is kevlar and I will receive payment in canoe form, if you really want to.
I spent a frustrating number of minutes trying to retrieve the Jordan Peterson video from my YouTube history but I couldn’t find it. This video doesn’t show the full clip, but it’s pretty close.
Ray Arata and Mark Greene have been helpful for me. Their advocacy for men rarely falls back on gender essentialism as Peterson’s does, and offers way that we (meaning all genders) can be allies for each other.
I really didn’t know how to write this article in a gender inclusive way. None of the studies and surveys I looked at had any data about transgender, non-binary or two spirit people. If you have feedback on how I could’ve done this better, I’d love to hear it in the comments.
There was one short I watched where Peterson talked about marriage and it was really kind of sweet and my heart softened a little bit. I felt like that was important to mention.
You won’t hear from me next week as I’ll be on a canoe trip in Algonquin. Don’t worry about me, I watched a gazillion YouTube videos and I mostly kind of maybe know what I’m doing a little bit. When it comes to canoeing, I actually know some shit about fuck.
XO,
Tarzan
Here’s an observation for discussion—I’d love your thoughts in the comments.
If we allow for Jordan Peterson’s opinions to be true on things like trans rights or critical race theory, it doesn’t allow for there to be any growth in those areas since the prevailing message is that any level of tolerance is authoritarian, making inclusion impossible.
Too often those opinions seem righteous and unfair. The confusing part is that it probably feels really good to agree with those opinions, especially if you hold a lot of dominant identities and you don’t want your life to be affected by certain social movements, or do the necessary work of becoming informed on these topics.
What am I not seeing here? How can I engage with Peterson’s opinions in a way that is meaningful and productive, without falling into a dangerous tug-of-war for power and righteousness?
Response below is from my partner who likes some (but not all) of what Peterson has to say. He wrote the below response to me when I asked for his thoughts on Tarzan's blog. Tarzan asked if I could post his comments below (with his permission):
I guess I agree with the shortcomings of Peterson Tarzan identified, but I don't agree with the substance of her evaluation of Peterson.
To elaborate a bit, she picked up on things that I agree with:
- I agree that Peterson seems to lack humility and plays the 'expert on everything' role. I've increasingly felt this lately. It's offputting and yeh, a bit culty.
- He does evoke righteousness and rage. Why? I think Gabor Mate nails it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOJ0lUSBI14.
But I also think Tarzan missed the substance of why people like Peterson. I'm not sure how much Peterson she has actually watched, but it sounds like she was triggered by an out of context brief clip (one where Peterson was triggered without showing the start of the interview) + things that Peterson didn't do and can't control (the click-baityness of the clip title, and the virulent comments).
And from that, she seems to have formed a simple and identity/group-centric view of Peterson as a transphobe, misogynist and racist. As one example, how she doesn't get how people can still call him brilliant despite him "slandering some of the most important social movements of the last hundred years".
A more nuanced, less identity based view would consider that even the most important social movements have their excesses and failings, and that calling this out doesn't equate to slander or bigotry. So, what is she missing about Peterson? If she thinks that support for Peterson is just because white heterosexual males "don’t want your life to be affected by certain social movements, or do the necessary work of becoming informed on these topics", then quite a lot.
I think some of the things that attract people to Peterson include; that he is quite an expert on myth and the wisdom it contains, that as an experienced (Jungian and personality) psychologist he has a lot of deep insights into people, that he had the courage to take a stand against the excesses on the diversity and inclusion movement, that he articulates the value in masculinity at a time where we hear much more about its toxicity, that he articulates the value and contribution of western cultural at a time when we hear only about its faults.
His focus is on helping men improve themselves so they can be good, respectful members of society. I wish you had watched the other 29min of that video, where the interviewer spoke over him and was purposefully combative.
He says he refers to people as any pronoun they like, but was opposed to the law because the government should never dictate how we communicate as it opens the door to further censorships.
If you ever have the time 12 Rules for Life is a powerful book, nothing about race, religion or politics. Its a good read and what changed my mind about him. I couldnt be further from his target audience too (young female and POC)
And if you dont like the book I guess you could always toss it out the side of your canoe, or recycle it.