WHY DOES EVERY GUY YOU KNOW WORSHIP
A controversial academic has become an unlikely spokesperson for a generation of young men. But is his message as saintly as he would have us believe?
he lights go down in a packed-out theatre. Every red-velvetcovered seat is taken, from the stalls to the balconies. People shuffle excitedly; expectation hangs in the air. A spotlight appears centre stage and a lithe, salt-and-pepper-haired man walks on, a strange vision in an impeccably tailored three-piece brown tweed suit, old-fashioned tan brogues – and a head mic. Over 1,800 people rise, whooping and cheering, clapping with all their might. There’s a two-minute standing ovation before a single word has been spoken. Eventually, the man on the stage raises his arms to head height and then lowers them slowly, palms to the floor, gesturing for his audience to take their seats. They obey without question and the room falls to enraptured silence.
The man on the stage? Not a rock star or a sold-out-Vegas magician. No. He’s a slightly gangly 56-year-old Canadian psychology professor by the name of Dr Jordan B Peterson, and he might just be the most famous person that you’ve almost certainly never heard of.
It all started back in 2013. That’s when Dr Peterson started putting his psychology lectures from the University of Toronto on YouTube. There he found an unwittingly engaged, largely male audience who came for his help but stayed (and there are almost 600 hours of lectures on YouTube) for his signature mix of tough love and even tougher science. His name became headline news in 2016 when he took a stand against the Canadian government’s attempts to pass a bill on gender identity, C-16 – in particular its endorsement of using neutral or preferred pronouns. Some thought he was talking practical common sense. Others thought he was dangerous and dogmatic. Whichever side you fell on, Jordan Peterson’s slide into world domination had begun.
A podcast series and a global best-selling book – 12 Rules For Life – followed, and his army of largely lost, angry, anxious young men grew. Because Peterson came along at a time when large factions of society were beginning to point the finger at men: they were too dominant, too aggressive. They felt voiceless for the first time in history. Too scared to speak up for fear of being branded that most insidious of things – a misogynist.
In the UK, Dr Peterson’s fame skyrocketed after an interview with
Channel 4 News’s Cathy Newman about the gender pay gap. Yet again, some hailed him the saviour of free speech, the anti-political-correctness messiah. Others? They thought he was a chauvinistic pig and an embodiment of the white male
“Some hailed him a saviour of free speech”
privilege he has spent a career denying the existence of. Such is the life and fame of Dr Jordan B Peterson. He is Marmite in man form.
Personally, I didn’t agree with everything he said – far from it – but I was curious about the fact that he was saying it in the first place. After the Cathy Newman interview, I Googled him. I fell into a YouTube blackhole so deep it took months to emerge. I read his book. Parts of it made me deeply, deeply angry; others struck a chord. His rules for life, things like “Stand up straight with your shoulders back” and “Clean up your room” actually resonated with me, and the men I saw around me, for their pure, anti-procrastination, common-sensical refrain.
I started to hear his name being whispered among my male friends. My boyfriend asked me if I’d heard about this Canadian dude that was pretty much breaking the internet on a daily basis. I found his name on male forums and help groups, and on every news site from here to Nova Scotia. Dr Jordan B Peterson doesn’t tell you that you’re great and that everything is OK. Because a lot of the time it isn’t. And understanding that is, to him at least, the first step towards actually doing something about it.
So when I saw that his book tour was coming to the UK, I couldn’t resist seeing who would attend. That’s how I ended up at the New Theatre Oxford on a cold October night. Dr Jordan B Peterson has found a legion of fans among the exact demographic of men that myself, and readers of this magazine, hold dear. So what is he saying to them that no one else is?
Modern messiah
The queue for the theatre snaked around the street. People – a ratio of 10 men to every one woman, at a guess – spilled out into the streets,
most brandishing their copies of 12
Rules For Life like a talisman. I have seen queues like that before, but they were always for boybands, iPhones or anything to do with Harry Potter. Not for academics. Looking around me, I realised these weren’t the sad, introverted, angry men I was expecting. They were sociable and dapper, all camel coats, chunky knitted scarves and hair clay. Some came alone, some with their dads, mates or even girlfriends. As I sat down in my seat, the man next to me (mid-forties, dark khaki chinos, navy woollen V-neck) took out a small notepad. He proceeded to take notes for the duration of the lecture and the entire audience Q&A that followed.
I found the effusive – nay, evangelical – reaction to his Oxford lecture mesmerising. I have never, ever seen a more engaged crowd. These intelligent, professional, charismatic men hung on every single world Dr Peterson said. But, I reasoned, Oxford is a conservative university town. Would the reception be the same elsewhere in the country?
Later that night, I booked to go to another show – this time in Birmingham, his last UK date, a couple of weeks later. There, the same thing happened. Standing ovations, whooping, cheering, hero worship in a symphony hall. I’ve never been to a Scientology meeting, but in my head it would feel just like this.
At the Birmingham show, I get talking to Richard Brown.* Tall, foppish, with mousy-brown hair and a cream jumper draped over his shoulders, he looks very much like someone my mum would’ve loved to see waiting in the porch to take me out to the cinema when I was younger. He’s here with a group of mates who all carry the professional hallmarks of single men in their early thirties: nice watches, good eye contact, no wedding rings.“Men flock to see Dr Peterson because they’re looking for something that is missing. They are in crisis,” he tells me.“It’s not necessarily related to how successful you are. You can be successful and not know what life is all about – why you are working so hard. Or you could have no idea what you want to do with your life and be listless. He provides answers for both.”
Toxic masculinity
At the back of the auditorium are two young men, deep in conversation. Both graduates, they have the freshfaced innocence of children’s TV presenters. In the time it takes me to leave, we have all followed each other on Instagram.
