3 Dinge, von denen Suzie Grime keine Ahnung hat (Doktorant)

(Siehe auch auf dem Blog von Doktorant)

Jordan Peterson zu Identitäten, Frauenunterdrückung und Feminismus

Ein interessantes Interview mit Jordan Peterson zu verschiedenen Fragen rund um feministische Theorie.

Im Grundsatz geht es um ein Gesetz, nach dem es strafbar sein soll, jemanden nicht mit den von ihnen gewünschten Pronomen anzusprechen, die wiederum beliebig gewählt werden können sollen.

So we shouldn’t call someone ‘your majesty’ just because they ask for it?

Well that’s another problem that’s lurking under the subjectivity argument, once you divorce identity from an objective underpinning. These people [advocates for multiple gender identities and laws to protect them] claim that identity is a social construct, but even though that’s their fundamental philosophical claim, and they’ve built it into the law, they don’t abide by those principles. Instead, they go right to subjectivity. They say that your identity is nothing more than your subjective feeling of what you are. Well, that’s also a staggeringly impoverished idea of what constitutes identity. It’s like the claim of an egocentric two-year old, and I mean that technically. Your identity isn’t just how you feel about yourself. It’s also how you think about yourself, it’s what you know about yourself, it’s your educated judgement about yourself. It’s negotiated with other people if you’re even vaguely civilized because otherwise no one can stand you. If your identity isn’t a hybrid of what you are and what other people expect, then you’re like the kid on the playground with whom no one can play.

Plus, your identity is a practical vehicle that you use to manoeuvre yourself through life. In your real identity, you’re a lawyer, you’re a doctor, you’re a mother, you’re a father, you have a role that has value to you and others. None of that’s subjectively defined. So that’s completely absurd, and philosophically primitive, and psychologically wrong. Yet it’s built into the law. I think the law makes discussions of biology and gender illegal. I think we got a taste of that in the TVO Agenda interview I had where [U of T transgender studies professor] Nicholas Mack said ‘well, the scientific consensus in the last four decades is that there’s no biological difference between men and women’. It’s an absurd proposition. There are sex differences at every level of analysis. There are masculinity/femininity scales that have been derived; they’re basically secondary derivations of personality descriptors. There are huge personality differences between men and women. There’s literature looking at differences of men and women in personality in many, many societies throughout the world. I think the biggest paper examined 55 different societies. And they rank societies by sociological and political equality. The hypothesis was that if you equalize the environment between men and women, you eradicate the differences between them. In other words, if you treat boys and girls the same, the differences between them will disappear. But that’s not what the studies showed. In reality, they get bigger. Those are studies of tens of thousands of people. The social constructionist theory was tested. It failed. Gender identity is very much biologically determined.

Die Idee, dass man seine Identität beständig wechselt, wie es einem gerade gefällt, ist in der Tat etwas, was mit dem klassischen Identitätsbegriff schwer in Einklang zu bringen ist und was glaube ich auch die allerwenigsten tatsächlich fühlen. Es ist natürlich eine bequeme Theorie für einen Rosinenpickeransatz, nach dem man sich immer die gerade bequemste Möglichkeit heraussuchen kann.

Und auch diesen Absatz fand ich interessant:

In a National Post op-ed you wrote that ‘words like zhe/zher are the vanguards of a radical left wing ideology that’s frighteningly similar to Marxism’. Can you elaborate?

Assigned identity is oppression. Assigned identity is the identity that’s assigned to you by the power structure – the patriarchy. The only reason the patriarchy assigns you a status is to oppress you. And so the language that frees you from that status is revolutionary language. So, as an example of revolutionary language, we’re going to blow out the gender identity categories, because the concept of woman is oppressive. The anti-patriarchy philosophy is predicated on the idea that all social structures are oppressive, and not much more than that. Then to assault the structure is to question its categorical schemes at every possible level of analysis. And the most fundamental one that the anti-patriarchy radicals have come up with is gender. It’s a piece of identity that children usually pick up on around two – it’s pretty fundamental. You could argue that there isn’t anything more fundamental. Though, I don’t know of anything that’s more fundamental, more basic, and that would have been regarded as more unquestionable, even five years ago.

Scheint mir das Denken dort ganz gut wiederzugeben: Die unterdrückende Struktur beseitigen bedeutet keine Einordnungen nach Kategorie in den klassischen Schemata zu erlauben und diese anzugreifen.

