By David Futrelle
There comes a time in every Jordan Peterson fanboy’s life when he starts to think about settling down with a high quality female for mating purposes.
And so one such fan recently turned to the Jordan Peterson subreddit to ask his fellow lobsters (yes, they call themselves that) to ask for some help with his mating math. At what age, he asked, should a man who is “progressing up the hierarchy ” allow himself “to be peeled off by a female” seeking marriage?
jtillery32 laid out his dilemma, noting first that
JP has often said women mate across and up [the] competence hierarchy. … Which is patently true. The problem that leaves me (and I’m sure a bunch of other lobsters vying for position) with is wondering when the appropriate time to allow yourself to be peeled off by a female.
Get out your calculators and lobster bibs, people, because things are going to get messy!
Essentially the question is this: if a man is progressing up the hierarchy (status, financial, getting into shape, etc), would it be in his and his future wife’s best interest to wait on settling down until he believed he was at his peak?
Because god forbid you marry some HB 7 you merely love and want to spend the rest of your life with when, if you had waited a few more years, you could have had yourself an 8 or 9 who was more interested in your money than your personality?
A good example of this problem is a 21 year old man who is handsome, articulate, athletic, in college, maybe works as a bartender and probably has pick of the women that attend the school or in some proximity, maybe from ages 18-25 VS the same man, 9 years later who is now in better shape, more handsome, more confident, more wise, financially “minted”, and has a much larger pool to choose from, maybe 21-35 year old women who are of higher quality (that sounds like a cut of beef) by nature of hypergamy.
Sounds a bit like that famous (if recently somewhat tarnished) “marshmallow test” where you offer a kid either one marshmallow right away or two if they’re willing to wait ten minutes. But with hot ladies instead of marshmallows. A whole pool of high quality hot lady marshmallows.
It would seem that if that 21 year old man was to marry someone at that age it would have been a grave mistake as he would have been able to have a higher quality partner had he waited 9 years.
Seriously, why settle for a One Marshmallow Stacey if you could wait a little and snag yourself a Two Marshmallow Stacey?
I would love an actual wise answer here and not some “well when you know she’s the right one when you just know” BS.
Fuck love, we’re all about Marshmallow Stacey Maximization here.
That sounds callous, but the reality is that you really can fall in love with many people and some people do multiple times in their lives, and could probably have successful marriages with more than “the one”.
Obviously this dude who rates women like cuts of beef has a great understanding of what makes for a successful marriage.
When should a man who is trying and succeeding to better himself in every way let himself be peeled off into marriage? And does preemptive peeling lead to resentment?
Dude, I suspect that with you EVERY SINGLE FUCKING THING IN THE WORLD LEADS TO RESENTMENT. Waiting. Not waiting. EVERYTHING.
You see this a lot in professional athletes, and people who are aggressively climbing the hierarchy. The superstar dated and married the best girl (smartest, funniest, prettiest) at the high school, but now he’s the quarterback of an nfl team and has his pick of the best girls in the world. It’s a common theme among meteoric rises in men and I haven’t seen a good answer for it. Be loyal to the person who loved you before the status or keep aiming up to someone better?
And plenty of these “superstars” do in fact stay loyal to what you would see as sub-optimal partners. Because, you know, love?
I hate to tell you this, dude, but if this is really the way you think about relationships, you are NOT the great catch you think you are. You’ll make yourself miserable no matter who you marry — if you can find anyone gullible enough to marry you in the first place.
And the chances are good that nine years from now you won’t actually be “in better shape, more handsome, more confident, more wise” with “a much larger pool to choose from,” You will probably be earning more money. But you’ll also be nine years more bitter and resentful, and that’s not an attractive look for any man.
Don’t get married now. But don’t get married nine years from now either — at least not until you clear your head of this utterly toxic way of thinking.
Unfortunately, this being the Jordan Peterson subreddit, none of the commenters offered him the blunt advice he so desperately needs — though a few did warn him that by waiting too long for the “perfect woman” he might end up old and resentful and alone. (Might? Almost certainly will.)
He also got this less-than-optimal advice, from someone calling himself liberal_hr.
I agree that you should wait until your reach your maximum potential peak and then start looking for potential females.
There is just too much of a risk of you falling head over heels for a female and settling for less than you deserve.
Given that he literally deserves no one, I find this a little hard to believe.
