In other weekend reading...

...I enjoyed this long, often funny, feminist's essay on the Jordan Peterson phenomena.   There are many sections that made me laugh, and I think she is pretty perceptive.   A sample:

Here’s his explanation of why men are frightened of women. (It comes with diagrams in the original video. They don’t help much.)

“Out of chaos emerges this first form, it’s the feminine form, it’s partly the form that represents novelty as such, and on the one hand it’s promise and on the other hand it’s threat…. Well, here’s the decomposition of the fundamental archetype. The dragon of chaos differentiates on the one hand into the feminine, that’s the unknown, and the feminine differentiates further into the negative feminine and the positive feminine. The negative feminine is the reason for witch hunts.”

Believe me, you are not too dumb to understand this. I speak fluent theory-wonk, and I promise, there’s no great secret here. I had a university housemate who used to come out with this sort of stuff at 3 a.m. on the morning before his essay was due while contemplating the ineffable beauty of his own screensaver in a fug of weed-smoke. In fact, I suspect that in order to absorb the full shuddering impact of platitudes like these, one needs not merely to be mired in the throes of a male identity crisis but also catastrophically high, and that would be a waste of good drugs.

Peterson has worked out the secret to monetizing his own persecution complex: If your audience is angry and lonely and you tell them that’s justifiable, you can take that muddle of meaning, blend it, and serve it through a candy-colored straw to those who are prepared to swallow anything and call it a juice cleanse. You can go quite far in the gig economy of modern entrepreneurial proto-fascism by talking to young men as if their feelings matter.