Critics are frequently berated for “taking him out of context.” So what I want to do now is put Peterson’s own words in context.
Jordan Peterson is a man who has said that feminists have an “unconscious wish for brutal male domination.” He’s a guy who rails against divorce, and the birth control pill because women would likely be happier if they “allow themselves to be transformed by nature into mothers,” and because allowing women to choose anything other than motherly transformation leads to declining birth rates “in the West” that might “do us all in.”
In case you were thinking, “Hey, that sounds kind of racist,” have some more context: Peterson says “no one can talk about” about that last bit because of “egalitarianism and diversity.” The context of his interest in “enforced monogamy” is that this is a man who thinks women who don’t want to be sexually harassed at work are “hypocritical” if they engage in a “sexual display” by wearing makeup. Peterson admonishes us that women and men working alongside one another is just an experiment, one that is only 40 years in. The man’s grasp of history is so shallow that if he ever goes back to teaching at U of T they might want to get a lighthouse put in his brain so the undergrads don’t run aground there. The professor warns us that it just might not be possible for men to spend eight hours in the same workplace as a woman without harassing her and explains that that “almost all of the hyper-productive people are men” and women aren’t really driven to work at the top anyway.
Peterson talking about the importance of enforced monogamy isn’t alarming because it’s been taken out of context; it’s alarming precisely because of its context. If, as Peterson argues, our “dead-end” non-monogamous society can be largely blamed on birth control, what is the best way to turn back the clock to the days before the pill and “whiny” feminists who should just get hobbies? Peterson says he never suggested “government-enforced” monogamy, merely “socially-promoted, culturally-inculcated” monogamy. Let’s take him at his word. If pulling the pill off the market isn’t an option, do you just “socially promote” women not using it? Do we build a database of all the pharmacies that sell it, hoping to drive them out of business?
What does that look like? Given the context that is Jordan Peterson, it’s hard not to think it looks like shaming women for refusing to conform to their proper archetypal role as mothers, producing what really matters—heroes and, of course, slaughter-preventing sex-providers. Perhaps, coming from the man who views attempts to foster gender equality as part of a “murderous equity doctrine,” it looks like pushing women out of the workforce, quietly passing them over for men for, you know, their own good.
If, as Jordan Peterson pinky-swears, it doesn’t involve the government trapping women in abusive marriages by restricting divorce, does it mean ramping up the shaming of single women, blocking them from fully participating in public life, putting back some of those barriers that only recently fell away? Single women have long been a punchline in the same circles now busily making single men a righteous cause. That is not incidental.