Nope; it’s apt.
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Ahem! I believe that would be 66.6% 
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Queue Peterstans explaining how that post with its detailed and well-argued takedown doesn’t count because …the author is a cognitive scientist, not a psychologist.
True story. Ugh.
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Or because it’s a Thursday.
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It is with great pleasure that I welcome you, the rare non-malicious newcomer, to BoingBoing!
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Oh they are already here… and a few have been eaten by the mods already.
And a non sarcastic… Welcome to BoingBoing new person please join us in our mutant fun.
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I predict a regular here is about to come to the defense of Peterson!
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‘Cue.’
But other than that, welcome to BB; genuinely.
Keep up that high quality of snark, and I’m sure you’ll be a valuable addition to the community.
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Good catch, and thanks!
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And yet, Peterson himself seems quite content to pontificate on subjects that are not in fact psychology. Go figure!
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De nada.
There’s a good reason I’ve never used this gif, apt though it may be:
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Heh. And she’s not rolling her eyes either!
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Well… Look at it this way. You can probably easily define what toxic masculinity is and don’t have any problems applying it to “bad men” that behave in ways that you see as falling into that definition.
But, and bear with me here, how would you feel about a “toxic femininity” term as a catch-all for all the nasty behaviors that “bad women” have? The “Let me talk to a manager” lady. The “Uses men for their money, cheats on them, dumps them” lady. The “histrionic screaming mother” lady. The “tiger mom who derives social status and basically a retirement fund via traumatizing her children” lady. The “Jumps on any social movement bandwagon and learns just enough about it to be annoying at Starbucks and on Facebook” lady. The “flirts with her boss and uses her sexuality to get ahead at work” lady. And so on, and so on.
I feel like there would be a lot more “But not every woman does those things that you’re talking about, and most women aren’t restraining themselves from acting that way, you’re just picking a few archetypes out and saying that they apply to all women…”
And then there you go. We usually apply a lot more nuance to groups that we think of ourselves as belonging to, and are more avoidant of creating/applying labels that might apply to us sometimes. So should we treat toxic masculinity as something that all/most guys display or are at risk of at all times, or should we treat it more as “a byproduct of being a shitty person and/or of being raised by shitty people”?
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The problem is that to do any actual good, It would have to be a bit more specific, much like the original example. 
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True, though I think the person who made it cut the loop before she could.
I do always have the option of trying to retool the gif, if so inclined.
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Well, he was in the news a lot when Bill C-16 was coming up for vote, because he was lying to everyone by claiming that inclusion of gender identity and expression protections in our human rights legislation would make it illegal for him to be an asshole about not using people’s preferred pronouns.
And then there was a brief thing last November where he was threatening to set up a webpage that would offer UofT students “true” course syllabi to warn them about what he referred to as “postmodern neo-Marxist cult classes” (i.e. most of the humanities, I guess?), but the CBC ran a story making fun of him about that on The National, and MacLean’s called him “the stupid man’s smart person”, and then he changed his mind.
Other than that, not really. I think we’ve mostly decided that if we ignore him he might go away. All the recent media attention seems to be from the US.
Edit: So turns out he was in a Munk Debate last week. I’m not in Toronto, so maybe people there knew about that event, but the debates aren’t broadcast or televised (they go up on YouTube afterwards), but I was blissfully unaware of it. Honestly, I doubt most people in Canada know who Peterson is, and the proportion probably drops substantially if you’re outside of Toronto or academia.
