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.
I’m another GenXer whose parents divorced (when I was a teenager). There was some nasty fallout, but I can trace it back to people being horrible people. There was also some pretty nasty stuff happening to trigger the divorce, so I can’t say I regret it, even though it was a scary stressful time for me and my sisters.
I don’t think Mr. Parasol and I will ever get divorced; we’ve already been married longer than my parents were, and he will point out we can always take his parents as a role model. Not to mention we’ve agreed that couples counseling will happen as necessary. But everybody should have the option to walk away from a dysfunctional relationship.
@Victorious Parasol:
Yes, everyone should have the opportunity to walk away. I couldn’t agree more.
@Dormousing_it
Human sex ratios being what they are, you can’t make all women monogamous without including all the men, too. Consider the gender-disparity in life expectancy, for example.
Not that I expect these assholes to think about consequences, of course.
I think of all the things I’ve seen recently that make me angry, this is one of the ones that make me the most angry (and that is saying something)
They bandy around terms like “enforced monogamy” and “redistributing sex” and people nod along and it’s a whole lot of euphemisms normalising the idea of taking away women’s right to choose their partners. After all, no-one’s suggested “redistributing” men, have they? There’s absolutely no suggestion that lonely women who can’t meet men have a right to a partner. But no-one will actually say “let’s enslave women”, the idea gets introduced gradually.
This is how this kind of crap always starts, with a whole load of newspeak euphemisms (like “concentration camp” and “friendly fire” and “extraordinary rendition”)
I just cannot believe people are going “oh yeah, that makes sense”. Let’s not dress it up, you’re talking about legalising rape and sexual slavery. I doubt very much if a woman who gets “redistributed” is going to have much say in who her new owner – oops sorry – partner is.
If this ever gets seriously debated by law-makers, I think I’m going to have to get serious with the protests.
@ wwth
In “Angry White Men”, Kimmel quotes statistics bearing this out. I don’t have the correct numbers cuz I don’t have my Kindle here, but it was something like 1500 male-kills-female partner (per year) and 1300 female-kills-male partner in the 1970s, and 20 years later, the number of female-kills-male had dropped to around 400, while the number of male-kills-female stayed at about the same number — except that about 65% of the male-kills-female murders now happened after the separation.
Kimmel attributes the drop in murders by female intimate partner to two factors, better access to divorce, and more access to domestic violence shelters.
E.T.A.
Violent attacks are what happens when men do not have EMPATHY, Mr. Peterson says, and society needs to work to make sure those men are BETTER SOCIALIZED
Fixed that for ya, Jordan… yer welcome.
@ Bina;
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/608/328/c87.jpg
@Imperator Kahlo
Now that’s an interesting point, yes. This may seem tangential, but your comment reminds me of a recent Richard Spencer tweet (remember him?) where he said that true free speech can only exist in a small, homogeneous society where people only disagree on unimportant stuff like baseball. Which … isn’t really free speech at all.
I think the link I was making was to do with a complete inability to understand that people have needs and wants that are different to your own, and experiences that are different to your own. Why would you support reproductive rights, for example, if they don’t affect you? It couldn’t possibly be that you see benefits for other people, surely? You must secretly love abortions!
I’m thinking more now of the right (alt-right?) suspicion of altruism in light of this, but it’s late and I should be in my bed.
Long ramble: over 🙂
I still don’t get why those incel commentators and, apparently Peterson, don’t get that sexual agency is something women AND men enjoy.
Those “Incels” would probably reject the vast majority of women they would stand a chance with.
@Violet the Vile
“After all, no-one’s suggested “redistributing” men, have they? There’s absolutely no suggestion that lonely women who can’t meet men have a right to a partner. But no-one will actually say “let’s enslave women”, the idea gets introduced gradually.”
And this is where they betray their misogyny. A woman is always to blame – some men are lonely and sad about it and that’s women’s fault.
As one of those lifer single women who has yet to have a man show interest in her for long term relationship I have yet to here these commentators talk about how men need to be “redistributed” and not seek sex without commitment.
If anything they tell women they need to improve if they want to find somebody.
@ Steph Tohill
None of this is about sexual agency, for men OR for women. This is a demand for power, driven by entitlement. It is about “being” the male lead in the movie, who is always the love interest of the (conventionally attractive) female lead, and who is always the secret crush of the (always not-quite-as-attractive-but-still-desirable) female lead’s sidekick.
It’s about being able to command the social capital the incel believes the male lead in the movie commands. About having access to others’ bodies (and minds) — this will come, of course, with the others’ consent, but those others won’t have any thoughts of not consenting — after all, the fantasy IS about “being the hero” and part and parcel of the fantasy is others WANTING to consent.
The incels, the MRAs, the Poopy Petersons, et. al. are in a huff because this is not the way human relationships work, and their entitlement tells them that they can FORCE compliance, either by law or by terror. Hasn’t it always BEEN that way???
WOHOOOO! Sorry for going off topic but I’m SO HAPPY!!!! I just got a job! With tenure! And a great salary! Finally all my job anxieties are laid to rest! And I don’t have to worry any longer that people will find out exactly how mental I am and think twice for that reason before hiring me… Because now I have job security! I expect my mental illness will improve just because I feel secure now, so I won’t have to take quite as many meds and feel like a walking pharmacy any longer.
Also, I’ll be able to support Husband! He can quit his job! Husband has worked at the railroad for eleven years. He always worked shifts which is always hard, but after a new company bought up the business and he got new management a year and a half ago things really took a turn for the worse. His schedule is horrible now, he’s constantly exhausted, and his new bosses are terrible. Now he can quit!
