HUNT

HUNT :

What's that?

SKELETON :

Warrant card. 

I wish to offer my resignation with immediate effect.

HUNT :

No. You don't get off that easy.

I want you to stay a copper and know every second of every minute of every day the true depth of your full betrayal of The Force, of Shaz, Ray, yourself.

Jail isn't your sentence, Chris.

I am.

Glenda Cooper wrote in The Daily Telegraph that “women like Hunt because he isn’t a bastard – or at least not to his team. In a world of short-term contracts, job insecurity and portfolio careers, Hunt’s undying loyalty to his squad (even while rabidly insulting them) make us wistful for a time gone by when you had a job (and colleagues) for life.”

“On paper, it should never have happened. 

Hunt is Seventies man writ large and we should be grateful that species is extinct. 

He wears a vest and his hair looks like it was styled during a power cut. 

He runs along towpaths in skimpy orange swimming trunks and has a torso that’s closer to a Party Seven than six pack. 

He has no concept of innocent until proved guilty and thinks it’s acceptable to turn up to a swingers’ evening with a prostitute he’s just busted. 

He’s racist, disablist and homophobic, and he calls his only female detective Flash Knickers. (And he means it as a compliment.) 

In fact when you see Hunt’s qualities spelled out like that, it looks appalling. 

[However] the fact remains: Gene Hunt is my guilty secret, and I know scores of other women feel the same.”

According to India Knight of The Sunday Times, the character has attained the status of an unlikely British sex symbol: “the combination of Power and, shall we say, lack of political correctness can be a potent one – which is why everyone in Britain fell in love with Gene Hunt, the hulking great throwback in the BBC series Life on Mars and that men wanted to be Hunt; women wanted to be with him.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Hunt#Sex_symbol_status

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. 

Peterson: And inherently driven by a Power Dynamic. 

Paglia: The answer to all of this, everything that we’re talking about, is education into early history. Until people understand the Stone Age, the nomadic period, the agrarian era, and how culture, how civilization built up. . . In Mesopotamia - the great irrigation projects. Or in Egypt where you had. . . Centralized government authority became necessary to master these. . . You had a situation, an environmentally difficult situation like the deserts Mesopotamia, or the peculiar character of Egyptian geography where you can only have a little tiny fertile line along the edges of the Nile. Otherwise, desert landscape. So [understanding] civilization and authority as not necessarily about power grabbing but about organization to achieve something for the good of the people as a whole. 

Peterson: That’s exactly the great symbolism of the Great Father. 

Paglia: By reducing all hierarchy to Power, and selfish Power, is utterly naive. It’s ignorant. I say education has to be totally reconstituted, including public education, to begin in the most distant past so our young people today, who know nothing about how the world was created that they inhabit, can understand what a marvelous technological paradise they live in. And it’s the product of capitalism, it’s the product of individual innovation. Most of it’s the product of a Western tradition that everyone wants to trash now. If you begin in the past and show. . . And also talk about war, because war is the one thing that wakes people up, as we see. 

Peterson: And as we may see. 

I Can't Imagine Just Watching The Story and Not Being a Part of It

“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.”

Operations Officer's log, supplemental. 

We've been on full sensor alert looking for signs that anyone else has detected Voyager. 

As a precaution, I've also asked Neelix and Kes to monitor all media broadcasts.

[Mess hall]

(A wall screen has six displays constantly changing.) 

KES: 

We've set up a computer algorithm to search for key words and phrases. 

Anything that might indicate Voyager. 

KIM: 

Anything so far? 

NEELIX: 

Not yet, although we have come across some very intriguing televised broadcasts. 

Take a look at this : —

It's a Form of Entertainment called a 'soap opera'.

The exploration of Human Relationships is fascinating. 

KIM: 

I can't imagine just Watching The Story and not Being a Part of It. 

KES: 

That's because you've been spoiled by The Holodeck. 

There's Something to Be Said for non-interactive stories like this, being swept away in The Narrative. 

NEELIX : 

Oh, I can't wait to see if Blaine's Twin Brother is The Father of Jessica's Baby. 

KIM :

Good Work. 

Keep me informed, and don't get too swept away. 

NEELIX :

Er, aye, sir. 

SHARON 

[on monitor] : 

Nobody'll know the difference. 

JACK 

[on monitor]: 

I'll know, Sharon. He's My Brother. 

How can I face him knowing that Our Son is His Son? 

SHARON 

[on monitor]:

 All you need to know, Jack, is that I love you!

Peterson:

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

17

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.

18

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.

