Jordan Peterson Event Report

[angrysoba]

Maybe that's not what it's supposed to mean. But it isn't just people who take affront who are interpreting it that way. There are also people who believe in the idea that being male is inherently toxic, and use "toxic masculinity" to mean that. You can say that they too are misinterpreting what "toxic masculinity" is supposed to mean, but they're part of the conversation whether we like it or not. So the group you refer to sees that group and reacts. And then everyone's angry and nobody is actually listening.

Sure, but there will always be people who think they understand something and do not. That is never going away. There are people on both sides of the argument on evolution by natural selection, both who affirm it and deny it, who actually have not got the first clue about it. There are people who think that evolution is essentially a Lamarckian process and will laugh at the Christian fundamentalist dip ***** who don't get it. In that case both are wrong, but that does not mean that evolution by natural selection is wrong, and to try to dispense with the idea on the basis that "everyone gets angry" is a non-starter.

As for "toxic masculinity", I remember an episode in which Sam Harris talked with an ex-neo-Nazi who said he and his (all-male) gang used to spend their weekends getting into a bit of fascism, getting drunk and beating up ethnic minorities. At the end of his interview, he took questions from the audience and one of them got up and asked Sam Harris about the idiotic idea of "toxic masculinity" to which Harris responded that if he had not just heard an hour and a half of very detailed examples of toxic masculinity then he did not know what to say.

Instead, it seems that people who want to deny the existence of it as a meaningful concept are those who like to argue "They are saying all masculinity is toxic!". I seem to remember that Peterson himself took this line when he criticized an APA report about what toxic masculinity is or at least the "risk factors" of being male. The Very Bad Wizards took this idea to task when they pointed out the report was made largely on the back of people complaining about a similar report that had been made for women and wondered, what about for men?

Here is Jorpy complaining about that, getting almost into a rage about it and then retorting with a bunch of non-sequiturs.



The report, from what I can see, is clearly saying that both harmful and positive aspects of masculinity exist:

Supporting the positive
It’s also important to encourage pro-social aspects of masculinity, says McDermott. In certain circumstances, traits like stoicism and self-sacrifice can be absolutely crucial, he says. But the same tough demeanor that might save a soldier’s life in a war zone can destroy it at home with a romantic partner or child.

“There are times when you need to be able to power through,” McDermott says. “But if you only do that, and you believe that if you don’t do that then you’re somehow less worthy as a person, that’s where you have a problem.”

The clinician’s role, McDermott says, can be to encourage men to discard the harmful ideologies of traditional masculinity (violence, sexism) and find flexibility in the potentially positive aspects (courage, leadership). He and his team are working on a positive-masculinities scale to capture peoples’ adherence to the pro-social traits expected from men, something that has yet to be measured systematically.

And again, for anyone who doubts that there is any "tradition" of violence or sexism in masculine behaviour, just look again at examples of neo-Nazi behaviour, gang culture, football hooliganism, general alcohol-fueled domestic violence etc...

 

[angrysoba]

Here is something that raised a red flag for me.

Peterson's endless references to Jung. Is Jung even taken seriously as a psychologist these days?

 

[TragicMonkey]

Here is something that raised a red flag for me.

Peterson's endless references to Jung. Is Jung even taken seriously as a psychologist these days?

The field of psychology isn't as Jung as it used to be.

 

[angrysoba]

The field of psychology isn't as Jung as it used to be.

I'm aFreud you're Reich.

 

[Carrot Flower King]

Here is something that raised a red flag for me.

Peterson's endless references to Jung. Is Jung even taken seriously as a psychologist these days?

Short answer: no.

See also Freud.

Their importance, such as it was, was to get the ball rolling and it has rolled a verey long way.

The only folk I knew who took Jung seriously, and even that was second-hand taking seriously, were HR types who worshipped at the altar of Myers-sodding-Briggs; clinical psychologists just laugh or hold their head in their hands and say, "Not that BS again!"

 

[angrysoba]

Short answer: no.

See also Freud.

Their importance, such as it was, was to get the ball rolling and it has rolled a verey long way.

The only folk I knew who took Jung seriously, and even that was second-hand taking seriously, were HR types who worshipped at the altar of Myers-sodding-Briggs; clinical psychologists just laugh or hold their head in their hands and say, "Not that BS again!"

Indeed. I assumed it was the case with most of these guys: Freud, Jung, Bettelheim, and I put Reich in there for a joke but really he was not that much different from the rest of them was he and at least he inspired a nice song by Kate Bush.