And then there was NoelTrotsky, whose advice was somehow even worse:
It would be interesting to apply economic game theory to this problem. I’d bet that a young man’s best move would be to marry an older rich woman while young , take the help up the ladder, have kids, then leave at about 35 and marry young for a second round. Why not increase your odds with several marriages of significant lengths?
So, in other words he should act like a male version of every “Red Pill” dude’s caricature of a calculating, mercenary hypergamous woman who would drop any man she was with if in a second if she had a chance to “branch swing” to a higher-status man?
It’s almost as if the Red Pill notion of female hypergamy is less a reflection of how women actually behave in the real world than a projection of every Red Pill dude’s not-so-secret desire to trade up to a Victoria’s Secret model.
Jordan Peterson really brings out the worst in people, huh?
Read a good post/thread somewhere (want to say twitter) on lobsters having basically made a deal with the devil for immortality. They don’t age they just get bigger and bigger with time until molting is just too physically taxing and they die from bacteria/parasite accumulation or being straight up squeezed to death by their own exoskeleton.
Yay Lobsters!
Yay Nature!!!
OT: Anyone catch this article?
https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/nearly-all-pepe-images-were-removed-from-neo-nazi-website-the-daily-stormer.html
To extent this has already been answered, but this question does get right to the root of the entitlement of MRA/red pill/JP fanboys and why they end up so bitter and angry.
They want all the privileges of patriarchy and none of the responsibilities. This why MRAs claim to hate traditional gender roles, but they also hate feminism and get angry when anyone else actually works towards dismantling gender roles. I’m not defending traditional conservative religious types because they’re awful too, but at least their worldview is a little more realistic. They understand that their are tradeoffs in patriarchy. If women are going to get married young, stay home and never use birth control or get an abortion, then the men have to provide financially for women and children.
MRA types on the other hand, don’t get that at all. There’s not a woman on earth who doesn’t work outside the home because her only job is servicing her man and raising white babies, but doesn’t need any money to survive and raise the children. There’s not a woman on earth who is chaste and virginal, yet acts like a porn star in bed when she finally meets the correct MRA type man. There’s not a woman on earth who has a Barbie doll body, perfect hair, stylish clothes, and always looks perfectly “naturally” made up but without spending any time and money getting that look. There’s not a woman on earth who dedicates herself to becoming a trophy wife but wants to end up with a man who isn’t wealthy and powerful. Not only that, but they want a woman who doesn’t age.
And not related to dating and marriage, but they also want to be treated like supremely rational and intelligent beings, but they also don’t think they need to craft any logical and coherent arguments when they debate and they don’t think they need any education beyond YouTube videos telling them what they want to hear.
They want to be treated like gods for no reason but their gender and they want a woman who doesn’t exist anywhere but maybe the most pandering subset of anime. Not only want it, but feel entitled to it. Of course they’re angry all the time. They hold out hope they’ll magically turn into Brad Pitt or George Clooney when they age and then they’ll find the living waifu of their dreams, but deep down they know it isn’t happening. What else is there to do but express their impotent rage online?
It’s quite illustrative when you compare this post to the previous post from Andrew Angelin. Really, the complete lack of respect for women’s basic humanity and autonomy is present in each; Angelin is just far more overtly hostile, while Peterson just slaps a mortarboard on it and calls it “academic”.
It just galls me that people fall for this guy. I mean, it’s one thing for you just to be your garden-variety misogynist and graduate from harassing Zoe Quinn on Twitter four years ago, supporting Trump three years ago, Milo two and then come to this Kermit-voiced dillhole and find him to be useful cover, but it’s something else to be a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old kid coming into his own, looking at this own identity and thinking that this obvious snake oil salesman is some kind of father figure. Because as much as I am just as susceptible to being taken in by a convincing story, the one thing that sets off red flags for me is when somebody tells me exactly what they think I want to hear based on who I am, and then the action items don’t take any work on my part.
That’s what makes Peterson so appealing to the YouTube generation: he’s a fatherly quote-unquote scholar who’s telling you “Yeah, all that contempt you’ve been building up for the women who haven’t thrown themselves at you and call themselves ‘feminists’ and those Black Lives Matter protesters that made you feel bad once and those trans people that call you a bigot and those… all that contempt is exactly what you should feel and you don’t have to question yourself at all. Just clean your room and pet a cat every so often and keep on consuming.” It’s almost perfect in its marketing: an action item that is just common sense boilerplate self-care, and zero challenges to the audience’s cultivated identity or comfort level. Nirvana can be achieved without leaving the bedroom. How goddamned convenient!
