The Next Lion

HARVEY: 

It's The Law of The Jungle now, mate, innit? 

LEN: 

Hmm. There are these two blokes, right? 

In a tent, in the jungle. 

HARVEY: 

You got another one for me, ain't you? Go on, then, go on. 

LEN: 

It's really dark, and they hear this terrible noise outside the tent. 

This terrible roaring noise. 

And one bloke turns to the other bloke and he says, 

' Do you hear that? '

HARVEY: 

What? 

LEN: 

I said, 'Did you hear that? '

HARVEY: 

Oh, right, yeah. 

LEN: 

' That was a lion. '

(The Doctor starts to pay attention to the anecdote.) 

LEN: 

And the other bloke, he doesn't say anything.

He just starts putting on his running shoes. 

And the other bloke turns to him and says, 

' What are you doing? 

You can't outrun a lion!! '

The bloke turns to him and says, 

' I don't have to outrun the lion. '

HARVEY: (feeble laugh) 

Don't get it. 

Time's Champion : 

He doesn't have to outrun the lion, only his friend. 

Then the lion catches up with his friend and eats him. 

The Strong survive, The Weak are killed. 

The Law of the Jungle. 

HARVEY: 

Oh yeah. Very clever. 

Time's Champion : 

Yes, very clever — if you don't mind losing your friend. 

But what happens when The Next Lion turns up...? 

(The cat is watching The Doctor.) 

LEN: 

What next lion? 

(The black cat burst out from behind the shelf of cat food and runs out of the shop.) 

Time's Champion : 

I think you'd better get your running shoes on, gentlemen.

Peterson: 

So I got a story to tell you that you might like because I’ve thought a lot about that Use of Language. 

Because language can be used as camouflage, 

and so here’s the story :

I think I got this from Robert Sapolsky. 

So he was talking about zebras, 

and zebras of course have stripes. 

And hypothetically that’s associated with camouflage. 

But it’s not a straightforward association because 

zebras are black and white, 

and  they’re on the veldt 

along with The Lions. 

The Lions are camouflaged because they’re grass colored, but the bloody zebras are black and white. 

You can see them like 15 miles away.

So biologists go out to study zebras, 

and they’re making notes on a zebra. 

And they watch it, then they look down 

at their notes, and then they look up. 

But they think, ‘Uh oh, I don’t know 

which zebra I was looking at.’ 

The camouflage is actually against the herd because 

a zebra is a herd animal, not an individual. 

So the black and white stripes break up 

the animal against the herd, 

so you can’t identify it.

So this was a quandary for the biologists, 

so they did one of two things. 

One was drive  a jeep up to the zebra herd, 

and use a dab of red paint 

and dab the haunch of the zebra, 

or tag it with an ear tag 

like you use for cattle. 

The Lions would kill it. 

So as soon as it became identifiable 

the predators could organize their hunt 

around that identifiable animal.

That’s why there’s the old idea that lions and predators take down the weak animals, but they don’t. 

They take down the identifiable animals. 

So that’s the thing: if you stick your damn head up, you get picked off by the predators. 

One of the things that academics seem to do is congregate together in herd-like entities, and then they share a language. And the language unites them.

As long as they share the same set of linguistic tools among themselves, they know that there isn’t anybody in the coterie that’s going to attack them or destabilize the entire herd. 

And that seems to me to account for that impenetrable use of language.

It’s group protection strategy. It has absolutely nothing to do with the search for. . . It’s the search for security within a system and not the desire to expand The System.

Paglia: So true. To me it’s blatantly careerist because it was about advancement, and it was also about the claim that somehow they have like special expertise. 

This is a special technical language. 

"No one else can understand it. Only we can."

These are Dark Musings.

"You know, I’ve thought for a while that 

We’re living in The Delusional Fantasy 

of a Naive Thirteen Year-old Girl. 

That basically sums up 

Our Culture."

Peterson : . . These are dark musings. 

And I would say, how much of the antipathy towards Men that’s being generated by, say, college-age women is deep repugnance for the role that they’ve been designed, and a disappointment with the men. . .

You know, you think of those. . . 

I can’t remember the culture —

The basic marital routine was to 

Ride into The Village 

and grab The Bride 

and run away with her 

on a horse. 

