Renowned clinical psychologist and philosopher of the “intellectual dark web” Jordan Peterson was moved to tears while discussing his influence over “disaffected young men” during an interview with Piers Morgan.
Peterson has been pointedly (and rather cheekily) defending his career against the flippant claims of actress-turned-director Oliva Wilde’s after she based the “villain” in her latest film, a patriarchal, male sex fantasy dystopia, on the “pseudo-intellectual” Peterson, as she framed it, to whom she credited as a “hero” to “incels.”
Morgan asked his guest on Tuesday about his influence on the “incel” community, a notorious but hardly influential corner of the internet in which men who are “involuntarily celibate” are particularly chagrined with and blame feminism for their lonely state.
“I want to ask you this quickly, the film director Olivia Wilde has a new movie out, which she says is based on you, this ‘insane man, a pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community,’ incel being these weirdo, loner men who are despicable in many ways,” the host asked. “Is that you? Are you the intellectual hero to these people?”
After a long pause, Peterson replied, “Sure, why not?”
“People have been after me for a long time because I’ve been speaking to disaffected young men. You know, what a terrible thing to do that is,” he said.
At this point, however, he began to choke up. “I thought the marginalized were supposed to have a voice?”
Morgan noted, “It’s making you emotional, to talk about it.”
Do you find Wilde’s attack on Peterson to be disturbing?
“Well, God, you know, it’s very difficult to understand how demoralized people are, and certainly many young men are in that category,” Peterson replied. “And you get these casual insults, ‘these incels,’ what does it mean? It’s like, well, these men, they don’t know how to make themselves attractive to women — who are very picky, and good for them. That’s your gift, man. Women, be picky. Demand high standards from your men. Fair enough.”
“But all these men who are alienated, it’s like, they’re lonesome and they don’t know what to do, and everyone piles abuse on them,” he continued.
“People have been after me for a long time… I thought the marginalised were supposed to have a voice?”
Jordan Peterson begins to cry as @piersmorgan asks him what he thinks of director @oliviawilde basing an “insane” character on him in Don’t Worry Darling.#MorganPeterson pic.twitter.com/BlvS76rL6r
— Piers Morgan Uncensored (@PiersUncensored) September 27, 2022
After the two quipped a bit about whether Peterson might see Wilde’s flim (he said he might) and his recounting having been portrayed as a Nazi supervillain in an issue of Captain America, Morgan circled back to his guest’s display of emotion.
“You’ve been so controlled today, yet in that brief moment you got very emotional: why?” he asked.
“It’s really something to see … constantly, how many people are dying for lack of an encouraging word,” Peterson replied.
Previously, the professor and author responded to Wilde’s comments that he had been the inspiration for the villain in her film by criticizing her for her mockery of men who had been “unsuccessful enough in the dating market to remain involuntarily celibate, and which might be regarded in this context as the kind of derogatory slur compassionate progressives claim to eschew.”
“Many of the young men whom the progressive and cancel-culture-facilitating mad woke mob (which contains no shortage of bitter, self-righteous, victimhood-brandishing, virtue-signaling, accusatory and even outright demented mean-girl feminists) have shamed and tortured into cowering for ever daring to manifest a single masculine attribute have turned to my work and found some solace therein,” he wrote in a statement.
He also noted he is hardly a supporter of the “incel” school of thought, nothing that he has “repeatedly and very publicly” told young people that they ought to “think very hard about their own personal shortcomings and not the evil of the opposite sex, and that they should in consequence strive to amend themselves in the very ways that would make them attractive.”
According to The Federalist’s Victoria Marshall, Wilde’s film “Don’t Worry Darling” is a “modern fever dream” that seems to conspicuously lack any substantial underlying social commentary.
The story centers around a married couple in the 1950’s played by Florence Pugh and Harry Styles who have an idyllic, prosperous life full of martinis, steamy conjugal relations and quintessential mid-century housewifery on the part of Pugh’s character, Alice.
That is, until Alice begins to uncover the terrifying truth, that (spoiler alert) this perfect picture is really just the construct of some “male-power fantasy visual stimulation” that sounds essentially like a cheap rip-off of “The Stepford Wives,” but with incels, or something.
Marshall said that even Wilde herself “doesn’t get the point of the film,” as the director keeps changing her explanation.
“From feminist thriller to vehicle-for-female-pleasure…to ‘Truman Show’ spinoff to ominous warning of the far-right politics of the incel community (or as she puts it, the ‘disenfranchised world of white men on the internet’), Wilde’s disparate explanations of her own film reveal even she doesn’t know what its key takeaway is — and that’s the problem. As a result, ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ is ‘shallow, arrogant, and unoriginal,’” she notes, quoting one scathing review.
The plot sounds simple enough to me, it’s a recycled critique of traditional marriage that, according to reviewers, doesn’t even bother to dig into why so many young men have grown disillusioned by our predominantly feminist society, let alone why so many American conservatives are defending the importance of the nuclear family and rediscovering the value more traditional social roles.
And a staunch defender of traditional roles for men and women myself, the premise of the film disgusts me…but not so much as it simply bores me, and it is painfully obvious to drag Peterson into its center to complete the fantastical fever dream of ill-informed feminist takes on traditional married life.
So it is with tired indignation that I roll my eyes at the notion that this is what Olivia Wilde thinks is behind current cultural trends challenging feminist orthodoxy — and that this embittered male sex fantasy is what Jordan Peterson gives to his audience.
I certainly do hope the incel community is following Peterson, as his insight and advice would redeem a great many embittered young men to take responsibility for their own lives and to give healthy, well-reasoned responses to woke dogma and destructive, divisive feminism.
In fact, this is why Peterson has had such an impact in circles much broader than this random subset of alt-politics internet groups that takes so much umbrage with the fact that they can’t get women to sleep with them.
No, it is among conservatives and free thinkers in general who understand that feminism and the broader postmodern progressive ideology that has had such a sweeping influence across all aspects of culture and society in recent decades is reaping devastating results in the minds, hearts, and soul of young men.
Peterson’s emotion is touching — and it is telling, as what he has is what the progressive left lacks. That is, is genuine compassion for people who are lost, confused and suffering.
It is this cold-heartedness, this culturally Marxist redistribution of importance and concern that has led to the disaffected state of so many young men, who have been banished to the outskirts of polite society and so turn to internet enclaves or angry rhetoric to find meaning and power in a world in which they’re constantly told they’re not wanted.
Completely rearranging society to demonize the men who we need to be showing up for women, marrying them, raising their children and generally contributing to the betterment of society rather than being told to sit on the sidelines so women can pursue self-fulfillment has been one of the most devastating endeavors of the last century, if not all of human history.
This is why so many perfectly normal, happily married or contentedly chaste people are turning away from feminism and fighting for the normalcy of the family unit, the dignity and honor of traditional masculinity, and the modern conservative pursuit of self-ownership and responsibility that Peterson has come to epitomize.
It is only in a society where young men are told they matter and have something to give to women and to their community that we can cultivate healthy, moral masculinity.
But for far too long, people like Wilde and other Hollywood liberals, influenced by the elite academics that have disseminated their radicalism into the furthest reaches of society, have been telling young men for far too long that they have something to apologize for instead.
Peterson has made a choice to redeem these young men, to give them a voice and help them to rethink their sense of purpose and the proper outlet for their chagrin with modern society.
He has done far more for men — and thus, women — than Olivia Wilde and her privileged Hollywood cohorts have ever done.
For this, as the mother of two boys, I sincerely thank him, praying that the world my little ones grow up in is a world where they are told they matter and have something to offer their fellow man as well as the women they love.
