General Discussion

https://blog.apaonline.org/2018/02/20/why-are-so-many-young-men-drawn-to-jordan-petersons-intellectual-misogyny/

Snip-"He evidently wants to return to unquestioned patriarchy by paradoxically claiming that “the idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.” This is an insidious sleight-of-hand in which, by denying that patriarchal oppression ever existed, men can continue to ignore what many women have been saying for centuries, from Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir to Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Kate Manne. Furthermore, Peterson has advised his followers to completely avoid the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, English, women’s studies, and ethnic and racial studies, a startlingly broad swath of the academy that he sees as “corrupted” by the supposed evils of feminism, postmodernism, and neo-Marxism. Peterson’s work invites a much more extensive critique than I have the space (or inclination) to offer here, and there have been numerous excellent critical pieces (including this recent article in The Guardian), but what’s more interesting to me is the question of why so many young men are drawn to his work, specifically what need his pseudo-intellectual misogyny fills for these men, some of whom I’ve found to be otherwise quite intelligent and reasonable in one-on-one interactions.

The men who are attracted to Peterson’s ideas seem to have a profound sense that their dominant role in society is coming to an end, and that feminist postmodernism is the primary agent of this loss of privileged status. This grievance is not news to anyone who pays attention to politics, as it is this very sense of loss of an imagined golden age that largely seems to have motivated Trump voters. But the deeper register of this insight is that postmodernism has, in fact, constituted a kind of death–a death of the modern–and an end of the certainty and privilege that men–especially straight white men–have experienced in the era currently coming to a close."

More there