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.
