Are you seriously asking me what society is, and whether there is any society outside the state? I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure there is.
So he's either demanding something I have literally never heard suggested by anyone ever, or saying relations and prospects should be more like they were in every European society in recorded history up to the 1970s. Yup, anyone's guess what he meant.
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If we grant that the notion "the solution to being single is to get married" has no undercurrent of coercion, it's as banal as reciting arithmetic.
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Today, the notion "the solution to being sexless is to get married" is quite radical. Marriage is presented as something you maybe do once your fun years of casual sex are over, not something you should be thinking about in your teens.
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We should be clear that self identifying "incels" are a very marginal group and cover a much broader age range than teens. the real gnawing sense of failure doesn't set in until the 20s and 30s, incel resentment is of missing out on casual fun and being expected to settle down.
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You've forced me to read the article, damn you. OK, he was talking about a 25-year-old, so this isn't just kids' frustrations. Peterson then claimed, "half the men fail" to get in relationships. If that's true, then the prospects for, say, 10% are completely hopeless.
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(I doubt it's true personally, but that's the argument he made) Conversely, if marriage is normal (as in most of European history), say 80% of people are marrying, then even if you're failing now, you can believe you have a reasonable chance.
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This isn't even original, it's fairly widely thought and discussed. Again, it's the difference between "X must be given sex, now" and "X should have reasonable hope that sexual success is attainable for him". One is ludicrous and impossible, other was a norm within living memory.
End of conversation
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And I'm not saying he's right! The point you seem to be missing is that the desperation of teenage "incels" is caused not just by their own situation, but what they see (erroneously, I believe) as their hopeless prospects.
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Telling a misfit youth that he should be building his life towards becoming a husband and father is rather different from telling him if he isn't getting sex at 17 he's a failure. But it does depend on marriage and family as a norm.
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as you noted how things were "up to the 70s", one could say that norm changed as women became more financially and legally empowered to leave undesirable and dangerous marriages. And that's where the subtext of Peterson's innocent shrugging starts rising to the surface.
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Yes! Now you're making reasonable criticism. I think he thinks that a moral consensus against casual sex would be enough, but I suspect (like you?) that economic and legal equality for women makes that impossible. That's the real argument here.
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But see how far we are from the original disagreement. "Dating advice for men... you deserve sex for existing".
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But that is still something incels do earnestly claim, and insofar as it relates to the Peterson profile, he was flirting with their grievances being valid, before smugly clarifying that actually he wasn't saying anything.
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In any case, I am sleeping now. Thanks for the chat.
End of conversation
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