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.