Strumia’s disgrace continues to be public

Alessandro Strumia was in the news earlier this fall — he’s the physicist who gave a workshop at CERN to declare that the humanities suck and that women were inherently less capable of doing physics than men. It was so bad that CERN struck the recording of his talk from their archives. We still have a copy of his slides.

By the way, there is a difference between a lecture and a workshop, and he seems to have failed to comprehend that, too.

Well, now CERN has also decided to cut Strumia altogether. His appointment as a guest professor has not been extended. Cue men wailing that he has been oppressed and discriminated against.

His excuses are terrible.

“Some people hated hearing about higher male variance: this idea comes from Darwin, like other offensive ideas that got observational support,” he told BBC News.

“Science is not about being offended when facts challenge ideas held as sacred”.

Darwin isn’t sacred, either. He published sexist claims that he did not support with evidence — they were reflections of the cultural biases of Victorian England. Darwin didn’t create Holy Writ, you can’t simply pretend that Darwin said it, therefore it’s true. Does Strumia also think pangenesis was correct, and that whales evolved from swimming bears?

He added that he believed that he had not been fairly treated.

“For months, Cern kept ‘investigating’ if my 30-minute talk might have violated Cern rules [requiring an] ‘obligation to exercise reserve and tact in expressing personal opinions and communication to the public’,” Prof Strumia said.

“In such a case, they would have opened some procedure, where I would have been able [to defend] myself. This never happened.”

Last September, Professor Strumia stated that “physics was invented and built by men, it’s not by invitation” at a presentation at the Cern the workshop.

If I were attending a workshop at CERN, I’d be expecting practical, interactive discussions about matters of utility in physics. He made a tactless, opinionated rant grounded in factual falsehoods while simultaneously dismissing the relevance of academic disciplines in the subject he was discussing. Not much investigation was necessary — he was so blatantly wrong that recordings were removed in embarrassment.

I’m going to take a wild guess here that administrators took notice of the harm he was doing to CERN, and also noticed that he was on a temporary contract that was going to expire in March, and decided that it was more sensible to wait on taking any action until his renewal was evaluated. In addition, there was a thorough rebuttal of his claims by his peers. He can whine all he wants that he wasn’t given an opportunity to defend himself, but his arguments were indefensible, and he demonstrated repeatedly that his “defense” was to bluster angrily and double down on his misogyny. Good riddance.

Strumia still has his professorial appointment at the University of Pisa…although the ethical committee at that university is investigating him, too.

I’ve always liked Emma Thompson

Fine actor. Socially conscious human being. What’s not to like? And now she has signed on to a letter rejecting TERF attitudes.

However this letter takes aim at the “harmful argument” that women’s rights are threatened by trans equality, with the letter’s signatories stating that: “Trans people have played an integral role in every civil rights movement to date; from LGBT equality to women’s causes.

“Attempts to airbrush trans people from conversations regarding equality and human rights, or to exclude them from advancements for LGBT and women’s rights, have happened before.

“Such efforts may have re-energised, but they are nothing new, and we say as a collective of women: they are not representative of us. We support trans rights.”

The letter’s author, Rhiannon Spear, goes on:

“As a woman and a proud feminist, I know that advancing trans rights does not threaten my womanhood or my feminism. That stance is not only shared by this letter’s co-signatories; but by many women’s support services, networks, organisations and centres across the country – who have a long history and solid record of standing up for women.

“Defining womanhood by conforming to strict biological and physical attributes has been fought against by strong women long before my time. To now see some advocate that trans women are denied their rights and their dignity on these very grounds, I believe would be a devastating step back for women and for feminism.”

Meanwhile, I check into YouTube this morning, and there’s Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) arguing that women have a biological imperative to reproduce, and any woman who can’t have babies isn’t a real woman with a purpose in society, so that he can complain about the existence of trans women.

Batman doesn’t smile enough

It’s true. Read the comics, watch the multitude of movies about him, and Batman almost never smiles. He’s grim. He’s all dressed in dark clothes. He tries to instill fear in his foes.

Apparently, that just wouldn’t work if he were Batwoman. She’d be told to smile all the time.

It’s ridiculous, but that’s the latest controversy over the upcoming Captain Marvel movie — she’s a serious superhero who doesn’t smile enough.

Look at that. Maybe he’d find out where he is if he smiled more, or offered the snitch some cookies.

