Psychology prof the new Hitler? What’s So Dangerous About Jordan Peterson?

[C C]

https://www.chronicle.com/article/what-s...out/242256

EXCERPT: [...] It’s during such sessions that Peterson is at his improvisational best, sprinkling in ideas from philosophy, fiction, religion, neuroscience, and a disturbing dream his 5-year-old nephew had one time. It’s a hearty intellectual stew ladled up by an intense 55-year-old psychology professor who gives the impression that he’s on the cusp of unraveling the deep secrets of human behavior — and maybe the mystery of God, too, while he’s at it.

You’d never guess from the reverential atmosphere in the 500-seat theater just how polarizing Peterson has become over the past year. Days before, fliers were tacked up around his neighborhood warning the community about the dangerous scholar in their midst, accusing him of "campaigning against the human rights" of minorities and associating with the alt-right. There have been several calls for his ouster from the University of Toronto — where he’s tenured — including a recent open letter to the dean of the faculty of arts and science signed by hundreds, including many of his fellow professors. Friends refuse to comment on him lest they be associated with his image. Critics hesitate, too, for fear that his supporters will unleash their online wrath. A graduate student at another Canadian university was reprimanded for showing a short video clip of Peterson to a group of undergraduates. One of the professors taking her to task likened Peterson to Hitler.

It can be tough to parse the Peterson phenomenon. For one thing, it seems as if there are multiple Petersons, each appealing to, or in some cases alienating, separate audiences. There is the pugnacious Peterson, a clench-jawed crusader against what he sees as an authoritarian movement masquerading as social-justice activism. That Peterson appears on TV, including on Fox & Friends, President Trump’s preferred morning show, arguing that the left is primarily responsible for increased polarization. That Peterson contends that ideologically corrupt humanities and social-science programs should be starved of students and replaced by something like a Great Books curriculum.

There’s also the avuncular Peterson, the one who dispenses self-help lessons aimed at aimless young people, and to that end has written a new book of encouragement and admonition, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Random House Canada). The book isn’t political, at least not overtly, and it grew out of his hobby of answering personal questions posted by strangers on the internet. That Peterson runs a website on "self-authoring" that promises to help those with a few spare hours and $14.95 discover their true selves.

Then there’s the actual Peterson, a guy who Ping-Pongs between exuberance and exhaustion, a grandfather who is loathed and loved by a public that, until very recently, had almost entirely ignored him. Now he has more than a half-million YouTube subscribers, nearly 300,000 Twitter followers, and several thousand die-hard disciples who send him money, to the tune of $60,000 per month. Even the man with all the answers appears stunned by the outpouring, and at the sudden, surreal turn in his life. "When I wake up in the morning, it takes about half an hour for my current reality to sink in," he says. "I don’t know what to make of it."

MORE: https://www.chronicle.com/article/what-s...out/242256

[Syne]

For people not allergic to facts, Peterson isn't hard to parse, nor oscillates between being appealing and alienating. Those are just symptoms of cognitive dissonance.

[Syne]

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/5ER1LOarlgg

[Yazata]

The other thread made me mildly curious about Jordan Peterson. (Somebody whose name I'd occasionally heard, but knew very little about.) Given the craziness so visibly on display in that thread, I thought that I'd comment on Peterson here in this older one. My interest is largely in why Peterson arouses such hysterical and hate-filled responses from his critics.

It appears that Peterson has published two books, both in what I take to be something of a pop-psychology vein (the first is more technical and perhaps philosophical than the second), neither of which seems all that controversial to me. He's also produced a bunch of pod-casts.

And most notably he's become something of a political figure inside Canada, an opponent of political correctness and an advocate of free-speech. (Including saying things the academic left doesn't want said.) I find myself agreeing very strongly with that.

The thing that seems to have really provoked his critics, particularly feminists and gay activists, is his opposition to Canada's Bill C-16. This added 'gender' and sexual preference to the list of legally protected categories, made any remarks by less favored individuals that might be perceived as critical of any more favored category into "hate-speech" and proscribed criminal penalties.

Personally, I agree with Peterson about that. I believe that real criminal laws need to be enforced. If somebody assaults somebody else, there are already laws against assault. It doesn't really change the assault whether it was motivated by antipathy to gays, or antipathy towards somebody who was wearing a red MAGA hat or speaking in favor of Donald Trump. It's assault either way. If we start punishing motivations, we have slipped over towards introducing a new Orwellian category of thought-crime.

