By David Futrelle
The “involuntary celibates” who congregate on the Incels.me forum have previously celebrated such lovely fellows as Toronto van killer Alek Minassian, a self-described incel who murdered ten pedestrians in a symbolic attack against sex-having “Chads and Stacies,” and Elliot Rodger, the incel “saint” whose 2014 murder spree in Isla Vista California helped to inspire Minassian’s rampage.
Now the incels — or at least a portion of them — have a new hero: Canadian self-help guru and angry fussbudget Jordan Peterson,
On Friday. you may recall, the New York Times ran a highly critical profile of Peterson in which the Jung-quoting lobster-hierarchy fetishist offered some thoughts on how to stop young men from taking up guns and vans and massacring as many people as they can. In one of his chats with the Times’ Nellie Bowles — conducted after the Toronto attacks but before Friday’s shooting in Santa Fe — Peterson suggested that the real solution to incel violence is “enforced monogamy.”
Here’s how Bowles described their discussion:
Violent attacks are what happens when men do not have partners, Mr. Peterson says, and society needs to work to make sure those men are married.
“He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,” Mr. Peterson says of the Toronto killer. “The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”
Mr. Peterson does not pause when he says this. Enforced monogamy is, to him, simply a rational solution. Otherwise women will all only go for the most high-status men, he explains, and that couldn’t make either gender happy in the end.
“Half the men fail,” he says, meaning that they don’t procreate. “And no one cares about the men who fail.”
I laugh, because it is absurd.
“You’re laughing about them,” he says, giving me a disappointed look. “That’s because you’re female.”
This is the sort of nonsense you might expect in an incel forum, or from some similarly reactionary manosphere hangout. And so it’s hardly a surprise to see many on Incels.me hailing Peterson as a new incel idol. The only real question is what took them so long?
In a post yesterday, one prolific Incels.me commenter brought Peterson’s interview to the attention of his fellow forum regulars, asking “Is Jordan Peterson, our guy?”
More than a few commenters responded with an enthusiastic “yes!”
“What he is saying is exactly what I have always been saying,” declared someone calling himself SaintMarcLepine, the moniker a dark tribute to the Canadian misogynist who murdered 14 women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique in 1989.
RageAgainstTDL was even more enthusiastic:
This is absolutely brilliant. He is forcing mainstream writers and the public to confront the idea of monogamy and explain why feminism has destroyed it for their own chad-hungry desires.
Peterson is contrarian by nature too. He thrives on disagreement. So he won’t let this go. The more feminists argue they have a right to only fuck Chads, the more he will highlight how damaging this is to society.
The tide is turning.
A wannabe philosopher calling himself TheWitchKing pounded out a thousand-word treatise which could be summarized as “lol, Peterson is triggering the femoids.” Here are a few snippets; I’ve removed, among other things, the author’s extended musings on Peterson’s similarity to Loki, the Norse trickster god.
I usually have little use for Peterson or his philosophy, but I can’t help but admire anyone capable of provocation of this magnitude. … Peterson is striking at one of the most precious values of the modern West: the agency of women when it comes to the matter of sexual selection and reproduction.
With this act Peterson has crossed a kind of threshold … The idea of compulsory monogamy is not some idea that will merely inspire outrage among radical feminists and the members of academia surveying the world from the dizzying heights of their ivory towers. Rather, the idea of enforced monogamy is the stuff of nightmares of every modern daughter of the West. …
Informed by the Enlightenment values that championed the freedom of the individual, the sexual revolution was kind of a dawn for women. What Peterson is suggesting would be tantamount to murdering the light of that new day and plunging women back into the prolonged nightmare they believed that had finally escaped. …
Sadly or happily, depending upon your perspective, the amusement to be had at all of the outraged shrieking is the only good thing that’ll come from Peterson’s scandalous idea.
Mikepence made essentially the same point in a few short sentences:
He really got them riled up with this. Femoids cringe at the thought of being within 10 feet of an ugly guy, she can’t imagine actually being in a relationship with one
It’s almost as though incels are less interested in dating and/or marrying women than they are in terrifying them and/or making them miserable.
Animeincel was equally smitten with Peterson:
Yes he is on our side, and his very very smart. He is just not as aggressive yet cause he know media will slaughter him then. He understands the incel problem 100% and I love him.