Peterson: And inherently driven by a power dynamic.

Paglia: The answer to all of this, everything that we’re talking about, is education into

early history. Until people understand the Stone Age, the nomadic period, the agrarian

era, and how culture, how civilization built up. . .

In Mesopotamia - the great irrigation projects. Or in Egypt where you had. . .

Centralized government authority became necessary to master these. . . You had a

situation, an environmentally difficult situation like the deserts Mesopotamia, or the

peculiar character of Egyptian geography where you can only have a little tiny fertile

line along the edges of the Nile. Otherwise, desert landscape. So [understanding]

civilization and authority as not necessarily about power grabbing but about

organization to achieve something for the good of the people as a whole.

Peterson: That’s exactly the great symbolism of the Great Father.

Paglia: By reducing all hierarchy to power, and selfish power, is utterly naive. It’s

ignorant. I say education has to be totally reconstituted, including public education,

to begin in the most distant past so our young people today, who know nothing about

how the world was created that they inhabit, can understand what a marvelous

technological paradise they live in.

And it’s the product of capitalism, it’s the product of individual innovation. Most of it’s

the product of a Western tradition that everyone wants to trash now. If you begin in the

past and show. . . And also talk about war, because war is the one thing that wakes

people up, as we see.

Peterson: And as we may see.

Paglia: Yes, war is the reality principle. My father and five of my uncles went to World

War II. My father was part of the force that landed in Japan. He was a paratrooper at

the time of the Japanese surrender. And a couple of uncles got shot up and so on.

When you have the reality of war, when people see the reality, the horrors of war -

Berlin burned to a crisp and so on. Starvation and all. . . Then you understand this

marvelous mechanism that brings water to the kitchen. And you flip on a light and the

electricity turns on.

Peterson: I know, for me, and I suppose it’s because I have somewhat of a

19

depressive temperament. . . I mean one thing that staggers me on a consistent basis is

the fact that anything ever works. Because it’s so unlikely, you know, to be in a situation

where our electronic communications work, where our electric grid works. And it works

all the time, it works one hundred percent of the time. And the reason for that is there

are mostly men out there who are breaking themselves into pieces, repairing this thing

which just falls apart all the time.

Paglia: Absolutely. I said this in the Munk Debate in Toronto several years ago. All

these elitists and professors sneering at men. It’s men who are maintaining everything

around us. This invisible army which feminists don’t notice. Nothing would work if it

weren’t for the men.

Peterson: A professor is someone who’s standing on a hill surrounded by a wall,

which is surrounded by another wall, which is surrounded by another wall - it’s walls

all the way down - who stands up there and says I’m brave and independent. It’s like,

you’ve got this protected area that’s so unlikely - it’s so absolutely unlikely - and the

fact that people aren’t on their knees in gratitude all the time for the fact that we have

central heating and air conditioning and pure water and reliable food. . . It’s absolutely

unbelievable.

Paglia: Yes, I mean people used to die. . . The water supply was contaminated with

cholera for heaven’s sake. People don’t understand. To have clean water, fresh milk,

fresh orange juice. All of these things. These are marvels.

Peterson: And all of the time.

Paglia: All of the time. Western culture is heading - because we are so dependent on

this invisible infrastructure - we’re heading for an absolute catastrophe when jihadists

figure out how to paralyze the power grid. The entire culture will be chaotic. You’ll have

mobs in the street within three days when suddenly the food supply is interrupted and

there’s no way to communicate. That is the way Western culture is going to collapse.

And it won’t take much.

Peterson: Single points of failure.

Paglia: Because we are so interconnected, and now we’re so dependent on

communications and computers. . . I used to predict for years it’ll be an asteroid hitting

the earth, and then we’ll have another ice age.

Peterson: Do you know how the solar flares work? This happens about once every

century. So back about 1880 - I don’t remember the exact year - there was a significant

enough solar flare. . . So that produces an electromagnetic pulse like a hydrogen bomb

because the sun is a hydrogen bomb. An electromagnetic pulse will emerge from the

sun and wave across the earth, and it produces huge spikes in electrical current along

anything that’s electronic, and it will burn them out.

20

It lit telegraph operators on fire in the 1800s. One of those things took out the Quebec

power grid in 1985 and knocked out the whole Northeast Corridor. So they figure those

things are about one in a century event.

My brother-in-law, who’s a very smart guy. . . He designed the chip in the iPhone. We

were talking about political issues the last time I went and saw him in San Francisco,

and his notion was that all that the government should be doing right now is stress-

testing our infrastructure the same way they stress-test the banks. Because we’re so full

of these single points of failure.

