"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.
