Yesterday on Twitter, Jordan Peterson had something of a “we hunted the mammoth to feed you” moment, demanding a little “gratitude” on behalf of the men who do the hard and sometimes dangerous construction jobs that we effete Twitter-readers allegedly refuse to do.
A little gratitude, eh? For whom? For the actual people who do the hard but necessary work to keep our society going — a group that clearly includes women along with men. (Do, say, nurses somehow not count as civilization-maintainers?)
Or are we supposed to give our gratitude to, well, all men, just because they share a gender with so many of those constructing high-rises?
Either way, the “protected and privileged” Peterson, who has turned an assortment of grievances into a surprisingly lucrative career as a social critic and advice author who doesn’t follow any of his own advice, is an odd candidate for working-class hero. As some of those responding to his little tweetstorm pointed out.
Some took on his blinkered misogyny:
Others mocked Peterson’s patronizing solemnity:
Still others asked Peterson the pointed question: What exactly have you done for people working these dangerous but necessary jobs?
Matumos has got a point, big man. What are you going to do about it?
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I’m shocked he didn’t bring up coal miners. These “men do all the work to hold up civilization” rants are not complete without an ode to coal miners.
I love the forklift certified comment.
Anyway, I’m new to the blue collar career, but when I took part in a big shutdown job, there were plenty of women running around. Do they get a big thank you too?
@ weirwoodtreehugger
Hmmmm… those same coal miners that unionized against basically capitalism in general? I was under the impression a lot of these keyboard warriors ranting like Peterson didn’t like anyone criticizing the system.
Speaking of such things, I was surprised when I switched careers and found out a lot of blue collar workers in the trades tend to vote Democrat.* Turns out in spite of people like Cawthorn talking about attracting them as voters, the Conservative policy of “support big business, screw the little guy” hasn’t made them popular in the unions.
*Speaking about the US anyway.
Says the man who believe everything is due to him.
If we can convert the energy of this kind of projection in exploitable energy, we would not need oil and nuclear power anymore…
Men: the necessary sex.
Women: the frivolous sex.
Frances Perkins (1880-1965) was shocked by conditions in which members of the working class labored. And she did something about those conditions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Perkins
My friend’s 20-something daughter just got her forklift certification! And she was also “Employee of the Month”! We’re all excited for her.
Petersen goes out of his way to demonstrate how intelligence is not inherently virtuous. The man clearly has a lot of brains, and yet we get to hear about all of this shite. I suspect he may be somewhat cynically monetizing a particular point of view, but he wouldn’t do it so effectively if he didn’t mostly believe it.
Most of us (I believe) who share Petersen’s academic discipline are cringing in vicarious embarrassment and hoping that those in the general public are not using him to draw conclusions about the field as a whole. Sadly, he’s pretty loud and I don’t have high hopes…
I think he’s forgetting that new humans are built inside the bodies of other humans and that the decanting of new humans has caused much misery and death. Also, men have fought hard to keep women out of traditionally male blue-collar jobs.
@Kat
I’m going to have to remember that! 😀 UAW is my union, can’t ask for a better role model!
Don’t look now, but the Rethugs are pushing American society closer to some sort of genocidal atrocity again:
https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/groomer-speech/
https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/fox-news/
https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/republicans-enemies-pedophiles-stochastic-terrorism/
[CW: mention of child sexual abuse; genocide]
How does he know people aren’t grateful? Seems awfully convenient to not ask that people be compensated justly for their hard and necessary work and instead go, “Everyone needs to be grateful and not take these things for granted, except me, because I am currently the only person being grateful and not taking things for granted.”
@KatInBoots
I’ve drawn the conclusion that the field of “pretending to be really smart and expecting people to buy it” has very little to do with academic discipline.
@LouCPurr
There’s probably a justification for why constructing new people is different. Maybe reproduction is animalistic and natural but production is civilized and praiseworthy?
Yeah, the obvious points largely got addressed by Twitter: The blatant hypocrisy of someone with his privileged position who is in league with those who want to attack the working class and their needs, the implicit misogyny (and also to some extent transphobia and homophobia and racism etc., because his right-wing views have negative consequences for those people in those fields who are not white or not straight), the emblematic way he strawmans his opponents when in fact applauding and lionizing workers is a pretty common thing for the left, etc.
But it’s also telling how Peterson nakedly embraces identity politics. When there’s a group that does something he likes and identifies with, no matter how little he actually understands them or defends their interests in general, he’s happy to use them as ideological shields. When other people do that, he rightly upbraids them for reasoning in that way, thinking in terms of people as groups rather than individuals, etc. Personal responsibility is a weapon for conservatives. And, of course, he’ll never identify the deeply anti-working class bent of the people he rubs shoulders with! Nope. Again, personal responsibility is for the poors.
Of course, society also needs women who are willing to have children and be good parents, and people who serve food, and farmers, and countless other groups he doesn’t mention because of his fetishes, many of whom are disproportionately female.
And I’m having a flashback to one of my favourite Kipling poems, “The Sons of Martha”, which is basically an ode to those who toil to keep infrastructure and civilization running so that everybody else, “The Sons of Mary”, can go blithely about their way not having to worry about just how fragile their lifestyle actually is.
Kipling at least didn’t have the explicit misogynistic double-standard (implicit, sure, but he only talked about the sons on both sides of the divide, so it’s not as if he was actively saying the daughters were all on one side). And the Bible verse he was referencing was explicitly about Martha keeping the household running, allowing Mary to sit adoringly and listen to Jesus. Not that Martha was particularly happy about being left to do all the work.
(I was an engineering student in Canada, where Kipling was asked to write a graduation ritual. Needless to say, that poem is reasonably well known in that context.)
I love the replies. So on-point. Particularly “crypto-zoo”. And Darci, who doesn’t exist? And the description given by the guy who shook Peterson’s hand. I’m an XX woman who never does manual labor who just shook her own hand, and even mine isn’t that soft.
Also I support unions, so that the people of any gender who do the hard physical labor have access to healthcare when they get hurt, and pensions that will support them after they retire due to being worn out.
Meanwhile, my sister in law who runs a riding school/boarding stable (with her husband) would laugh in his face. Try getting running water into a rural area, clearing the land, building all the structures, taking care of horses (large, somewhat fragile animals) in temperatures from the 90s in summer to -10 in winter, and let’s not forget the literal horseshit (as opposed to Jordy’s verbal). She could probably hoist him over her shoulder and throw him out of the barn.
And even Joe Rogan didn’t believe that cider thing!
@Big Titty Demon
I’m glad you enjoyed that quote. Here’s the part I left out (in bold):
And here’s a picture of the woman herself, Frances Perkins, my hero since I was about ten years old. She was a factory inspector at the time of this photo (1911):
When I first went to Hong Kong in the 1970s it was in the middle of a construction boom. All the hardest and crappiest jobs- i.e. hauling bricks up several storeys of bamboo scaffolding- were done by women, because men had monopolized the easier, more skilled, and higher paid jobs.
Saw a Peterson post where his argument was women who were 19 years old were too young and ignorant to make a decision about whether they wanted to have babies eventually, so men like Peterson should make the decision for them that they should become mothers at that age.
And then you’ve got people like traveling livestock shearers Katie and Darian McRose (warning for sheep being womanhandled):
@FMOx: I know someone who used to be in Dykes on Bikes. Jordy could never hope to have the strength of those women.
And why is it that every time guys like this wax so rhapsodic about Real Manly Men, they sound gayer than the queer men they so hate, and swoonier than the romance novels they also hate (cuz girl cooties)?
I have such a big impulse to somehow force Peterson to check to see if a cow is pregnant. I’ve had to check that since I was like 11. I want to see how tough of a man he is when he’s up to the shoulder inside a cow’s asshole.
@GSS: Because when you’re used to your feelings being taken as serious, sober, and inspiring when you talk, you never need to do any of the work to process it or alloy it.
@Fred: True, and they’re also jealous and insecure (As well as scoundrels and skunks).
@Elaine: I don’t want to see that, but I do want to hear about it if he tries. I bet milkmaids did that for centuries without complaining, along with all that heavy pail of milk carrying.
@GSS ex-noob:
@Elaine: I don’t want to see that, but I do want to hear about it if he tries. I bet milkmaids did that for centuries without complaining, along with all that heavy pail of milk carrying.
Psst—milkmaids also routinely got vaccinated, leading to the very etymology of the word—although that was an accidental occupational perk. (Or sometimes not so accidental: consider Onesimus, enslaved by Cotton Mather, who pointed out to his master that inoculations against smallpox were an established practice in the Old Country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onesimus_(Bostonian)
@ Full Metal Ox
Jenner obviously made an important contribution to immunology (even though they’d been inoculating people in India for ages). However I think we should also acknowledge the contribution of Blossom the Cow. She’s the one who actually produced the vaccine after all.
https://www.rcpath.org/uploads/assets/73a2a525-c5de-4de4-993cb77470582552/26-Blossom-The-Cow.pdf
She is immortalised now at St Georges Medical School at the University of London.
I don’t have a problem with them exhibiting her hide as they also have the stuffed body of Jeremy Bentham. So it appears to be how they pay respect to people.
@Elaine The Witch,
Or try to help an unwilling cow give birth. Animals that size aren’t easy to control when they don’t wanna do something.
There was an incident a few years ago in my hometown where one of the dairy farmers had his father and brother helping out with the calving (farmer had an injury that kept him from doing it himself). Everything was going okay until one cow decided she didn’t want those filthy ape paws on her junk anymore and made her wishes known by squishing the father against the stall wall and made the brother into a mattress. This was despite the fact that it was far from her first calving and that these were humans she knew fairly well. For unknown reasons she just didn’t want the help that day.
From the humans’ point of view things turned out okay. The worst injury was (I think) a collapsed lung on the brother, who got Lifelined to an Indianapolis hospital for treatment. Otherwise it was mostly bruises and a sore body for the next several days. From the cows’ point of view, not so good. The farmer, understandably upset by his family’s injuries, grabbed a gun and shot her. The calf she birthed was given to another cow to raise, so it was taken care of at least.
Mixed ending, depending on how you see that situation.