EXCERPT: [...] It’s during such sessions that Peterson is at his improvisational best, sprinkling in ideas from philosophy, fiction, religion, neuroscience, and a disturbing dream his 5-year-old nephew had one time. It’s a hearty intellectual stew ladled up by an intense 55-year-old psychology professor who gives the impression that he’s on the cusp of unraveling the deep secrets of human behavior — and maybe the mystery of God, too, while he’s at it.

As I've said, I haven't read his books. But just from glancing superficially at it, he seems like a lightweight. That isn't a crushing indictment, since most academics in the contemporary humanities and social "sciences" seem similarly light weight.

You’d never guess from the reverential atmosphere in the 500-seat theater just how polarizing Peterson has become over the past year. Days before, fliers were tacked up around his neighborhood warning the community about the dangerous scholar in their midst, accusing him of "campaigning against the human rights" of minorities and associating with the alt-right. There have been several calls for his ouster from the University of Toronto — where he’s tenured — including a recent open letter to the dean of the faculty of arts and science signed by hundreds, including many of his fellow professors.

He opposed Bill C-16, and thus gained the hysterical hatred of the gender nut-cases (and their academic-administrator enablers). I still remember the 1980's when biologist E.O. Wilson was similarly treated, because he had discussed "sociobiology", the idea that animal behavior, including human behavior, has innate roots and is shaped in part by evolutionary selection. The left activists feared that if the large shape of human behavior was to some significant extent innate, then that threatened all their social-change agendas. Wilson's lectures were routinely disrupted by activists and he was physically assaulted on at least one occasion. (Wilson looks to my former biology student's eye like a more substantial academic than Peterson, but the reaction to him at the time was exactly the same. That was when I began my slow migration from the political left to the political right.)

Friends refuse to comment on him lest they be associated with his image.

Right. We see more and more of that on university campuses these days. If you say something the activists (today's version of Hitler's brownshirts) don't like, you will have your career destroyed. If you're a graduate student, you will never earn your PhD. If you're a young professor, you will never get tenure. So people with unpopular views learn to keep their mouths shut and tend to gravitate to less politicized fields like engineering.

A graduate student at another Canadian university was reprimanded for showing a short video clip of Peterson to a group of undergraduates. One of the professors taking her to task likened Peterson to Hitler.

Exactly.

It's ironic that Hitler tried to eliminate Jewish intellectuals and what he took to be Jewish ideas from German academia, while left-academics today try to eliminate any idea that they don't agree with from intellectual life. Then they strut around and boast how all the smart people all agree with them on some controversial subject. Just like in Nazi Germany, all the German academics who spoke publicly all agreed with Hitler.

It can be tough to parse the Peterson phenomenon.

Peterson puts me off by criticizing the post-modern humanities while seeming to me to derive some of his ideas and much of his impressionistic style from it. (In the philosophical sense, he seems more "continental" then "analytic".) He doesn't win my respect when he suggests that Donald Trump's election is an indication of what he calls a "fascist" reaction to the left's excesses. (If I was speaking to Peterson, I'd ask him what Trump has ever done that's in any way "fascist".) Like I said, he criticizes the left (and attracts their hysterical hatred) while accepting and echoing some of their fundamental biases.

For one thing, it seems as if there are multiple Petersons, each appealing to, or in some cases alienating, separate audiences.

Yes, I sense that too.

There is the pugnacious Peterson, a clench-jawed crusader against what he sees as an authoritarian movement masquerading as social-justice activism.

And he's right. If he's "clench-jawed", it's probably because of how he thinks that he's been treated. When much of the Canadian political, intellectual and academic establishment tries to destroy him, then it's natural that he will fight back.

That Peterson appears on TV, including on Fox & Friends, President Trump’s preferred morning show, arguing that the left is primarily responsible for increased polarization.

I believe that they most definitely are.

That Peterson contends that ideologically corrupt humanities and social-science programs should be starved of students and replaced by something like a Great Books curriculum.

Again I agree. I think that the best approach to our intellectual inheritance is by a history of ideas approach. What did the thinkers of the past think about various questions? Why did they think those things? What influenced and motivated them? How has that changed over time? I'd also favor a cross-cultural approach. How have other intellectual traditions addressed analogous issues? What can we learn from them? What mistakes can we avoid?