And I think you’re absolutely right. Luckily we’ve been, what would you call, invaded

by stupid terrorists instead of smart terrorists, because a smart terrorist could do an

unbelievable amount of damage in a very short period of time. And it’s just God’s good

graces that that hasn’t happened yet.

Paglia: What will happen is that it’s the men. . . The men will reconstruct civilization

while the women cower in the houses and have the men go out and do all the dirty

work. That’s what’s going to happen again. Only men will bring civilization back again.

The Ongoing Pussification of The American Superhero

“We’d spent many enjoyable hours in conversation, working out how to restore our beloved Superman to his pre-eminent place as The World’s First and Best Superhero. 

Following the lead of the Lois and Clark TV show, the comic-book Superman had, at long last, put A Ring on his long-suffering girlfriend’s finger and carried her across the threshold to holy matrimony after six decades of dodging The Issue — although it was Clark Kent whom Lois married in public, while Superman had to conceal his wedding band every time he switched from his sober suit and tie. 

 

This newly domesticated Superman was a somehow diminished figure

 

 All but sleepwalking through a sequence of increasingly contrived “event” story lines, which tried in vain to hit the heights of 

“The Death of Superman”

seven years previously. 

Superman Now was to be a reaction against this often overemotional and ineffectual Man of Steel, reuniting him with his mythic potential, his archetypal purpose, but there was one fix we couldn’t seem to wrap our collective imagination around: The Marriage. 

The Clark-Lois-Superman Triangle — 

“Clark loves Lois. 

Lois loves Superman. 

Superman loves Clark,”

 as Elliot S. Maggin put it in his intelligent, charming Superman novel Miracle Monday — seemed intrinsic to the appeal of the stories, but none of us wanted to simply undo the relationship using sorcery, or “Memory Wipes,” or any other of the hundreds of cheap and unlikely magic-wand plot devices we could have dredged up from the bottom of the barrel.”

- Grant Morrison,

SuperGods

“Here’s another horrifying example, an aspect of American culture, The Continued Pussification of The American Male in the form of 
Harley Davidson Theme Restaurants. 

What the fuck is going on here? 
Harley Davidson used to mean something. 

It stood for biker attitude; grimy outlaws in their sweaty mamas full of beer and crank, rolling around on Harleys, looking for a Good Time – Destroying Property, Raping Teenagers, and Killing Policemen… 
All very necessary activities by the way. 

 

 

"And I wonder, too, like how much of the antipathy towards. . . 

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. 

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. It was quite widespread. 

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.

 

“There's Two Things that the Postmodern NeoMarxists are full-scale assaulting :

One is Categorisation, because They believe that 

The Only Function of Categorisation is POWER.

The other is,

There's a War on Competence -

Because, if you admit that there are hierarchical structures that are predicated upon Competence, 

then you have to grapple with the issue of Competence, 

and you have to grapple with the issue of Valid Hierarchy.

If All Hierarchy is Power

and

All Power is Corrupt

and

All Corrupt Power is Tyranny

then, you can't admit to Competence.

But the downside is, there's a terrible price to be paid for that, because 

Every Value System Produces a Hierarchy.

So if you dispense with the hierarchy, 

You dispense with The Value Systems.

“The rise of the new feminism, the protest movements of ethnic, national and sexual minorities, the anti-institutional ecology struggles waged by marginalized layers of the population, the anti-nuclear movement, the atypical forms of social struggle in countries on the capitalist periphery — all these imply an extension of social conflictuality to a wide range of areas, which creates the potential, but no more than the potential, for an advance towards more free, democratic and egalitarian societies.”

The Point is that these new Groups of People could be Useful.

Douglas Murray,

The Madness of Crowds

[We finally find Peter lying on a mat and doing sit-ups. Ned is holding his legs in place for him.]

Ned:

Hey, can I be your 

Guy in The Chair?

Peter:

What?

Ned:

Yeah. You know how there’s 

A Guy With a Headset

Telling The Other Guy Where to Go?

[Peter’s face contorts into a weird expression. He is still doing sit-ups faster than any other student.]

Ned:

Like, like if you’re stuck in a burning building, I could tell you where to go. 

Because there’d be screens around me, and I could, you know, swivel around, and... 

‘Cause I could be your 

Guy in The Chair.

Peter:

Ned, 

I don’t need a Guy in The Chair.

Coach Wilson: 

Looking good, Parker.

[The teacher points at Peter as he passes the mat that Peter and Ned are working out on. Peter glances at him, then frowns and takes a huffing breath, trying to look as if the exercise is really taking a toll on him.]

