Actress Olivia Wilde recently discussed the origins of the villain in her new movie, and revealed that the villain is based on Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. Peterson is a Canadian psychology professor who has experienced sudden fame within the past five years, originally for taking a stance in Canada against compelled speech laws.
In this reveal, she referred to Peterson as “…this insane man…who is this pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community.” Weird and false as it is to refer to a man who has published more than one-hundred academic papers as a pseudo-intellectual, I found it even weirder to refer to him as a “hero to the incel community.”
But you may not even know what an “incel” is.
The term “incel” is short for involuntarily celibate. They see themselves as unable to attract sexual attention from women as a consequence of feminism. It’s not that they are the problem, they think women, as a class, are the problem.
And Olivia Wilde is not the first to link Peterson with this group of disgruntled men in this online community. I have read at least a few articles here on this platform assuming the same. So, is it true?
Well, let’s look at some evidence.
I’ve read all three of Peterson’s books, seen him speak twice, and have watched God only knows how many of his discussions. Here are three things that conflict with the premise that he is the hero of a community of men that think the problem is not them, but women.
1. Mating Hierarchies
One idea that Peterson talks about very often is that human females mate across and up status hierarchies. There is a large literature on this subject and it looks to be true for human mating patterns cross-culturally.
The idea is that men occupy positions in relation to other men on dynamic hierarchies of status in their society. Women, when looking for mates, tend to select men as high on that status hierarchy as possible. Of course there are many variations, and how a person individually see status is important, but on average and throughout our evolutionary history, this looks to be the case.
Assuming this is true, and that he at least believes it to be true, means he sees any males not finding mates as failing because they are low status. So, it is not the fault of anyone but the men who are complaining. In other words, they should be attending to cleaning their own room and upping their own game if they are failing the mating game.
Weird for a group of men, incels, to see Peterson as a hero when he often refers to evidence that makes the case for incels being low status.
2. Biblical Mythology
The way Peterson describes the part of Genesis that involves the human fall from grace — the part where Eve eats from the tree of life and then encourages Adam to do the same — puts Eve in a place of responsibility for the development of consciousness itself. The idea is that rejection from women is at least in part what creates self-awareness in men, which is why it makes sense that Eve brought Adam to self-awareness. I know rejection has made me incredibly self-conscious.
This ties into the reason why humans continue to develop higher levels of consciousness.
As women mate across and up the status hierarchy, a hierarchy that requires competence and higher levels of consciousness for men to climb, they select for higher levels of consciousness. This process of female choice contributes positively to the evolution of higher levels of consciousness for all of humanity.
Women are responsible for the evolution of consciousness itself and encourage its further development through rejecting and not mating with lower status men.
From a psychological, sociological, evolutionary and Biblical perspective, Peterson continually describes women in the position of responsibility for our development and increase of consciousness. This infers a duty for men to increase their levels of competence in order to be eligible for mating, which is the exact opposite of an incel.
In fact, he has said exactly that to men who were irritated with “women as a class” for rejecting them.
3. His Own Words to Incels
This clip from a discussion posted in March of 2022 contains a message from Peterson to young men who are irritated at women. Let’s take a look at what he says in this short, fifty second clip:
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxQrrHT4-08TfHwTDWx4sshtGc0L_Ob9V_
So, what did you think? Did you take the fifty seconds to hear what his own words are? When a man tells men who have been rejected by women that they are the problem and not the women, does that jive with what an incel would want to hear?
Peterson goes on to ask these hypothetical men if they “have a plan,” or if they are putting in the work to make themselves attractive to women. Because it’s their job to do so. Not the woman’s job to look down and pick you out of the bottom of the heap.
Now all of the articles I have looked through about this incident say little, if anything at all, in opposition to the claim. Nowhere have I seen them even produce incels stating that Peterson is their hero. They simply report on what Olivia Wilde stated and take his heroic status in the incel community as fact. They don’t actually challenge her statement like what I would expect a journalist to do.
But what’s more important? Getting to the truth or supporting a narrative that creates a world you believe should exist?
And that is how the magic happens. That is how a lie becomes a well known fact.