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Whether or not you consider Peterson to be a good psychiatrist, this seems to be fundamental to the way that he sees the world. His idea of truth seems to be the most idiosyncratic, and the emphasis is broader than plain facts:
“What scientific truth tells you is what things are, but genuine religious truth tells you how you should act, and those things are not the same. And so a great story, like a great novel, which is a quasi-religious construction, because it’s like a distillation of ordinary life into its most important elements – that’s a map about how you should comport yourself in the world. And you might say, what do you mean by should… That’s the question the moral relativists ask…”
This is something that underlies Peterson’s way of looking at things – truth is personal, not abstract. You don’t learn values like loyalty, trustworthiness or responsibility from bare facts. So when he talks about myths and archetypes, or more specifically about Biblical narratives, the question of whether or not they actually happened doesn’t seem to matter that much to him. Rather, it has a lot to do with whether it resonates with you and whether it gets you where you need to be. According to him, these stories can be truer than facts, because they resonate on a deeper level. They say something about us in the way that a dream might – as a window into our psyche and what drives us rather than an accurate representation of reality. I think it’s less that he sees humans as hardwired by archetypes and innate traits, and more that we often have to analyse our behaviour and thinking in less rationalistic terms (including examining the narratives and personality types underlying them) in order to move forward.
“Everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is. And you should know what your myth is, because it might be a tragedy. And maybe you don’t want it to be.”
One of the problems is that his analysis of reality is a sort of seat-of-your-pants whirlwind tour of lots of different fields, and despite claims that he’s very careful with his words, he’s not that careful with his words. His treatment of archetypes can be quite like a conspiracy theorist – everything is connected and we keep playing through ancient myths, so humans are like lobsters and SJWs are Soviet revolutionaries and the barbarians at the gates. It’s all really, really significant.
In some ways, I get why he thinks this; I’m going through the audiobook of The Gulag Archipelago at the moment, and it’s an interesting insight into the thought process involved in creating that culture. As for Peterson, when you spend decades talking about the evils of fascism and communism, and are then called a fascist yourself, this is how you’ll understand it. Character assassination is an important part of this culture, as well as violence in response to speech. I mean, a couple of months ago a mob turned up at one of his lectures and stormed the stage, then hammered on the windows throughout the talk when they were kicked out. One woman was carrying a garotte supposedly for defence. That was in March, and I counted nine other generally violent attempts by leftists to shut down speech that month, that all went beyond the limits of free speech. If the left wants to show that they can have political discourse and are better than that, they could start by not using lazy slurs against people like Peterson, especially as these slurs are used as a way to incite violence.
As for his largely white male audience, if anything this should be a wake-up call to progressives, who are often worse than useless at relating to men. The fact that so many prominent male feminists turn out to be sexually abusive liars, and many of the things that feminism is supposedly helping to solve are actually getting worse as feminism becomes more mainstream, while Jordan Peterson can get over a million mostly male followers by telling them to take responsibility for their lives while talking for hours on the female-dominated subject of psychiatry and the dead and buried subject of Old Testament theology, should at least give people a clue that they may be missing something. I’m glad many men here have their lives on track, but people come to him saying that he helped them to turn their lives around when they were at the point of dropping out or committing suicide. Peterson is speaking to them, and progressives are not. This matters, and if you want to dismiss him, you should offer something better.
In case it looks like I’m a fan, I disagree with him on issues like:
- The nature of truth – as Bertrand Russell put it, “It seems to me a fundamental dishonesty and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because you think it’s useful and not because you think it’s true.”
- Jungian archetypes
- The extent of biological determinism
- The idea that violence is always in the background of male discourse, and that men and women may not be able to work together well in part because physical escalation is ruled out
- The importance of Christianity
- The emphasis on the alpha male/hero archetype
- Not necessarily his fault, but his cult-like fandom
- And many other things.
As for the topic of toxic masculinity, since basically all of its traits have a positive correlation with fatherlessness, victimisation, inequality, marginalisation etc., I think the reality is far more complex than boys being boys. If anything, it could come from a toxic lack of positive masculinity, particularly during early life. At the very least, I will spend more time listening to people who want to see men change because they believe that society needs them to be healthy and competent, not because they think that they are a problem. That is a toxic attitude that men need to hear less of.
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tl;dr: Cool bro story.
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Isn’t this the issue? That some young white men are not turning into well-adjusted adults for some reason? First they get lured in by Peterson types, who provide the answer to why they’ve failed to succeed; i.e., everyone else. Then they move on to redpill and men’s rights activism, then they become Proud Boys, and finally they go full-on white nationalist.
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