“That’s another issue I want to bring up, because one of the things I cannot figure out is the alliance between the postmodernists and the neo-Marxists. 

I can’t understand the causal relationship.

 

Tell me if you disagree with this, okay, because I’m a psychologist, not a sociologist. 

 

So I’m dabbling in things that are outside of my field of expertise. And there is some danger in that.

But The Central Postmodernist Claim seems to me that because there’s a near infinite number of ways to interpret a complex set of phenomena - which actually happens to be the case - you can’t make a case that any of those modes of interpretation are canonical. 

 

And so, if they’re not canonical, and if that canonical element isn’t based in some kind of Reality, then it serves some Other Master.

And so The Master that it hypothetically serves for The Postmodernists is  

Nothing but Power, 

because that seems to be Everything That They Believe in. 

They Don’t Believe in Competence. 

They Don’t Believe in Authority. 

They Don’t seem to Believe in 

An Objective World, 

because everything is language-mediated. 

So it’s an extraordinarily cynical

perspective: that because there’s an infinite number of interpretations, none of them

are canonical. 

You can attribute everything to 

Power and Dominance.

Does that seem like a reasonable summary of the postmodern. . .

Paglia:

Yes, exactly. 

It’s a Radical Relativism.

Peterson:

Okay, it’s a Radical Relativism. 

Now, but The Strange Thing is, despite. . .

Okay, and so what goes along with that is the demolition of Grand Narratives. 

So that would be associated, for example, with the rejection of thinkers like Jung and Erich Neumann, because of course they’re foundational thinkers in relationship to the idea that there are embodied Grand Narratives. 

That’s never touched.

But then, despite the fact that the Grand Narrative is rejected, there’s a neo-Marxism that’s tightly, tightly allied with postmodernism that also seems to shade into this strange Identity Politics. 

And I don’t. . . Two things. 

I don’t understand 

the causal relationship there. 

The Skeptical Part of me thinks that Postmodernism was an

intellectual. . . 

It’s intellectual camouflage for the continuation of the kind of pathological Marxism that produced the Soviet Union, and has no independent existence as an intellectual field whatsoever. 

But I still can’t understand how The Postmodernists can make the “no grand narrative” claim, but then immerse themselves in this Grand Narrative without anyone pointing out the self-evident contradictions. 

I don’t understand that. 

So What Do You Think About That?

Gamora: 

What was that story you once told me about Zardu Hasselfrau?

Quill: 

Who?

Gamora: 

He owned a magic boat?

Quill: [long pause] 

David Hasselhoff....?

Gamora: 

Right.

Quill: 

Not a Magic Boat — 

A Talking CAR.

Gamora: 

Why did The Car talk again...?

Quill: 

To help him FIGHT •CRIME•, 

and to be •supportive•!

Gamora: 

As a child, you would carry his picture in your pocket… and you would tell all the other children… that he was your father, but that he was out of town.....

Quill: 

...shooting Knight Rider or touring with his band in Germany. 

I told you that when I was drunk. 

Why are you bringing that up now?

Gamora: 

I •love• that story.

Quill: 

I •hate• that story. It’s so •sad•...!

As a kid, I used to see all the other kids off playing catch with their dad. 

And I wanted that, more than anything in The World!

Gamora: 

That’s my point, Peter. 

What if this man is your Hasselhoff? 

If he ends up being Evil… 

We will just kill him.

Paglia & Faludi on Donahue (1992)

There is No Female Mozart Because There is No Female Jack The Ripper

Feminism: in conversation with Camille Paglia 

"It's not just that we've been wrapping them in cotton wool, it's that they don't know anything - and are not ever likely to." 

 There is No Female Mozart Because There is No Female Jack The Ripper

The Daddy Problem

Now one of the criminals hanging there reviled Jesus, saying, 

“Are you not the Messiah? 

Save yourself and us.”

The other, however, rebuking him, said in reply, 

“Have you no fear of God, for you are subject to the same condemnation? 

And indeed, we have been condemned justly, for the sentence we received corresponds to Our Crimes, but This Man has done Nothing Criminal.” 

Then he said, 

“Jesus, re-member me when you come into Your Kingdom.”

He replied to him, 

“Amen I Say to You ‘Today you will be with me in Paradise.’”

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

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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.

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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.

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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 men 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.

Peterson: 

So what confuses me about that is that despite the fact that the patriarchy is viewed as this essentially evil entity, and that that’s associated with the masculine energy that built this oppressive structure, the antithesis of that, which would actually be femininity as far as I can tell, which is tightly associated with care and with child-rearing, is also denigrated.

