Jordan Peterson

[Valka D'Ur]

Allowed them to feel justification for hateful views towards others?

Obviously, but I'd like @Mouthwash to explain what Jordan Peterson has said or done that has benefited me. How has my life become better because this misogynist has been spouting his garbage all over the place?

 

[Mouthwash]

"Gender is a lie" is, I take it, a caricature of contemporary queer theory. Butler et al.

It's not a caricature.

"Womyn power" is similarly a caricature of a certain strand radical feminism. Dworkin et al. But the thing is, these two groups do not get along, at all. They start from incompatible assumptions and arrive at very different conclusions. Further, each branch of the feminist tradition contains often-contradictory currents. Some queer theorists interpret "gender is a lie" as a call to the abolition of gender identity, while others takes it as an invitation to a multiplicity of gender identities. Some radical feminists take "women's liberation" to be a liberation of women from womanhood (traditionally defined), while others take it as the liberation of womanhood, of femininity, from patriarchal constraints. And there are, of course, a thousand other shades between and on either side.

The weird thing is, it would have been easy to get away this, because there are a lot of currents in modern feminism which are not compatible on close examination, and a lot of people don't engage with these contradictions in a lot of depth. A lot of the discussion around trans issues takes gender to be innate, while a lot of the discussion around genderqueer identities takes it to be voluntaristic, and a lot of people will employ, as you say, some pretty heady doublethink to avoid confronting this apparent inconsistency. All of this compounded by liberal feminists who take any of it terribly seriously, but have borrowed certain vocabulary or reference points from more radical currents because it is very important to appear woke af. (See: the 2016 Clinton campaign.)

That's pretty much what I mean. All Peterson has done is not join in the crusade.

But instead, you're lumping divergent and often deeply acrimonious currents in together as if they were the same thing, because all you can see is what they aren't, that they're opposed to a conservative patriarchal social structure. You're not interested in the content of their ideas or practice, and I'm going to frankly suggest that you don't have the first clue as to the differences anyway, you're only interested in what they represent to you, in the role they fill in the narrative you've built. The same way that an anti-Communist can look at Stalinists, Trotskyists and Eurocommies, even at milder-than-milk social democrats, and say "yes, these are all exactly the same thing", because what matters to him isn't what they do or say or think, but that they're on the other side.

You're getting all this from my use of the word 'bandwagon?' I'm perfectly aware of the difference, I'm just noting that disparaging either one is now grounds for expulsion from polite society.

I didn't pick up this point just to be a pedant- "um, well, actually, Rühle was associated with the Allgemeine Arbeiter-Union Einheitsorganisation, not the Allgemeine Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands"- but because the failure to recognise these fundamental and longstanding division within the feminist tradition reflects a basic misapprehension underlying your argument, that feminism is something external into the culture that has been introduced as a deliberate and foreign influence, a coherent "bandwagon" driven by a definite political will, but the reality is, feminism is the culture, or at least a part of it, however people happen to feel about the f-word itself, that certain key assumptions of Western culture are by any definition "feminist ones". The discussion is about what feminism looks like, about what these assumptions imply for how the world looks and how the world should look, not whether feminism was a good idea at all. Those choosing to raise this latter argument, far from the defenders of convention are making an active choice to reject it, to stay behind in a half-imagined past while the world moves passed them- or even, as often as not, the world stays perfectly still and they move further away.

And you've now gone from "Mouthwash thinks all feminism is the same thing" to "Mouthwash wants to save Western civilization from feminism." Who exactly do you think you're arguing with?

I agree totally that feminist ideas (well, most of them) are authentic developments of the Western liberal tradition, which presumably was derived from Western culture*. What I have a problem with is liberalism tearing apart unconsciously rooted social structures, communities, and beliefs that don't follow its logic to the last extreme.

*Unlike Dr. Peterson, I don't have a high opinion of 'Western civilization.'

What has he actually done for people?

Obviously, but I'd like @Mouthwash to explain what Jordan Peterson has said or done that has benefited me. How has my life become better because this misogynist has been spouting his garbage all over the place?