[ And then send represenatives to agree a price! ]

It’s like The Motorcycle Gang Member 

who rips the too-naive girl 

out of the bosom of Her Family.

Paglia: 

Yeah, there used to be Bride Stealing. 

[ Still Is. ]

It was quite widespread.

[ Still Is. ]

Peterson: Right, so I kind of wonder if part of the reason that modern university women aren’t so angry is because that fundamental feminine role is actually being denied to them. 

And they’re objecting to that at a really, really fundamental level. 

Like a level of primitive outrage.

Paglia: Well, what’s happened is the chaos that my generation of the 1960s bequeathed through the sexual revolution. 

When I arrived in college in 1964 the colleges were still acting in loco parentis, in place of a parent, so my dormitory, all women’s dormitory, we women had to sign in at eleven o’clock at night. 

The men could run free the entire night. 

So it was my generation of women that rose up and said, ‘Give us the same freedom as men have,’ and the colleges replied, 

‘No. The World is dangerous. You could be raped.

We have to protect you against rape.’ 

And what we said was,

 ‘Give us the freedom to risk rape.’

What today’s women don’t understand: it’s the freedom that you want. 

It’s the same freedom that gay men have when they go and they pick up a stranger some place. 

They know it’s dangerous, they know they could end up beaten up or killed, but they find it hot. 

If you want freedom, if you want equality, then you have to start behaving like a man.

[ Well, Yes and No... ]

So what we did is we gave freedom to these young women for several generations, but my generation had been raised in a far more resilient and robust culture. 

We had the strength to know what we wanted and to fight for what we wanted. 

These young women have been raised in this terribly protected way. So I think in some strange fashion that all these demands for intrusion from these Stalinist committees, investigating dates and so on - it’s a way to reinstitute The Rules that My Generation threw out the window.

So I think these young women are desperate. 

Not only that, but I have spoken very strongly in a piece I wrote for Time Magazine. 

It was in my recent book that raising the drinking age in this country from 18 to 21 has had a direct result in these disasters of binge drinking fraternity parties. 

Let college students, the way we could, go out as freshmen, have a beer, sit in a protected adult environment, learn how to discourse with the opposite sex in a safe environment.

And now today, because of this stupid rule that young people can’t even buy a drink in a bar until they’re 21, we have these fraternity parties that are like it’s The Caveman Era.

Well of course in this modern age this advantages men. 

Men want to hook up. 

Men want to have sex. 

Women don’t understand what men want. 

Women put out 

because they’re hoping 

the man will continue 

to be interested in them. 

The man just wants experience.

The hormones drive toward. . . To me, I theorize that the sex drive in men is intertwined with hunt and pursuit. This is what women don’t understand. And if women understood what I understand from my transgender perspective. . . 

These women on the streets. . . You know, I am, obviously, a Madonna admirer, and I support pornography and prostitution, so I don’t want what I’m about to say to seem conservative because it isn’t.

What I’m saying is, that women on the streets.

Young Women who are jogging 

with no bra on, short-shorts, 

and have earbuds in their ears, 

just jogging along. 

These women do not understand 

The Nature of The Human Mind. 

They do not understand 

The Nature of Psychosis.

[ Even The Psychotic Ones. ]

And this intertwining that I’m talking about of The Hunt and Pursuit thing. 

They’re triggering a hunt thing. . . Just what you have talked about in terms of the zebra herd.

They are triggering the hunt impulse in psychotic men. 

There goes a very appetizing and totally oblivious animal, bouncing along here.

And we’re in a period now where psychosis is not understood at all. 

Young women have had no exposure to movies like Psycho. 

You know, the kind of rapists, serial murderer thing and so on. 

The kind of strange dynamic which has to do with assault on the ‘mother imago’ in the mind of a psychotic. I think there’s an incredible naïveté.

These young women are emerging and going to college in this like incredible Dionysian environment of orgiastic sexual experience in fraternity houses. They’re completely unprepared for it. 

And so you’re getting all this outrage. 

So feminist rhetoric has gotten more and more extreme in its portrayal of men as evil. 

But in fact what we have is a chaos. 

It’s a chaos in the sexual realm. 

The girls have not been told anything real in terms of biological substratum to sexual activity.

Peterson: No, there’s full of lies about what constitutes consent, too. 

