Canadian Sexism


  1. Premise: All societies are sexist in different ways.
  2. Premise: Canada is a highly-urban, extractivist arm of the British Empire, and in addition to its English and French population, the English of which maintains an ongoing, fairly creepy (unreflective), idealist, rivalristic, anti-American nationalist discursive project, its settler population largely consists of the merchant class diaspora of war-torn and industrializing countries. The indigenous population has been highly influenced by this culture as well as missionary Christianity. In aggregate, this sociological foundation influences the Canadian brand of sexism.
  3. Premise: Sexism is carried out by both women and men, though they have distinctive roles in its functioning.

Canadian sexism

  1. Work networking occurs through male collective association contexts.
  2. Females have traditionally served as social reproducers, including managing and conducting a large sector of unpaid imperial social-service carework volunteerism.
    1. The Canadian government protects a healthy number of holidays, assisting social reproduction.
    2. However, today most socio-biological reproductive work also has to be subsidized by other populations, including both immigrants, and intergenerational labour (by grandparents), as the structure of costs v. socially-average wages in Canada is based on working-age (age 20-68) households with two adults in paid employment.
  3. Liberal Canadian feminist identity valorizes a mytho-poetic “Strong Woman” construction, which means a woman who avails herself of some part of the repertoire of rights and obligations proper to bourgeois females, or mature (desexualized/queered) females under state-protected security, including moving about freely in public spaces, particularly while volunteering, in paid employment, and consuming; novel reading and aesthetic appreciation; household, neighbourhood, or poverty management/reproduction; and gender-segregated communicative freedom and freedom of same-sex micro-assembly.
    1. Under this liberal model, and perhaps due to its high level of urbanization, the “modern” Canadian femininity variant consists of  adopting the habitus of flamboyantly gay male culture, permitting practitioners commercially-compliant, aesthetic and cultural appreciation/critique, in addition to more typically-feminized carework and human-relations management.
  4. In Canada, the sexual availability signal is simple, one-on-one cross-gender fraternization. There is no secondary tier of sexual availability signalling beyond such fraternization, for example an additional verbal negotiation and agreement. It is always assumed that one-on-one cross-gender socialization and networking is primarily for the purpose of sexual intercourse. So, women and men generally cannot and do not socialize as friends or work together in a dyad in Canada. A desegregated “friendship” or desegregated working dyad in Canada would require submission to or perpetual negotiation of the baseline Canadian open sexual access expectation.
    1. It is unclear to me at this stage how people of the same gender signal sexual availability to each other, given the heavy reliance in Canada on same-gender socialization to police the sexual-access boundary.
      1. However, it could be an aspect of Canadian sexism that, for example, same-gender sexual solicitation (or boundary assertion excluding sexualization) is accomplished through an additional tier of egalitarian verbal communication that is not available across unequal genders.
      2. It seems also clear that Canadians rely on group socialization and work environments to permit non-sexualized, gender-desegregated interactions. Through group or chaperoned interaction, Canadians avoid signalling the sexual availability they assume to be an inherent property of cross-gender one-on-one interaction in that society.
    2. A norm is a norm. If the prohibition on non-sexualized cross-gender fraternization is not observed (For example, in the case of a cross-gender social or work interaction between two people.), but the female privately and/or publicly objects to the Canadian sexualized-relationship norm itself (in the case where she comes from another culture where women and men are able to engage in non-sexualized social or working relations without chaperones), her objections to the norm are categorically disregarded by Canadians, and she is simply considered a norm violator; to Canadians her objection to the sexist norm is indistinguishable from deviance.
      1. Her only alternative to silently submitting to the Canadian sexualized relationship norm in one-on-one cross-gender interactions is to levy a sexual-harassment charge upon the individual man (“friend”/colleague), requiring the female to defect from her social/professional relationships, and put her own social and/or professional capital on the line.
        1. This legalistic, antisocial, and personally-damaging line of “remedy” is enforced by the community, including women, as the only way to intervene on the norm. They will not allow the social norm to be publicly reconsidered. This approach is in accord with highly-delimited and institutional liberal conceptions of social change, as well as the general devaluation of women’s work.
        2. In Canada, it is imagined that only through such individual “Strong Woman” acts of self-sacrifice, or strict adherence to group/chaperoned unsegregated social interaction, can men’s natural, free sexual being be contained for and within the collective good.
        3. With this Canadian-sexism consequence tree, this incentive structure, the community maintains the cross-gender relationship sexualization norm.
        4. This collective norm maintenance is likely reinforced by its benefit to reliable, predictable, calculable social reproduction, undergirding and stabilizing the market.
  5. As in many other jurisdictions, attachment to a lineage of male protection secures women (a lower quality of) social credit and social cooperation in Canada.
    1. In the patriarchal protection racket, a husband is no substitute for a father. Effectively dispensing with the protection of a father, like divorce or death, an exercise of patrilocality strips women of individual identity and much social credit and cooperation.
    2. While patriarchal networks can provide reduced-quality economic cooperation to women attached by marriage to the network–as a way of directing additional resources to the patrilineage, attached females do not cooperate substantively down or across the patriarchy (as is typical in patriarchies, where new-female blood is expected to relieve senior females of the patriarchy’s highly-dehumanized, super-exploited roles).
      1. The only possibility for women seeking to acquire social cooperation in Canada is through building exclusively-female networks outside the patriarchal networks.
      2. In patrilocality, offspring are culturally regarded as property of the patrilineage. The possibility that the liberal Canadian state could support the outsider mother’s claim on the offspring, and potentially, her removal of the offspring, is constructed as a permanent, existential patriarchal community threat. Thus a female relocated to a Canadian patrilocality is collectively, primarily perceived within the patrilocality social network as a latent existential threat if she produces an offspring, particularly a male.
        1. Although natural to the patriarchal culture, this is an extremely creepy and alienating cultural phenomenon, from the relocated female perspective. She must countenance not only suspicion and barely-suppressed hostility in social interactions across the patrilocality, but also endless assertions of primary patriarchal ownership of the offspring, and heavy, instrumentalist (with an eye toward state appeal) documentation of the patrilineal relationships. While it may incentivize some degree of placating behaviour, patrilineage-securitization also produces alienation between the introduced female and the patriarchy network (both male and female), and depletes trust, credit, cooperation, and recognition.
        2. Patrilineage-securitization in a patrilocality can stress the marriage partnership, as that relationship requires copious, substantial trust; and much emotional work is demanded within the marriage to prevent that ambient paranoid securitization from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
    3. Recognizable, performative butch-lesbian professional identity is respected in liberal Canada as an alternative path to economic cooperation, as long as it is associated with management initiatives exploiting and/or expropriating working women.


