Caring for men and boys. After an encounter with a colleague who told me, "the patriarchy influences everything, it’s everywhere” I decided, in this episode, to focus on Jordan Peterson’s critique of the idea of patriarchy; his critique is in his chapter about Rule 11 in his book, ‘12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos’; the chapter is wittily entitled ‘Do not Bother Children When They are Skateboarding’ and the section I’m presenting here has a sub-heading ‘The Patriarchy: Help or Hindrance?’
And good guy of the week was the subject of a story I heard in the queue at Lidl’s last weekend about an exuberant footballing boy and his super dad.
Caring for men and boys. After an encounter with a colleague who told me, "the patriarchy influences everything, it’s everywhere” I decided, in this episode, to focus on Jordan Peterson’s critique of the idea of patriarchy; his critique is in his chapter about Rule 11 in his book, ‘12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos’; the chapter is wittily entitled ‘Do not Bother Children When They are Skateboarding’ and the section I’m presenting here has a sub-heading ‘The Patriarchy: Help or Hindrance?’
And good guy of the week was the subject of a story I heard in the queue at Lidl’s last weekend about an exuberant footballing boy and his super dad.
Questioning the Idea of the Patriarchy
Recently, I was sharing research data about domestic abuse with a colleague; I was saying that there’s research that shows that men and women experience domestic abuse at similar levels and that the majority of domestic abuse is co-created. I also shared statistics from a paper published by the National Centre for Biotechnology Information in the United States; this paper presents findings that same sex relationships have similar, if not higher, incidences of the phenomenon. I use this data to gently criticise the radical feminist gendered construction of domestic abuse, to argue that something other than the patriarchy is influencing behaviour here and to suggest that it’s not just a gender issue but a human issue. The NCBI paper draws an interesting conclusion, saying that the higher domestic abuse rates in same sex couples is a result of the extra social stressors they experience of being in a minority. I would not disagree with this; in my therapy models, all rage behaviours result from stress, from the stress of early life developmental trauma and/or the experience of traumatic life events. There’s a link to the research I’m referring to and a link to the NCBI paper is in the episode notes.
When I’d shared this research with my colleague, I expressed my opinion that in the light of this data it didn’t make sense to me that only men and the patriarchy are to blame for domestic abuse; my colleague replied, “but the patriarchy influences everything, it’s everywhere”. This took me back to the early 2000’s and a post I had seen on the Respect website; for those who may not know, Respect is a UK organisation, funded by the home office to tackle domestic abuse. Respect, as an organisation, was in its infancy and had been criticised by many of us for its gendered approach; as a result, I believe in an effort to acknowledge the existence of female on male violence, they offered a hasty, and very simplistic, one sentence explanation of the phenomenon; that explanation went, ‘that female domestic abuse is because women are behaving like men’. I don’t think much empirical research had gone into that determination.
Anyway, back to my colleague and her ‘the patriarchy is everywhere’ comment; I was a bit startled by my blunt response, I said, “I don’t believe in the patriarchy’. As I reflected on what I’d said later, it sunk in, on a deeper level than ever before, that the patriarchy is just a belief system. There’s no evidence base to it, no underpinning empirical research, it’s not a tangible thing at all.
So, as a result of this encounter, I decided, in this episode, to focus on Jordan Peterson’s critique of the idea of patriarchy; his critique is in his chapter about Rule 11 in his book, ‘12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos’; the chapter is wittily entitled ‘Do not Bother Children When They are Skateboarding’ and the section I’m presenting here has a sub-heading ‘The Patriarchy: Help or Hindrance?’ There’s a link to Peterson’s book in the episode notes
Peterson begins by telling us that culture is not beyond criticism and that, ‘of course culture is an oppressive structure; it’s always been that way’; we inherit it from the past as a ghost, machine and monster; it is wilfully blind and out of date and hammers us into a socially acceptable shape, wasting a great deal of potential and requiring the efforts of the living to rescue, repair and keep it at bay.
He tells us that thinking about culture as only oppressive is ignorant; that every word we speak is a gift from our ancestors and every thought has come from someone smarter. He appreciates economic structures, technology, wealth, health and lifespan, freedom, luxury and opportunity; and he acknowledges that the structure is a hierarchy and creates winners and losers.
To my mind Peterson goes on to make some excellent points with regard to hierarchies, that when a group of people collectively pursue a goal that they value, there is inevitably a hierarchy because some do better than others in their efforts; he adds, indeed, to a great extent, it’s the pursuit of such deeply desired goals that makes life meaningful; further he adds, moving successfully towards our goals means that we experience almost all the emotions that make our life feel deep and engaging. The price to be paid for such depth and engagement is the inevitable creation of hierarchies of success and differential outcomes.