I'm inclined to think that the contemporary academic humanities and social sciences are increasingly corrosive and harmful to the larger society. Everything that people once believed in or identified with is now attacked and deconstructed. All on the basis of... what? Today's academics' own personal moral intuitions? That's one of the most distinctive aspects of today's academia, how so many ideas have been moralized, how questions of true and false are being replaced by assertions of good and evil. Moral condemnation takes the place of thoughtful argument.

To some extent, students are already voting with their feet. Enrollments in the humanities are down dramatically. (That's mostly because students see them as "want fries with that?" majors that don't prepare them for careers.) But apart from that, I agree with Peterson that taxpayers shouldn't be forced to support people who want nothing more than to destroy everything that most of those taxpayers believe in, love and identify with. Which in effect means any sense of community, or belonging, that people once had. If one can't identify with one's nation any more, or with one's culture, with one's community and family traditions, then what's left?

One's activist commitments, I guess. The whole idea of "identity politics" more or less proclaims it. Blacks should identify first and foremost as blacks (and that identity should shape their politics and their entire worldview). Women should identify as feminists and think accordingly. Gays should be gay before they are anything else. That growing social fragmentation is a big part of the explanation of the growing social polarization right there.

If we disagree with the 1970's Wilson that much of human behavior is at least strongly influenced by tendencies that are innate and biological, and agree instead with the hordes of academics who insist that it's entirely "socially constructed", then where are we left when the 'social' is corrupted and finally eliminated entirely? When common tradition that pretty much everyone in the community once shared (more or less) is overturned as evil? When all the symbols of common identity like flag and nation have been Kaepernicked?

It's a recipe for anomie, for the lack of any of the social glue that connects disseparate individuals into a cooperative group, a community. In order for a community to exist, its members have to share more in common than sets them apart. The loss of our sense of shared identity will only result in growing social isolation and no end of social pathologies.

Frankly, I fear for the future of Western Civilization.

[Syne]

Peterson puts me off by criticizing the post-modern humanities while seeming to me to derive some of his ideas and much of his impressionistic style from it. (In the philosophical sense, he seems more "continental" then "analytic".) He doesn't win my respect when he suggests that Donald Trump's election is an indication of what he calls a "fascist" reaction to the left's excesses. (If I was speaking to Peterson, I'd ask him what Trump has ever done that's in any way "fascist".) Like I said, he criticizes the left (and attracts their hysterical hatred) while accepting and echoing some of their fundamental biases.

This is the closest to your paraphrasing I could find from Peterson, but he's specifically talking about the white identitarian alt-right, not the major impetus for Trump being elected.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/SzHj6och58Q

I haven't see anything from him that hints at him thinking a majority of Trump voters had a fascist tendency. My guess is that you've inadvertently conflated something his critics have said...or just him specifically talking about white identitarianism...which I think we agree is a reaction to left/minority identitarianism.

Here, he does talk about the conservative attitude towards disgust (in the context of Haidt's moral foundations theory) as a major factor in Trump's election. Where the evolutionary psychology reasons to favor strong borders against things like disease played a role.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/AQYMfA76zXs
He does, briefly, talk about infectious disease and authoritarianism, but I don't think he actually makes the connection to Trump's election.

[C C]

[...] I still remember the 1980's when biologist E.O. Wilson was similarly treated, because he had discussed "sociobiology", the idea that animal behavior, including human behavior, has innate roots and is shaped in part by evolutionary selection. The left activists feared that if the large shape of human behavior was to some significant extent innate, then that threatened all their social-change agendas. Wilson's lectures were routinely disrupted by activists and he was physically assaulted on at least one occasion. (Wilson looks to my former biology student's eye like a more substantial academic than Peterson, but the reaction to him at the time was exactly the same. That was when I began my slow migration from the political left to the political right.)

[...] Peterson puts me off by criticizing the post-modern humanities while seeming to me to derive some of his ideas and much of his impressionistic style from it. (In the philosophical sense, he seems more "continental" then "analytic".) [...] Like I said, he criticizes the left (and attracts their hysterical hatred) while accepting and echoing some of their fundamental biases. [...]