Hypothesis: Little influenced by democratic republicanism, but commercially-compliant, Canadian sexism is a liberal-Anglo ideal type.


Clarifying Social Reproduction Feminism: Not Liberal, Not Idealist, It’s Socialist and Historical-materialist

The essay, “Traveling in the Wrong Direction” by British political philosopher Lorna Findlayson is required reading for socialist feminists. The first half is a brilliantly-written take-down of liberal feminism. The second half wobbles around, and reveals something very interesting, an analytical deficit in an otherwise powerful analysis:  A philosophical-Marxist (as opposed to political-Marxist) tendency to analyze capitalism as THE ruling class mode does not survey history, really take women’s socio-material global experience seriously, and does not consider that exploitative capitalism is a competitive option, always reliant on mass expropriation, in the arsenal of rivalristic regional ruling class strategy. Findlayson posits social reproduction strikes as an *alternative* to organized industrial action.

Findlayson needs some Jane McAlevey correction. Greta Thunberg’s individual action, the Climate School Strike, is not industrial action, and it is not the sole answer. But, as she indicates, it is a good form of collective action for a young person on the autism spectrum.

Findlayson is trying to equate social reproduction socialist-feminism with liberal feminism, in terms of strategic lameness and misdirection. But to pursue this reduction, she doesn’t see the strategic problem that is visible today: How do you counter a rivalristic, regional ruling class strategy that has always juggled a little bit of exploitation with a lot of expropriation?

In the late 19th century, industrial action, particularly in steel production, was effective because Western economies leaned on steel production at that time (Lawrence 2014).  At their most effective, industrial action was in truth collective action across working class communities. We just don’t see it because our delegated capitalist imaginations only recognize the exploited male labor, and so we’re gender blind.

Then there’s the issue: Western economies have moved on from the industrializing era. What does this mean for industrial action, or for smallholder political interests and strategy in regions that have been capturing global wealth?

Further, over the long haul, we have seen that capitalism cannot be dismantled simply by disrupting key nodes of exploitation, though conceived more broadly as building working-class communicative and egalitarian-cooperative capacity (by capitalist definition, disruptive; see also McAlevey 2016 for description), union-community action needs to be organized again–recognizing that militarization and policing is funded precisely to crush that organization. (Left Critics of the Left always uncannily forget about or black-box the massive repressive apparatus into which much of global wealth, energy, and human capacity is poured. This tradition of “Critical”/competitive kvetching (firing circle) Left “forgetting” always reads like a ritual that might easily be fanned by cops.)

By cohering a hierarchical economic alliance through selective exploitation, regional capitalists sell finance as a vehicle for expropriation, and they enjoin class-solidaristic, shifting-frenemy rivalries with each other. But the properly-capitalist exploitative mode is plodding as well as fungible and optional where there are other strategies–imperial war, for example–of pursuing elite rivalries for domination. Where there are other strategies is everywhere, all the time, because once you make money off of commodity production, you plunge it into higher-profit expropriative and rentier activities to keep your advantage and entitlements (See Pistor 2019, Piketty 2013). Exploitation and commodity production are a tool for organizing economy, society, and states under globalizing capitalist elites, and underwriting elite power expansion. Once the organization and underwriting have been accomplished, the real elite Power Resources are in taking, not making.

Industrial action cannot itself dismantle capitalism not only because capitalists possess the surveillance technology, the legal strategists, the economist marketeers and whips, the state, and layers of militarized police (as Adam Smith observed in 1776), not only because it’s far easier for less-numerous, habitually, socially class-solidaristic capitalists than workers to organize across space and scale, along with their supportive comprador class of lawyers and managers (as Adam Smith again observed in 1776, was demonstrated in the early 20th century strikes, and was analyzed by Bill Domhoff over his career), and not only because they possess the wealth to outlast resource-poor worker revolt, but also because erstwhile capitalists possess the economic degrees of freedom to shift to rents, extraction, and expropriation.