I want to add here that in my experience there’s a wide variety of hierarchies in life, and we can be in varying positions in all of them; in some we may be higher up the hierarchy, even at the top, and in others we may be middling or lower down.
Peterson argues, quite convincingly I think, that absolute equality would mean sacrificing the very thing, striving for the deeply desired goals, that makes life worth living. It would also, I think, rob us of the opportunity to differentiate that makes us unique.
Focussing now on the issue of ‘the patriarchy’. Peterson tells us that it’s perverse to consider culture the creation of men. He offers an alternative narrative. Throughout history men and women have both struggled against privation and necessity; they’ve battled for freedom from the overwhelming horrors of filth, misery, disease, starvation, cruelty and ignorance; and before the twentieth century, the experience of surviving on very little money per day.
He acknowledges that women were often at a disadvantage during that struggle, as they had all the same vulnerabilities as men but with the extra reproductive burden and less physical strength; they also had to put up with the serious inconvenience of menstruation, unwanted pregnancies, the chance of death or serious injury during childbirth and the burden of too many young children. This has echoes of Dr Warren Farrell’s discussion about men and women both being in survival mode until recent times.
Peterson asks us to consider that women were indeed disadvantaged, but this was because of their particular female vulnerabilities, on the top of struggling with the same dire circumstances which men also struggled with, rather than being disadvantaged because men were tyrannical.
In Peterson’s opinion, what has been labelled as the patriarchy was an imperfect, collective attempt by men and women, over millennia to free themselves from privation, disease and drudgery.
Peterson mentions four good guys in this section and asks us ‘were they part of the patriarchy’? There’s Arunachalam Muruganatham who undeterred, and according to his family in a state of insanity, spent 14 years trying to rectify his wife’s dilemma of having to choose whether to buy expensive sanitary products or milk for the family. The low cost and locally produced sanitary napkins that he invented are now distributed across all India.
Next up is James Young Simpson who used ether to help a woman with a deformed pelvis to give birth. Later he switched to using chloroform and the first baby delivered with this support was named Anaesthesia.
It was a man who produced the first tampon; Dr Earle Cleveland Haas made his product of pressed cotton and cardboard applicator tubes. By the early 1940’s, 25% of women were using them, thirty years later it was 70%, now it’s four out of five using them.
Lastly, we’re introduced to Gregory Goodwin Pincus, the man who invented the birth control pill.
Peterson asks, ‘did these men oppress or free women’? And ‘in what manner were these practical, enlightened, persistent men part of a constricting patriarchy?
He asks a further question; “why do we teach our young people that our incredible culture”, and I would add, an incredible culture which people from all over the world wish to migrate to, “is the result of male oppression?” He mentions a wide range of academic disciplines including education, social work, art history, gender studies, literature, sociology and increasingly law, that he says are ‘blinded by this assumption’; and I would like to add psychology, psychotherapy and counselling to that list. He is further concerned that the teaching of such ideology encourages radical political activism, and that the radical political activism is so embedded in the education that it’s not distinguishable from it. Universities today are fostering political engagement; not a bad thing you might say, but it’s being fostered from only one perspective, a radical left-wing perspective.
In conclusion, it feels very important to me to be raising awareness about this, what I would call, invisible indoctrination; this invisible indoctrination is embedded in culture generally and education in particular; and it’s also important to me to be presenting an alternative world view even though I’m acutely aware that holding the views I do in my profession, ironic ally, places me in a minority.
Good Guy of the Week
I heard the most delightful story in the queue for the till at Lidl’s this week. As I tried to load my purchases onto the conveyor belt in a very particular order, I was totally captivated by a story that the customer in front of me was telling. She told the cashier, ‘I’m so pleased that things at school are getting back to normal and also that my grandson can go back to his football training. He’s missed it so much. It was his first practice this morning and he got up at 5.30 a.m. and got his kit on. He woke his mum and said, ‘is it time to go yet?” His mum explained, as I probably would have done, that it was several hours yet before football practice and that he should probably go back to bed. But his dear dad jumped out of bed and said, “hang on, I’ll get my kit on, you get the ball, and let’s go to the park for an early practice”; and apparently, according to the granny in the queue, off the two of them went, at that ungodly hour, to the local park for a kick about. Well, while all my purchases were in a muddle, I had a tear in my eye and the warmest feeling in my heart. What a lovely, exuberant boy, and what a super dad.
Domestic abuse research
Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos