By David Futrelle
I‘ve got a piece up on Broadly today on how Jordan Peterson and Ross Douhat’s recent discussions of “enforced monogamy” and the “redistribution of sex” are helping to mainstream toxic ideas that have long been a staple of the manosphere.
Here’s a snippet:
You can’t solve the problem of aggrieved male entitlement by engineering some weird and at least semi-coercive program of “enforced monogamy” built on the assumption that men inherently deserve some sort of access to women’s bodies—regardless of what the women inhabiting these bodies want. You can’t rid the world of violence born of aggrieved male entitlement with a “solution” that reinforces that sense of entitlement.
No, the only solution is to challenge that entitlement directly.
You can read the whole thing (and it’s a long one) here.
Outstanding article, David! I repeat the demand that the New York Times fire any one of its “conservative” columnists and replace them with you. Eff all of them, especially Douthat.
(Incidentally, this weekend is Doors Open Toronto and they’re doing walking tours of Willowdale where the van attack took place.)
????
Whaaaat?!?!?
I… but, but… I….
Don’t have time to read the piece yet, but I will say this, I think this stuff is not actually a response to incel violence. It’s backlash against me too movement. This new solidarity women are having is terrifying a lot of men.
Nice article. Every time I check in to see what you are writing about, I am reminded how much I am glad that you are doing the deep dive on this subject so I don’t have to research about it myself . . .. But it is kind of scary that Douthat, et. al. are trying to normalize some of these ideas.
Yay, more David!
I think its more that the response to MeToo is showing the extremists that they have an opportunity to be heard, and that they have common ground with more people than they might have initially thought.
Re: Peterson – somebody over on Tumblr suggested, and I think they have a point, that Petersen used anti-trans sentiment (combined with his position as an academic) as the thin edge of the wedge to get mainstream attention – he first began showing up in the papers a year or so back as That Professor Defending His Freedom of Speech By Refusing to Use the Gender Pronouns Other People Ask Him To If He Disagrees With Their Gender Identification, and he’s continued to bask in attention.
Excellent and chilling article!
Ugh, for fucking real.
Perhaps the most chilling thing about all of this, to me, is that these aren’t the social conservatives. These are the libertarians. These are the asshats who claim to care about individual rights and freedoms.
Peterson claims to be a libertarian and then goes around talking about “enforced monogamy” like it’s not a radical departure from his claimed worldview. Douthat claims to be a fiscal conservative, and then talks about government “redistribution of sex” like sex is a fungible material commodity and like he wouldn’t be against redistribution of literally anything else.
God forbid you tax and redistribute income, or give material benefits to people in need – that would be socialism! But you know, socialism might not be that bad if it was just government-mandated rape.
God forbid the government levy fines for knowingly and willfully antagonizing members of a disadvantaged class of people. That’s downright Maoist. But hey, it would be totally within reason for the government to enforce a ban on breaking up with someone once you’ve had sex with them (him).
Like. I want to believe that libertarians are principled. I want to believe that there is honesty on both sides of the political divide.
And then the “libertarian” and “fiscal conservative” pundits and alleged intellectuals come out with this kind of bullshit, this bullshit more oppressive than all but the worst communist dictatorships and cults, and they go “Hey maybe we could solve this terrorism problem by forcing women to let the terrorists rape them!”
Because as they’re not affected, what’s the problem?
I seriously expected these guys to pull a Roosh and claim it was satire, and that excuse might actually work for these conservative intellectuals as a tone-deaf strawman of socialism. But they haven’t backed down.
I swear conservative thought these days is just “whatever will trigger the libs lol.” Modern conservatism is broken and bankrupt. Burn it to the ground.
Great article, David!
I wish you didn’t have to write it.
I second @Scildfreja – wonderfully written article, a shame it needs to be said.
When things were beginning to get ridiculous in the US and Trump first got elected, I think I did the typical smug Canadian thing of thinking at least it couldn’t happen here. But it’s creeping in, isn’t it. It’s election time in Ontario and I live in the northern part of the province (not far North, but North of Parry Sound), and this area is supposed to be Liberal (centre party) or NDP (left/ctr-leftish depending on the leadership). And there are so many damned Conservative signs. And I know someone in Toronto who was a block away from the van attack. And I don’t know if It’s me or my depression/anxiety talking but I just worry at times and want to shake my head and yell “Haven’t we gotten past this bs yet? It’s 2018 for goodness sake!”
But thank you Dave and everyone else here. Seeing everyone else here reacting, often echoing my own thoughts and feelings, makes me feel less alone.
FABULOUS article! I posted a tumblr post with a link, hope that gets some more traffic to it because it is great!
Adding my congratulations, and the wish that it weren’t necessary.
What happened to the world that some shit like that comes from people who are not fringe?
Yeah there are alternatives, getting people out of the incelcomunitys would be a good one.
Making it harder for teens to get weapons.
Make it easier for young people with problems to get help. (Perhaps optimistic but that would solve a lot of other problems for other people also)
Don’t glorify murders.
A closer look at the incels and if they break the law in their forrums do somethink.
Not giving anyone who sugest inhuman “solutions” any room.
(None of them is for the comunity here but for society in general )
No we are not trying to solve a problem by creating a bigger one (enslaving a part of the population, not knowing how many women you need is somethink I can’t believe anyone is really sugesting).