Maybe it's because I sensed a waft of such resonating around Peterson, or in his background, that subconsciously contributed to my disinterest in him one way or another up to his point. I occasionally have curiosity about continental "heavyweights" of the 20th-century, but not as much with regard to flies buzzing around those piles for whatever varied motivations (on whichever side of the Atlantic).

It's been said that PoMo's ethnic equalisations like "no particular culture gets reality right or wrong anymore than any other culture" would actually benefit Christianity in the era of science. But the latter have not cottoned to it for the most part due to being demonized by SocJus movements and "para-Marxist" goosestepping cliques outputted by PoMo effects (which can be overbearing themselves in an Orwellian manner).

Further below, there's even an example of Peterson, PoMo, and Wilson converging together -- in the second (hit) piece. In the first item here, Nietzsche is recognized in "duh" fashion as an ancestral catalyst for PoMo (and later twists in psychology?). Thus supposedly one example of its backhand influence on Peterson. (Nietzsche's expression "will to power" is directly mentioned in "Beyond Good and Evil", an outlook which seems would factor into Peterson's lobster metaphor -- or at least Fluss's take on it.)

From announcement of a club meetup back in 2017: Though Nietzsche’s work is widely contested in interpretation, there is no doubt that his work was foundational in existentialism, postmodernism, post structuralism, literature, psychology and politics. Nietzsche is generally considered amongst the first rank of philosophers of all time, standing with the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Decartes, Locke, Hume and Wittgenstein. [...] Nietzsche was also perhaps Peterson’s most important intellectual influence. In this meetup, the focus will be on one of Neitzsche’s most important works, Beyond Good and Evil. [...] This meetup will consider the foundational impact Nietzsche has had on modern Western thought; Peterson’s original and ground-breaking theories and methods; and the relation between the two thinkers. --Jordan Peterson and Friedrich Nietzsche

Whereas in this second item Nietzsche's "will to power" and/or other aspects of his philosophy are apparently conflated with negatively regarded classical liberalism. "Negatively" because it's from a (democratic socialist?) magazine called the Jacobin that either it or the writer (or both) seems fixated with ideologically categorizing Peterson, Nietzsche and those Austrian proponents of classical liberalism Hayek and Mises under the same or similar tent.

So in terms of the latter, it's the supposed Hegel connection (or again Fluss's take on such) that provides a continental or ancestral PoMo element. Wilson and indirectly evolutionary psychology get mentioned as part of Peterson's "hodgepodge" at the tail end.

Jordan Peterson’s BS
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/02/jordan-pe...-alt-right

EXCERPT (Harrison Fluss): Peterson is often portrayed as an enigma. Those on both the Right and Left defend him against charges of [_X_] ... Peterson’s fans argue that he is not a fascist, just a classical liberal; not a racist, just someone who acknowledges “ethnic differences”; not a misogynist, just honest about the real differences between men and women. ... With all of the focus on issues of free speech and how the Left allegedly has turned authoritarian, there is something missing in discussions of Peterson. Rather than being an “enlightened” and “scientific” critic of postmodernism, Peterson’s critique of the Left is fundamentally Nietzschean.

[...] Peterson’s empirical observations, which range from zoology to pop psychology, all share an aristocratic disdain for modernity. His worldview aligns with classical liberalism’s elitist and antidemocratic tendencies [...] But Peterson adds something to his predecessors’ economic liberalism: a tragic conception of Being (which he capitalizes, after Heidegger) in which the world is divided between winners and losers. This authoritarian worldview naturalizes domination, weaving hierarchy into the very fabric of existence.

Critics often mock Peterson for his comparison of lobsters and human beings. [...] He reduces class conflict to a natural and eternal struggle for existence that no political or economic revolution could ameliorate. The individual lobster — sorry, human — must develop an aggressive, alpha-male attitude in order to climb the social ladder. Peterson bases his worldview on one example from the animal kingdom — an example belied by other instances in which animals engage in mutual aid and cooperation.

Peterson’s writings are a hodgepodge of Christian existentialism, Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal, and E. O. Wilson. But the main philosophical issue is his Nietzschean conception of power. Only a strong will, exercising itself against a contingent and meaningless world — and against the weak — can ever hope to flourish.

- - -

Harrison Fluss’s BS (alt opinion)
https://medium.com/@hugonewman/jacobin-m...1deaf921c8

Hugo Newman: "Fluss’s piece on Jordan Peterson is filled with unsupported charges, cookie-cutter left-wing strawmanning, and unselfconscious irrationalism. In other words, he’s full of ####."