Like Animeincel, Weed is convinced that Peterson is an incel ally who can’t quite say that outright just yet:
I think Peterson tries to appear as neutral as possible but deep down he is on our side.
nklfdnblidnfbli wondered if Peterson was directly cribbing from him.
i mentioned enforced monogamy in the incelcast, maybe peterson listened to that and got the idea from me? mainly we need it because almost all girls want only chad and chad is polygynous.
While Peterson was a bit vague as to what he meant by “enforced monogamy,” nklfdnblidnfbli was happy to spell out what he himself meant by the term.
here’s how i think it should work
– people can opt in or opt out of enforced monogamy
– if they opt in they pay lower taxes and get free basic income from the govt
– marriage laws must first be overhauled so that men aren’t disadvantaged and family courts are fair
– in enforced monogamy people must be married to have sex, and if you get divorced you have to go through a 6 month waiting period where you are not allowed to have sex, this is to discourage people from getting married and then divorced for every hookup
Huh. That seems a bit, er, elaborate, but I guess it might increase the odds that dudes who hate women and love murderers will eventually have sex.
All this said. there were more than a few in the thread who weren’t quite so excited about Peterson’s incel turn. Some were turned off by Peterson’s paeans to self-improvement — incels dislike being ordered to clean up their rooms, Peterson-style, nearly as much as they hate being told they need a shower.
Others thought Peterson was little more than “controlled opposition,” blaming his recent rise to fame on the machinations of, you guessed it, the (((Jews))). (Of course Peterson isn’t Jewish, and while he’s not a Christian either, he’s a big Jesus fan whose beliefs have been described as similar to Kierkegaard’s “Christian existrntialism.”)
“Peterson is a gatekeeper attempting to keep men from turning to far rightwing ideologies to correct their problems,” declared WarriorSkull.
He does warn women that he constantly sees career women … end up in their 30’s desperate for children and unable to secure a man for obvious reasons. This isn’t sufficient to make much of a dent in the direction our culture has and will continue to head, but the jews will continue promoting him as a “safe” alternative to rabid leftism.
ElliotRodgerHere put it more bluntly:
Jordan peterson is a f*ggot judeophile. fuck him, he is popular among the MGTOW cucks
In a later comment he added that Peterson “has a horribly ugly jewish wife.”
Starystulejarz compared Peterson to other alleged tools-of-the-Jews like Alex Jones and … Richard Spencer?!?
he is (((((controlled opposition))))) like alex jones, mark dice, trump, lauren southern, richard spencer, they will tell you 15-50% truths and rest is misinformation to brainwash you and keep you in state which jews want you to be (not to wake up and swallow blackpill fully)
Apparently this sort of conspiracy theorizing is contagious, as I can’t help but wonder myself if this little chorus of anti-Semites, all of them relatively new members on Incels.me, are part of an alt-right recruitment squad deliberately targeting angry, troubled men.
Another new recruit, a fellow calling himself rabbiter, kicked back hard at the notion that Peterson was “controlled” anything.
People like Jordan Peterson have helped a lot in moving the Overton Window in the last 3 years or so. We need more people like him. Anyone who criticizes him as “controlled opposition” needs to be sent to a North Korean Gulag.
Unfortunately, I think rabbiter is right that Peterson is nudging the Overton Window rightward — and bringing some of the worst ideas that have been floating around in the manosphere into the mainstream. “Enforced monogamy” is probably not the last terrible incel idea Peterson will bring to his growing audience in the next few months and years as he continues to explore his own inner incel.
Because married men are never violent towards their spouses.
Seriously, does anyone really believe that if these guys were handed the compliant partner (or sexbot) of their dreams, their hatred and anger would magically cease? Rage is addictive, especially for those who define their masculinity through it.
Just look at Trump supporters, who are more angry and bitter than ever, even though their party controls the government. Giving terrorists what they want never appeases them.
@Fluffy Spider Now I want to add even more people to my circle of loves. * hugs husband and boyfriend very, very tightly* Eff you, Peterson!!
