I think we should quote Jordan Peterson in his own words:

Men get frustrated when they are not competitive in the sexual marketplace (note: the fact that they DO get frustrated does not mean that they SHOULD get frustrated. Pointing out the existence of something is not the same as justifying its existence). Frustrated men tend to become dangerous, particularly if they are young. The dangerousness of frustrated young men (even if that frustration stems from their own incompetence) has to be regulated socially. The manifold social conventions tilting most societies toward monogamy constitute such regulation.

That’s all.

No recommendation of police-state assignation of woman to man (or, for that matter, man to woman).

No arbitrary dealing out of damsels to incels.

Nothing scandalous (all innuendo and suggestive editing to the contrary)

Just the plain, bare, common-sense facts: socially-enforced monogamous conventions decrease male violence. In addition (and not trivially) they also help provide mothers with comparatively reliable male partners, and increase the probability that stable, father-intact homes will exist for children.

Jordan Peterson | On the New York Times and “Enforced Monogamy”

It is worth reading his blog to appreciate how entirely reasonable, straightforward and stable he sounds.

But that’s because he’s worse than hysterical. He’s wrong. He’s so breathtakingly wrong in his analysis of sociological papers that one wonders if he is, to truncate CS Lewis’s famous trilemma, a liar or a lunatic.

Scroll back a little in his blog entry:

Simply put: monogamous pair bonding makes men less violent. Here are some examples of the well-developed body of basic evolutionary-biological/psychological/anthropological evidence (and theory) supporting that claim.

The Competition–Violence Hypothesis: Sex, Marriage, and Male Aggression

“men who transition to a monogamous, or less competitive, mode of sexual behavior (fewer partners since last wave), reduce their risk for violence. The same results were not replicated for females. Further, results were not accounted for by marital status or other more readily accepted explanations of violence. Findings suggest that competition for sex be further examined as a potential cause of male violence.”

Here’s the paper in question: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/... A mild pox on the authors for their abstract, which misses out some incredibly important limitations they raise at the end of the paper. I’ll post the text in a comment, but here’s the gist of the two problems they raise:

1. They cannot ascertain whether change in sexual behaviour causes decreased violence, or vice versa. In particular, they mention “a growing body of research” supporting precisely the viewpoint that causation runs the other way — that individuals become less violent as they mature and then, amidst the ensuing calm, they are more able to settle down into monogamy.
2. They cannot ascertain, either, whether both change in sexual behaviour and decreased violence might be caused by common factors (rather than one causing the other). Marriage has fantastic long-term returns — which means precisely that it can be unavailable to those in short-term uncertainty. As a palpable example, it’s a bad idea to get hitched if you can’t guarantee a stable income for a while. But such instability also engenders violence.

For the paper to make Peterson’s point (monogamy is a good way to reduce violence), it would have to exclude precisely these possibilities. Instead, the paper explicitly asks people to look into them.

But even worse, for the paper to make Peterson’s point, it would have to have entirely different math.

Here’s the money shot table:

Basically, each b column measures the violence propensity of each group (out of 5 points) relative to the first group, “Highly competitive”. (The SE columns are uncertainties.) The negative signs show that all groups are less violent than the highly competitive group, and we see that violence decreases as you go down the table. The right two columns account for the effect of marital status — even after controlling for marriage (which, as many know to their sorrow, does not guarantee sexual monogamy), sexual monogamy still has its effects. And voila! Not only are monogamous males less violent than highly competitive males, non-sexually-active males are even less —

Wait a minute. Yup. Monogamous men are civilised, but sexless men are even more so. If you recall, this is the exact snickersnackety opposite of the entire incel philosophy — in Jordan Peterson’s own exact words, that “frustrated men tend to become dangerous”. The vast majority of non-sexually-active men seem to do just fine!

So how does our genius Jordan Peterson quote a paper that says the exact opposite of what he believes as evidence for his position? On one level, it’s a simple misunderstanding of the word “competitive”. A competitive person can either be one who wants to compete, or who can compete. In the first sense, both I and Magnus Carlsen are competitive chess players. But I am certainly not competition-worthy competitive!

And it is clear that the paper means competitive in the second sense — a “highly competitive” respondent is one who has had six or more sexual partners in the relevant time period, which is the exact opposite of an incel. And now the sexual competition-violence hypothesis makes a dark sense. You’d only engage in violence to access sex if you had a really great chance of landing it anyway. If you’re a 1 out of 10, on the other hand, hitting on a 10 out of 10 isn’t going to result in sexytime anyway — so why get yourself a bloody nose into the bargain? Seen that way, monogamy isn’t a bargain between sexually-undesirable people to get them some without violence — it’s a bargain between sexually desirable people to reduce competition, by mutually limiting appetites instead of fighting over a buffet for one. (And yes, as a self-interested transaction it’s overwhelmingly patriarchal.)

So even though incels are sexually competitive in the first sense — they want to compete for sex — they simply aren’t actually sexually competitive, certainly not in the sense of this research paper. Which damns then all the more — based purely on their sexual status they should be less violent than the jocks they mock. No, something other than their celibacy must be stirring them to violence.

Something like, say, Jordan Peterson telling them they’d be getting sexytime if only society would just erase those nasty feminists and go back to more marriagey times — oops, sorry, he’s not actually saying anyone should do that, he’s actually saying things would be a lot nicer that way (and I’m not saying anyone should do that, even though I don’t even have the balls to actually say I’m not saying anyone should do that), proving definitively that passive aggressiveness is definitely something men can do as well as women with sufficient motivation.

But back to Jordan Peterson: this doesn’t come down to misreading the dictionary, not for him. Jordan Peterson isn’t illiterate. So he must be an abject fraud on some level.

I want to be wrong. I really want to believe that a “leading conservative intellectual” is, in fact, an intellectual, because conservatives are the best error detectors a liberal can find. Please enlighten me, conservatives! Maybe I’ve grossly misread the paper, or maybe negative numbers just work exactly opposite in sociology, in which case I’ll take all the mockery I’ve heaped on him in this piece and pour it out double on myself. I want to disagree on ideology, not basic decency.

But I can’t. Either this man had no idea he was citing a paper that directly contradicted him, or he did — and cited it anyway.

A lunatic, or a liar. Good Lord!