[Syne]

Maybe you should read/watch more from the man himself, instead of hit pieces. If you think the latter is accurate, you're deluding yourself.

[Secular Sanity]

https://www.chronicle.com/article/what-s...out/242256

EXCERPT: [...] It’s during such sessions that Peterson is at his improvisational best, sprinkling in ideas from philosophy, fiction, religion, neuroscience, and a disturbing dream his 5-year-old nephew had one time. It’s a hearty intellectual stew ladled up by an intense 55-year-old psychology professor who gives the impression that he’s on the cusp of unraveling the deep secrets of human behavior — and maybe the mystery of God, too, while he’s at it.

That's how I see him but with a dash of delusional grandiosity.

(Wilson looks to my former biology student's eye like a more substantial academic than Peterson, but the reaction to him at the time was exactly the same. That was when I began my slow migration from the political left to the political right.)

That’s because E. O. Wilson is a biologist. Peterson is a psychologist. He said he was an evolutionary biologist but he’s not.

"I’m an evolutionary biologist, by the way, not a political philosopher. So, my time scale is thousands of years, not hundreds of years."—Jordan Peterson

Well, at least he admitted that one of his rules that’s hard for him to follow is tell to the truth or at least not to lie.

A graduate student at another Canadian university was reprimanded for showing a short video clip of Peterson to a group of undergraduates. One of the professors taking her to task likened Peterson to Hitler.

Exactly.

It's ironic that Hitler tried to eliminate Jewish intellectuals and what he took to be Jewish ideas from German academia, while left-academics today try to eliminate any idea that they don't agree with from intellectual life. Then they strut around and boast how all the smart people all agree with them on some controversial subject. Just like in Nazi Germany, all the German academics who spoke publicly all agreed with Hitler.

What's ironic hypocritical is that Peterson has no problem stating that a true atheist would be like Raskolnikov, the murderer in Dostoevsky’s "Crime and Punishment," and that the atrocities of Nazi Germany came out of a loss of belief in God. He said, "Nazism was an atheist doctrine. So was Marxism."

That's not true.

"A popular image of the Nazis is that they were fundamentally anti-Christian while devout Christians were anti-Nazi. The truth is that German Christians supported the Nazis because they believed that Adolf Hitler was a gift to the German people from God. German Christianity was a divinely sanctioned religious movement which combined Christian doctrine and German character in a unique and desirable manner: True Christianity was German and True German-ness was Christian." 

Anti-Semitism was an important aspect of the Nazi state, but the Nazis didn’t invent it. Instead, they drew upon centuries of Christian anti-Semitism and extensive anti-Semitic theology in Germany’s Christian community. The Nazis believed that Jewishness was more than just a religion, a position which was supported by religious leaders who supplied the Nazis with baptismal and marriage records to help identify converted Jews. source

Everything that people once believed in or identified with is now attacked and deconstructed. All on the basis of... what?

But apart from that, I agree with Peterson that taxpayers shouldn't be forced to support people who want nothing more than to destroy everything that most of those taxpayers believe in, love and identify with. Which in effect means any sense of community, or belonging, that people once had. If one can't identify with one's nation any more, or with one's culture, with one's community and family traditions, then what's left?

One's activist commitments, I guess. The whole idea of "identity politics" more or less proclaims it. Blacks should identify first and foremost as blacks (and that identity should shape their politics and their entire worldview). Women should identify as feminists and think accordingly. Gays should be gay before they are anything else. That growing social fragmentation is a big part of the explanation of the growing social polarization right there.

Nationalism is similar to tribalism in someways but tribalism can include common causes, such as religion, traditions, ethnicity, etc. 

I'm a little confused, though, Yazata. Are you saying that identity politics is a negative thing but something that we should preserve?

It's a recipe for anomie, for the lack of any of the social glue that connects disseparate individuals into a cooperative group, a community. In order for a community to exist, its members have to share more in common than sets them apart. The loss of our sense of shared identity will only result in growing social isolation and no end of social pathologies.

Frankly, I fear for the future of Western Civilization.

Maybe that's just a generational bias, eh?

Traditional values are weapons frequently used against the LGBT community.

Jordan Peterson - Should GAY COUPLES Raise Children?