If workers and other smallholders in the West can be organized for internationalism, to solidaristically support Chinese and Indian worker revolt, that may well cause enough disruption to produce change, including some lessening of elite confidence. But we have learned that it will not be enough to direct change or maintain an egalitarian direction. Disruption is not the same as strategy, full human coordination capacity. We already have had neoliberalism producing change. What we need is to build the capacity to direct change strategically upon a temporary elite loss of confidence that industrial action could achieve, aiming to build up redistributive incentives. A key to collective agential change is agile, multipronged strategic capacity. Social Reproduction feminists are in one of the best positions to think strategically in this context, as I have indicated previously (Fridell 2017).

Socialist Social Reproduction feminism still has plenty of room for development, but it has been forwarded by some of the most powerful analysts of both logical structure and empirical variation, and, compatible with historically- and regionally-sensitive Political Marxism (per Meiksins-Wood), it holds out the promise of clarifying better anticapitalist strategy than is possible via idealist-discursive philosophy, including idealist-philosophical Marxism.

As Bourdieu suggested, idealist philosophy’s contribution to an egaliberte justice telos arrives when those philosophers turn their decisionist- genealogical and discursive-deconstructionist approaches on their own discipline…or even on conservative-liberal law and mainstream economics, if they cannot bear to critically analyze their own methods and knowledge’s structure and (given the encompassing historical context that philsophers are not interested in specifying) its effects. The neoliberal era is a long, conservatizing period in which junior managers and marketeers have aestheticized managing the variables they can control (for philosophers–critiquing equality-justice discursive logics), bereft of anything like Scenario Analysis–analyzing the optimal and worst case scenarios of how the products of that management interact with adjoining and governing incentives. For some reason in this conservatizing period, only financial managers have been allowed to assess management’s and products’ interactions with context.

To accomplish better socialist strategy, Social Reproduction feminism advances not idealist philosophy, but materialist philosophy. Historicist, socialist-feminist Social Reproduction scholarship and praxis, as well as new feminist indigenous theory, have reconstructed philosophical materialism as an egalitarian, internationalist form of cosmopolitanism supporting re-organization.



Benner, Erica. 2018 (1995). Really-existing Nationalisms. Verso.

Bezanson, K. and M. Luxton, eds. 2006. Social reproduction: Feminist political economy challenges neoliberalism. McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Bhattacharya, T., ed. 2017. Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. Pluto.

Federici, Silvia. 2018. Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Pm Pr.

Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia.

Finlayson, Lorna. 2019. “Traveling in the Wrong Direction.” London Review of Books

Finlayson, Lorna. 2015. The Political is Political: Conformity and the Illusion of Dissent in Contemporary Political Philosophy.

Fraser, Nancy. 2017. “Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography— From Exploitation to Expropriation: Historic Geographies of Racialized Capitalism.” Economic Geography 94(1): 1–17.

Fraser, Nancy. 2013. Fortunes of feminism.

Fraser, Nancy and Axel Honneth. 2003. Redistribution or Recognition?

Fraser, Nancy and Linda Gordon. 1994. “Dependency Demystified: Inscriptions of Power in a Keyword of the Welfare State.” Social Politics 1(1): 4-31.

Fraser, Nancy and Linda Gordon. 1992. “Contract vs. Charity: Why Is There No Social Citizenship in the United States?” Socialist Review 22(3): 45-67.

Fridell, Mara. 2017. “The Social-Democratic Small-State Strategy and Immigration: Sweden in the 21st Century.” World Review of Political Economy. Vol. 8, No. 3, Small States in the Multi-polar World (Fall 2017), pp. 390-415.

Kollontai, Alexandra. 1916. Society and Motherhood.

Lawrence, Andrew G. 2014. Employer and Worker Collective Action: A Comparatie Study of Germany, South Africa, and the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press.

McAlevey, Jane. 2016. No shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age.

Meiksins-Wood, Ellen. 2014. “Capitalism’s Gravediggers.” Jacobin, December 5.



Queer-constructionist Political Economy?

Seriously, though, I don’t get the promotional friendship between Melinda Cooper and the US East Coast-networked leftists, their combined attempt to mischaracterize and discredit Nancy Fraser, as if she were an opponent of queer constructionism.

Where Fraser, as a philosopher, did a philosophical analysis of how neoliberalism co-opted the antimarxist liberal and postmodern feminism that developed upon a conservative philosophical tradition championing the justice telos of difference against the justice telos of egaliberte, Cooper just appropriates some of the 1990s family sociology and political soc work, tosses in a couple superficial gestures to Marx, and tacks it onto a hatchet job on Fraser. Australia has the worst academic production incentives. Maybe it would seem fresh and necessary if you were a Political Scientist and thought queer social constructionism was birthed in the 2016 H. Clinton multijurisdictional campaign. Cooper’s latest is the most manipulative, orchestrated, bad-faith academic work I have seen coming out of the social sciences in recent years. Because the empirical history retelling is so derivative, it seems like it was done just to sell the denunciation, maintain the conservative elite + patronaged-exception political coalition.

