Peterson traces the categories of male and female deep into humanity’s primordial history. For millennia, these predictable forms have been symbolically associated in human consciousness with order and chaos, respectively. He argues that this dichotomy doesn’t reflect a value difference between male and female. Its origins might have to do with the fact that much of human and animal society is structured according to male hierarchies (order), and that all human beings are born out of the unknown (chaos, which is symbolically associated with femininity). In any case, while Peterson doesn’t suggest that this distinction can be woodenly applied to men and women today—it’s just an archetype—it does reflect the fact that, in his view, men and women are generally different.
In modern society, this gender difference gets expressed in a variety of ways. One example with societal ramifications is that, across cultures, women usually value a male partner who’s equal or higher in status to them. But since women are increasingly exceeding men in many fields, desirable partners are harder to find—and Peterson suggests that since modern education doesn’t accommodate male behaviors well, boys increasingly struggle to grow up into suitable, well-adjusted partners. If they don’t have outlets for daring, boundary-pushing behavior, then, young men remain weak and susceptible to overly harsh, even fascistic ideologies to compensate for their weakness. Basically, Peterson proposes that if boys are allowed to act like boys are usually naturally inclined to do, both men and woman ultimately benefit. So, while Peterson doesn’t hold that male/female distinctions should be viewed as innate and inflexible, he advises being aware of their deep roots in human consciousness and working with them, not against their grain.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Gender and Relationships ThemeTracker
Gender and Relationships Quotes in 12 Rules for Life
Order and chaos are the yang and yin of the famous Taoist symbol: two serpents, head to tail. Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white—and the white in the black—indicate the possibility of transformation: just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos.
Chaos emerges in a household, bit by bit. Mutual unhappiness and resentment pile up. Everything untidy is swept under the rug, where the dragon feasts on the crumbs. But no one says anything […] Communication would require admission of terrible emotions […] But in the background […] the dragon grows. One day it bursts forth, in a form that no one can ignore. […] Every one of the three hundred thousand unrevealed issues, which have been lied about, avoided, rationalized away, hidden like an army of skeletons in some great horrific closet, bursts forth like Noah’s flood, drowning everything.
If you shirk the responsibility of confronting the unexpected, even when it appears in manageable doses, reality itself will become unsustainably disorganized and chaotic. […] Ignored reality transforms itself (reverts back) int the great Goddess of Chaos, the great reptilian Monster of the Unknown—the great predatory beast against which mankind has struggled since the dawn of time. […] Ignored reality manifests itself in an abyss of confusion and suffering.
If the consequences of placing skatestoppers on plant-boxes and sculpture bases […] is unhappy adolescent males and brutalist aesthetic disregard of beauty then, perhaps, that was the aim. When someone claims to be acting from the highest principles, for the good of others, there is no reason to assume that the person’s motives are genuine […] I see the operation of an insidious and profoundly anti-human spirit.
Boys are suffering, in the modern world. They are more disobedient—negatively—or more independent—positively—than girls, and they suffer for this, throughout their pre-university educational career. […] Schools, which were set up in the late 1800s precisely to inculcate obedience, do not take kindly to provocative and daring behaviour, no matter how tough-minded and competent it might show a boy (or a girl) to be.
Of course, culture is an oppressive structure. It’s always been that way. It’s a fundamental, universal existential reality […] Culture takes with one hand, but in some fortunate places it gives more with the other. To think about culture only as oppressive is ignorant and ungrateful, as well as dangerous. This is not to say (as I am hoping the content of this book has made abundantly clear, so far) that culture should not be subject to criticism.
It is almost impossible to over-estimate the nihilistic and destructive nature of this philosophy. It puts the act of categorization itself in doubt. It negates the idea that distinctions might be drawn between things for any reasons other than that of raw power. […] There is sufficient truth to Derrida’s claims to account, in part, for their insidious nature […] [T]he fact that power plays a role in human motivation does not mean that it plays the only role, or even the primary role.
It might be objected […] that a woman does not need a man to rescue her. That may be true, and it may not […] In any case, it is certain that a woman needs consciousness to be rescued, and, as noted above, consciousness is symbolically masculine and has been since the beginning of time […] The Prince could be a lover, but could also be a woman’s own attentive wakefulness, clarity of vision, and tough-minded independence.
When softness and harmlessness become the only consciously acceptable virtues, then hardness and dominance will start to exert an unconscious fascination. Partly what this means for the future is that if men are pushed too hard to feminize, they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology.