Now look at this Captain Marvel person. Terrifying.

Don’t get me started on that Wonder Woman movie. She seems to take the whole World War I scenario way too seriously. No wonder that movie totally bombed.

Welcome to Up-Is-Down world, where “Free Speech” doesn’t mean what you think it means

It’s a sad day in America, when a movie review site has been seized in a fascist coup and is denying people their free speech rights. The people are shrieking through their ball gags on Twitter about this criminal assault on democracy.

You might be wondering how they did it, and what they did. Rotten Tomatoes noticed that movies that hadn’t been released yet, that no one had even seen, were being swarmed by people downvoting them, making their reviews unreliable and even more biased than usual. So they made a rule: you don’t get to rate a movie until after it has been released. This, of course, is a colossal threat to democracy!

What triggered these people is that next week, Marvel is releasing another super-hero movie, titled Captain Marvel. The hero is a…a…a WOMAN. The usual delicate little flowers have been raging about this atrocity for months, howling that it has to be a really bad movie (it might be, I’m feeling considerable super-hero fatigue myself), and organizing brigades of angry keyboard warriors to downvote it, sight unseen. The sleazy underbelly of YouTube is full of angry man-children who have been bellowing about a movie with a woman in the lead for months, and it’s just ridiculous. The movie is going to be playing at the Morris Theater next week (in time for my birthday! Maybe my wife will take me there on a date!), and I’ll watch it, and you know me, I’ll probably complain about it on the blog afterwards. It’s OK. But these nuts…

One of the leaders of the anti-woman mob is mentioned above: Ethan Van Sciver. He’s a Mormon comic book artist who has apparently alienated all the big publishers and is reduced to begging for money on the internet, and has found the kind of red meat that draws in gullible young men to donate. His secret ingredient is raging misogyny. And stupidity.

That’s brilliantly idiotic. We’re all Captain Marvel obsessive SJW bullies, which is a peculiar way to describe people who are just fannishly interested in seeing a movie, and we shouldn’t be permitted to push normal people, who don’t want to see the movie, around. Gosh, I agree. If you don’t want to see a movie, don’t see the movie. There is no campaign to gather up Van Sciver fanboys and strap them into theater seats. There is no scheme to disallow negative reviews (just look on YouTube, there are already heaps of negative reviews from people who haven’t seen it). Once it has been released, even Rotten Tomatoes will allow the brigading twits to charge forward and click a button to give it zero stars.

It’s kind of creepy how one small, loud segment of the internet has become a hate-filled clique that feeds on their own rage.

Here are some awful Red Pill stories, but hey, did you know feminists are just as bad?

Here’s an interesting article about the Red Pill cult, focusing mostly on people who have left it. There’s a common thread: lonely young men who are socially awkward and find themselves in a group that tells them all their problems are caused by an evil, alien force, that is, women.

Jack became involved with the Red Pill when he was 23, and had been single for a “long” time. “I was numb, lonely and desperate,” he says. “It was a terrible time in my life.”

Though Jack only spent two months on the subreddit, he quickly fell in with anti-feminist and libertarian rhetoric. “An uncomfortable misogynistic streak grew within me,” he says. “At one point [I] thought that Donald Trump was a good candidate for President.”

But then, unfortunately, the article falls into bothsiderism.

Like many of the places we frequent online, the Red Pill has become an echo chamber. The psychologist I spoke to, Mike Wood, told me this can lead to people adopting more and more extreme views. “If you’re in some sort of a group that defines itself by its opinions, then people will get more and more polarised over time,” he says. “Individuals will try to conform to what the group mandates.” This is true of not just the Red Pill, but its opponents. While radical feminists on Tumblr, for example, become more extreme in their views, so too does the subreddit. In many ways, the extremes of each group justify one another’s existence in their minds.

OK, I’ll bite. You’ve just written an article that describes men who characterize half of humanity as evil parasites, who find unity in demonizing women in absurd ways, who get brainwashed into voting for Donald Trump, who advocate for murdering women and in far too many cases actually do so. They’re members of a Reddit subgroup with 200,000 members. It’s a fucking horror show.

Where’s the equivalency? The lazy shorthand of generically referring to “radical feminists on Tumblr” is not evidence and is not convincing. You’ve got incels going on murder sprees, you’ve got the École Polytechnique massacre in 1989 — misogyny has a body count. Who have the Tumblr lesbians slaughtered lately?