Every time I see a reviewer scratch “Masterful” or “Magesterial” next to Cooper’s cheap appropriation smacked onto a wildly-bad faith denunciation, I grow curiouser and curiouser. Is this about Political Science just co-opting Political Sociology work, and Political Scientists rallying behind that? After all these years, I finally worked out how much the tenured Arts academy (not just commercial science faculty) is a collection of people seeking patronage from (or contributing to the campaigns and interests of) political parties, foreign states and defense industry, banks, etc. Is this a security institutions thing–some attempt to hush down the political, antimarxist role of academic poststructuralism in the academy? Why is Cooper so well networked into the Anglo-American Atlantic–to the point where a quick ‘n’ dirty, basic, redundant lit review is hailed as “magesterial”? Usually, Australians are networked into the Commonwealth. Curiouser & curiouser.

Maybe Cooper gets carte blanche for some reason after “Life as Surplus”? Maybe she just earned publishing house-backed credit as someone who can crank out books. Again, quality is at issue.

For obdurate reasons of ontological difference, Queer social constructionism is not a logical fit with political economy. Micro constructionism (discursive essentialism) and macro-constructionism (political economy) can make space for each other, but they cannot fuse. All Cooper did to bridge the ontological incompatibility was fake a shared epistemology–by appropriating it. This is clearly not sustainable, because it required not producing knowledge but stealing the work of and then denouncing all the people who did the empirical work, the social science social reproduction feminists, whom Cooper dismissed by reducing and subsuming them under their philosophical-interpretive ally,  Fraser. This is not scholarship; it’s gaming. While I understand that ambition’s at play here, it’s really not going to work to demand that older feminists in particular submit like good cis-het girls to queer-careerists humping their leg, because to be a mature female feminist is also to work with being existentially queered, and it always has been. It’s not a choice. It’s not a strategy. It’s not a brand.

For leftists, it is not worth selling out all the socialist feminists who do the social reproduction empirical and theoretical work, have done it since Kollontai (1915), just to try to fake like there’s a viable, hybrid queer-constructionist political economy tradition or agenda to market. Don’t force it. If you need a queer path to political economy to fill out the cocktail party or to compete with a Coca-Cola commercial, some slightly-less-mercenary queer careerist can plagiarize Stephanie Coontz and Sarah Diamond (not queer enough 4 U ?) without profoundly disrespecting all the sex-heterogeneous socialist feminists and their work.

By contrast…The great things about Fraser are that as a philosopher she pays attention to the empirical, craft work of feminist social scientists without appropriating it. She does her own work. And b) her work is rigorous, reflective, coalitional and politic, informed by experience, and a reorienting, politically-necessary intellectual intervention that guides and clarifies ideas. Like a philosopher is supposed to. It’s not just a weathered French academicism–pre-scripted, delegated, conservative imperial market-state reproduction strategy–slap-dash and slathered with bluster, a la Cooper.

Colonization and the Abject Female Supervillain


Reading Norse folks tales both old and new, it’s not totally clear to me that trolls, in the materialist Nordic forest cultures, aren’t a disrespectful way to depict people, within Nordic society. exhibiting antisocial qualities and brutishness, from either elite or hoi poloi perspective. Grendl and his mother, for example, were trying to beat back and protect themselves from a community of vicious marauders. Trolls aren’t really outsiders. They’re big, ugly, thuggish, irresponsible and dangerous people who live next to and interact with the human or  protagonists a lot. Often trolls are distinguished by long noses, for example, a trait that tends to crop up in Scandinavian people anyway. Modern author Rolf Lidberg’s trolls are clearly just common folk. And trolls and people tend to marry or morph into each other over the course of some stories. After all, troll literally just means magic. Protagonists, including when they seem very much to be representing the youngest member of a family audience, are depicted as underappreciated princesses and princes, while in some stories, characters that start out as talking animals end up being princes. So there’s a lot of fluidity there, between behaviour and metaphorical nature, and there’s a clear tendency to hyperbolic representation in these folktales.

Usually the mighty Icelandic troll ladies were slain by the saga hero, though sometimes they were spared in exchange for treasure, or befriended, as in the case of Brana & Halfdan, according to Martin Puhvel (1987, McGill).


As Silvia Federici documented (1998), the crippling fear of women is often the result of instrumental, imperial-cosmopolitan divide-and-conquer interventions imposed upon hinterlands communities. Eleanor Hull’s research (1927) showed that female Celtic supernatural villains like banshees and various evil, watery tarts were degenerate descendants of ancient, mighty war goddesses like Macha and Bodb.

grendels mom

Egalitarian Sexuality Bibliography

Toward a theory of the macro-social construction of gender:


Kristen Ghodsee on better sex under socialism:

Ghodsee, K. 2017. Why women have better sex under socialism, and other arguments for economic independence.

Henwood, D. 2018. Interview with K. Ghodsee, “Why women have better sex under socialism.”

Miller, Jane. 2018. “Want better sex? Try socialism,” review of Ghodsee’s “Why women have better sex under socialism.”

Baker, Katie JM. 2013. “Cockblocked by Redistribution: A Pickup Artist in Denmark.” Dissent.

Kollontai, Alexandra. 1916. “Preface,” to the research study Society and Motherhood.

Conservative Social Reproduction via Social Media


Social media and capitalist dispositions

Another medium for classic conservative social reproduction strategy

I don’t like engaging with liberal wonk and pop culture fetishes, including neophilia, but where I work, there’s a lot of both engagement with and promotion of their baby, psychologist Jordan Peterson. So I’ll mention this as a case of how social media is crude and stupid, and entwined with crude, stupid professional comms. So, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Jordan Peterson is a successful academic psychologist whose academic years are mostly behind him. When I say that, you may key in on “successful,” so I should underscore that the framework here is: he is a psychologist. His scientistic theory of natural human inequality is founded on his belief that humans = invertebrates (to be precise: lobsters). As Zach Beauchamp (2018) has helpfully clarified,

The relationship between human and lobster brains is outside Peterson’s area of academic expertise. Experts in the field who have evaluated his claims have found them lacking, as lobsters’ and humans’ neurological systems are radically different. One important distinction is that humans have brains and lobsters (technically speaking) do not.”