And it’s become something that’s essentially portrayed linguistically as a sequence of progressive contracts, which is. . . 

You know, I’ve thought for a while that we’re living in the delusional fantasy of a naive thirteen year old girl. 

That basically sums up our culture.

And I look at all these sexual rules that permeate the academia, and I think two things.

The first thing I think is, well. . . I know because I was an alcohol researcher for a long time, and you know that 50% of violent crimes are directly contributed to alcohol. 

So if you’re murdered, there’s about a 50% chance that you’re drunk and about a 50% chance that the person who kills you is drunk. And alcohol is the only drug that we know that actually amplifies aggression. 

It does that in laboratory situations. Plus it’s a great disinhibitor.

So what alcohol does is. . . It doesn’t make you oblivious to the future consequences of your actions, because if you ask someone who’s drunk about the consequences of something stupid, they can tell you what the consequences are. 

But it makes you not care. 

And it does that because it’s technically an anxiolytic like barbiturates or like benzodiazepines.

And it also has an activating property for many people who drink, so it’s a stimulant and an anxiolytic at the same time. And a very, very potent. . . It’s very potent for both of them. You know, we put young people together and douse them in alcohol at the binge drinking level - which also interferes with memory consolidation, which of course makes things much more complex - and then we’re surprised when there are sexual misadventures.

And then it’s also attributed almost purely to the predatory element that’s part and parcel of Masculinity, but a tremendous amount of that is also naivety and stupidity.

Because we expect. . . 18 year old guys, especially the ones that aren’t, that haven’t been successful with girls, which is like 85% of them because the successful men are a very small percentage of men.

The 85% who haven’t been successful with men or with women - they don’t know what the hell they’re doing at all. 

And part of the reason they’re getting drunk is to garner up enough courage to actually make an advance. 

Because another thing I think women don’t understand, especially with regards to young men, is just exactly how petrifying an attractive woman who’s of, say, somewhat higher status actually is to a young guy.

There’s lots of guys that write me constantly, and people that I’ve worked with, that are so terrified of women they can’t even talk to them. 

It’s very, very common.

Paglia: I take a very firm position, which is that I want college administrations to stay totally out of the social lives of the students. 

If a crime is committed, it should be reported to The Police. 

I’ve been writing that for twenty-five years now. But it’s not the business of any college administration to take any notice of what the students say to each other - say to each other - as well as do with each other. I want it totally stopped.

It is Fascism of the worst kind.

Peterson: I agree. And I think it’s fascism of the worst kind because it’s a new kind of Fascism. 

It’s partly generated by legislation, like the Title 9 memo that was written in 2011. I recently got a copy of that goddamn thing. That was one polluting bit of legislation.

That memo basically told universities that unless they set up a parallel court system, they were going to be denied federal funding. 

It is absolutely unbelievable.

Paglia: Incredible. And the leftists are supporting this? This shows there is no authentic campus leftism. I’m sorry, it’s a fraud. The faculty should be fighting the administration on this. Federal regulation of how we’re supposed to behave on campus?

Peterson: Well how can you be so naive and foolish to think that taking an organization like the university, which already has plenty to do, and forcing it to become a pseudo legal system that parallels the legal system could possibly be anything but utterly catastrophic..?

It would mean you have to know absolutely nothing about the legal system and about the tremendous period of evolution that produced what’s actually a stellar system and an adversarial system that protects the rights of the accused and of the victim. 

And to replace that with an ad-hoc bureaucracy that has pretty much the same degree of power as the court system with absolutely none of the training and none of the guarantees.

Paglia: Kangaroo courts. 

That piece that I wrote about date rape - it was in January, 1991 Newsday - was the most controversial thing I ever wrote in my entire career.

I attacked the entire thing, and demanded that colleges stand back and get out of the social lives of the students. The reaction. People tried to call. . . They called the president of my university, tried to get me fired. You can’t believe the hysteria.

Peterson: I can believe it...!

Paglia: Yeah, you can believe it. 

Anything that says to women that they should be responsible for their own choices is regarded as reactionary? Are they kidding me?

This is such a betrayal of authentic feminism in my view.

Peterson: Well it’s The Ultimate Betrayal of authentic Feminism because it’s an invitation of all the things that you might be paranoid about with regards to The Patriarchy back into Your Life. 