These are two rather separate questions.

Peterson is helping young men and women who are frustrated, angry, miserable, etc find some sort of grounding. A lot of what he says is common sense to me, but it's actually reaching people... and better him than professors who apply words like 'privilege' to entire groups of people to explain the problems of others.

As for what he's done specifically for you, well, I don't think you're exactly the target audience. IIRC you've said that you aren't interested in a relationship or a career, and you're older.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

As for what he's done specifically for you, well, I don't think you're exactly the target audience. IIRC you've said that you aren't interested in a relationship or a career, and you're older.

When did I say I wasn't interested in a career?

 

[Mouthwash]

I'm not sure. It's just something I seem to recall. Is it wrong?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I'm not sure. It's just something I seem to recall. Is it wrong?

I have mentioned that I discovered early on (in my first year) in college that I really didn't want to continue in the B.Ed. program because my first-year practicum taught me that I wouldn't have been comfortable spending 7 hours/day, 5 days/week, 200 days/year in the company of 30-35 kids.

That's not to say that I don't enjoy teaching; I did teach music for awhile. But that's on a one-to-one basis, in a quiet environment.

(Well, usually; there was one weird day that happened when my typing business and music lessons collided; the mother of my student was understandably confused when a cop showed up and asked to speak to me - she didn't know that he was there to pick up his wife's term paper that I'd typed the previous night.)

 

[aelf]

You're getting all this from my use of the word 'bandwagon?' I'm perfectly aware of the difference, I'm just noting that disparaging either one is now grounds for expulsion from polite society.

This is untrue. Much of "polite society" is still unapologetically male-dominated.

The alt-right does have a love affair with lies like this.

 

[Mouthwash]

This is untrue. Much of "polite society" is still unapologetically male-dominated.

Dominated by males who think Hillary Clinton is a role model for their daughters.

The alt-right does have a love affair with lies like this.

I've been caught!

 

[Traitorfish]

It's not a caricature.

If you sincerely believe that "social construct" means the same thing as "lie" then I don't really have anything else I can say to you. We're speaking mutually incomprehensible dialects and I don't care to learn yours.

 

[Mouthwash]

Okay, it might be just a bit of a caricature. But only a tiny bit.

 

[Traitorfish]

It's a fundamental misrepresentation of the argument.

"Gender is a social construct" means that gender is something that people create and re-create through collective action, a set of practices and expectations that exists because and insofar as they are agreed upon, and are therefore open to revision and to renegotiation- have mostly likely been revised and renegotiated in the past, and will almost certainly be revised and renegotiated in the future.

"Gender is a lie" means that gender is a malicious fiction, a set of knowingly untrue claims which somebody has simply invented, which originates with a conscious and willing agent, a liar, which people do not actively participate in creating but merely accept and at most re-tell, and which can only be perpetuated or disproven.

These claims aren't merely contradictory at a fundamental level they're almost directly opposed.

 

[Mouthwash]

I meant "lie" to mean "falsehood." That isn't just a shorthand, it's a valid use of the word.

 

[Traitorfish]

I understand that "lie" and "falsehood" are synonyms, yes.

If you want to interpret the claim that gender is a social construct as a claim that gender is an error, an untrue thing that is widely perceived to be true, then the contrast I've drawn still stands, you just deleted the adjective "malicious". The implied dynamic is otherwise the same, that people have received this untruth, that they can either retell that untruth or dispute it, but they don't actually participate in it.

A social construct is all about participation. That's what the "social" part indicates. Gender isn't simply received from some ancient authority any more than it is simply discovered in nature, people are actively involved in the production and reproduction of the norms and categories and expectations underlying gender, and in doing so they are engaged in an extended process of negotiation and revision. That process may be more or less explicit, it may be more or less rapid, it may be more or less fundamental, but there's no point in human history where it simply isn't, and behind all the drama and pearl-clutching, "feminism" is just what we call that process of negotiation and revision when women make it explicit.