I was thinking about my own political trajectory just this morning and I realized that I’ve gradually been moving further and further left as time has gone on. Without a doubt, a large part of it is reactionary in the face of right-wing malfeasance: watching your teachers and school support workers get screwed over by the government as a fifteen-year-old kid tends to crystallize your politics pretty quickly. But it was far more moderate when I was younger and still had some faith in media and the capacity of the average person to learn based on past decisions. Mike Harris’ Premiership, Bush’s re-election in 2004, Stephen Harper, followed by Rob Ford, Donald Trump and now Doug Ford has only laid bare that people cannot be relied upon to account for their own mistakes, nor can they adequately resist a reassuring fiction. They will vote for the bullshit artist that lets them keep doing what they’re doing every time.
But blame for their rise can’t rest on them alone: they can only succeed in the absence of a robust opposition that offers an alternative to the snake oil and that’s what’s had me questioning whatever centrism I used to hold. Because in each of the cases I mentioned above, the rise of the right-wing grifter came after decades of ineffective and milquetoast “centrist” governance. 13 years of austere Liberal rule at the federal level topped off by a Sponsorship scandal gave us the Harper Tories. 15 years of status quo and political gamesmanship on the part of the provincial Liberals have given us Premier Doug Ford. Eight years of David Miller struggling against amalgamation gave us Rob Ford. And in the face of Donald Trump telling people that he could “make America great again,” what was Hillary’s response. “America’s already great”? Great for who?! Nobody in the Democratic coalition except maybe a handful of Manhattanites. Talk about being out of touch….
If I have one worry going forward, it’s that tepid leadership under Trudeau will yield an even worse Tory government in the future. It won’t be Scheer and it probably won’t be for another decade, but for all we know, the Jordan Peterson acolyte of today could be a Tory leadership hopeful of tomorrow playing off centrist failure to change anything.
And that scares me.
That said, the one thing Trudeau has as his major legislative achievement is marijuana legalization and that just might make him popular enough with young people to secure victories in the coming years. Time will tell.
Ah yes, the banana of bachelorhood. A magical potassium-rich wonderland…
FANTASY: …of nonstop career advancement, lifting, and partying.
REALITY: …of higher tax brackets, meaningless sex, no unemployment cushion, and being 100% responsible for household maintenance. Thus not having as much time to focus on climbing the career ladder as he thinks he will, unless he’s fine living with dirty dishes, wrinkled shirts, takeout containers, and a Superfund bathroom for the next twenty years.
(It’s been said before, but men benefit significantly from marriage, especially financially).
@ellesar – Yeah, that sentence is really revealing. Hot gold digger > unconditional love? I don’t know why these guys are so outraged and surprised when they reduce human relationships to the exchange of commodities, and then find themselves viewed as a commodity. He’s literally saying he plans to purchase beauty with his future earnings.
Maybe that’s why they’re so salty about child support and alimony. They don’t think they should have to keep on paying once the dewy youthfulness is gone.
@Catalpa
I guess the “logic”, if you can call it that, is that women are a resource, and monogamy only applies to resources, not owners. A gallon of milk or a car doesn’t just up and go find a new owner. But an owner can decide at any time to trade in a high-mileage car or a jug of sour milk for a new one.
I think maybe we ought to up their optimum marriage age to “5 billion years from now, when the sun engulfs the earth”.
@Surplus
I can’t even wrap my mind around the huge opportunity cost of being with Graham’s Number Gertrude. That’s a lot of s’mores.
@K
I’m glad that Furie is fighting the good fight. It’s a shame that he has to do so, though. It’s shitty enough when people steal and repost your art online, I can’t imagine how much worse it is to have your artwork appropriated by a bunch of fascists into a hate symbol.
@Mogie
I think you’re on to something with this Elon Musk and Peterson fanbase comparison. I disagree with some of the opinions here, which seem to put the Musk fanbase on a more intermediate ground, given that he’s following is almost entirely libertarian and he’s already on his way to becoming Trump.
Remember when he announced a registry of fake news journalists as retaliation for investigate reporting calling him out on preventing his workers from unionizing?
And there’s also a lot of pure, undiluted truth into what WWTH just said as well, which can be of use when looking into these fanbases, which nearly always seem to stem from libertarian circles.
