What parts of feminist theory again? Sorry if I'm asking you to repeat. Having blasted through that godawful interview I'm mostly zeroed in on the hostility towards Equality of Outcome(loosely). This is interesting to me as a man who's been in pink collar for the last dozen years.
I can't really answer - I know just enough about feminist theory to know Peterson is misrepresenting it, without knowing enough to know what the details are.
The thing about equality of outcome vs. equality of opportunity is mostly a canard. Extremely disparate outcomes make opportunity for the next generation distribute highly unequally, and obviously many things having little to do with "merit" as normally defined play a major role in outcome. He sets up a strawman when he says that leftists want entirely identical outcomes. Most Western leftists simply want far lower inequality than today; basically a large reduction in the
Gini coefficient - but not all the way to 0.
But Peterson's "sorting yourself out" amounts to an assertion of traditional, even patriarchal masculinity, under the assumption that this is something which is both necessary and which contemporary norms are failing ("failing") to instill in young men. The methods may be those of gradual, individualistic self-improvement, but they're drawn up within a framework of culture-war.
At the very least, that is how Peterson himself has chosen to locate those methods with his public and social media presence, and how they will inevitably be interpreted as a result. Perhaps if book was discovered by somebody with no further exposure to Peterson or to Peterson enthusiasts, they may take it all at face value, as an instruction to sit up straight and eat their greens- but by that token, Animal Farm is just a story about talking pigs.
No major argument with you there. Peterson does push for masculinity in a way that is more nuanced than the usual chest-thumping approach, but he certainly is still leading a defense of a concept that is causing major problems.
I just think that arguing that Peterson for men blaming the world for their problems is similar to blaming Chomsky if someone becomes a Stalinist. It's perfectly possible to take his passages critical of capitalism, ignore his explicit condemnation of Soviet-style communism in general and Stalin in particular, and use him as an inspiration to become a Stalinist. A person would be on firmer ground than I believe you are here by blaming Chomsky for inspiring the Venezuelan government to wreck the country - he not only inspired some of Chavez's thinking but was supportive of his government throughout the 2000s. That's the sort of argument Peterson would make against leftism, and I think it's specious.
One can be polite and be a BSer. In fact the brilliant Sarah Kendzior has argued that being polite and well-mannered serves that end extraordinarily well. We're used to blowhardy and loudmouthed liars and squirrels. We can spot them a mile away. But the calm liar is granted far more trust. People are loathe to see the person who appears calm, reasonable, and intelligent as anything other than those things.
I'll put it this way - if you've consumed hours of content one has created, and you don't know their stance on a fairly basic question of the thing they're generally known for talking about, that is a sign that the person is up to something, is not being straight with the audience for a reason. And the reason is most certainly not to the audience's benefit.
About politeness - certainly true. To give the worst case of this I know of, Jared Taylor is a very polite and civil white nationalist whose discussions usually go about the way they do in
this awesome Contrapoints video. Politeness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a good discussion. My estimate of the odds that a discussion can even happen with Peterson in which he is forced to admit his ignorance of real opposing arguments are higher than they are for the vast majority of people who take sides on any culture war issue, but I'm not going to say they're high.
I think "squirrelly" was not the right word to describe his question-answering behavior. He doesn't appear to evade giving straight answers to hard questions at all - rather he seems to really believe that his own strawmen are accurate, and no discussion I've seen with him got into the details enough to show how he's misrepresenting leftist arguments. I'm virtually certain he would at least try to give non-evasive answers if someone did this. I've also never seen a discussion where someone tried to figure out to what extent he thinks that gender differences in outcomes (e.g. the wage gap or male-female ratios in various fields) are down to inherent biological differences vs. social conditions, or how far we should go towards inducing societies to be more equal than they currently are, and so on.
^_^