Framing gender as a lie or an error or even simply a fiction doesn't permit for any of that, which is why proponents of gender as a social construct don't frame it in those terms. It is and could only be a caricature.

 

[Mouthwash]

If you want to interpret the claim that gender is a social construct as a claim that gender is an error, an untrue thing that is widely perceived to be true, then the contrast I've drawn still stands, you just deleted the adjective "malicious". The implied dynamic is otherwise the same, that people have received this untruth, that they can either retell that untruth or dispute it, but they don't actually participate in it.

A social construct is all about participation. That's what the "social" part indicates. Gender isn't simply received from some ancient authority any more than it is simply discovered in nature, people are actively involved in the production and reproduction of the norms and categories and expectations underlying gender, and in doing so they are engaged in an extended process of negotiation and revision. That process may be more or less explicit, it may be more or less rapid, it may be more or less fundamental, but there's no point in human history where it simply isn't, and behind all the drama and pearl-clutching, "feminism" is just what we call that process of negotiation and revision when women make it explicit.

Name a single proponent of gender as a social construction who thinks that there is value in keeping our current one. Who thinks that people who violate the construction, or claim for themselves arbitrary genders/identities without any tie to biological circumstance ought to be so much as discouraged from doing so.

 

[sophie]

Name a single proponent of gender as a social construction who thinks that there is value in keeping our current one. Who thinks that people who violate the construction, or claim for themselves arbitrary genders/identities without tie to biological circumstance ought to be so much as discouraged from doing so.

 

[Synobun]

@Mouthwash: That's clever wording.

Ignoring your second criteria and only focusing on the first, I'm one of those.

 

[Mouthwash]

Like I said, there's a sort of doublethink going on in that many people who take pride in their gendered characteristics believe gender is entirely an identity. That's why my litmus test is, do you think there should be the slightest social expectation to conform?

@Mouthwash: That's clever wording.

Ignoring your second criteria and only focusing on the first, I'm one of those.

Don't have a clue what you're trying to say.

 

[Synobun]

Your second criteria makes the request self-defeating. "Show me someone who believes what you believe but utterly rejects it and discourages it" leads nowhere.

 

[Mouthwash]

Your second criteria makes the request self-defeating. "Show me someone who believes what you believe but utterly rejects it and discourages it" leads nowhere.

They aren't a contradiction at all. You can believe that a social construct has value despite being constructed, and suggesting that people should be encouraged to violate the construct is the same thing as rejecting the construct itself (consider how giving homosexuality equal social status required a rejection of 'heteronormativity').

 

[Traitorfish]

Name a single proponent of gender as a social construction who thinks that there is value in keeping our current one. Who thinks that people who violate the construction, or claim for themselves arbitrary genders/identities without any tie to biological circumstance ought to be so much as discouraged from doing so.

If I did, what would you do with that information?

What I think you want to do, correct me if I'm wrong, is claim that gender-as-social construct is a rationale for social and sexual deviancy, and only those already predisposed towards deviance or sympathetic to deviants would accept that gender is a social construct. But, that doesn't follow, any more than it follows that scientists reject Creationism in favour of the modern evolutionary synthesis because they really want to have a monkey for a grandad. Without elaboration, it's equally plausible that sympathy towards social or sexual deviance- or, in modern parlance, not being a dick to LGBT people- is the necessary conclusion of the observation that gender is a social construct.

If not, then- what?

 

[sophie]

If I did, what would you do with that information?

What I think you want to do, correct me if I'm wrong, is claim that gender-as-social construct is a rationale for social and sexual deviancy, and only those already predisposed towards deviance or sympathetic to deviants would accept that gender is a social construct. But, that doesn't follow, any more than it follows that scientists reject Creationism in favour of the modern evolutionary synthesis because they really want to have a monkey for a grandad. Without elaboration, it's equally plausible that sympathy towards social or sexual deviance- or, in modern parlance, not being a dick to LGBT people- is the necessary conclusion of the observation that gender is a social construct.

If not, then- what?

I mean this is a wonderful elaboration.

But put more elegantly: Girl Power