It’s an insistence that the most intrusive part of The Tyrannical King come and Take Control of the most intimate details of your life.

Paglia: Incredible. Absolutely incredible.

Peterson: And the assumption is that that’s going to make Your Life better rather than worse.

Paglia: And not to mention this idea of the stages of verbal consent, as if your impulses based in The Body have anything to do with words. 

That’s the whole point of sex is to abandon that part of the brain that’s so trammeled with words.

Peterson: It’s actually a marker of lack of social ability to have to do that. 

Because if you’re sophisticated. . . It’s not like if you’re dancing with someone, it’s not like you call out the moves. If you have to do that, well then you’re worse than a neophyte. You’re an awkward neophyte, and anyone with any sense should get the hell away from you.

So if you’re reduced to the point where you have to verbally negotiate every element of intimate interaction. . .

Paglia: What a downer.

Peterson: Yes, but what an unbelievably naive and pathological view of the manner in which human beings interact. There’s no sophistication in that.

Paglia: What I’m worried about also, in this age of social media. . . 

I’ve noticed that as a teacher in the classroom that the young people are so used to communicating now by cellphone, by iPhone, that they’re losing body language and facial expressions, which I think is going to compound the problem with these dating encounters.

Because the ability to read the human face and to read little tiny inflections of emotion.. . 

I think my generation got that from looking at great foreign films with their long takes. So you’d have Jeanne Moreau and Catherine Deneuve in like potential romantic encounters, and you could see the tiniest little inflections that signal communication or sexual readiness or irony or skepticism or distance or whatever.

The inability to read other people’s intentions. . . 

I think this is going to be a disaster. 

I just notice how year by year the students are becoming much more flat affect. And they themselves complain that they’ll sit in the same room with someone and be texting to each other.

Peterson: 

Yeah, well there’s a piece of evidence, too, 

that supports that to some degree --

Women with brothers are 

less likely to get raped. 

And the reason for that is that 

they’ve learned that 

nonverbal language deeply.

Paglia: 

Not only that but I have noticed in my career that 

women who have many brothers 

are very good as administrators 

and as business people, because 

they don’t take men seriously. 

They saw their brothers. 

They think their brothers are jokes. 

But they know How to Control Men 

while they still like men. 

They admire men. 

This is something 

I have seen repeatedly.

Peterson: 

So that would be also reflective 

of the problem of fewer and fewer siblings.

Paglia: Yes, that’s right. I’ve noticed this in publishing. The women who have the job of publicist and rise to the top as manager of publicity - their ability to take charge of men and their humor with men. 

They have great relationships with men, because they don’t have a sense of resentment and worry and anxiety. They don’t see men as aggressors.

And I think that’s another thing, too. 

As Feminism moved into 

its present System of Ideology 

it has tended to 

denigrate Motherhood 

as a lesser order 

of Human Experience, 

and to enshrine, of course, abortion. 

Now I am a hundred percent for abortion rights. I belonged to Planned Parenthood for years until I finally rejected it as a branch of the Democratic Party, my own party.

But as Motherhood became excluded, 

as Feminism became obsessed 

with The Professional Woman, 

I feel that the lessons that Mothers learn 

have been lost to Feminism. 

The Mothers who bear Boy-children understand The Fragility of Men, The Fragility of Boys --

They understand it. 

They don’t see Boys and Nen 

as a menace. 

They understand 

the greater strength of women.

So there’s this Tenderness and Connectedness between The Mother and The Boy Child when Motherhood is part of the experience of women who are discussing gender. 

So what we have today is that this gender ideology has risen up on campuses where all... None of the girls, none of the students have married. None of them have had children.

And you have women, some of whom have had children. . . 

But a lot of them are like lesbians or like professional women and so on.

So this whole Tenderness and Forgivingness and Encouragement that Women do to Boys. . . 

This Hypersensitivity of Boys is not understood. 

Instead, boys are seen as somehow more privileged. And somehow their energy level is interpreted as aggression, potential violence, and so on. 

We would do better if would have. . . I have proposed that colleges should allow. . . 

The moment a woman has entered, she has entered that college for life and that she should be free to leave to have babies when her body wants that baby, when it’s healthy to have them. 

And then return, have the occasional course, and build up credits. And Fathers might be able to do it as well.