I agree that online tribalism can polarize and lead to in-group conformity. Those are common psychological phenomena. But the red pill cult has crystallized around ideas that dehumanize women and justify lies and hatred, and it does us no favor to synonymize that with every social group ever. Especially when Tumblr feminists seem to have a far better sense of humor than the redpillers.

Whisper Network vs. Old Guys’ Network

Theres been another development in the story of BethAnn McLaughlin. To recap: she’s a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt who also has a reputation for activism for women’s rights in science. She was up for tenure, which she was initially awarded, and then, in a peculiar maneuver, suddenly a second committee was convened to revoke tenure, something I’d never heard of being done before.

The shocking new development is that a member of the second committee was abruptly placed on leave a few months ago. Why? Because he’s accused of assaulting a graduate student! Furthermore, Vanderbilt had been sitting on this accusation for almost a year before deciding they needed to take action.

As of August this year, Vanderbilt University neuroscientist David Sweatt has been on leave while the university looks into allegations that he drugged and sexually assaulted a student at a conference, according to documents obtained by Buzzfeed News and published in a report yesterday (October 31). The school initially became aware of the accusations nearly a year before, in September 2017, but determined there were no grounds for action at the time.

“Nauseous in my kitchen reading this. Vanderbilt knew for 11 months Sweatt was dangerous and did nothing,” climate scientist Sarah Myhre at the University of Washington writes in a tweet about the Buzzfeed article yesterday. “Students and trainees – like lambs to slaughter,” she continues.

It was a tweet by Myrhe from August describing the allegations that prompted Vanderbilt to suspend Sweatt, Buzzfeed reports.

Here’s that tweet:

One has to wonder how this guy continued to get on committees that decided women’s fates while under this cloud of suspicion. I think there must be an Old Guys’ Network that gets activated when their privilege is threatened, and all we have to counter it is a Whisper Network.

Vanderbilt is working hard to destroy its reputation

I think I like this person, although I don’t think we’ve ever met.

BethAnn McLaughlin has no time for James Watson, especially not when the 90-year-old geneticist is peering out from a photo on the wall of her guest room at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Banbury Center.

“I don’t need him staring at me when I’m trying to go to sleep,” McLaughlin told a December 2018 gathering at the storied New York meeting center as she projected a photo of her redecorating job: She had hung a washcloth over the image of Watson, who co-discovered DNA’s structure, directed the lab for decades—and is well-known for racist and sexist statements.

The washcloth image was part of McLaughlin’s unconventional presentation—by turns sobering, hilarious, passionate, and profane—to two dozen experts who had gathered to wrestle with how to end gender discrimination in the biosciences. McLaughlin, a 51-year-old neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) in Nashville, displayed the names of current members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) who have been sanctioned for sexual harassment. She urged other NAS members—several of whom sat in the room—to resign in protest, “as one does.” She chided institutions for passing along “harassholes” to other universities. “The only other places that do this are the Catholic Church and the military,” she said.

In the past 9 months, McLaughlin has exploded into view as the public face of the #MeToo movement in science, wielding her irreverent, sometimes wickedly funny Twitter presence, @McLNeuro, as part cudgel, part cheerleader’s megaphone. In June 2018, she created a website, MeTooSTEM.com, where scores of women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) have posted mostly anonymous, often harrowing tales of their own harassment. In just 2 days that month, she convinced the widely used website RateMyProfessors.com to remove its “red hot chili pepper” rating for “hotness.” And after launching an online petition, she succeeded last fall in spurring AAAS, which publishes Science, to adopt a policy allowing proven sexual harassers to be stripped of AAAS honors.

It turns out, though, that being a vigorous voice for equality has a cost. You make enemies.

Indeed, McLaughlin has made bitter enemies: Last fall, she says, she was anonymously FedExed a box of feces. And her scientific career is now on the line. Her tenure process was frozen for 17 months starting in 2015 while VUMC investigated allegations that she had posted anonymous, derogatory tweets about colleagues. The probe was spurred by complaints from a professor whom she had testified against in a sexual harassment investigation. VUMC closed the probe without disciplining McLaughlin, but in 2017 a faculty committee, having previously approved her tenure, unanimously reversed itself, according to university documents. Absent a last-minute reprieve, she will lose her job on 28 February, when her National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant expires.