But resting just under the surface lies conflict.“My social circle is full of men like me, who have graduated, but don’t know what they want to do with themselves. They feel disenfranchised,” one of them, Alex Stone,* tells me.“It’s hard to yearn for success when as young men all we hear is that our success is less valid because we are male, and therefore living in a world set up for our benefit…”
This rant comes thick and fast, like he has been waiting for someone to ask him that very question for a long time. But he cuts himself short, self-censoring. Having now spoken
“Young men feel they’ve been put in the dock”
to many Dr Peterson fans for this story, I recognise the unsaid right there in the silence – that to Alex, and men like him, it doesn’t feel like the world was set up for their benefit at all. In fact, it feels like the exact opposite – that they have come of age at a time when to be a man is to apologise. To be uncertain or feel guilty about your role in society, or about the very impulses – ambition, competition, competence – that make up who you are.
I know what you’re thinking – that women are also ambitious, competitive and competent. Yes, of course we are. But it is those qualities specifically in men that have somehow come under scrutiny in the last five years in a way they never have previously. As one man I spoke to put it,“An entire generation of men are being fed the message that they are inherently bad, and that masculinity itself is somehow ‘toxic.’ A lot of young men feel that they have been put in the dock, unfairly, and they’re becoming angry about it.”
Anger is something Dr Jordan B Peterson knows a lot about. He has come under intense scrutiny, for example, from those who say his particular brand of self-help is fuelling the fire of right-wing groups both here and in North America. Some of his fans – and I am at pains to point out that it really is only some – have mercilessly trolled any perceived critic of their adopted leader. Having read his book and listened to many of his interviews and lectures, it is true that if you are coming from a place of misogyny, you could easily find scientific justification for your views in his mandate. But does that make him a misogynist? A pawn of the alt-right? Or will ignorant people use anything they can lay their hands on to prove their case? Pointing out that there are differences between the sexes is not sexist. If we, as women, are entitled to our opinions and expect to be heard, isn’t it essential that men get the same opportunity?
A father figure
Will Nielsen* doesn’t strike me as a man who needs someone to speak for him. But the 27-yearold entrepreneur says things used to be quite different.“My early twenties were plagued by a sense of impending doom,” Will tells me.
“I was a few months into my first job, I had huge amounts of debt and was constantly anxious and depressed. I’d drink 10 pints a night just to get through it. My life felt like watching water swirl around a sink, it just kept swirling and swirling, but never going down. It was spiralling out of control.”
Eventually Will told his family about the pay-day loans, the drinking, the “lad” culture he felt he had to be a part of in order to fit in. They helped him. And thanks, he says, to Jordan Peterson, he is also now able to help himself.
“Last month my grandpa was in hospital. When I visited him, I could feel myself shrinking. I wanted to cut myself off from talking about how I really felt. But Dr Peterson always says to stand up straight with your shoulders back. I knew I had to face this and not run away.”
This is typical of the Dr Jordan B Peterson fans I met. At both lectures I went to, young men flocked around him, all sharing stories that follow the same trajectory: struggle, realisation, acceptance, change. These exchanges often move Peterson to tears, something he’s openly comfortable with and sees as important.
The outpourings continue over email. One I’ve seen reads: “Dr Peterson’s advice has changed my life. I kept spiralling into depression,
spending sleepless nights wondering what should be made of my life. Now I feel like I have the reins back in my hands.” According to Peterson himself, he’s had hundreds of people tell him that the material he puts out has stopped them from taking their own lives.
To his fans, certainly the ones I have spoken to and seen first-hand at his lectures, he is the ultimate father figure. A role model who Will thinks is “smart, sensitive and strong”. It is his ability to show emotion that is one of the things they value most. It’s why they are so protective of him, so deferential that every single person I interviewed would only ever refer to him as “Dr Peterson”, and never use his first name.
For his part, the feeling is mutual. I speak to the man himself, Dr Jordan B Peterson, three weeks after the Birmingham lecture. He tells me that he sees his role as “a fatherly one. As encouraging, and I mean that technically – to appeal to their courage.” Almost as an aside to himself, he adds, “I am protective of them.”
Speaking up
For those of you currently screaming to yourselves,“BUT WHY DO MEN NEED OUR PROTECTION?” I hear you. I really do. But we are not talking about the Bill Cosbys or Louis CKs of the world here. I am talking about the men in your office that you like to joke around with, the ones who don’t speak up in your university seminars, your friends, boyfriends, brothers, dads. I didn’t really understand it myself until I started speaking to people, but when enough of them tell you the same thing – from a position of reason and rationality, not anger or resentment – you start to listen.
“You don’t want to crush masculinity in the hope that what you get is peaceful men. You’d have to be such a bloody fool to think that’s a good idea. It’s as bad as thinking if you hyper-protect children, nothing bad will happen to them,” Dr Peterson states.
He continues in the same vein, saying that if we lived in a world where things like ambition, confidence and competition were neutered in men, presumably so that women and society could thrive, the world would actually be a much more dangerous place than it is right now.
“When you make something weak in one direction, it seeks strength inappropriately in another. Whatever you repress or fail to develop lives underground and waits for its opportunity to manifest itself in crooked form.” You only have to look at things like the rise of the incel community to know this to be true.
After speaking to Dr Peterson, I pick up the phone to Will again. I want to know one thing: what does he wish women understood about masculinity in 2019? There’s a pause. He’s not working out what to say – he’s merely trying to guess whether or not I’ll be offended by it. “The assumption is that men do not suffer. But suffering is not gendered. Yes, we as men need to get better at speaking up about it. But perhaps society needs to get better at really listening when we do.”
“He sees his role as a fatherly one”