 

[Ziggurat]

Instead, it seems that people who want to deny the existence of it as a meaningful concept are those who like to argue "They are saying all masculinity is toxic!". I seem to remember that Peterson himself took this line when he criticized an APA report about what toxic masculinity is or at least the "risk factors" of being male.

First, here are the actual guidelines:
https://www.apa.org/about/policy/boys-men-practice-guidelines.pdf

Here's what Peterson had to say about the APA guidelines:

https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/pol...guidelines-for-the-treatment-of-boys-and-men/

You can read Peterson's criticisms yourself, see what you think, I won't go through it point by point. I will note that the APA guidelines define "masculinity ideology" rather oddly. They say:

"Although there are differences in masculinity ideologies, there is a particular constellation of standards that have held sway over large segments of the population, including: anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence."​

I'm not sure what "anti-femininity" is really supposed to mean, but the only really bad characteristic there is violence. If you make violence part of the definition, then yeah, "masculinity ideology" is a bad thing. But how prevalent is that ideology really? Elsewhere the guidelines refer to "traditional masculinity ideology", but there's no definition of how traditional masculinity ideology differs from non-traditional masculinity ideology. There seems to be an effort to tie violence to traditional masculinity, and that sets off alarm bells for me.

And here's where I will briefly touch on Peterson's criticism: violence among males is most prevalent among fatherless males. In fact, fatherlessness is an incredibly strong predictor of all sorts of behavioral pathologies, not just violence. But the APA guidelines don't even mention the effects of fatherlessness. There's a section encouraging males who ARE fathers to be engaged with their children (which is good), but nothing about the special needs of children who were deprived of a father figure. Peterson is right: that's a glaring omission.

There also seems to be a lot in the APA guidelines about privilege. And a lot of that stuff is absolute bull ****, which Peterson is also right about. The guidelines state,

When working with boys and men, psychologists can address issues of privilege and power related to sexism in a developmentally appropriate way to help them obtain the knowledge, attitudes, and skills to be effective allies and potentially live less restrictive lives.​

The goal of a psychologist shouldn't be to indoctrinate patients into becoming leftwing shills, which is basically what "allies" means when talking about "privilege".

Or take this one:

Psychologists can help clients develop awareness of systems that assume cisgender masculinity expression is the expected norm, and identify how they have been harmed by discrimination against those who are gender nonconforming.​

Sure, if you ARE gender-nonconforming, a therapist telling you that it's OK to be nonconforming may be helpful. And sure, you should be accepting of other people who are gender-nonconforming. But if you're a basically normal guy who is socially awkward and working a dead end job without much money, and you're depressed because you can't get a girlfriend because you're not attractive to women, being told that chicks don't dig you because they've accepted the patriarchy's standards of masculinity doesn't help. A victim mentality doesn't help. But that seems to be primarily what's on offer.

 

[dudalb]

He started out no believing it. But the problem for those peddling a line of bull droppings is that eventually they'll come to believe what they're peddling themselves.

That is what happened with L Ron Hubbard. He started Scientology as a scam, and but came to actually beleive the crap he was spouting.

 

[Norman Alexander]

That is what happened with L Ron Hubbard. He started Scientology as a scam, and but came to actually beleive the crap he was spouting.

Not quite. He always knew the whole thing was a scam. But he became more and more heavily belief-invested in the methodologies used to continue the scam. Because to admit they were a scam was to cut off the fat, tax-free financial supply line...and the playboy lifestyle to which he had become accustomed. So keep it up, make it bigger, louder, more cult-like. Until it is a whole big scammy business.

Ditto Jordan. He's got a well-paid gig going on spouting his brand of nonsense to dumb marks willing to pay to listen. Could be a demographic overlap with other conservatives. He is smart enough to keep "building his brand" by being "controversial" on various topics, just controversial enough to keep him in paying speaking gigs. Does he believe in what he says? Dunno, but it pays him well to spout it.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

@Ziggurat
I note that the most you had was some semantic games of pretending not to be able to read plain English in that APA guideline. Nor to be able to read what it actually says is the problem with those ideologies. Like apparently you can't read right the page before your quote saying:

demands have negative consequences on the individual or others
(for reviews, see Pleck, 1981, 1995). The negative effects of gender
role strain are mental and physical health problems for the individual
and within relationships (O’Neil, 2008, 2013; Pleck, 1995). Boys
and men experience gender role strain when they (a) deviate from
or violate gender role norms of masculinity, (b) try to meet or fail to
meet norms of masculinity, (c) experience discrepancies between
real and ideal self-concepts based on gender role stereotypes, (d)
personally devalue, restrict, or violate themselves, (e) experience
personal devaluations, restrictions, or violations from others, and/
or (f) personally devalue, restrict, or violate others because of gender
role stereotypes (Pleck, 1995).​

