DO NOT BOTHER CHILDREN WHEN THEY ARE SKATEBOARDING

There’s this skate park near my apartment, which is convenient because skateboarding is very important to Peterson. Skateboarding is about danger and mastery and pushing limits and masculinity — because, of course, most skateboarders are men. And boys.

Do not bother children when they are skateboarding. This is Rule 11 and really the crux of the book. All rules lead to Rule 11. The chapter sweeps from skateboarding to the suffering of boys in the modern world to the perils of Marxism to the fact that Lisa Simpson was attracted to the bully Nelson Muntz, which proves, surely, that even progressive women want tough men and men just need to buck up. In fact, all of Peterson’s exhortations to sort yourself out seem to boil down to this singular objective.

Anyway, I went to the skate park and bothered a bunch of the skateboarders, which sort of broke the rule, I suppose. I found four young men in their 20s who’d been skateboarding since they were kids and were practising on a Sunday afternoon.

“It’s an outlet if you’re angry or something,” Mousa Jaber told me. “It kills you to not skateboard.”

At 26, Mousa was getting ready for his fourth knee surgery stemming from skateboarding injuries. One of the others, Ben Duncan, said he’s broken his ankles a bunch of times, as well as a kneecap. “We’ve run into each other at the hospital,” Mousa joked.

I asked why they thought more girls don’t skateboard. They had several ideas: maybe men are more inclined to take risks. Maybe women’s wider hips make it harder to balance. “Not your average girl wants to end up with scrapes and cuts every day,” said Adam, who declined to give his last name.

Adam said he’s seeing a wave of women in their 20s starting to skateboard. He has a feeling they’re doing it to prove a point, because the sport has been so dominated by men.

There were, in fact, a few girls at the skate park that day, though not many. I walked over to a couple of them, Melinda Massolas and Shayla Brooks, and asked them the same question. “I think a lot of girls are more scared of hurting themselves,” said Shayla, 19.

Melinda, 23, described how embarrassing it was when she fell and got a huge goose egg on her forehead and had to face her friends the next day.

I told them about Peterson, about Rule 11 and how it seemed to apply more to boys than girls. They were unconvinced. “If a girl falls and a boy falls,” Melinda said, “it’s just a fall.”

I’ve never been on a skateboard. It was never something

the girls I knew did.

I think Jordan Peterson would say that’s okay — normal, even. In Chapter 11, he tells us that men are not like women, nor should they want to be. And women, I surmise, should not want to be like men, though he never quite goes that far. Chapter 11 is self-help via biological determinism.

“If they’re healthy, women don’t want boys. They want men,” Peterson writes. “They want someone to contend with; someone to grapple with. If they’re tough, they want someone tougher. If they’re smart, they want someone smarter.”

Reading this, I was reminded of a New York Times piece a few years back on a study showing that couples had less sex when husbands did traditionally feminine chores like laundry, compared to those with a more conventional division of labour. (When I looked it up again recently, however, I came across another study, published three years after the first, showing the exact opposite result.)

I am less convinced than Peterson that all of this is proof of some immutable, biological truth. Maybe I would find, if I tried to skateboard, that my hips are too wide to balance properly. But I doubt it.

Still, how to explain the phenomenal appeal of Twilight or Fifty Shades of Grey, stories featuring ordinary women who become the obsessions of extraordinary, dominating, dangerous men, without accepting there is something to what Peterson is saying?

I called Sandra from the meet-up the next day. She’d described herself as a “masculine woman” who’d always been scrupulous about dividing tasks equally between herself and her long-term boyfriend, and fought off “any whiff of anything traditional.”

Sandra works in tech, writing code for a living. She never planned on getting married or having kids. But she told me she found herself getting frustrated by the fact that she’s always been

the “carer” in her relationship, despite her focus on being egalitarian. Peterson has helped her accept that it’s okay for men and women to be different, she said, and to take on different roles. “It made me less resentful, I think.”

Sandra told me that she believes modern feminism is “really screwing up women.” She thinks we’ve thrown out all the rules and the traditional gender roles, but we haven’t built any workable replacement.

“I think it’s really tough on women. In a way, you suddenly have to do everything, right?” she said. “I don’t know what the solution is.”

I found myself wondering what Peterson thinks the solution is. In a recent New York Times profile, he was quoted telling someone that “lots of women” have told him they wish they could be housewives, but they’ll “never admit that publicly.” He never goes that far in the book, but he hints at it. There’s one section in Chapter 11 where he says most high-achieving female lawyers quit when they hit their 30s because their priorities change. He also argues there’s an increasing shortage of university-educated men, and that’s a problem for educated women who generally want to marry up.

This is not what Sandra is suggesting. She said she doesn’t know a single woman who wants to stay home and raise children.

Sandra doesn’t call herself a Jordan Peterson fan. She didn’t find his book particularly insightful, but she donates to his Patreon account — in fact, once people started publishing “hit pieces” against him, she doubled her donations. She likes that Peterson says things that other people don’t.

If there’s a genius to Jordan Peterson, it’s his willingness to shout from the rooftops the things that a lot of us would rather not say. I can respect that. But I can’t shake the feeling that, beneath the lobster metaphors and the bit about skateboards, I am the problem he’s trying to help men solve.