It seems to be absolutely standard in Psychology, the belief that human dispositions are both fixed by nature and best represented by random animal behaviours. I can never get over the Psych PhD dissertation defense I guest chaired where the data on human motivation came from intermittently observing four (4) goldfish. That is just the stark, raving insane way that psychologists understand human behaviour. I think they feel such equivalences are scientific? Because animals are natural? Only through anti-liberal arts disciplinary siloing can a discipline get away with such validity-trashing scientism. The crass, anti-biological illogic makes you want to stab yourself in the eyeball. Science: Humans are vertebrates, have brains, and those brains are big because we are radically social, and humans have mostly lived in egalitarian relations.

Peterson has produced psychology studies of personality. He went into Psychology from undergrad Political Science because he felt political mass movement was pathological, and he was interested demagoguery, which he seems to have studied as a how-to guide. His affinity with academia is that he is drawn toward the organizing, civilizing work of the minister, which has gelled into political ambition at this late point in his working life.

You’ll recall that at the turn of the 20th century social-psychologist Emile Durkheim’s big project was to advocate for capitalist churches to organize people in liberal capitalist societies. Little did Durkheim imagine that this would not be a problem. Peterson once wanted to buy a church, before realizing that young people use Youtube as a church. Low, low fixed capital costs.

Like most psychologists, he has expertise in how to manipulate people, and he is an ideological extreme individualist and conservative. As a productive, professional, heterosexual family man, his flamboyant and domineering personality was given a very long leash in Psychology, a profession infamous for its long leash. And who could believe a Canadian is a fascist? Give that man-with-a-plan all the credit in the world, has been the reliable response to Jordan Peterson.

growls playfully

Like all conservative attachés to economic power, his conservative individualism is about advancing himself as a Philosopher King. He harvests status and wealth by delivering to the doorstep of socio-economic power a corralled and disciplined consumer, servant, and political constituency, young men.

While he is recognized for exclusively expressing (sometimes tearful) compassion at the plight of young men, advising them to sit up straight to be competitive, modeling for them both coldly interrupting and trolling and screaming explosively at opponents, Peterson organizes a constituency by manipulating a crowd’s anxieties and narcissistic defenses. The classic, proven conservative marketing pitch and collective platform, to men and youth in liberal societies is:

You feel your birthright entitlements are inaccessible; but you can get your shit together and be the ubermensch, like me, by joining my exclusive pyramid scheme of credit and cooperation, subordinated only to economic power.

Outside of this collective, we do not act in good faith; we do not extend credit, and we do not cooperate.”

Although this conservative sales script is dog-eared, a new generation of surprised-to-be-challenged-in-dear-old-capitalism proto-patriarchs arises repeatedly, ready to buy. Peterson himself was one of these, at an early age steered by Alberta librarians and teachers toward Ayn Rand and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago inter alia, top sellers among the voluminous anti-egaliberte young-adult fiction hallowed in the English-language tradition, in the imperial, capitalist-slaver Anglo-American empire.

Conservativism’s patriarchal individualism works as exceptionalist flattery and a membership password signal; but the method is organizing a ‘password’-protected, ‘gated’ collective. It is a pyramid scheme, not unlike Tupperware or Avon, but not for busy, isolated 1950s housewives. This is for busy boys and young men, rightly terrified by the commodified competition and instrumentalism marketed through the corporatized university, and anxious to Get Theirs. Joining the network is for recognition, maybe cooperation and credit once you’re in. So continuing male socialization, abjecting the network’s abjected, feminized outside plays a much more important role than even at Amway.

Because the guru Philosopher King, Peterson, is fundamentally the organizing principle for a pyramid network, his various opinions on things outside his limited expertise–personality and the manipulation thereof, as well as navigating academia as an institution–do not have to be, and are not informed, consistent or coherent. This allows him to extend and retract radically inegalitarian conceptualizations here, civilized-comportment principles there, never providing the respect of sincerity, coherency, and consistency, never providing cooperation to interlocutors outside his church. You join his church, you buy and sell his pyramid-scheme commodities (Youtuberie; books; Patreon donations), you hoist his flags. Hopefully your new Peterson-brand friends will hook you up with exclusive financial opportunities at some point.

You know, because they’re rightfully gripped, young men are really hopeful in this regard. I used to watch my brother for years, desperately convinced that his young, pothead, Jewish scion golf-and-drugs buddy would at any moment hand over his family’s wealth so my brother could use it to make a dream bar. I hate to give away spoilers on what eventually transpired there, after years of immovable faith and diligent planning on my brother’s part, but No. No. Nope. Never. No. Capitalism. You can search high and low, but no transgender politeness ever intervened to cause the inevitability of my brother having to settle for a respectable if not blingy career with UPS.


Dude: “We had so much in common: Soup, pot, golf, contempt for women. Why didn’t he open his trustfund to me? To this day, it is a baffling mystery.”