I’m SOOOOO happy!!!!!
Congratulations Dvärghundspossen!!!
@Dvärghundspossen: Congratulations!
The fact that ideas like “enforced monogamy” are getting more and more acceptable to suggest in mainstream society legitimately scares me. It feels like we’re heading toward The Handmaid’s Tale and idk how to stop it.
I was one of those children Peterson claims to speak for and I absolutely 100% am glad for more liberal divorce laws. Even with all the problems and stress that came with it, particularly the financial ones, it was still many leagues better for everyone than if my parents had been forced to stay together.
It’s strange but not surprising that he talks about what he would like to think we’d say, as if we’re not here, not legion, and not readily available for comment. Like, we weren’t disappeared into the ether, dude. We didn’t die or lose our ability to speak to the Lovecraftian horrors you think we now live (the looming shadows of fear and literally my father in hall were within the marriage for me too, not outside).
You know, I think I just figured out why conservatives are so obsessed with both single mothers and childless career women. It would seem like a bit of a catch-22 for women here. If women have children when they’re young and broke and need government assistance to make ends meet, that’s bad. They’re immoral parasites. If women wait until they’re more financially stable and mature to have children, that’s bad too. They’re losers who are too old and ugly to get a man and will have to die alone. Now way to win, right?
Wrong. There’s one way for women to start having babies really young while still being married and financially stable. That’s if teenage girls and young women are forced into arranged marriages with middle aged men with established careers.
That’s what they want, isn’t it?
Did he watch Fahrenheit 451 on HBO Saturday and take away the entirely wrong message?
Oh, and here’s an example of a partnered man killing family members in a public way that also injured non-family members
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/05/21/he-took-his-family-to-lunch-left-the-table-and-rammed-them-with-his-car-killing-two-police-say/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0805f1de7341
The Sunday lunch rush was underway at the Surf and Turf Lodge in Bessemer City, N.C., a restaurant about 30 miles west of Charlotte. Inside the rustic eatery with wooden plank walls, Roger Self, a former police officer turned private investigator, was eating appetizers with his family. Around noon, the 62-year-old got up from the table. The family thought he was going to the restroom, the Gaston Gazette later reported.
With Self behind the wheel, the car blasted through the restaurant’s log cabin facade, punching into the heart of the building and colliding with the table where Self’s family was sitting, police said. Through curtains of dust, patrons and employees saw some people still pinned beneath the wreckage. “I helped paramedics move tables off this dude, and I moved debris out of the way so they could get to him,” a busboy told WSOC.
How exactly would “enforced monogamy” have stopped this.
And notice how the excuse making for his actions has already started.
Because of course, Self is white. If he wasn’t white, he would be called an animal.
I’m sorry. I just can’t get over the not a conscious act part. What the fuck. Seriously? What. The. Fuck?
It was premeditated and something he’s been wanting to do for awhile. “Mental illness” or not, it was a choice. Once again, women struggle with mental illness too and by and large do not do things like this!
Congratulations, Dvärghundspossen!
@Weird Eddie: That picture is perfect; I’mma yoink it, if you don’t mind.
@Mish:
Well, then. I guess we can safely squelch him when he whines about his Freeze Peach being “violated” by dredging up that tweet and throwing it back endlessly at his fashy haircut, no?
@Steph Tohill:
Not only would they, they do. They actively hate women who don’t look like supermodels, and they also actively hate women who do: the former because that’s what their actual dating pool looks like, and the latter because snowball’s chance at the equator. Meaning, their “celibacy” is anything but involuntary, and their detachment from realism would make Salvador Dalí weep with envy.
@Dvärghundspossen:
Oh sure. Getting up from the table, going outside, getting behind the wheel of a car, putting a key in the ignition, backing up and then ramming right into the spot where your family is still eating at the table isn’t a conscious act. At all. Nope, nope, nope. He did all that in his sleep. Silly world!
And yeah. Even when I was at my sickest, mentally, I never thought of taking anyone with me when I contemplated suicide. I felt I was a burden to the world and wanted to remove myself from it with a minimum of fuss. I’m only thankful that, since I was majorly depressed, I didn’t have the energy to research the methods, pick one, and carry it out.
This is not just white nonsense, it’s white MALE nonsense.
Thanks for all the congrats people!
@Dvarg
In case it doesn’t show up – it’s YAY!!!!! Congratulations on your brilliant news! 🙂
In terms of post topic – fuck Peterson, don’t fuck incels.
It’s white male ENTITLED nonsense… the family belongs to him, he’s responsible for their keep, and his privilege tells him they would be lost without him, so he’s perfectly within his right and his responsibility is to take them with him.
*\o/* *\o/* *\o/* *\o/* *\o/* *\o/*
@Dvärghundspossen!
I’m really happy for you 🙂
(I think those are sparklers; I just like sparklers, they are best hand-held fireworks) *\o/*
Dvärg, congratulations!
Re: man who drove into restaurant,
The victims he murdered were his daughter and daughter-in-law. *He* made the reservation, *he* chose the table in front of the window…
*He* planned this. This was *absolutely* an act he chose to consciously act upon.
I don’t see how his stuff doesn’t violate Patreon’s TOS. Oh wait, when you’re pulling in almost a million a year Patreon’s cut has to at least equal 30 pieces of silver. (Why no, I’m not bitter just because some Furry Artists got banned due to content but this ass tick gets to keep going)