Jordan Peterson's Ridiculous Take On Dating
Do the top 20% of men really have exclusive access to the top 80% of women?
It’s important to distinguish between “Petersonian” theory and “what Dr. Peterson actually thinks. After a careful reread of Das Kapital, I failed to find any injunction to create a “Gulag Archipelago”. Likewise, it would be shocking if the prevailing sentiment among Peterson’s fans was similar to Dr. Peterson’s own beliefs in every important way. I applaud Peterson’s suggestion that we occasionally ask ourselves questions like “What use am I to other people?”. I even agree with Jordan’s extremely controversial belief that being the biological parent of a child confers a moral responsibility to educate and care for them to the best of one’s abilities. But enough with this context and fairness, from here I proceed purely in the spirit of ridicule.
I put it to you that: Women do not choose their mates based on their position in a dominance hierarchy. Furthermore, I hope to demonstrate that this belief is so naive it ranks along side “All heterosexual sex is rape.” as one of the silliest doctrines ever attributed to a public intellectual. At the same time, I hope to amuse you. You are all dear friends who are kind enough to read something I wrote in 45 minutes and then posted on the internet.
I shall never suggest, even in the for purposes of merriment, that a list of examples constitutes an argument. Human Thoughts are expressible as sentences, whereas lists are instruments of emotion.
Thought:
The 80/20 theory of gender relations is absurd because:
“Men and women overwhelmingly prefer their mates to all other people even the more attractive ones.”
Peterson’s theory of dominance based attraction and the concept of Love are contradictory. Love is real, google it.
Whether in the case of friendship, business, or romance. People seek out individuals they can form productive relationships with. Once people have noticed mutual compatibility, they grow attached to each other as the relationship strengthens over time, or drift apart as the relationship decomposes. The concept of “top 20% of the male population”, is meaningless. People seek out “compatible mates”, enter into relationships with them and either become more committed over time, or move on.
Is the search for compatibility a better explanatory model than the 80/20 rule? In the 80/20 paradigm, there should be a way of combining a man’s salary, height, facial symmetry, IQ and hand size in order to create a higher order variable that would correlate with his desirability. A sort of “dominance IQ”, which I invite you to refer to as Alpha. We’d expect to see enthusiasm for a mate track this dominance hierarchy quotient. This would mean that women would maintain the same level of interest in a man throughout a relationship, unless the guys Alpha declined. Instead we observe 1. Women enter into relationships hopefully and then sometimes lose interest. 2. Women often differ on which men they find attractive. 3. Men and women who stay together for long periods of time become increasingly attached to their mates even as their bodies decay and their reproductive capacity implodes. This leads me to my first counter example.
1) Kidnapping is a bigger global industry than murder for hire.
Why aren’t people more eager to get rid of a spouse and keep their money? Could it be because the relationship has an inherent value that exceeds the upside of finding a more attractive or wealthy partner?
The idea that relationship compatibility is the primary factor in mate choice explains people’s long term attachment to one another. 80/20 advocates will argue that their rule explains initial attraction and long term compatibility is really a separate phenomenon. Is it not true that women first eliminate 80% of men from consideration on the basis of objective worth and then find their favorites among the remaining men based on a few essentially frivolous preferences?
I say no. Rather, personal preferences and pure chance narrow the field of men down to a small number of acceptable suitors. Women evaluate the remaining men based on an even more personalized standard. This brings me to my second point.
2) Mr. Rochester was even more attractive after he got his face burned off.
If you haven’t read “Jane Eyre”. At least, watch the movie. This paragraph contains Spoilers. It’s the story of a woman who marries her true love, a creepy man who’s twice her age and who is blind from having his face burned off. Why does she do it? Not for prestige, the man was a social pariah. Not for money, she’d just given away the equivalent of millions dollars the chapter before. God knows she didn’t do it because of his athletic ability, charm, or facial symmetry. As I mentioned, the man was a weirdo with a burned-off face. The answer is that she did it for reasons that make sense in the overall context of the story, and are therefore not explicable in terms of a calculation based on the man’s Alpha quotient. “Jane Eyre” is a timeless classic based on a powerful emotional truth that couldn’t exist in a world ruled by the 80/20 rule.
An 80/20 advocate or educated Petersonian will cite similarities between Jane Eyre and “Beauty and the Beast”. Peterson likes to point to stories like “Beauty and the Beast” and “Twilight,” to make the point that the male nature has an “inherently dark and destructive side” and women seek to harness the power of that darkness and transform it into a social good. This seems to connect to the 80/20 rule in that women are attracted to “bad boys”, billionaires, and troubled artists, because they have “enormous reserves of destructive power for ladies to channel with their civilizing influence.”
The implication is: deadbeats, “nice guys”, people with low testosterone, and cowards, lack “enormous reserves of destructive power” and therefore must content themselves with conciliating the unfortunate 20% of women who fall out of favor with Drake, Aubrey Marcus, the NBA. This is actually true, but I admit it with one caveat: Most men are decent.
3) Few nowadays can match the cunning of Odysseus or the martial prowess of Achilles, but you’d be hard pressed to find a guy who’d eat a baby for $1000.
Positive habits like industry, thrift, diet, and exercise, do make people more attractive. However, these accomplishments are well within the reach of 80% of any population. After that, it really comes to down whether you like the same music. Despite his athleticism Achilles was reduced to kidnapping women by yanking them onto his chariot. Ghengis Khan may have had thousands of children, but not because he was in the “top 20% of men.”
Surely, anyone can see why comparing one’s dating success to the reproductive success of a serial rapist is drawing a false equivalency.
If you’re willing to meet other human beings half way, you’ll find yourself surrounded by friends. The real 80/20 rule is that not lying and not smelling bad gets you 80% of the way towards finding a mate. The other 20% involves being interested in things so that you can find common interests with others. Women with advanced degrees marry men with advanced degrees because those are the guys that they have something to talk to about. If your primary focus is “gender based grievances” you limit your social circle to other people who find that interesting. The attractive couples you see walking around the produce isle are together because they share a love of diet and exercise.
There is no elect 20% of men who are privileged to choose their own mates. It’s simply that men and women who find things in common enjoy each other’s company. Peterson’s injunction to “Clean up your room and take control of your health.” is excellent, but the rational is flawed. Self improvement doesn’t make your more “Desirable” it makes you a more welcome addition to another person’s life.