I mean conservative voices okay, but somethink that has to stop in the US, is the right beeing okay with everythink as long as it aint left.
No there a points were you should stopp, you are not pro-freaking slavery, you are not okay with racist, show me that you can stil be called a half-decent humanbeeing.
@Button
These are people whose founder said children should be salable on the open market like any other commodity. (That’s Rothbard, btw; Friedman, the other principal creator of right-libertaranism, is the one who mentored Pinochet’s economic advisers). So there’s your right-libertarian version of principles.
FTFY
FTFY. Conservatism has always been about conserving privilege and oppression. There was never a ‘better’ or ‘real’ conservatism that had legitimate points. Not ever.
@Who?
Never gonna happen. Can’t happen; being a conservative is mutually exclusive with being a decent human being.
Great article.
I hadn’t read Peterson’s attempt to explain away his NYT interview, but his word choice in the quote struck me: women are damsels. Even when he’s trying to pretend he wasn’t taking women’s agency away from them he uses terminology that explicitly denies women’s agency.
@Button:
I gave up any hope of that long ago. I can’t pinpoint a precise moment, but it gradually dawned on me that one of the things they want to be “liberated” from is all common decency and humanity. They are all about “liberty for me, but none for thee — and especially none for THEE, wench!”
Once you understand that, it all makes sense. Terrible sense, mind you.
Every “libertarian” dudebro I’ve come across seems to possess the same mindset:
“Psh, all problems are individual and the solution to them is just to try harder, individually, without any help or assistance! If someone is suffering from “oppression”, it’s because they’re whiners who just aren’t trying hard enough. …Oh, what’s that, there’s a problem that affects ME personally and directly? Holy crap, everyone everywhere needs to stop what they’re doing and solve this problem immediately, this is a top priority, we all need to work together!”
@Button:
I haven’t thought they were principled for a long time. One big clue was when I first started noticing (probably in my teens) that whenever “fiscal conservatives” got elected, the deficit ballooned…
You have an extraneous word there at the start of that sentence.
@Who?
2018 seems to be 1938 all over again …
Another excellent piece Dave! 🙂
We have a T, and you need a ‘t’ up above, too.
Unless that’s on purpose, to keep trolls away ..
Or if you meant Douche Hat, I found myself reading it as thus, anyway.
Someone on this site posted a Twitter thread about Jordan Petersen and “enforced monogamy”, where a Petersen supporter went in and said that since he’s a libertarian, of course he doesn’t mean that the government should force everyone into monogamous relationships they don’t want. All of the enforcing should be done by social pressure and cultural forces! Ok that’s fine then I guess.
Someone posted a twitter thread about Jordan Petersen and “enforced monogamy” on this site earlier, and a Petersen fan explained that since he’s a libertarian, of course he doesn’t want the government to do the enforcing. It should all be done through social pressure and cultural forces! Well that’s alright then.
Sorry for the double post, the first one weirdly disappeared so I posted again, and then it popped back up…
Thanx David – great article. I too wish you would not have needed to write that.
For me the elefant in the room is the obvious question:
“Who is responsible for mens sexuality – men or women?” and up to now the secret unspoken answer somehow only whispered from time to time is: Women, which is a classic in terms of: you are responsible for something you cannot control – hence creating a helpless passiv responsible human being who can only run from the responsibility by avoiding. The interessting thing is that this kind of basic thinking is part of modern hierarchies in economy too: responsibility is deligated to for example an engineer, but he hasn’t the real means to execute it in terms of the time he thinks nescessary to spent on the project, the material he thinks nescessary etc. It’s part of the toxic power game stuff which is going on especially in cooperations.
Why is this so popular? Because women somehow unconsciously still are “responsible” for losely everything social in the minds of a great many men and somehow at least from the viewpoint of a Jordan Peterson and collegues. Sure men help a bit privatly in their relationships but they are after all really really busy doing the Important things in the world – which from a certain point of view is all things material and where the gratification is money, status and power.
What someone like Petersen does not want to understand (at least not officially) is that the system that produces the looser (because thats what hierarchies do – its system immanent) needs to take the social responsibility for this act and provide socially for those loosers not by forcing half of the population to care for them for free – thats just shifting societies costs on from the rich to the poor – but by a social health system that does the work to support looser in such a way that they are socially able to have stable relationships despite their low status in hierarchy.
@Button
I suspect Douthat is kinda making exactly that point. He’s out to get a reaction from liberals rejecting redistribution of sex, and he’ll draw a parallel with redistribution of wealth via taxation and go ‘gotcha!’
He’s also a misogynistic asshole, so its basically win-win for him.
I don’t doubt that some libertarians are, but it is worth looking at the rise of things like neoreaction (monarchocapitalism!) and “classic liberalism” (a return to the good old days of a few hundred years ago, but don’t call it conservatism!) and their popularity with libertarians and you’ll see that those principles are often “lets build a hierarchy with people like me on top!” with a side order of “fuck you jack, i’ve got mine”.
Conservatism is a bit like communism, in that there’s this platonic ideal of how it ought to be, but actual real world implementations immediately decay into reactionary authoritarianism. It has always been that way.