To get married women and women with children into the classroom. The moment that happens, as happened after Word War II where you had a lot of married guys in the classroom. . . Not that many women. The experience of a married person with a family talking about gender. . . Most of the gender stuff would be laughed out of the room if you had a real mother in there who had experienced childbirth and was raising boys.

So I think that’s also something that has led to this incredible artificiality and hysteria of feminist rhetoric.

Peterson: There’s another strange element to that, which is that on the one hand the radical feminist types, the neo-Marxists, postmodernists, are very much opposed to The Patriarchy, let’s say, and that’s that uni-dimensional, ideological representation of Our Culture.

Paglia: That has never existed. Perhaps the word could be applied to Republican Rome and that’s it.

Peterson: Maybe it could be applied usefully to certain kinds of tyranny, but not to A Society that’s actually functional.

Paglia: Victoria England, arguably. But other than that, to use the word ‘Patriarchy’ in a slapdash way, so amateurish. It just shows people know nothing about history whatever,

have done no reading.

The Great Mother

Leia is The Hearth

 

"And underneath it all I see this terrible striving for arbitrary power that’s associated with this crazy utopianism.

But I still don’t exactly understand it. I don’t understand what seems to be the hatred that motivates it that you see bubbling up, for example, in identity politics, and in the desire to do nothing but, let’s say, demolish the patriarchy.

It kind of reminds me. . . And this is something else I wanted to talk to you about.

You’re an admirer of Erich Neumann and of Carl Jung. The Neumann connection is really interesting because I think he’s a bloody genius. I really like The Great Mother.

It’s a great book and really a great warning, that book. And also The Origins and History of Consciousness.

Paglia: One my most influential books.

Peterson: Yeah well that’s so interesting. I read an essay that you wrote. I don’t

remember when it was.

Paglia: It was a lecture I gave on Neumann at NYU, yes.

Peterson: Yes, it’s always been staggering to me that that book hasn’t had the impact that it should have had. I mean Jung himself, in the preface to that book, wrote that that was the book that he wished that he would have written. It’s very much associated with Jung’s Symbols of Transformation. And it was a major influence on my book, Maps of Meaning, which was an attempt to outline the universal archetypes that are portrayed in the kind of religious structures that you put forward.

But the thing that I really see happening. . . And you can tell me what you think about this. In Neumann’s book, consciousness - which is masculine, symbolically masculine for a variety of reasons - is viewed as rising up against the countervailing force of tragedy from an underlying feminine, symbolically feminine, unconsciousness. And it’s something that can always be pulled back into that unconsciousness.

The microcosm of that would be the Freudian Oedipal Mother familial dynamic where the mother is so overprotective and all-encompassing that she interferes with the development of the competence not only of her sons but also of her daughters, of her children in general. And it seems to me that that’s the dynamic that’s being played out in our society right now.

And it’s related in some way that I don’t understand to this insistence that all forms of masculine authority are nothing but tyrannical power. So the symbolic representation is Tyrannical Father with no appreciation for the Benevolent Father, and Benevolent Mother with no appreciation whatsoever for the Tyrannical Mother.

I thought of ideologies as fragmentary mythologies. That’s where they get their

archetypal and psychological power. In a balanced representation you have the

Terrible Mother and the Great Mother, as Neumann laid out so nicely. And you have the Terrible Father and the Great Father. So that’s the fact that culture mangles you have to death while it’s also promoting you and developing you. You have to see that as balanced. Then you have the heroic and adversarial individual.

But in the postmodern world - and this seems to be something that’s increasingly seeping out into the culture at large - you have nothing but the Tyrannical Father, nothing but the destructive force of masculine consciousness, and nothing but the benevolent Great Mother.

It’s an appalling ideology, and it seems to me that it’s sucking the vitality - which is exactly what you’d expect symbolically - it’s sucking the vitality of our culture. You see that with the increasing demolition of young men, and not only young men, in terms of their academic performance. They’re falling way behind in elementary school, way behind in junior high, and bailing out of the universities like mad.

Paglia: Well the public school education has become completely permeated by this kind of anti-male propaganda. To me, public school is just a form of imprisonment.

They’re particularly destructive to young men, who have a lot of physical energy.