Und zu „Anti-Hate-Speech-Regelungen“:

No. Hate speech laws are wrong. The question – not a question, but THE question – is ‘who gets to define hate?” That’s not to say there’s no such thing as hate speech – clearly there is. Hate speech laws repress, and I mean that in the psycho-analytical sense. They drive [hate speech] underground. It’s not a good idea, because things get ugly when you drive them underground. They don’t disappear, they just fester, and they’re not subject to correction. I made these videos, and they have been subject to a tremendous amount of correction over the last six weeks. I don’t just mean from my public response, but also partly from the university’s response, partly from a group of friends who have been reviewing my videos and criticizing them to death. This is why free speech is so important. You can struggle to formulate some argument, but when you throw it out into the public, there’s a collective attempt to modify and improve that. So with the hate speech issue – say someone’s a Holocaust denier, because that’s the standard routine – we want those people out there in the public so you can tell them why they’re historically ignorant, and why their views are unfounded and dangerous. If you drive them underground, it’s not like they stop talking to each other, they just don’t talk to anyone who disagrees with them. That’s a really bad idea and that’s what’s happening in the United States right now. Half of the country doesn’t talk to the other half. Do you know what you call people you don’t talk to? Enemies.

Wenn man etwas nicht sagen darf, was man als wahr ansieht, dann bilden sich in der Tat schnell Subgruppen, die nur noch miteinander reden und sich insoweit verstärken. Deswegen sollte man immer bereit sein, seine Meinung der Kritik zu stellen, aber auch dagegen sein, die freie Rede einzuschränken.

Und zu Social Justice Warriors:

Do you view social justice culture as a threat to democracy, and why?

Absolutely. There’s nothing about the PC authoritarian types that has any gratitude for any institutions. They have a term – patriarchy. It’s all-encompassing. It means that everything our society is, is corrupt. There’s no line, they mean everything. Go online, go look at ten women’s studies websites. Pick them at random. Read them. They say ‘western civilization is a corrupt patriarchy right down to the goddamned core. We have to overthrow it.’

Which means democracy, which means liberalism, which means human rights.

It means the whole thing. The whole edifice. And what do they compare it to? Utopia. Why do you think the feminists would go after Ayaan Hirsi Ali? She’s a hero, that woman. She’s from Somalia. She grew up in a very oppressive patriarchy – a real one. She escaped from an arranged marriage, and moved to Holland and she fell in love with Holland. Two things really struck her initially before she went to university and become a student of the Enlightenment. Number one – she would stand where there was public transport, and a digital sign would say when the public transport was going to arrive, and it would arrive exactly when it said it was going to. It was unbelievable to her. And the other thing she couldn’t believe was that police would help you. You know you’re in a civilized country when the police don’t just rape you and steal everything you have. The radical left people don’t give a damn about any of that.

Die Weltfremdheit und der unbegründete Hass auf die westliche Gesellschaft ist in der Tat etwas, was SJW untragbar macht.

Und eine interessante Stelle zur Unterdrückung der Frau in der Vergangenheit:

Are you denying the existence of discrimination based on sexuality or race?

I don’t think women were discriminated against, I think that’s an appalling argument. First of all, do you know how much money people lived on in 1885 in 2010 dollars? One dollar a day. The first thing we’ll establish is that life sucked for everyone. You didn’t live very long. If you were female you were pregnant almost all the time, and you were worn out and half dead by the time you were 45. Men worked under abysmal conditions that we can’t even imagine. When George Orwell wrote The Road to Wigan Pier, the coal miners he studied walked to work for two miles underground hunched over before they started their shift. Then they walked back. [Orwell] said he couldn’t walk 200 yards in one of those tunnels without cramping up so bad he couldn’t even stand up. Those guys were toothless by 25, and done by 45. Life before the 20^th century for most people was brutal beyond comparison. The idea that women were an oppressed minority under those conditions is insane. People worked 16 hours a day hand to mouth. My grandmother was a farmer’s wife in Saskatchewan. She showed me a picture of the firewood she chopped before winter. They lived in a log cabin that was not quite as big as the first floor of this house. And the woodpile that she chopped was three times as long, and just as high. And that’s what she did in her spare time because she was also cooking for a threshing crew, taking care of her four kids, working on other people’s farms as a maid, and taking care of the animals. Then in the 20^th century, people got rich enough that some women were able to work outside the home. That started in the 1920s, and really accelerated up through World War II because women were pulled into factories while the men went off to war. The men fought, and died, and that’s pretty much the history of humanity. And then in the 50s, when Betty Friedan started to whine about the plight of women, it’s like, the soldiers came home from the war, everyone started a family, the women pulled in from the factories because they wanted to have kids, and that’s when they got all oppressed. There was no equality for women before the birth control pill. It’s completely insane to assume that anything like that could’ve possibly occurred. And the feminists think they produced a revolution in the 1960s that freed women. What freed women was the pill, and we’ll see how that works out. There’s some evidence that women on the pill don’t like masculine men because of changes in hormonal balance. You can test a woman’s preference in men. You can show them pictures of men and change the jaw width, and what you find is that women who aren’t on the pill like wide-jawed men when they’re ovulating, and they like narrow-jawed men when they’re not, and the narrow-jawed men are less aggressive. Well all women on the pill are as if they’re not ovulating, so it’s possible that a lot of the antipathy that exists right now between women and men exists because of the birth control pill. The idea that women were discriminated against across the course of history is appalling.

