I tried to be a submissive wife.
Please don’t laugh, especially those of you who know me in real life. I’m not joking for once. There was a brief period in my life when I I really, truly, actually did attempt to follow the advice of misogynists and anti-feminists everywhere and let my husband control everything.
It came during the early 1990’s, at the beginning of what I like to think of as the Lost Decade. My husband had been laid off and couldn’t find another job, my mother was clearly descending into the long, dark night of dementia, and my aunt could not (or would not) accept that I couldn’t just leave my job, house, and husband to come to Pittsburgh to tend to Mum. That our mortgage was underwater, that my job as a legal secretary was paying almost all the bills, that our marriage was in serious trouble...I loved my aunt dearly, but she had never married or had a serious relationship in her life, and she simply would not have understood how my entire personal life was one inch from collapsing completely.
As for how Wingding and I had come to such a pass, less than a decade after we’d married on a gorgeous spring evening, it’s hard to say. Part of it was incompatability, part of it different expectations and backgrounds. Secretiveness, untruths, infidelity (him)...anger, mistrust, jealousy (me)...oh, it was a deadly brew we mixed between the two of us, and as much as I’d like to blame him, I can’t. I might have lashed out in reaction to his behavior, but that doesn’t excuse some of what I said and I did. He was not a good husband but I was not a good wife, and it’s just as well that we finally did split for good.
As bad as things had gotten, however, I was stunned when he told me one night that he was on the verge of leaving me and going home to his parents without so much as a word of warning or a note of explanation. Only his mother’s desperate pleas that this was wrong, that he could not treat me this way and remain her son, had changed his mind. “I can’t take the way you scream at me,” he said. “You’re out of control.”
He wasn’t wrong. I was angry. I did yell at him. I had said cruel, bitter things. But with very few exceptions the rage, the shouts, the nastiness were in reaction to something he’d done or said; lying about where he was, whom he’d seen, why he’d gone somewhere he wasn’t supposed to or spent money we didn’t have.
I hated that he lied. Even more, though, I hated the person I was becoming, who used words as weapons and was constantly, constantly angry. I wanted us to be happy again, to have a calm and welcoming home. I wanted him to love me, because I still loved him.
And so, like the fool I was, I told him that I would no longer question where he went or what he did. He was the man, the head of the household, and decisions about our lives were his to make. I would not question, I would not object, and most of all, I would not scream. We would have a traditional marriage (even though I was the one who worked while he played online games) where he would be in charge (even though he was a terrible money manager) and I would do as he said, no matter what.
He smiled, handed me a Kleenex, and let me cry on his shoulder. And then, after a dinner neither of us particularly wanted, we went to bed, silent as strangers, never once touching even though he’d gotten what he wanted.
I don’t think either of us slept much that night.
The submissive part of the experiment only lasted a couple of years — my attorney wouldn’t allow me to do what Wingding wanted or expected after my mother passed a couple of years later, for which I will be eternally grateful — and by the time we’d moved to the Last Homely Shack things had once again deteriorated. We tried counseling (which consisted mainly of him complaining about me and not giving an inch), I floated the idea of having a baby (“You’re not stable enough, I can’t trust you”), and he found refuge in a group that met on weekends (nice people, but it was crystal clear that I was not welcome). At best we’d achieved an uneasy truce...and then he met Secunda, and that, as they say, was that.
The worst of it was that being submissive hadn’t even worked when I did what I was told, deferred to him in virtually everything, and let him control the money. Wingding still treated me poorly, still lied, still cheated, and still spent whatever he pleased even when we were on the verge of foreclosure. All the happy housewife guides in the world that assured me that “letting him be the man of the house” would lead to happiness had been wrong. If anything, I was in worse shape, because I’d stopped writing, given up on a career change that would have been perfect for me, had lost the respect of several people I dearly loved, and was so emotionally drained I could barely get out of bed in the morning.
In short, it wasn’t worth it. Not in any way, shape, or form.
My experience with “letting my husband be the man of the house” may or may not be typical; we’re all individuals, and what works for some people will not work for others. Letting the man take the lead in all things certainly did not work for me, and I’ll bear the emotional scars to my grave. At the same time, there are those who swear that it works, works well, and not only should be an option, but should be the option for everyone if society is to survive and humanity to advance. “The old ways are the best ways. We need to return to the traditional lifestyle,” they cry, and dismiss all criticism as whining by discontented feminists who only wish to be men.
It’s only coincidence that the majority of these fine folk are themselves men, of course. Women are too clouded by emotion and resentment and envy of what they can never be to be allowed to be in charge, or even to share the power and responsibility of leadership. So says history, and tradition, and all examples to the contrary are mere chaos or myth.
