Jordan Peterson Cries, Men Show Off Their Mullets, and a New Book About Boys and Men
Another Link Party Round Up
The Mandate focuses on topics that men don’t like to talk about. It’s written by Olympic Medalist and frequent Men’s Health contributor Jason Rogers. If you were forwarded this email, subscribe below.
Greetings friends! I’m about to head off on a reporting trip (more on that to come), so it will likely be a little while before the next installment of the Mandate. But in the meantime, I thought I’d share some nuggets from the last few weeks.
💧The Strange Tears of Jordan Peterson
The infamous Canadian psychologist and cultural warrior extraordinaire was recently a guest on Piers Morgan Uncensored. Peterson has largely retreated from progressive mainstream media and has taken up shop at the DailyWire+, where he ridicules the trans community and the progressive left for imposing “cultural marxism” on the world.
Unsurprisingly, Morgan’s line of questioning was like a warm embrace. The two have fostered some kind of spiritual bromance, as evidenced by the fact that Peterson has subsequently released a lengthy conversation between the two about the “art of interviewing” and the “importance of living truthfully,” among other things.
At the end of the interview, Morgan asked for Peterson’s reaction (at 39:50 in the timeline) to a recent quote from the actor and filmmaker Olivia Wilde. In an interview about her new film Don’t Worry Darling, she apparently said that Peterson had inspired a character and that he was an “insane man” and a “pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community.” Peterson laughed off the slight and noted his intense efforts to speak to disaffected men for years. He then began to cry, and when Morgan asked why he was getting emotional, Peterson said, “I thought the marginalized were supposed to have a voice.”
I won’t go as far as to say that these were crocodile tears. I have no idea what makes Peterson feel emotional, nor what personal grievance he might have been thinking about at that moment. But the whole thing did feel opportunistic, as if he knew that weeping at that exact moment would inspire a meme-extravaganza on both the left and the right. Again, I can’t really speak to the authenticity of this moment, but suffice it to say that it felt really really weird.
But herein lies my problem. This is probably the first and only time I will defend Jordan Peterson, and it’s not even a defense, more a critique of media culture write large. Shortly after the interview aired, there was an outburst of tweets and articles with headlines like “Did Olivia Wilde Just Make Jordan Peterson Cry?”
If you watch the interview, you can clearly see that his tears are not in response to Wilde’s words. (He even says he laughed about the insult with his family). His reaction was due to something else. Again, what strange pain he’s buried around this topic is another story, but this headline is a deliberate misrepresentation of the moment for clicks. Quite sneakily, it maintains the thinnest veil of defensibility by posing the thought as a question. I mean, if you squint and turn off the audio and maybe scroll Instagram while watching it, you could interpret it this way, right?
Peterson’s fans will see this and justifiably say, “See! The left is misrepresenting him.” They will feel encouraged to ignore any future critiques of his strange soapbox rants, and he will continue to climb the hill of demagoguery. This frustrates me intensely because it is a small example of the kind of bad-faith interpretations we apply to myriad cultural issues. People on both sides have their hands over their ears, intentionally trying not to understand.
A Few More Links
💪 Gender-Based Violence is a Men’s Issue — The academic and writer Jackson Katz has been a leading voice for decades on sexual assault. Brut America compiled a short clip of his work. — Watch on Instagram.
📚 Of Boys and Men — I spent the entirety of last weekend reading the recently published Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves, senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution (a think tank in D.C.). As the title suggests, the book analyzes some of the structural problems facing men — for example, the significant gender gap in college education, disproportionate loss of male middle-class jobs, the degrading role of the father in the family, and a 3X likelihood of men dying “deaths of despair.” (BTW if you don’t want to read the whole book there are some good pieces about it in the Atlantic and also the New York Times) — Brookings
💈 Business in the Front, Party in the Back — I don’t think I need to say any more about this New York Times article that it features the search for America’s best mullet— The New York Times
Jordan Peterson Cries, Men Show Off Their Mullets, and a New Book About Boys and Men
Really enjoyed your latest letter Jason. I was particularly interested in your bit on Richard Reeves’ new book on men. The Atlantic’s review contained a David Brooks quote (about the book) that really stood out for me - “ The culture is still searching for a modern masculine ideal”. And I wondered where you may have spotted efforts, by culture, to nurture this ideal?