…and leave Canada for a nice chunk of ice in the Antarctic. 😛
Yes. HELL yes. Because what happened before that, when two people decided they could no longer live together, and couldn’t afford to petition Parliament (or whatever organizations ran their states) for a bill of divorcement? DESERTION, that’s what. Or adultery, or bigamy, or even murder. Ever try telling kids that their daddy ran out on them for no apparent reason, other than that he was tired of Mom? Or vice versa? Or that one of them killed the other because a divorce was not to be had? It wasn’t exactly a paradise of marital stability.
Well, have you tried ASKING them, and really LISTENED to what they said? My guess is you didn’t. Because you’re the same guy who thinks women are the spawn of Chaos and Old Night, and other dumb superstitions like that. Millions of those “destabilized” children are thanking heaven that divorce was finally liberalized so that their abused mom didn’t have to live with their abusive dad anymore, because he also abused THEM. And again, that is no paradise of mental and societal stability.
Somebody has been reading way, way, WAY too much Lovecraft.
Either that, or he hasn’t learned his own tradecraft, which is supposed to be aimed at helping the querent make sense of their life without judgment, NOT subjecting them to judgments that make not the fuckingest bit of sense.
(And yes, I used a singular “they” for a person of unspecified gender, as was perfectly good English practice for centuries before male-supremacist grammarians made a fuckery of it in the 1600s or thereabouts. Fight me, Peterson — I’m an English major who actually paid attention in class.)
Didn’t female on male spousal killing dramatically decrease when no fault divorce laws went into effect? Because when someone is trapped in an abusive marriage, murder starts to look like the only way out. Perhaps women being able to divorce their husbands isn’t such a bad deal for men after all.
Violent attacks are what happens when men don’t have partners???
You mean ‘violent attacks’ outside the home, surely.
Obviously #notallmen – no really, not all men.
….
HiddenTurtle
Actually, no I do have a kid and I would exactly help him look around for another way to get $20. Ideally through chores or learning to save up. What I wouldn’t do is let my nearly 11 yo create some sort of system whereby I have to give him disposable cash whenever he wants while he gets to behave like an entitled spoiled brat.
It’s not like most of these guys are inherently incapable of having a relationship. Their theories of how relationships work, how people choose partners is divorced from actual reality and they’ve turned into bitter shits by stewing in their own toxic mental juices. Maybe some of them have fundamental personality issues which mean they aren’t capable of having long term relationships, but they all seem think it’s their physiology making them incapable. There is a way for them to get what they say they want (I’m not sure how much they really want a mature, respectful relationship) but they have to put in the work to set aside their awful ideology and learn to be a decent partner.
I learned everything I need to know about this man when I discovered that he has a houseful of Soviet realist painting, not because he likes Soviet realism, but to remind him of how awful communism is.
That’s not a sign of a healthy person.
There’s a guy on another forum I read and comment on who is a big Peterson fan, and some others who are more minor Peterson fans. The big fan kind of IDs as an incel, or something similar, and keeps explaining that incels are super sad, and just want to be able to be with some woman, any woman.
I keep trying to be patient, but it’s like, FUCK YOUR HARD-ON, SON, this guy wants women to suffer and die so he can feel like society makes sense on some deep Jungian level, and I am not even vaguely playing here.
Incels and Peterson are not the only ones who think women should just “marry up” or “give it out more” to stop male violence it’s this woman and MRAs as well.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/7o9bsq/female_italian_pornstar_suggests_that_the?sort=top
I read a Twitter thread about Petersen that someone posted on this very site. There’s this Petersen fan in the thread who tries to say that “enforced monogamy” doesn’t mean anything horrible at all – it just means the system we have now, where monogamy is encouraged in various ways (one example he gave was that you can only marry one person). That makes absolutely no sense; would Petersen say that a good way to stop incel terrorism is to merely continue as we do now? It doesn’t fit with the context. But it’s a good example of something I’ve seen people accusing Petersen himself of doing all the time; when people angrily confront him he’ll be like “I never meant that! I actually meant this! Stop twisting my words!”
Maybe? There was some incel quoted earlier on this site who said something to the effect that you can’t really expect “Stacies” to have sex with them, but “Beckies” should, so he really resented Beckies for not being willing.
Dalillama:
Some things Loki did:
* Tied his own balls to a goat
* Had sex with a stallion, and gave birth to a deformed horse
* Fathered a serpent
But apparently it’s all good as long as libs are triggered.
