TREAT YOURSELF LIKE SOMEONE YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR HELPING

There’s this thing Peterson does that I really don’t like. In Chapter 2, he’s writing about order and chaos, which are symbolically male and female, for reasons I don’t fully understand. He gives an example of a woman rejecting a man. “For the men,” he writes, “that’s a direct encounter with chaos, and it occurs with devastating force every time they are turned down for a date.”

Later in the same chapter: “Women have been making men self-conscious since the beginning of time. The capacity of women to shame men and render them selfconscious is still a primal force of nature.”

Later in the book: “It’s the terror young men feel towards attractive women, who are nature itself, ever ready to reject them, intimately, at the deepest possible level.”

I do not know what any of this means. I have never felt powerful when rejecting men — only awkward and selfconscious and afraid it’s my fault. But sure. Primal force of nature.

Anyway, Rule 2 is about treating yourself properly and setting out a direction for your life. Except the chapter isn’t about that at all. An awful lot of it is a retelling of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, because apparently that’s where selfhatred comes from.

There’s also this theory Peterson cites that sexual selection, or the possibility of rejection, has driven the evolution of the human mind.

“Women’s proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained… creatures that we are,” he writes.

The idea belongs to Geoffrey Miller, an American evolutionary psychologist who published a book in 2001 called The Mating Mind. It’s controversial, in part because it implies that women’s choosiness drives men to excel, but not necessarily the other way around.

I called Miller to ask about this, and he insisted that men and women have an equal capacity for ideas and creativity, but men are just louder about it — think male rock stars who are in it for the groupies, he said.

If that’s what men need to do to attract women, I asked, what’s the advice in there for women? Miller told me men are looking for different things in their mates. A century ago, for instance, middle-class women could play piano and have witty conversations. “I think a lot of those traditional social skills aren’t being cultivated in an era of Tinder and texting,” he said. “I think young men are kind of missing that.”

I decided I wanted a second opinion. I texted a guy I’d met on Tinder and asked if he thinks rock bands are just in it for the girls.

“No,” he said. “And f--- Gene Simmons for ever saying that!”

A few days later, the Tinder guy rejected me. Turns out it wasn’t that primal or chaotic — he’d just met some other girl. Perhaps I should have played him some piano.