I identify as transgender myself, but I do not require the entire world to alter itself to fit my particular self-image. I do believe in the power of hormones. I believe that menexist and women exist, and are biologically different. I think there is no cure for the culture’s ills right now, except if men start standing up and demanding that they be respected as men again.

Peterson: Okay, okay, so I’ve got a question about that. We did a research project a year ago trying to figure out if there was such a thing as political correctness from a psychometric perspective, to find out if the loose aggregation of beliefs actually clump

together statistically. And we actually found two factors, which I won’t go into. 

Then we looked at things that predicted adherence to that politically correct creed. There were a couple that were surprising.

One was - being female was a predictor. The personality attributes associated with

femininity - so that would be agreeableness and higher levels of negative emotion - were also both independent predictors. But so were symptoms of personality disorder,

which I thought was really important.

Because part of what I see happening is that. . . I think that women whose relationship with men has been seriously pathologized cannot distinguish between male authority and competence and male tyrannical power. They fail to differentiate because all they see is the oppressive male. And they may have had experiences that. . . Their

experiences with men might have been rough enough so that differentiation never

occurred. Because it has to occur. 

And you have to have a lot of experience with men - and good men, too - before that will occur.

But it seems to me that we’re also increasingly dominated by a view of masculinity that’s mostly characteristic of women who have terrible personality disorders, and who are unable to have healthy relationships with men. 

But here’s the problem. 

This is something my wife has pointed out, too. She said, ‘Well men are going to have to stand up for themselves.’ 

But here’s the problem.

I know how to stand up to a man who’s unfairly trespassing against me. 

And the reason I know that is because 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.

That’s forbidden in discourse with women. And so I don’t think that men can control crazy women. 

I really don’t believe it. I think they have to throw their hands up in. . . In

what? It’s not even disbelief. It’s that the cultural. . . There’s no step forward that you can take under those circumstances, because if the man is offensive enough and crazy enough, the reaction becomes physical right away. Or at least the threat is there.

And when men are talking to each other in any serious manner, that underlying threat of physicality is always there, especially if it’s a real conversation. It keeps the thing civilized to some degree. 

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.

But I can’t see any way. . . For example there’s a woman in Toronto who’s been

organizing this movement, let’s say, against me and some other people who are going to do a free speech event. And she managed to organize quite effectively, and she’s quite offensive, you might say. She compared us to Nazis, for example, publicly, using the Swastika, which wasn’t something I was all that fond of.

But I’m defenseless 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. So I don’t know. . . It seems to me that it isn’t men who have to stand up and say, ‘Enough of this.’ Even though that is what they should do, it seems to me that it’s sane women who have to stand up against their crazy sisters and say, ‘Look, enough of that. Enough man-hating. Enough pathology. Enough bringing disgrace on us as a gender.’

But the problem there - and then I’ll stop my little tirade - is that most of the women I know who are sane are busy doing sane things. They have their career. They have their family. They’re quite occupied, and they don’t seem to have the time, or maybe even the interest, to go after their crazy, harpy sisters. And so I don’t see any

regulating force for that terrible femininity. And it seems to me to be invading the

culture and undermining the masculine power of the culture in a way that’s, I think, fatal. I really do believe that.

Paglia: I, too, believe these are symptomatic of the decline of Western culture. And it will just go down flat. I don’t think people realize that masculinity still exists in the world as a code among jihadists. And when you have passionate masculinity circling the borders like the Huns and the Vandals during the Roman Empire. . . That’s what I see.

I see this culture rotting from within and disemboweling itself, literally.

Now I have an overview of why we’re having this problem, and it comes from the fact that I’m the product of an immigrant family. All four of my grandparents and my mother

were born in Italy. So I remember from my earliest years in this factory town in upstate New York, where my relatives came to work in the shoe factory. I can remember, still, the life of the agrarian era - which was for most of human history - the agrarian era where there was the world of men and the world of women.

And the sexes had very little to do with each other. Each had power and status in its own realm. And they laughed at each other, in essence. The women had enormous power. In fact, the old women ruled, not the young beautiful women like today. But the older you were the more you had control over everyone, including the mating and marriage. There were no doctors, so the old women were like midwives and knew all the ins and outs and [had] inherited knowledge about pregnancy and all these other

things.