Capitalism: “Dough$ before Bros.”

Peterson is a conservative, and that’s not just about stepping into the Philosopher King ideological organizer role. He’s also a Canadian from oily Edmonton, Alberta, selected for by Anglo-American immigration policy and raised to base all his ideas on a toxic, facile, historically-invalid equation of genocide with egalitarianism. He’s a psychologist, so his political ideas and historical and biological knowledge are on the same level as your average Engineering or Econ 101 student, but he tells a beautiful, familiar tale for such primed audiences, reassuring them that everyone is compleat in conservatives’ eyes, there is never any need for human or intellectual development, just male hardening.

Male hardening. Psychologists sure understand markets.

Peterson’s captivating tweak on the Classic Conservative Marketing Script: ‘In this, our magical land, inegalitarianism is biologically natural; we know because lobsters = humans. Then communism came along to deaden everyone who was otherwise living peacefully in a natural, inegalitarian daisy field. After we bravely, heroically disappeared the communists and thereby buried in Davey Jones’ Locker the unnatural notions of human development, egalitarianism, and democratic social construction forever, “Underground Communists,” AKA postmodernists oozed up to disseminate the devilish notion that (non-class-based, capitalism-compatible) equity and social construction (or at least transgressive textual interpretation) are still legit. RALLY TO ME (Specifically: my Patreon account, political warchest), JUNGIAN WARRIOR IDEAL-TYPES, AND WE SHALL RID THE UNIVERSITY OF TERM PAPERS! In their place, you shall have a totally-gameable, purchasable test bank from a major textbook sales firm in which I have a not-inconsiderable financial interest. ALL SHALL LOVE ME AND DESPAIR!’

Peterson sashays this conservative conspiracy slur in the face of the empirical fact that the post-1968 poststructuralists and postmodernists have nearly all been avowed Commie Hunters, like him. The communists were not disappeared by conservatives working alone, much as conservatives are in fact deeply, madly into mass killing, and would love to take the credit. All those pomos ever wanted was to choose and be chosen by (free-ish market) meritocracy. But even that is, in the last instance, another ancient enemy of conservative entitlement.

So Peterson is another Commie Hunter, but since his Cold War youth, the commies have been successfully hunted down in Anglo-America (Yay, elite/objective freedom!), and he’s reduced to hunting capitalism-compatible ladies, transfolk, and people of color in universities, as the scapegoat cause of young white males’ anxieties. Not the Chamber of Commerce seated on the university Board, nor the parasitical university administrative management and marketeering overhang, all redefining the university as a commodity mine, and students as Tuition Units. No, for those obvious sources of anxiety are powerful, and thus existentially right in the conservative mind. No, the scapegoat for the grand conservative politics of fear will be scholars, professors and fellow students. Peterson’s branded Lobster Crusade no doubt seems deeply relevant to 19-year-old undergrads and their dealership-owning Chamber of Commerce dads.

Okay, compared to hunting Real Commies, this may be a bit of a pitiful hunting ground, more drone practice than WWI trenches, but, dammit, it’s where the boys of summer are at, and–take heart!–there is a respectable market for the hunt. For there are Sexual Enemies who have gone through university civilization, and (though professional men of course generally only reliably provide income-generating professional opportunities to other men) these lady-pretenders have snagged some decent-paying jobs, and potentially could be shot, bagged, and cleared out, so that…ah…so that the youthful members of a special frat collective should forever be free of education for democratic development (“Democracy is hard!”–Ken Doll.), leaving the struggle through adversity to the Weak, and (this is where we make another brave, brave logical leap) instead may be restored to easy, exclusive ownership over that income stream that ideally should be theirs by patriarchal and slaver social contract…if not actual capitalist relations, where dividing and playing workers off against each other is the name of the game. Surely, all the conditions for the Petersonian Longleash Utopia are coming into place–Soup, pot, golf, contempt for women! Psych! Let us wait with ‘bated breath for the Treasure Island bank vaults to spill open for the Lost Boys, while Jordan Peterson nets himself a fat Tory sinecure.

The usual suspects–conservatism’s target congregation/army of energetic, competitive, anxious, entitled men, hugely frustrated on capitalism as it is founded upon the private property principle of scarcity, and thrilled to be urged to scapegoat to avoid a real fight with  men of truly exclusive power and their armies (So hard, the lobsters.)–these are Peterson’s devoted congregation.

Similarly, a wider liberal media and audience beckons, catches, and hangs on, fascinated over bits and snatches of Peterson’s whirling, hodge-podge opinions, much as they catch and fetishize the floating values that occasionally attach to liberalism–toleration and inclusivity, civilized comportment and politesse, self-actualization, professionalism, Merit and Competence, entrepreneurialism, equity, commodity scientism, accountability, etc.

Snatching at and clinging to these unmoored bits, loving them because they are optional, elective, all about the virtues of choice and taste, liberal communications professionals adore the conservative Philosopher-entrepreneur King, because he has a market locked and loaded, because he is a proven, credentialed meritocrat (because he has a market and institutional credentials), and because he talks to them not of his expertise, or even his message of a capitalist patronage settlement for young white heterosexualish men, but of uninformed, incoherent, politicized opinions on random but sexy topics.

