Why Jordan Peterson insulted Yumi Nu
He didn’t have to say anything. It was just one of the hundreds of feel-good stories the American press produces every day. But controversial psychologist and public intellectual Jordan Peterson just had to jump in.
“Sorry. Not beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that,” he tweeted in response to another tweet on the plus-size model Yumi Nu appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue. As of this writing, the tweet has over 5,000 retweets, almost 11,000 quote tweets, and over 65,000 likes.
Mr. Peterson hit on a combination of misogyny and cruelty (“not beautiful,” meaning ugly) and resentment (“authoritarian tolerance”) that roused his followers. “Don’t let the wokesters make you say a fat girl is pretty” is a fair summary of many of the responses.
It was an unfortunate statement from a man who has made millions
on books — “12 Rules for Life” and “Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life” — that urged a consciously old-fashioned way of living. The books seem to have done much good, especially for young men who had not learned such rules in their upbringing.
Among the old-fashioned ways, however, are the rules of chivalry. These include “Do not insult a woman’s looks,” and “Don’t say something hurtful when you don’t have to.” Society depends on rules like these to keep people from hurtingand eventually hating each other.
Mr. Peterson seems to have missed these lessons, or decided he didn’t like them. I can imagine my father’s look had I said what Mr. Peterson said. It’s a look I worked very hard to avoid.
Mr. Peterson treats something socially constructed and culturally relative as if it were an eternal truth. “Not beautiful,” he says. “Says who?” says I. We don’t know how he defines beauty, but his idea clearly does not include larger women. It does for many other people, including the editors of Sports Illustrated. Tastes differ. A lot. Mr. Peterson should know that.
One of the funniest responses to his tweet was, in Petersonian form, “Reject modernity, embrace tradition.” And then showed Renaissance paintings of voluptuous women. An age he admires — an age intensely interested in beauty — had an ideal of feminine beauty different from his. A wise man would learn from that.
Mr. Peterson’s absolutizing of his own tastes is a problem in itself. It’s an intellectual weakness. But it’s not themain problem with the tweet.
The main problem is the reason he tweeted it. Why did he tweet that comment? Because he gave into temptation. After readers reacted to his tweet, Mr. Peterson noted the way Twitter encourages people to blurt out their first reactions. “The incentive structure of the platform makes it intrinsically and dangerously insane,” he said.
True. Unfortunately he was speaking of the criticism he got — “an endless flood of vicious insults” — and not his own tweet. He started the fight, and then acts as if he didn’t.
Why did he give in to temptation? Because he saw a chance to challenge “the woke.” I suspect the third sentence of that tweet was the important one to him.
He seems to have thought that the magazine featuring such a model on its cover meant to impose its “woke” view of feminine beauty. That’s the only way he can explain the editors putting Ms. Nu on the cover, instead of a classically thin butbuxom young woman.
The culture-warring instinct runs deep in Mr. Peterson. Deep enough to drive him to insult a young woman of whom he had no reason to speak at all. But she’s not the point. Attacking the wokesters is the point.
When our youngest child was four, we were at some event with lots of people manning tables. One man had a badly deformed nose. Our son said, loudly, maybe five feet away from the poor man, “Mommy, what’s wrong with that man’s nose?” His older siblings nearly strangled him.
My son was four and as yet unclear on what you could say to people and what you couldn’t. He was a very kind child, but he did not yet know how to speak kindly. Jordan Peterson is an intellectual. He was a respected professor of psychology in Canada’s major university. Events threw him into the spotlight and he proceeded to make himself famous and wealthy. He became a guru, and a hero to the enemies of wokeness.
But in the process he forgot what he should have known: that the world looks different to different people. And that caring about how other people feel isn’t authoritarian or woke, but kindness. And that people deserve kindness, and societies depend on it.