I can remember this. And the joy that women had with each other all day long. Cooking

with each other, being companions to each other, talking, conversing. My mother

remembered, as a small child in Italy, when it was time to do the laundry they would

take the laundry up the hill to the fountain and do it by hand. They would sing, they

would picnic, and so on.

We get a glimpse of that in the Odyssey when Odysseus is thrown up naked on the

shores of Phaeacia and he hears the sound of women, young women, laughing and

singing. And it’s Nausicaa, the princess, bringing the women to do the laundry. It’s

exactly the same thing. So there was. . . Each gender had its own hierarchy, its own

values, its own way of talking. And the sexes rarely intersected.

I can remember in my childhood in a holiday - it could be a Christmas, it could be a

Thanksgiving, whatever - women would be cooking all day long, everyone would sit

down to eat, and then after that the women would retire en masse to the kitchen. And

the men would go. . . I would look at them through the window and see all the men.

The men would be all outside, usually gathered around the car - at a time when cars

didn’t work as well as they do today - with the hood up. And the men would be standing

with their hands on their hips like that. Everyone’s staring at the engine. That’s how

I learned men were refreshing themselves by studying something technical and

mechanical after being with the women during the dinner.

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So all of these problems of today are the direct consequence of women’s emancipation

and freedom from housework thanks to capitalism, which made it possible for women

to have jobs outside the home for the very first time in the nineteenth century. No

longer to be dependent on husband or father or brother.

So this great thing that’s happened to us, allowing us to be totally self-supporting,

independent agents has produced all this animosity between men and women,

because women feel unhappy. Women today - wherever I go, whether it’s Italy or

Brazil or England or America or Toronto - the upper-middle class professional women

are unhappy, miserable.

And they don’t know why they’re unhappy. They want to blame it on men. The men

must change. Men must become more like women. No. That is the wrong way to go.

It’s when men are men, and understand themselves as men, are secure as men - then

you’re going to be happier.

Peterson: There’s nothing more dangerous than a weak man.

Paglia: Absolutely. Especially all these quislings spouting feminist rhetoric. When I

hear that it makes me sick. But here’s the point. Men and women have never worked

side by side, ever. Maybe on the farms when you were like. . . Maybe one person is in

the potato field and the other one is over here doing tomatoes, or whatever.

You had families working side by side, exhausted with each other. No time to have any

clash of this. It was a collaborative effort on farms and so on. Never in all of human

history have men and women been working side by side. And women are now. . . The

pressure about Silicon Valley - they’re all so sexist, they don’t allow women in, and so

on. Men are being men in Silicon Valley.

Peterson: Especially the engineers.

Paglia: And the women are demanding that. . . ‘Oh, this is terrible, you’re being

sexist.’ Maybe the sexes have their own particular form of rhetoric, their own particular

form of identity. Maybe we need to reexamine this business about. . . Maybe we have

to perhaps accept some degree of tension and conflict between the sexes in a work

environment.

I don’t mean harassment. I’m talking about women feeling disrespected. Somehow

their opinions, when they express them, are not taken seriously. Even Hillary Clinton

is complaining. When a woman writes something online she’s attacked immediately.

Everyone is attacked online. What are you talking about? The world is tough. The world is competitive. Identity is honed by conflict. The idea that there should be no conflict, that we have to be in this bath of approbation. . . It’s infantile.

Peterson: That’s right. It’s absolutely infantile. Okay, so, a couple of things there.

Well the first thing is that the agreeableness trait that divides men and women

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most. . . There’s three things that divide women and men most particularly from the

psychometric perspective.

One is that women are more agreeable than men, and so that seems to be the primary

maternal dimension as far as I can tell. It’s associated with a desire to avoid conflict.

But it’s associated with interpersonal closeness, compassion, politeness. Women are

reliably higher than men, especially in the Scandinavian countries and in the countries

where egalitarianism has progressed the farthest.

So that’s where the difference is maximized, which is one of the things James

Damore pointed out quite correctly in his infamous Google Memo. Women are

higher in negative emotion. So that’s anxiety and emotional pain. That difference is

approximately the same size. And again that maximizes in egalitarian societies, which

is extremely interesting. And then the biggest difference is the difference in interest between people and things. 

And so women are more interested in people, and men are more interested in things, which goes along quite nicely with your car anecdote.