Experts on Canadian law said that Peterson was misreading the bill — that the legal standard for “hate speech” would require something far worse, like saying transgender people should be killed, to qualify for legal punishment. This is an early example of what would become a hallmark of Peterson’s approach as a public intellectual — taking inflammatory, somewhat misinformed stances on issues of public concern outside his area of expertise” (Z. Beauchamp 2018)

Legal opinion? Hey, let’s talk to the chatty Ayn Randie with a PhD in Personality Psychology! He comes with his own market of vigorously-typing/rape-threatening youth! My oil-industry-sponsored Wednesday lunch club at the Palm Room tells me that he’s the next Rob Ford.

Comms Pros hate and avoid scholarly experts talking about their expertise, because so often that expertise is not carrying the Chamber of Commerce’s brand message. Comms Pros’ job is to sell shit to a pre-manufactured market, and therefore they elicit insincere, scattershot opinions flying out of a middle-aged white male maw atop a shiny row of institutional brass. Incapable of distinguishing between liberalism and conservatism because clinging to the inessential bits of liberalism as evidence of their civility, incapable of admitting the conservative-friendly, but distinct, anti-democratic taproot of liberalism, absolute private property right, liberals accommodatingly provide conservative entrepreneurs venues to organize the conservatives’ own private Church of the Steep and Immobile Hierarchy. They beckon these conservatives to join them in conversations in which conservatives will not participate in good faith. Their Chamber of Commerce bosses smile on wanly.

The Youtubes overflow with reposted interviews between liberals and the conservative Philosopher-entrepreneur King, invariably labeled “Watch [conservative] Destroy Leftist Ladies.” No lefist has ever been permitted within 8,000 miles of a corporate teevee talking head job, what with that glorious Commie Hunt that perhaps you’ll recall. Never in the interviews is anyone actually ‘destroyed,’ because no one is ever talking about the same thing, or anything at all consistently. To non-congregationalists, the conservative misdirects and dissimulates. That’s what counts for conservatives as ‘destroying’ their opponent.

And it’s all win-win. Liberals love it because liberals are those people who are deeply opposed–for reasons of market and personal interest, and incentived and socialized disposition–to pursuing and advancing radical–rooted–informed and coherent ideas. Across the Pro Comms media, liberals celebrate Peterson’s yogi guru advice to the youth: “Harden up, lads, but don’t develop, and most of all, don’t change society. Leave it to the bosses.” Do you hear that? It’s the smell of paid liberal Loyalists creaming their pants throughout the land. God Save the Queen.

And so society will continue to oscillate between our dumb twin poles of, on the one side, dudes who’d rather punch girls (who won’t carry the dude’s own private genetic stock) than ever get serious, organize, and fight the actual capitalist manufactured scarcity and worker competition that is dividing and riding us all, and on the other side, the comfortable, networked liberals guarding absolute private property right with a whipped cream topping of meritorious taste and choice. For joy, all the livestock are lowing in their pens, and there is past & future wealth to be privately, exclusively extracted to the apotheosis of social and environmental irrationality!

Won’t someone please think of the children?

See also:

Peterson is a conservative organizer, by Bernard Schiff.

Pankaj Mishra’s critique of Peterson’s mystical “self help” youth conservative mobilization programme. Self-educated Mishra is sometimes an insufferable colony Anglophile snot; but Peterson’s mysticism is properly historicized in this critique.


The darndest things you find in social media

  1. Mobs of guys bitching about some moment’s published analysis.
  2. Mobs of rightwing guys shitting on some woman with a published analysis.
  3. Mobs of leftwing guys in the Instagrams or Reddits shitting on some woman with a published analysis.
  4. Rightwing guy snipers in the Youtubes comments section, announcing their intent to rape some woman who has given a speech.
  5. Young Darlin Brand Princess intellects promoting their brand whilst shitting on other intellectual women outside their promotional collective.
  6. Young male professional photographer Brand Princesses on the Instagrams anxiously defending the sanctity of their brand.husky convo
    Online conversations, but with more attractive, loving creatures


Findings: Social media engagement is for 2.5 purposes

a) Professionals with established markets hawking wares, enlarging their market.

b) An outlet for mental health problems.

c) Pack male sociality, which usually looks like mental health problems.


Update April 2019

I am in the processes of slightly reevaluating my view of the political impact of Jordan Peterson. While I have not changed my mind on either conservatism or psychology, which is basically conservative, I am moving toward viewing Peterson as playing a necessary role. This is almost to say that I can see a role, a marginal role, for conservatives in society.

Today, at the end of another long term in which I worked my ass off for students, and spent way too many hours on serving them, when I should have been applying for grants and researching, doing adult things, thinking adult thoughts, like an adult, I unfortunately happened upon a student coming from a makeup test. The student was a Linguistics major, not a major from my department, and she was a senior student. There, within the span of a few short minutes she conveyed to me: 1) the test was too easy; 2) she shouldn’t have taken my 2nd year class because she found its coverage of Enlightenment controversies over the good life to be “boring,” 3) I violated and made feel unsafe the African students in the course because I didn’t say that contemporary African-American moralists denounce the 19th century equation of women’s oppression with slavery, regardless of the fact that those are African students and thus are more likely to be descended from slavers than slaves–a fact she perhaps did not consider since she is not African or African-American; 4) she wasn’t sure if I was going to go “All Jordan Peterson” on her.