So it’s like the only proper role for women to adopt is a patriarchal role, despite the fact that the patriarchy is something that’s entirely corrupt. So the hypothesis seems to be that the patriarchy would be just fine if women ran it. So no changes. It would just be a transformation of leadership, and somehow that would rectify the fundamental problem, even though it’s hypothetically supposed to be structural.

Okay, so I’m going to close with something. So, you know, there are elements in my character that are optimistic. I’ve looked, for example. . . I’ve worked for a UN Committee on the relationship between economic development and sustainability. 

And I found out a variety of things that were very optimistic like the fact that the UN set out to half poverty between 2000 and 2015 worldwide, and actually hit that by about 2010.

So we’re in the period of the fastest transformation of the bottom strata of the world’s population into something approximating middle class that’s ever occurred.

And there’s all these great technological innovations on the horizon. 

And it looks to me like things could go extraordinarily well if we were careful. 

But I’m not optimistic, and maybe that’s me. 

I’m pessimistic because I also see that there’s five or six things happening, all of which appear at the level of catastrophe, that are all happening at the same time.

Single Points of Failure

Peterson: I know, for me, and I suppose it’s because I have somewhat of a depressive temperament. . . I mean one thing that staggers me on a consistent basis is the fact that anything ever works. 

Because it’s so •unlikely•, you know, to be in a situation where our electronic communications work, where our electric grid works. And it works all the time, it works one hundred percent of the time. 

And the reason for that is there are mostly Men out there who are breaking themselves into pieces, repairing this thing which just falls apart all the time.

Paglia: Absolutely. I said this in the Munk Debate in Toronto several years ago.

All these elitists and professors sneering at men. 

It’s MEN who are maintaining everything around us. This invisible army which feminists don’t notice. Nothing would work if it weren’t for the men.

Peterson: A professor is someone who’s standing on a hill surrounded by a wall, which is surrounded by another wall, which is surrounded by another wall - it’s walls all the way down - who stands up there and says ‘I’m brave and independent.’ 

It’s like, you’ve got this protected area that’s so unlikely - it’s so absolutely unlikely - and the fact that people aren’t on their knees in gratitude all the time for the fact that we have central heating and air conditioning and pure water and reliable food. . . It’s absolutely unbelievable.

Paglia: Yes, I mean people used to die. . . 

The water supply was contaminated with cholera for heaven’s sake.

People don’t understand. To have clean water, fresh milk, fresh orange juice. All of these things. These are marvels.

Peterson: And all of the time.

Paglia: All of the time. Western culture is heading - because we are so dependent on this invisible infrastructure - we’re heading for an absolute catastrophe when jihadists figure out how to paralyze the power grid. 

The entire culture will be chaotic. 

You’ll have mobs in the street within three days when suddenly the food supply is interrupted and there’s no way to communicate. 

That is the way Western culture is going to collapse.

And it won’t take MUCH.

Peterson: Single points of failure.

Paglia: Because we are so interconnected, and now we’re so dependent on communications and computers. . . I used to predict for years it’ll be an asteroid hitting the earth, and then we’ll have another ice age.

Peterson: Do you know how the solar flares work? This happens about once every century. So back about 1880 - I don’t remember the exact year - there was a significant enough solar flare. . . So that produces an electromagnetic pulse like a hydrogen bomb because the sun is a hydrogen bomb. An electromagnetic pulse will emerge from the sun and wave across the earth, and it produces huge spikes in electrical current along anything that’s electronic, and it will burn them out.

It lit telegraph operators on fire in the 1800s. One of those things took out the Quebec power grid in 1985 and knocked out the whole Northeast Corridor. So they figure those things are about one in a century event.

My brother-in-law, who’s a very smart guy. . . He designed the chip in the iPhone. We were talking about political issues the last time I went and saw him in San Francisco, and his notion was that ALL that the government should be doing right now is stress-testing our infrastructure the same way they stress-test the banks. 

Because we’re so full of these single points of failure.

And I think you’re absolutely right. 

Luckily we’ve been, what would you call, invaded by stupid terrorists instead of smart terrorists, because a smart terrorist could do an unbelievable amount of damage in a very short period of time. 

And it’s just God’s good graces that that hasn’t happened yet.

Paglia: What will happen is that it’s The Men. . . The Men will reconstruct civilisation while the women cower in the houses and have the men go out and do all the dirty

work. 

That’s what’s going to happen again. 

Only men will bring civilization back again.