She had the support of her peers, which ought to be the final say in a tenure decision, but that was overruled by the administration, and I can guess what happened: an influential and moneyed person in the department got the ear of someone higher up, and poisoned the process. That’s not supposed to happen, but it does happen. Here’s the event that seems to have imperiled her career:

But the university halted her tenure process in December 2015, in the wake of allegations that arose during the investigation of a colleague. In early July 2014, former graduate student Erin Watt sued her former Ph.D. supervisor, neuroscientist Aurelio Galli, who was then at the Vanderbilt School of Medicine. Watt alleged in the lawsuit that Galli had sexually harassed and belittled her, leading her to quit the Ph.D. program.

In late July of that year, McLaughlin, her then-husband (a Vanderbilt neuroscientist at the time, who collaborated with Galli), and a visiting McLaughlin friend and collaborator, Dana Miller of the University of Washington in Seattle, were invited to dinner at Galli’s home. Miller and McLaughlin later recalled that while preparing dinner, Galli threatened to “destroy” Watt. Miller recalled him calling Watt “a crazy bitch” and vowing to “spend every last dime” to ruin her. The women say Galli showed them a handgun and noted that he had a permit to carry it. Miller, a lesbian, also told investigators that Galli made inappropriate comments about her sexuality.

Galli, now at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, declined to comment on the dinner party. But he told Science: “I have never done anything to any student or any faculty in terms of harassment or retaliation.” He provided an email that McLaughlin sent him the day after the party: “Dinner was fantastic. … Thank you,” she wrote with a smiley face.

In December 2014, a judge dismissed Watt’s lawsuit against Galli and he was immediately promoted. (Watt settled with Vanderbilt University, which she had also sued.) Miller says she was alarmed by Galli’s promotion, and in January 2015 reported the alleged events of the July 2014 dinner to a Vanderbilt administrator. McLaughlin testified in the ensuing investigation, backing up Miller’s account. In August 2015, investigators determined that the evidence they had obtained could not support a finding of harassment, according to a letter to Miller from Vanderbilt’s Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action, and Disability Services Department (EAD).

Whoa. So much awful in that one story. A student, Erin Watt, abandons a career in science because her advisor was a jerk. Nothing happens to the jerk advisor except that he gets promoted, and uses his advancement to make a lateral move to another university. We have two eyewitness testimonials to horrible behavior by said jerk. The jerk then illogically tries to dismiss the accounts by waving around a thank-you note, as if it is impossible for an asshole to serve a good meal. And now various poisonous persons are using the fact that she reported the jerk’s ugly behavior to get her fired.

This does not speak well of the environment at Vanderbilt, which is a shame — I gave a job talk there decades ago and was impressed with the program, and it was high on my list of desirable positions.

I’ve also seen these tenure battles from a couple of perspectives now, and I can say that they’re always ugly and they never end well — even if you win, you lose. McLaughlin deserves to win, but she’s probably better off finding a new home, one that hasn’t been trampled over by the “harassholes”, where her talents will be appreciated. On the other hand, there is virtue in crushing your enemies. What a difficult situation!

Happy Darwin Day?

I’m a big fan of Darwin, and think he made an important contribution to the world of science, but I also have to remind you all…NO HEROES. I go even further than Edna Mode. He said a few things we’d all rather forget.

In The Descent of Man, Darwin argued that evolution made man “superior” to woman. For Darwin, that superiority largely played out in the intellectual and artistic realm. He wrote: “If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music—comprising composition and performance, history science and philosophy … the two lists would not bear comparison.” Spencer echoed Darwin’s sentiments and went further, postulating that in order for the human race to flourish, women must devote their lives to reproduction.

These assholish attitudes have afflicted science for a long, long time.

To compensate, everyone should go read that article about Antoinette Brown Blackwell.

Blackwell was among those grappling with science’s social implications. Reading works by scientists and social scientists such as Darwin and Spencer forced Blackwell to come to terms with her moral, religious and scientific beliefs. Just as Blackwell preached against Biblical passages that were at odds with her ethics, she began to write against scientific theories that she believed to be biased. Through her writing, she reconciled her understanding of science with her religious beliefs: “If one can perceive a truth,” she wrote, “it matters very little whether he got it at first hand from God’s book, or from man’s.”

Blackwell had no formal scientific training, which she freely admitted. But she read widely. Although she knew her critique of Darwin and Spencer—who she called “the great masters of science and scientific inference”—would be seen as presumptuous, she believed she had one qualification to address inequality of the sexes through evolution: she was a woman.