I replied in cheerful but kindly, measured tones that since the course–not a seminar but a larger classical theory foundations lecture course, which she took because she thought it would be a slide–is about classical theory and we really couldn’t stop and have a seminar discussion about every thing a contemporary moral authority has objected to about 19th century thought, I wondered what prevented her from raising her hand and mentioning in lecture this crucial, morally-rectifying literature she had learned in her contemporary linguistics theory courses. She replied that she couldn’t formulate her thoughts in time, but that it was my responsibility to convey her discipline’s theory material, cuz it’s objectively moral, the most moralest.

She wrapped up these pleasantries by musing that I could Go All Jordan Peterson on her, to which this this was my immediate reaction: “Get the fuck away from me, you little SJW shit.” It came in the passive-aggressive form of big smiles and a firm, “Well, have a good summer! Good bye,” whereupon I turned and left.

Now two things: 1) I will be discouraging upper-level undergrad Linguistics students from all my classes in the future. My experience is that they are all trained to be disrespectful, snotty little morality-policing SJW shits. Whether introductory or advanced, my courses are not about discursive morality policing, which I do not regard as democratically liberating, so, they’re not for undergrad Linguists! 2) Jordan Peterson? Fine. Fuck it. If he’s out there priming asshole young white men to go to battle with asshole ethnically-ambiguous undergrad girls who insist that scholarship = discourse-determinist moral regulation, just like Good Ol’ Mom made back in her Linguistics philosophy courses, that is fine by me. Enjoy your classically-gendered division-of-labor, kids! Just keep reproducing conservative liberalism amongst yourselves, as is done.

Conservatives’ War on Women

Refuting conservatives’ War on Moms (war on social reproduction):

“According to a 1995 U.N. Human Development Report, ‘If more human activities were treated as market transactions at the prevailing wages, they would yield huge monetary valuations–a staggering $16 trillion… Of this $16 trillion, $11 trillion is the non-monetized, ‘invisible’ contribution of women.’ The work of moms–both of moms who are in the labor force and those who are not–is significant

…with equal resumes and job experiences, mothers (today are) offered $11,000 lower starting salaries than non-mothers (Fathers, on the other hand, (are) offered $6,000 more in starting salaries than non-fathers). Since over 80 percent of women in our nation have children by the time they’re 44 years old, this means the majority of women in our nation are disadvantaged by discrimination at some point in their lives…(W)ith the cost of raising children so high, three-quarters of moms are now in the labor force. And many moms go in and out of the labor force at different times in their lives, sequencing their careers, thus making the distinction between moms who are in the labor force, and moms who are outside of the labor force nearly irrelevant. Many moms have been both”
(K. Rowe Finkbeiner, April 2012).

Finkbeiner points out that 50% of the workforce is now female (Coincidentally, 50% of the population is female.), in major part because the economy has been structured, via the asset-price / cost of living increases and consumer debt that capital depends on, to induce all adults to work to live within the constraints of capitalism. No, it’s not the abject slavery of having no access to money within capitalism (the classic middleclass dependent housewife fate); but (with all due respect to Gertrude,) coercion is coercion is unfreedom is vulnerable to exploitative manipulation by despots.



But here’s the real magic: when performed by low-income single mothers in their own homes, those same exact tasks—changing diapers, going to the playground and the store, making dinner, washing the dishes, giving a bath—are not only not work; they are idleness itself. … So there it is: the difference between a stay-home mother and a welfare mother is money and a wedding ring. Unlike any other kind of labor I can think of, domestic (reproductive) labor is productive or not, depending on who performs it” —Katha Pollitt, quoted by Corey Robin (April 2012).

Temma Kaplan argues that capitalists are in some historical periods, such as the present, confident about the supply of labor. When confident about the supply of labor, capitalists dismantle welfare, that is, they destroy reproductive social supports as well as democratic supports, and privately pocket “the savings” (the surplus).

As the wealth surplus is hoarded and destroyed, most people are impoverished, and these extreme conditions force particular adaptive relational strategies. Conservatives not only withhold the massive build-up of wealth; they buy popular support for their rule by paying off men with Little King privileges–abuse of women. Hey, it’s free. The poor consequently cannot build cohesive, productive, developmental cross-gender relationships; they cannot build supportive families and communities. It’s a wonderfully self-replicating hierarchical system for the elite. And it means poor women raise kids alone.

“Single women raising children alone or with other women who were not necessarily blood relatives became one of the possible working class family forms back to the 16th century…(P)oor women raising children alone or with kin and friends has been the model for one kind of proletarian family in certain places around the globe for centuries. It has been the family structure of poverty under capitalism.” –Kaplan, Temma. 2002. “The Disappearing Fathers Under Global Capitalism,” pp. 152-157 in Holmstrom, Nancy, ed. The Socialist-feminist Project. NY: MR.)

Decreeing– legislating!–that by submitting to patriarchy, by any means necessary, women will solve poverty = shooting the fish you stuck in your own poverty barrel. It preserves and champions inequality, surplus hoarding and capitals destruction, the sociopathic freedoms of the elite, and poverty, while playing with poor, disrupted, radically-constrained  women’s miseries. It solves no problems. It’s nothing more than bullying. It is conservatism.

Kaplan’s social-feminist theory, BTW, is obviously perfect for explaining Trump and Rightwing populism, and explaining slavery-state antichoice policy in 2019. It also suggests that population reproduction policy is not immaterial to the development of conservatism, as the pro-immigration Open Borders coalition has been trying to insist.