Or that in his link there's this even more succinct description of the problem:

For example, the masculine requirement to remain stoic and provide for loved ones can interact with systemic racism and lead to so-called John Henryism for African-American men, a high-effort method of coping that involves striving hard in the face of prolonged stress and discrimination. John Henryism has been linked with hypertension and depression​

Also,

These private conflicts can have tragic ramifications. Though men report less depression than women, they complete suicide at far higher rates than women, and the numbers are moving in the wrong direction. The suicide rate for non-Hispanic American Indian and Alaska Native men jumped 38 percent between 1999 and 2014, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; for white men, suicide rates increased 28 percent in that time span ( National Center for Health Statistics , 2016 ). Suicide rates for women have been on the rise as well, but because men complete suicide more often than women, men’s suicide death rates remain the highest.​

It's not even the only place in either, mind you.

Yeah, no, obviously you won't see what's wrong with it, if you don't actually read it. No need to worry about a 10-20,000 more suicides per year (in addition to other problems), when you could be just pretending it's just a philosophical problem in what is really wrong with it

Not to mention, out of all possible sources for a definition of toxic masculinity, you both seem to have picked one that DOESN'T define or use that in any way. In fact, the only places where the string "toxic" even appears at all is in "alcohol intoxication" and even that only in the bibliography. It's not even against it per se, it's just a guideline for dealing with people who have problems, which may or may not be because of it, and where it may or may not interfere with the therapy. The focus is how to keep them from making like Michelangelo and Kurt Cobain and painting the ceiling. Which is pretty futile if you don't get them out of the mindset that's making them create those problems in their own head.

So, you know, AT BEST, pot, kettle, you know the drill...

 

[Ziggurat]

Hans,

I'm rather disappointed in your response. My last long post wasn't about toxic masculinity, but about the APA guidelines and Peterson's response to them. You are quite right that those guidelines do not define or even use the term "toxic masculinity", but you didn't seem to realize that 1) I didn't pick the source, and 2) I wasn't addressing the topic of toxic masculinity itself in that post (note I didn't use the term either), but only the APA guidelines and Peterson's response to them. Your own post does nothing to address either mine or Peterson's criticism of the APA guidelines, which (again) are distinct from the validity of toxic masculinity as a concept.

 

[angrysoba]

First, here are the actual guidelines:
https://www.apa.org/about/policy/boys-men-practice-guidelines.pdf

Here's what Peterson had to say about the APA guidelines:

https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/pol...guidelines-for-the-treatment-of-boys-and-men/

You can read Peterson's criticisms yourself, see what you think, I won't go through it point by point. I will note that the APA guidelines define "masculinity ideology" rather oddly. They say:

"Although there are differences in masculinity ideologies, there is a particular constellation of standards that have held sway over large segments of the population, including: anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence."​

I'm not sure what "anti-femininity" is really supposed to mean, but the only really bad characteristic there is violence. If you make violence part of the definition, then yeah, "masculinity ideology" is a bad thing. But how prevalent is that ideology really? Elsewhere the guidelines refer to "traditional masculinity ideology", but there's no definition of how traditional masculinity ideology differs from non-traditional masculinity ideology. There seems to be an effort to tie violence to traditional masculinity, and that sets off alarm bells for me.

And here's where I will briefly touch on Peterson's criticism: violence among males is most prevalent among fatherless males. In fact, fatherlessness is an incredibly strong predictor of all sorts of behavioral pathologies, not just violence. But the APA guidelines don't even mention the effects of fatherlessness. There's a section encouraging males who ARE fathers to be engaged with their children (which is good), but nothing about the special needs of children who were deprived of a father figure. Peterson is right: that's a glaring omission.

There also seems to be a lot in the APA guidelines about privilege. And a lot of that stuff is absolute bull ****, which Peterson is also right about. The guidelines state,

When working with boys and men, psychologists can address issues of privilege and power related to sexism in a developmentally appropriate way to help them obtain the knowledge, attitudes, and skills to be effective allies and potentially live less restrictive lives.​

The goal of a psychologist shouldn't be to indoctrinate patients into becoming leftwing shills, which is basically what "allies" means when talking about "privilege".