It’s certainly not a coincidence that the same men who form the most vocal bit of the anime fanbase, the gaming community, comics fanbase, and libertarian circles intersect into this huge Venn diagram which includes the most toxic and reactionary political movements.
Personally, I feel that the reason why personalities like Trump, Musk and Peterson seem to resonate so strongly with Millennial libertarians is that they seem to offer what they have been advertised their entire lives.
Our generation has been bombarded with entertainment moreso than any other previous generation. And given that a lot of that entertainment was geared towards legitimizing gender roles and expectations, whilst romanticizing power and violence, it has fostered socially regressive views to levels never before seen.
These men were brought up to believe they were entitled to a beautiful partner, who would be entirely subservient to them, and they were also brought up to believe that they could conquer any obstacle through sheer effort or strength of character, only to find out neither of these was true.
It also doesn’t help that they are mostly White men and were afforded privileges that others did not have whilst growing up. So they’ve become entirely convinced that they are entitled to everything without having to better themselves.
And after that perceived slight of having “everything stripped away from them”, along come personalities such as Musk, Trump and Peterson who represent the übermensch they’ve wanted to be their whole lives, and who tell them that this status can easily be gained, if they just trample all over the disenfranchised.
In short, I feel that the reason why these fanbases are overly toxic to people who criticize these Musk, Trump or Peterson, is not because they actually believe them to be flawless, but because they represent the idealized version of what White men could be were it not for the pesky minorities and lefties: successfully wealthy, “intelligent” men, married to “beautiful” women.
I was browsing YouTube late one night
When I came across a guy, talking shite
He sounded like Kermit and made no sense to me
But he’s very big on forced monogamy
He’s done the maths
He’s done the lobster maths
The lobster maths
It was a Reddit smash
He did the maths
Although it seems quite crude
The lobster maths
Is this even peer reviewed…?
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AkNmTfGZOF8/UJGTT_5HgFI/AAAAAAAAFvg/xAFc13EPSCU/s1600/Monster-Mash.jpg
@Weirwoodtreehugger: You so hit the nail on the head with that one. There’s such a thing as a realistic conservative, in that his values might be fucked up but at least he’s got an internally consistent picture of what he wants life to be like and what he wants women to be like. The people David mock on this blog, on the other hand, not so much…
@Alan Robertshaw, Scildfreja Unnyðnes *standing ovation*
@Scilfreja
I just wanted to say I have really enjoyed your intelligence and writing style as I’ve read through the archives (that goes for many others here too actually). This post was the first I commented on so I was a little nervous.
@StaceySmartyPantsTwiceRemoved,
Aw, thank you <3 It means a lot to me! I spend a lot of time editing my posts to make sure they say what I mean them to say. Which is to say, sometimes I get it close to correct. Welcome, I'm glad you're posting!
@WWTH, I totally agree with you. All I'd add is to emphasize that MRA's really just want to be told how smart/correct they are. They want to be valued and vindicated. For a lot of dudes, being "valued" means "gaining the rewards of society" – wealth, status, hotwife, etc.
It's in the name, Return of Kings. They think they're all kings, rightful rulers by divine providence. It's the womz what’ve stolen what’s rightfully theirs.
All easier to do than to look at the pain and hurt inside and evaluate it all honestly.
@Diego, I think also you are right! The intersection point between Libertarians, MRA’s, Fascists, GamorGate, etc, is in the inability for a certain subset of mostly-white-men to get the fuck over themselves. They were told they were kings, and find the world doesn’t treat them like royalty, so instead of just dealing with that they throw their tantrums. And because they’re at the peak of the social hierarchy, the world shudders with their punch-drunk ambulation.
@Scildfreja
Did anyone keep the receipt?
@Diego
Well said. Part of me thinks that Trump’s piggish behavior is an essential part of his appeal to white supremacists. Trump ascending to the Presidency is “proof” to them that even the worst white man is better than the best woman and the best black man. Trump is a total POS, inferior in every way, and yet he holds the same office as Obama, buoyed and protected by a thousand arcane rules, conventions, and institutions designed to insulate him from the consequences of being such a POS. The right loves to watch him getting away with stuff Obama and Hillary couldn’t.
@StaceySmartyPantsTwiceRemoved
Welcome! Love your nym. Maybe we’re distant cousins?
Pull up a chair, and help yourself to a welcome package from the sidebar.
I think the most striking thing about this is that it’s deeply embedded in the question’s basic assumptions that men accrue value, women can only lose it as they get less young and taut.