But the thing about men interacting with men again is that it isn’t that they respect each other’s viewpoints. That’s not exactly right. 

What happens with a man. . . I know a lot of men that I would regard as remarkably tough people for one reason or another. And everything you do with them is a form of combat. 

Like if you want your viewpoint taken seriously, often you have to yell them down. They’re not going to stop talking unless you start talking over them.

It’s not like men are automatically giving respect to other men, because that just doesn’t happen. It’s that the combat is there, and it’s expected. 

And one of the problems. . . And so, this is one of the reasons I think men are bailing out of so much of academia and maybe the academic world in general. 

And maybe The World in general.

Men actually don’t have any idea how to compete with women.

Because the problem is that if you unleash yourself completely, then you’re an absolute bully. And there’s no doubt about that, because if men unleash themselves on other men, that can be pretty goddamn brutal, especially for the men that really tough. And so that just doesn’t happen with women ever. 

So you can’t unleash yourself completely. If you win, you’re a bully. If you lose, well you’re just bloody pathetic. So how the hell are you supposed to play a game like that?

I’ve worked with lots of women in law firms in Canada, for example. And high achieving women, like really remarkable people I would say. 

And they’re often nonplussed, I would say, by the attitude of the men in the law firm, because they would like to see everyone pulling together because they’re all part of the same team. 

Conquering vs. Sharing

Whereas the men are like at each other’s throats in a cooperative way because they want the law firm to succeed, but they want to be the person who is at the top of the success hierarchy.

 

And that doesn’t jive well with the more cooperative ethos that’s part and parcel of agreeableness. 

So we don’t really have any idea how to integrate male and female dominance hierarchies.

Paglia: Exactly. Exactly. That’s exactly right. This is why I love this show Real Housewives, which is [inaudible]. And just last night I was watching an episode where the women were at each other at a party and recounting. ‘But I said this to you, but you said this to me.’ 

And the men got together there and said ‘Well this is the way they communicate with each other. 

And we men just will have a fist fight, and ten minutes later we’re going to have a beer at the bar next to each other.’ I have observed that my entire life.

Peterson: My daughter used to be really irritated about that because she, like most people, was the target of feminine conspiratorial bullying at one. . . She’s no pushover, my daughter.

So it wasn’t like this was a continual thing or that she didn’t know what to do about it.

But she had observed these girls conspiring against her and blackening her name on Facebook, which is part and parcel of the typical female bullying routine, which is often reputation demolition. 

There’s a good literature on that. And then she’d watch what would happen if my son would have a dispute with his friends. 

And maybe they were drinking, and there was a dispute. They’d have a fight, and the next day they were friends again.

That’s another thing that’s strange is that men have a way of bringing a conflict to a head and resolving it. 

And it isn’t obvious to me that women have that same, perhaps you might call it, luxury.

But it’s also the case that men don’t know what to do when they get into a conflict with a woman. Because what the hell are you supposed to do?

Mostly what you’re supposed to do is avoid it.

Paglia: Well I’ve seen - I don’t know if this crosses into other countries - that there’s a certain kind of taunting and teasing that men, that boys do with each other that toughens them, where they don’t take things seriously. 

But a girl’s feelings become extremely hurt if she hears something that’s very tough, sarcastic against her.

So I do feel that there are profound differences between the sexes in terms of emotions, in terms of communication patterns. My father used to say that he could never follow women’s conversations. He said women don’t even finish sentences, that women understand immediately what the other woman is saying. 

And women tend to be more interested in - or have been traditionally more interested in - soap operas.

It’s not just that the women were home without jobs. It’s that honestly, I believe that soap opera does reflect, does mirror, the way women talk to each other.

These communication patterns have been built up through women - The World of Women, which. . .

It made sense that there was a division of labor.

It wasn’t sexism against women that there was a division of labor.

The men went off to hunt and did the dangerous things.

The women stayed around the hearth because you had pregnant women, nursing women, older women, that were cooking and so on.

So I feel that these communication patterns that we’re talking about have been built up over the centuries. Men had to toughen each other to go out. 

The hunting parties of Native Americans. . . They could be gone for two weeks when the temperature was below zero. 

Many of them died. 

The idea that somehow. . . ‘Oh, any kind of separation of the sexes, or different spheres of the sexes, is inherently sexist’.

 ... That is wrong.