Ein interessanter Vergleich, der deutlich macht, dass viele Männer es eben auch nicht gerade einfach hatten und unter schweren Arbeitsbedingungen geschuftet haben.

Now groups that were discriminated against. What are you going to do about it? The only societies that are not slave societies are western enlightenment democracies. That’s it. Compared to utopia, it sucks. But compared to everywhere else – people don’t emigrate to the Middle East to live there, and there’s good reason for that.

The other thing is to do a multi-variate analysis. For example, if we wanted to predict long-term life success in western countries the two best predictors are intelligence and conscientiousness. Intelligent people get there first, and conscientious people work hard. It accounts for about 30 percent of the variance in long-term life success. There’s no discrimination there, it’s just competence. What about women and the glass ceiling? That’s a lot more complicated than it looks. For example, I’ve dealt with big law firms for years. They can’t keep their women. All the big law firms lose all their women in their thirties. Do you know why? It’s easy. Women mate across and up the dominance hierarchy, so women in big law firms who are over 30 who are married, maybe they’re making $300,000 per year. So are their partners. They don’t need to make $600,000 per year. If you want to make $300,000 per year as a lawyer, here’s your life: you work 60-80 hours a week flat out, and you’re on-call. If your Japanese client calls you at 3:00 on a Sunday morning, your answer is ‘yes, I’ll do that right now’ because they’re paying you $750 an hour. These women are high in conscientiousness, great students, brilliant in law school, and stellar in their articling. Then they make partner, and they think ‘what the fuck am I working 80 hours a week for?’ because that’s what sane people think. So it’s all men who are at the absolute pinnacle of professions.  But it’s not all men, it’s this tiny percentage of weird men. They’ve got IQs of 145 or higher, and they’re insanely competitive and hard-working. It doesn’t matter where you put someone like that, they’ll work 80 hours a week. The reason men do that more than women, is that status makes men sexually attractive. Men are driven by status – both biologically and culturally – in a way that women aren’t. So the real issue, when you look at these positions and thinking ‘oh, these are wonderful, luxurious positions of plenitude and relaxation’. That’s rubbish. Those people work so hard that it’s almost unimaginable. Most people not only can’t do that, but there isn’t even a chance that they’d want to. Most women hit partner in their 30s. The funny thing is when you’re in your thirties is that that’s when you really start to have to have your own life. When you’re 18, you’re just like every other knob-headed eighteen-year old, you’re all the same. By the time you’re thirty, you have enough idiosyncratic experience to sort of carve your own life, and most people realize ‘well, I don’t want to work 80 hours a week.’ They want to have a family, and they’re out of time. And then when they have a family, they discover that to have a child – it’s not a generic baby, it’s a new person in your family. That new person is THE most important thing to you. Period. So women they hit that, they get two kids and they think ‘I’m only going to have little kids for five years, you think I’m going to go work for eighty hours a week? To make money I don’t need? Doing something I don’t like? Or am I going to spend time with my kids?’ They can’t keep women in law – there’s no goddamned glass ceiling. The legal profession is desperate to keep qualified people because they don’t have enough. They haul them in from anywhere – especially the women who are not only good lawyers, but who can also generate business. That’s just one dirty little secret about the difference in power structures between men and women. Men do almost all the dangerous jobs, men work outside, men are far more likely to move than women are. So, if you look, if you break down the statistics in terms of wage differential, if you equate for the other factors, young women make more money than young men. The whole “women make $0.70 for every dollar a man makes” is such a lie. Men-run small businesses make way more money than female-run small businesses. Why? Because females start small businesses when they have kids, when they’re at home, so the business is just part time. So that’s why they don’t make as much money. It’s got nothing to do with prejudice, it’s got everything to do with choice. So these arguments that people make about prejudice are not even out of tribal psychology yet.

Und zu den Vorteilen des Kapitalismus in Bezug auf Gleichberechtigung:

We’ve made unbelievable advances in terms of levelling the playing field, and a lot of that was due to pure capitalist greed. In capitalist societies, people are desperate for talent. If they have to put up with women and minorities, generally they will. Transformations are happening so fast that there’s nothing you can do to make them go faster. Everybody’s yelling ‘prejudice’ – it’s a one-stop shop for every explanation. Why is society like this? Prejudice. Why is it like that? Prejudice. There’s no thinking involved at all, no multi-variate analysis. It’s reprehensible.

Und zu Warren Farrell

Warren Farrell wrote the book Why Men Earn More. He was a worker for the National Organization of Women in New York before he wrote the book. He actually wrote the book, at least in principle, for his daughters, because he wanted to help guide them to higher status. He did a multi-variate analysis. He went and looked, and learned more. He found that men do the high paying trades jobs, they’re dangerous, they’re outside, they’re doing hard, physical work. Then there’s the other reasons as well. There’s discrimination for sure, but it counts for maybe ten percent of the variance in success.