He doesn’t have a concept of a couple getting better together, both getting more educated, earning more, becoming more self-aware, working together to achieve goals. It’s about becoming your ‘best self’ and then snagging a woman too young and naive to realize how shoddy your best self is.
And I mean, that’s BEFORE we talk about love.
They should read more Victorian novels. The young man is supposed to fall in love, and then work feverishly to become a successful enough fellow that he can hold up his head when he asks her papa for her hand.
That’s more than two years if you devoted twelve hours a day, seven days a week to watching Jordan Peterson videos. And just typing that, I feel my whole body cringing in boredom and weariness. It sounds like something that would happen to you in 1984. If you really pissed off Big Brother.
Finite, unlike those ordinals, and not even particularly impressively big by finite standards (consider e.g. TREE(3) Marshmallow Theresa). 🙂
Maybe the only way out would be to terminally baffle them with Continuum Hypothesis Constance, whose exact ranking is not only unknown, but known to be formally undecidable.
@StaceySmartyPantsTwiceRemoved
Welcome! Pull up a hard chair and join us in our scented candle burning ritual
Edit:
Which you’re required to do for proper “context” before commenting or refuting.
A whole pool of high quality hot lady marshmallows
You mean like most eligible princess in Arendelle?
No, I’m pretty sure you have to read his books as well before you are so much as allowed to comment on the color of his shoes, much less his easily debunked reactionary views.
@Scildfreja
Hey Scildreja! Welcome back (not sure if you went away or if I kept on missing your comments, but I’m going to welcome you back regardless)!
You’re precisely on point with all this aggrieved entitlement. I’ve spent years arguing on a facebook page against libertarianism, and one of the regulars once said something that stuck with me:
“Libertarians are guys born on third base, who think they’ve hit a third.”
That phrase can be largely applied to the entire manosphere. These people were born to privilege and were able to get away with consuming entertainment their whole lives, without having to amount to anything. So, when their time came to go out into the world they found their skills lacking, in nearly every field.
Of course, rather than questioning their life choices and trying to improve themselves, they just stuck with blaming everyone else. Especially those women and POC who stole their dreams of financial stability and a hot, subservient wife.
@Buttercup Skullpants
Nice read. It’s certainly not incidental that many of the forms of entertainment these people watch hinge upon that premise: no matter how good or exceptional women or POC are, the White man is always supposed to rule over them.
Plenty of shows and anime, in particular, sell that concept over and over again. Lonely guy, living by himself, finally settles with hot girlfriend who happens to be an alien/super robot/super heroine/inter dimensional being/goddess/demon/etc etc ad infinity, and who also happens to be entirely into him and subservient.
The message is etched into their minds: no matter how bad they are or how good she is, she’s still supposed to be subservient.
@StaceySmartyPants: Here’s your welcome package! Enjoy!
Ok link fail… I’ll just copypaste the url in here then and hope that works better: https://artistryforfeminismandkittens.wordpress.com/the-official-man-boobz-complimentary-welcome-package/
@Diego Duarte
It is a common misconception that peterson’s comments need to be taken in the context of the rest of his work. You can learn every word he’s ever said or written and be able to repeat it on demand, but you still won’t have the right context, which is that you must accept peterson as your lord and savior. Once you’ve done that, you’ll understand his sayings.
Dvärghundspossen
And the worst part of it is that Peterson’s rants are 10,000 worse when put into proper context. Take his “enforced monogamy” bullshit.
By itself, the concept of enforced monogamy is problematic, but it could be interpreted in many different ways (each one still as problematic as the next).
But put that “enforced monogamy” in the context of expressing his support for a group that want to enslave women and reduce them to the status of property, and it immediately becomes a dumpster fire. Worse yet, throw in the fact that he called for enforced monogamy in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, and in support of people going ER and it becomes entirely indefensible.
Peterson himself is aware of this and that is why he always engages in platitudes or vague statements. He throws out random general statements, which by themselves might be entirely true, but he always does it in a context that implies that the societal differences between men and women are biological, instead of cultural.
So that forces the other person to either try to refute his earlier statement, making them seem unhinged and overly emotional, or to try to decrypt whatever the fuck he’s trying to say, at which point he’ll complain he’s being misrepresented.
Personally, I think these people know full well Peterson is full of shit. They just hang on to him for dear life because they know they can quickly deflect. This is a sort of reactionary movement they can sell to everyone, as opposed to Nazism, which is too blatant to be palatable to most people.