Glad to be able to point at someone inadvertantly challenging this brand of nonsense.
My parents no-fault divorced and it was no big deal. Bit of a bummer at the time but we grew as people and moved on. They are happier now and I learned that love is complex and change is not the end of the world. Good lessons.
Peterson is their guy. And as such is the enemy of civilisation.
But of course I probably misunderstood him right? Lol.
I liked this it is a good word play.
I read a bit through his 12 rules and I have to say this: He is really sneaky.
Many of the rules use old an proven pop-psychology tricks to increase a feeling of accomplishment and happiness (animal empathy, simple short-term goals, active awareness of your own body). It’s like the old “smile into your mirror for a while”. Yes, it works. But in between he drops the most regressive, pseudo-scientific and proto-fascist crap I’ve seen in a while. But his meandering and interconnected purple prose make it seem as if all those things were entirely connected and necessary.
A very parlor trick.
If my wife hadn’t been able to back out of her first marriage after she realised quite rapidly that she’d made a terrible mistake, my kids wouldn’t exist.
So I imagine they’re very grateful indeed for no-fault divorce laws.
@idli sambar
Can you name any other self-absorbed reactionary shitstains who have publically recanted their views? Failing a sudden and unprecedented collapse in the regressive right, they have absolutely no reason to see the error of their ways… indeed, there’s fame and fortune to be found in continuing to be as unpleasant as possible.
Do you really think peterson is somehow unusually naive, or some sort of attention seeker who has only recently come into these ideas?
From the OP:
Obvious, huh. You’re saying that they’re, y’know, celibate and single? Like, involuntarily?
Sounds like a cry for these women to go out and murder a bunch of folk. That’ll get them a load of sympathy, and they’ll get what they want handed to them on a plate. That’s how this all works, right?
Iseult:
Dvärghundspossen:
There seems to be some wishful thinking based on just world fallacy. Like, “I really want that hot girlfriend like Chad has, but it’s not realistic so there MUST be some reasonable compromise. I MUST deserve at least an average looking girlfriend, and I MUST be able to be happy with that, otherwise there’s no hope. I AM GENEROUS WITH MY STANDARDS.”
Incels seem to have a distorted view of how conventionally attractive women generally are. It’s probably a combination of visual media bias and wishful thinking. They think there would be a “reasonably attractive” woman available for nearly every man, if only the distribution was more equal. They develop this idea that some sort of “effective polygyny” must be rampant in modern society, because how else could 20% of men be hogging 80% of women for themselves? This isn’t just an incel thing, you see it all over manosphere.
@ lumipuma
You could have stopped there really.
Longtime reader here, finally delurking.
I’m always baffled as to how these people view sex as something that you acquire from someone, rather than something you do with someone. All these takes about how these poor guys need sex or they’ll kill us all–sex from who? From any woman?
Peterson is yet again misleading people by calling his suggestion “enforced monogamy”, when it’s really government-mandated or, at best, (somehow) socially enforced sex slavery. I don’t think he’s actually talking about enforcing ~monogamy~ because that wouldn’t provide incels partners in the first place. As usual, he’s just being vague so that he can accuse people of misrepresenting him after the fact.
Even after being exposed to the manosphere for like five years now, I still can’t figure out why they think sex, in and of itself, is so special. If it doesn’t matter who your partner is as long as they’re attractive, what is the importance of having a partner? They’re obviously not interested in communicating or sharing an experience with another human. Honestly, their vision of sex seems way less rewarding than just masturbating.
On Twitter Jessica Valenti posted JPs crap with a commentary, and one guy replied with:
<a href="
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Or, best-case scenario, they agree for the husband to stage an affair so the wife has “evidence” to take to court.
Bollocks the link borked. I think it got confused with the blockquote part. Still it gets interesting so here’s the rest. https://mobile.twitter.com/steveroh/status/997501830350495744
@ moon custafer
That used to be really common. Sometimes the husband and wife would ask a friend to be “Co-Respondent”.
Enforced monogamy for women, not for men. Never for men.
That’s what he really means.
My mother told me she had a dream, around the time her divorce from my father was being finalized. She dreamt that a rat was sitting on her chest. I think the symbolism is obvious.