Edit:  And his little bit on patriarchy...well, we weren’t even allowed to vote until 1920. That was just one lifetime ago. A wife’s subordination to her husband wasn't even ended until 1981 by the Supreme Court and marital rape was criminalized by all fifty states by the 1990’s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_ra...ted_States

[Syne]

Exactly.

It's ironic that Hitler tried to eliminate Jewish intellectuals and what he took to be Jewish ideas from German academia, while left-academics today try to eliminate any idea that they don't agree with from intellectual life. Then they strut around and boast how all the smart people all agree with them on some controversial subject. Just like in Nazi Germany, all the German academics who spoke publicly all agreed with Hitler.

What's ironic hypocritical is that Peterson has no problem stating that a true atheist would be like Raskolnikov, the murderer in Dostoevsky’s "Crime and Punishment," and that the atrocities of Nazi Germany came out of a loss of belief in God. He said, "Nazism was an atheist doctrine. So was Marxism."

That's not true.

"A popular image of the Nazis is that they were fundamentally anti-Christian while devout Christians were anti-Nazi. The truth is that German Christians supported the Nazis because they believed that Adolf Hitler was a gift to the German people from God. German Christianity was a divinely sanctioned religious movement which combined Christian doctrine and German character in a unique and desirable manner: True Christianity was German and True German-ness was Christian." 

Anti-Semitism was an important aspect of the Nazi state, but the Nazis didn’t invent it. Instead, they drew upon centuries of Christian anti-Semitism and extensive anti-Semitic theology in Germany’s Christian community. The Nazis believed that Jewishness was more than just a religion, a position which was supported by religious leaders who supplied the Nazis with baptismal and marriage records to help identify converted Jews. source

Two things can be true at the same time. The Nazi's could have been functionally atheist in their manipulation of religion for their own purposes and Germans who called themselves Christians could have supported those in power, for their own self-interests. Some Christians can be anti-Semitic and that not mean that anti-Semitism is a feature of Christianity in general. Some Christians could support Nazi's and that not make Nazism inherently Christian.

Pretending otherwise is a false dilemma.

Everything that people once believed in or identified with is now attacked and deconstructed. All on the basis of... what?

But apart from that, I agree with Peterson that taxpayers shouldn't be forced to support people who want nothing more than to destroy everything that most of those taxpayers believe in, love and identify with. Which in effect means any sense of community, or belonging, that people once had. If one can't identify with one's nation any more, or with one's culture, with one's community and family traditions, then what's left?

One's activist commitments, I guess. The whole idea of "identity politics" more or less proclaims it. Blacks should identify first and foremost as blacks (and that identity should shape their politics and their entire worldview). Women should identify as feminists and think accordingly. Gays should be gay before they are anything else. That growing social fragmentation is a big part of the explanation of the growing social polarization right there.

Nationalism is similar to tribalism in someways but tribalism can include common causes, such as religion, traditions, ethnicity, etc. 

I'm a little confused, though, Yazata. Are you saying that identity politics is a negative thing but something that we should preserve?

Nationalism is not identity politics. Tribalism is bad because it implies a finer scale fragmentation, much smaller than merely a division between the interests of different countries. Conflating the two is not valid.

It's a recipe for anomie, for the lack of any of the social glue that connects disseparate individuals into a cooperative group, a community. In order for a community to exist, its members have to share more in common than sets them apart. The loss of our sense of shared identity will only result in growing social isolation and no end of social pathologies.

Frankly, I fear for the future of Western Civilization.

Maybe that's just a generational bias, eh?

Traditional values are weapons used frequently against the LGBT community.

Jordan Peterson - Should GAY COUPLES Raise Children?

No, those are facts, that any intellectually honest person can go verify for themselves. Outcomes compared to family makeup are pretty clear.

Edit: And his little bit on patriarchy...well, we weren’t even allowed to vote until 1920. That was just one lifetime ago. A wife’s subordination to her husband wasn't even ended until 1981 by the Supreme Court and marital rape was criminalized by all fifty states by the 1990’s.

And? The "patriarchs" are exactly who gave women the right to vote and criminalized marital rape. Society evolves, but not without the will of those in power...who are still mostly men, righting all these past wrongs. Why weren't women voting in a majority of women ever since suffrage? Maybe because they largely hold traditional values too.

[Secular Sanity]

.

And?