Or take this one:

Psychologists can help clients develop awareness of systems that assume cisgender masculinity expression is the expected norm, and identify how they have been harmed by discrimination against those who are gender nonconforming.​

Sure, if you ARE gender-nonconforming, a therapist telling you that it's OK to be nonconforming may be helpful. And sure, you should be accepting of other people who are gender-nonconforming. But if you're a basically normal guy who is socially awkward and working a dead end job without much money, and you're depressed because you can't get a girlfriend because you're not attractive to women, being told that chicks don't dig you because they've accepted the patriarchy's standards of masculinity doesn't help. A victim mentality doesn't help. But that seems to be primarily what's on offer.

Thanks. I’ll have to look through it. Both documents are pretty long and I don’t have time to read them both. I think, though, that Peterson undercuts his case by flying off into a blistering rage in the article. I already posted a video of his reaction and I thought that maybe he would put a more thoughtful critique to paper, but it starts out just as hyperbolically as his video:

The American Psychological Association (APA) recently released their Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men (paralleling, in principle, their 2007 guidelines for girls and women). It manages to be simultaneously predictable, reprehensible, infuriating and disheartening — no mean feat for a single document. Make no mistake about it: this document constitutes an all-out assault on masculinity, as such — or, to put it even more bluntly, on men. The coup of the APA undertaken by the ideologues and the second-raters is now complete. The field has been compromised, perhaps fatally. And the unforgivable Guidelines provides sufficient but by no means exhaustive evidence of that.

It is similar to his rage-filled resignation letter from the University of Toronto and his rage-filled bombastic videos he made on The Daily Wire before (I assume) someone told him that he was really overdoing the apocalyptic tone - white-faced and yelling in a black room.

Oh, I also see he is moving onto poetry with a collection of really odd poems about children being molested and / or beaten to death or gang raped in jail. It’s called the ABC of Childhood Trauma.

 

[arthwollipot]

That is what happened with L Ron Hubbard. He started Scientology as a scam, and but came to actually beleive the crap he was spouting.

Not quite. He always knew the whole thing was a scam. But he became more and more heavily belief-invested in the methodologies used to continue the scam. Because to admit they were a scam was to cut off the fat, tax-free financial supply line...and the playboy lifestyle to which he had become accustomed. So keep it up, make it bigger, louder, more cult-like. Until it is a whole big scammy business.

Going a bit off topic here, but I firmly believe that L Ron was an undiagnosed schizophrenic. The signs were all there, up to and including his mistrust of the psychiatric industry that prevented him from getting a diagnosis. I think the belief structure that he initially constructed as a scam got more and more incorporated into his psychosis as he got older and by the time he died he was fully convinced that his fantasy was real.

 

[Norman Alexander]

Going a bit off topic here, but I firmly believe that L Ron was an undiagnosed schizophrenic. The signs were all there, up to and including his mistrust of the psychiatric industry that prevented him from getting a diagnosis. I think the belief structure that he initially constructed as a scam got more and more incorporated into his psychosis as he got older and by the time he died he was fully convinced that his fantasy was real.

Agreed, off topic.

I think you are right, just not in the timing. Hubbard was a known nut-case long before he was discharged from the US navy in 1950, which was long before Scientology. They picked him as outright bonkers and relieved him of command of vessels as a result of his nuttery (he attacked Mexico!). He never forgave the navy for shunting him. So he made his own navy - Scientology. All the trappings and even the uniforms! That's why it is Sea Org at the top of their structure. Even his "religious text" is full of barely-hidden references to navy jargon.

But back to Peterson. He isn't bonkers as far as I can tell. He just knows a good grift when he sees one.

 

[arthwollipot]

I haven't seen any evidence that Peterson is schizophrenic, no.

 

[Susheel]

I haven't seen any evidence that Peterson is schizophrenic, no.

He was a guest on a Russell Howard Hour episode in which he shared details about suffering from bouts of crippling depression.

 

[Cain]

At about 9:30 his wife cut him off and the event was over.

What a ******* cuck.

Jordan Peterson is profiled on the Decoding the Gurus podcast (along with other ********). My opinion is that every university should have at least one Jordan Peterson-like figure: A charismatic professor who stalks the lecture hall, has a quick answer on any topic, and is happy to tell you why everyone else gets it wrong. People need to have their views challenged. Peterson's less than ideal because he has a martyr-complex. I'm also aesthetically biased against anybody who is comfortable with having followers. Not surprisingly, large, enthusiastic crowds also make me uncomfortable.

 

[Robin]

Wasn't the whole "alpha male" thing discredited by the person who came up with it?

(L David Mech, my son tells me.)

 

[The Great Zaganza]

Something that sounds cool can never be discredited by facts.

 

[Darat]

Wasn't the whole "alpha male" thing discredited by the person who came up with it?

(L David Mech, my son tells me.)

Amongst others - but he is an interesting case of a scientist challenging his own work.