Jordan, Milo, and the Bitch Queen

I’ve told you how I saw the interview between Jordan Peterson and Cathy Newman as a Christian and as a fencer.

Now it is time to tell you how I saw it as a woman.

Cathy Newman is a bitch. Of course she is, that is her stock-in-trade. It was on display a year ago when she interviewed Milo, and it was there in spades when she was talking with Jordan. She was not interested in having a productive conversation with either Milo or Jordan. She—as an empowered woman—wanted to take them both out.

She had a harder time with Milo. He just laughed at her accusations, incredulous at how she twisted what he said into purported evidence that he did not believe in equality for women or that he believed women had no place in the workforce—or on the internet.

Jordan, however, she got to—big time. Yes, there was that moment when he turned on her and pointed out how willing she was to be offensive and how uncomfortable it made him. But for the most part, he played the gentleman, turning the other cheek to her accusations and trying to make his argument without offending her. (Good luck with that!) Even after he achieved his “gotcha” moment he wasn’t trying to dominate her, quite the reverse. He was holding firm against her attacks, but he did not want to hit her back.

She did. She wanted to hurt. Oh, she had no intention of physically challenging either Milo or Jordan.

But she wanted to hurt them.

You can see it in her eyes, hear it in her voice.

“Answer me,” she demands of Milo. “Should women just give up trying and go play with their Cindy dolls?” she challenges Jordan.

Classic bitch queen tactics, to which there is no polite answer.

Honey Badger Radio has an outstanding analysis of the way in which Newman played her hand against Peterson, turning his desire to keep from hurting her into a victory for her after the fact. Men—at least, chivalrous men, which in the West means most men; other cultures arguably have other standards—do not like hurting or dominating women. It is, if you will, their kryptonite, which women like Newman use against them all the time.

I say, women like Newman, but we’ve all done it at some point, haven’t we, ladies? You’ve heard yourself use questions like Cathy’s against your husband or boyfriend. You know exactly what she was doing. Own it. And be more compassionate. It’s what women are supposed to be good at, right?

Caring.

Yeah, right. Even Jordan falls into that stereotype when Cathy is badgering him about what women-led companies might be like. Sure, he suggests, you might run the experiment and make a company more “compassionate” and “caring” towards its workers and see how that turned out. “Why not?” When all the while he is having a conversation with a woman who is the antithesis of compassionate and caring towards him.

How on earth did men ever get the idea that women are compassionate and caring in the first place?

Because without us, they have nothing to live for.

Okay, maybe not Milo—he has John—but men like Jordan? He talks about it all the time! Women are what inspire him: his daughter, his wife. He cares about them deeply and wants to make a good life for them. Which means taking on the sacrifices that he needs to in order to grow the hell up and succeed.

But it terrifies him. You can see that, too.

Just look what he says about Adam and Eve. There was Eve, tempted by the snake to eat the fruit, and there was Adam, the poor dope, going along with her. She eats the fruit and gets self-conscious, so she gives some to him—and he gets even worse. He gets conscious of her judging him.

In Jordan’s words:

Now, no clear-seeing, conscious woman is going to tolerate an unawakened man. So, Eve immediately shares the fruit with Adam. That makes him self-conscious. Little has changed. Women have been making men self-conscious since the beginning of time. They do this primarily by rejecting them—but they also do it by shaming them, if men do not take responsibility. Since women bear the primary burden of reproduction, it’s no wonder. It is very hard to see how it could be otherwise. But the capacity of women to shame men and render them self-conscious is still a primal force of nature.*

“So are you saying,” the Cathys of the world would reply, “that women should be meek and sweet just because men are afraid of them?”

No—but we should not be hypocrites about it either. They are afraid of us, just look at them. Working all hours of the day and night to make us more comfortable, out there in the street laying gas lines, out on the oil rigs risking their lives to get us energy, staying up late into the night writing managerial reports and legal briefs. Work, work, work, work, work.

Men do the most physically dangerous jobs so that women like Cathy—and me—can sit around writing lengthy tomes about how oppressed women are because they aren’t in charge of enough Fortune 500 companies or head of more academic institutions.

Give me a break.

Do you want to know why I have always hated gender studies? Because the only question that anybody seems to care about in gender studies is why women don’t have more power. Over and over again. “How did women exercise authority?” “How did women assert control?” “Why aren’t women more in charge?”

You’d almost think we were back in the Dark Ages.

Remember the Wife of Bath’s tale? We read it in high school, and it took me a long time to figure out what the punchline meant, probably because at that time the thing that I wanted most was a boyfriend and there were no takers.

Except there were—I just wasn’t interested in the young men who were interested in me.

What is it that women most desire according to the Wife of Bath? Sovereignty. We want to rule over our men, shame them into growing the hell up so that they will be good husbands and fathers and take care of us when we have children.

The stakes are high—as Jordan acknowledges. You want to risk having a child with a man who won’t be there to fight off the dragons? Not me.

But the choice is the woman’s, as it should be.

And men know it and fear us because they are nothing unless we say yes.

No wonder Milo finds it a relief to be gay. Who wants to be subject to a Cathy?

*Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Random House Canada, 2018), 48.