Tonight I bring you a book by a learned, articulate, and very persuasive professor who argues that we need to return to the ancient order of things to heal a broken world and restore all that is good and right. That his golden words have been seized upon by forces that seemingly are neither good nor right is mere coincidence. He is an expert, with a weighty tome, a popular book, and centuries of tradition backing him up, and woe to any who oppose him:
12 Rules for Life, by Jordan B. Peterson — Like so many of the authors discussed in these diaries, little about Jordan B. Peterson’s background would indicate that someday he might write a Book So Bad It’s Good. A Canadian clinical psychologist with an impressive CV, he’s alternated between teaching and a small psychology practice for decades. Happily married, with two children and a spotless personal life, his only previous work is the sort of dense, weighty book that can make a reputation while breaking the back of any student unfortunate enough to be forced to tote it to and from class.
Nor does Peterson’s bestselling 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos necessarily seem like a worldchanging manifesto. Much of it is composed of banalities like “Clean your room,” “Stand up straight with your shoulders back,” and “Sort yourself out, bucko,” all discussed to a fare thee well in pithy if somewhat overwritten prose. Good posture is something mothers have urged upon their children for decades, if not centuries, and is there a parent who hasn’t despaired about Junior or Janey’s poor housekeeping? In many ways it’s a very ordinary self-help book, just like all the others that urge discipline and correct living upon the bewildered young.
The problem with Jordan Peterson isn’t necessarily his teaching, or his family, or his academic work. It’s not even that he’s written a self-help manual. It’s that somehow, some way, this intense, articulate, slightly old fashioned man has become a role model for the Very Angry Young White Men who populate the ranks of the alt right.
How this happened isn’t immediately clear. Peterson, born and raised near Edmonton, was a voracious reader who developed a fascination with mid-century anti-Communist writing about the time he hit puberty, including Ayn Rand, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell. He was particularly struck by the horrors described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, to the point that he was plagued by apocalyptic nightmares about nuclear attacks by the time he was in university.
One might think that this would lead him to join the nuclear disarmament movement, but Peterson was more interested in how the arms race could have happened in the first place. Soon he was plowing through the collected works of Carl Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and (of course) Solzhenitsyn in an attempt to determine the origins of the human capacity for destruction. Soon he’d become a clinical psychologist, and by the early 1990’s he was teaching psychology at Harvard while running studies on drug-fueled aggression. He also maintained a small psychology practice on the side, which he continued after he returned to Canada to accept an appointment at the University of Toronto.
This should have been enough to keep anyone busy, but not Dr. Peterson. He wrote or co-wrote over a hundred academic papers, supervised doctoral theses, and raised two children with his wife, Tammy Roberts. And in whatever time he could spare, he worked on his magnum opus, book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief.
This massive book (over 600 pages), which took over a decade to write, draws upon mythology, literature, philosophy, religion, Jungian psychology, and cutting edge medical studies about brain function to set forth a complete theory about how humans construct belief systems and narratives. And not just any belief system, oh no. Peterson, who’d been obsessed by the question of how and why humans are moved to acts of collective evil most of his life, attempted to solve not just the problem of evil. He hoped to explain why individuals develop the intellectual and psychological justification to participate in mass atrocities such as genocide, concentration camps, and ethnic cleansing, then propose ways for humanity to evolve toward a universal system of morality that would prevent such horrors in the future.
This is a worthy goal, especially in times like these. So how did Peterson himself become the darling of the exact sort of Very Angry Young Men who participated in the very sort of mass movements that led to the sort of evils that had given him nightmares?
Part of it is Peterson, who is both widely and deeply read, draws heavily on the work of pioneering psychologist Carl Jung in formulating his theories. Jung, a one-time friend of Sigmund Freud who broke with him over dream theory, believed strongly that myths, religious systems, and popular stories all drew upon universal archetypes: wise kings, callow youths, nurturing mothers, noble warriors, virginal tomboys who yielded to masterful lovers, and so on. His work influenced a huge number of early twentieth century thinkers, artists, and writers, including poet/mystagogue W.B. Yeats, Inkling member Charles Williams, proto-fascist ideologues Julius Evola and Rene Guenon, folklore specialists Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell, and fringe religious figures such as Rudolf Steiner.
That there is not a scrap of clinical evidence that any of Jung’s theories are correct does not seem to have factored into Peterson’s work. Nor does he seemingly care that a shocking number of Jung’s mid-century followers themselves adhered to the sort of poisonous belief systems.that led straight to the death camps (including Jung himself, who rhapsodized about Aryan perfection and was not overly fond of Jews). Peterson is firmly convinced that if we only think correctly and construct the right sort of belief system, humanity will be saved from itself.
As for just what this nirvana will look like…one must turn not to Jordan Peterson’s academic work, or even his bestseller. The place to learn exactly why Jordan Peterson thinks “compassion is a vice” and urges seekers to “toughen up, you weasel[s]” is that wonder of the modern age, YouTube.
That’s right. Jordan B. Peterson, possessed of academic degrees, clinical experience, and that most valuable of things, tenure, has become a public intellectual thanks to the same platform that inflicted the likes of PewDiePie, cute cat videos, and Rickrolling on a weary world.
Yes. Really.
The apotheosis of Dr. Peterson began in 2013 when he starting uploading his academic lectures to his own channel. A podcast of his discussions with the likes of Camille Paglia followed in 2016, and by the spring of this year he had over a million followers and had garnered nearly 50 million individual views of crowd pleasers like “Personality and Its Transformations.” He’s recorded a series of live lectures on the archetypes underpinning the Bible, continued to upload his academic sessions, and supplements his teaching income from royalties from 12 Rules and a Patreon that nets him a cool $14,000 every month in exchange for special content. He’s gone from comfortable mid-range scholar to celebrity pundit, and he’s made it look easy.
In and of itself, this is not a problem. Every generation has a public intellectual or two, from Vannevar Bush to Camille Paglia, and in many ways Peterson is no worse than average. He’s certainly less irritating than Paglia, who blithely anointed George Lucas a great visual artist without realizing that the visual look of his films is largely cribbed from old Frank R. Paul and Hannes Bok illustrations. And despite a somewhat old fashioned vocabulary, Peterson isn’t nearly as pompous as William F. Buckley. He’s an engaging, fluid speaker, and it’s not hard to see why he’s become so popular.
No, the issue is not Peterson’s success as a lecturer, author, and YouTube star. It’s his ideas on gender, academia, and what he decries as “political correctness.” And despite his thorough grounding in Jungian psychology and what Italian philosopher/fascist/mystague Julius Evola would call “Tradition,” Peterson seems not simply bewildered but personally offended that anyone could find grounds for disagreement with him.
I mean, seriously. Just because he came out against a recent Canadian law that would have added gender identity to the list of protected classes under the Dominion’s human rights laws doesn’t mean he’s a bigot! He doesn’t want to be forced by angry transgendered advocates who are unaware of stereo archetypes to address them by their preferred pronoun, or use hideous neologisms like “zhe” instead of “he,” nothing more. “I will never use words I hate,” he proclaimed, adding that such terms were “at the vanguard of a post-modern, radical lefist ideology I detest,” then went on to boast that such well-meaning but ultimately dangerous ideas would make him “a puppet of the radical left” and its “anti-human ideas” while steering humanity straight toward the “murderous ideology” of Marxism. Just how what Miss Manners would call “politeness” leads to puppetry and murderousness...well, I guess you have to be a Jungian psychology to figure that out.
And why would anyone object to Peterson’s distaste for term “white privilege”? “It’s racist in the extreme,” part and parcel with the horror that is “identity politics” promulgate by those horrible tweedy types who secretly hate the poor. The same goes for “cultural appropriation” and neo-Marxist nonsense like gender/women’s/ethnic/racial studies and any academic discipline corrupted by this claptrap, like sociology, anthropology, and English literature (?). These are unscientific, fraudulent, ideologically-based ways that Marxists poison the minds, and never you mind that the only evidence for Tradition and archetypes is several century-old books written by people with very questionable attitudes toward anyone who wasn’t a white European male of the heterosexual persuasion.
All this, mind, is in addition to his referring to feminists as “rabid harpies,” which actually isn’t a vile insult but a clear references to the nasty, smelly, vicious bird-women of Greco-Roman myth. “Boys’ interests tilt towards things” and “girls’ interests tilt toward people” thanks to biological factors, and if you don’t believe him, well, just look at the corpus of Western literature and history. Men who are tough, manly, and dominant are the gold standard from Homer on down (even Achilles ultimately spurned Patroclus in favor of Briseis, you know), and Angry Young White Men need to keep this in mind when their girlfriends are foolish enough to disagree.
As for modern politics, well, Peterson might live in Canada but he’s no fan of Justin Trudeau. “I’m afraid that our Prime Miniser is only capable of running his ideas on a few very narrow ideological tracks,” he told the anchor on Fox & Friends, while elsewhere he’s warned that far-right politicians in Europe and America are inevitable when “men are pushed too hard to feminize.” Even though he’s pushed his own female clients to be more assertive in their personal lives, he ultimately thinks that men are men (bold, strong, dominant leaders), women are women (agreeable, nurturing, and somewhat passive), and society is happier, healthier, and overall better if everyone keeps this in mind.
And oh, in case you were curious? He hates Social Justice Warriors and others who have “an excess of compassion,” comparing them to Ursula, the villain from The Little Mermaid, for reasons that remain obscure.
Anyone who wishes to know more should check out Dr. Peterson’s YouTube channel. It’s less dense than his academic book, less expensive than 12 Rules, and Peterson himself bears a fascinating resemblance to a younger version of the late, great Sir Christopher Lee. All the hip young dudebros with their tiki torches and clean white polo shirts are doing it, so have fun, and remember: clean your room, you weasel!
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Have you ever heard of Jordan B. Peterson? Read one of his books? Flirted with Jungism? Watched Bill Moyers’ conversations with Joseph Campbell or tried to read The Masks of God? Confession is nearly as good for the soul as cleaning one’s room, so come and share….
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