To refute Darwin and Spencer’s claims that the process of evolution made man superior to women, it was vital to Blackwell that women weigh in. Male scientists, Blackwell wrote, stood on “a learned masculine eminence, looking from their isolated male standpoints through their men’s spectacles and through the misty atmosphere of entailed hereditary glamour.”

In other words: Men, by virtue of being men, were biased, and so too were their scientific theories. And if women, such as herself, had little scientific training, so be it. “There is no alternative!” Blackwell exclaimed. “Only a woman can approach the subject from a feminine standpoint; and there are none but beginners among us in this class of investigations.”

Nobody gets abortions because they’re fun, or they hate babies

The same group of people cheering on the destruction of families at the border are also calling for an end to late term abortions — force those women to bring damaged babies to term, even if it kills them both! Pious politicians are crying over the fact that a woman and her doctor might decide to terminate a pregnancy even shortly before it is due, or during labor, as if they just want to kill babies on a whim. That is not the reality, of course. Read this story of a woman who was 35 weeks pregnant when she got terrible news.

The neurologist delivered more bad news: additional brain anomalies. My little daughter would likely never walk, talk, swallow, or support the weight of her head. She would require brain surgery to extend her life, but no surgery could ever cure her.

“What can she do?” I asked. “Does a child like mine just sleep all day?”

He winced at the question. “Children like yours are not generally comfortable enough to sleep.”

She didn’t have much choice.

Why was she offering me these choices? Didn’t she know how deeply I loved my baby? I tried to respond, but could only manage a question, “There are abortions for women like me?” I was 35 weeks pregnant. I wondered if there had been a mistake.

“We don’t know.” She said. “We used to send women to Kansas. But we can’t anymore.”

I understood. The doctor who performed abortions for women 35 weeks pregnant had been shot by a man who followed him to his church. Somewhere in my brain, the memory of that news story revealed itself along with the stark understanding that I was entering a world in which people might want to shoot me, too, depending on my choice.

There was only one clinic that could take care of her, it was 2000 miles away, and she had to pay $25,000 up front to get it done. That’s the situation we’re in right now, where essential health care is locked up and hidden away by controlling men and Christian bible-wallopers.

But hey, you want a little good news? The city of Minneapolis has approved the construction of a new Planned Parenthood facility.

The commission approved two land-use applications for the three-story building, which will replace Planned Parenthood’s existing Uptown clinic, located at Lagoon & Emerson. The project will allow Planned Parenthood to triple its annual patient capacity in Uptown, according to Jen Aulwes, communications director of Planned Parenthood North Central States.

The organization will provide all of the same services in the new building that are available in the existing building, including OB-GYN exams and pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease testing, according to Aulwes. The center’s services will include medication abortion.

It looks like a lovely building.

I notice the rendering left out the mob of ignorant assholes with signs screaming at patients trying to get in. That makes it much prettier.

How dare the APA refuse to recognize that men and boys are violent creatures of instinct

Jeez. Jordan Peterson really hates human rights and gender issues. Those things really fire him up, which suggests there’s something deeply wrong with him. So he’s been meeting with Doug Ford to complain, and it’s disturbing that Ford thinks Peterson is providing credible input, especially when Peterson is raging about basic human decency.

Oh, yeah, he also hates education. But that’s nothing: man, is Peterson pissed off about the American Psychological Association.

The American Psychological Association (APA) recently released its Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men. It manages to be simultaneously predictable, reprehensible, infuriating and disheartening — no mean feat for a single document. Make no mistake about it: this document constitutes an all-out assault on masculinity — or, to put it even more bluntly, on men.

The coup of the APA undertaken by the ideologues is now complete. The field has been compromised, perhaps fatally. And the damnable guidelines provide sufficient, but by no means exhaustive, evidence of that.

He’s very upset that the APA argues that traditional masculine roles can do harm (I imagine they’d say the same thing about traditional feminine roles, but this document focuses on men and boys), and translates their words to be men who socialize their boys in a traditional manner destroy their mental health. How horrible! Except it’s true. “Traditional” here means narrow and limited, and they are quite right to say that wedging kids into a predetermined role can be damaging. Why should this be considered controversial? Here’s the specific quote from APA Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men (pdf):

Boys and men have historically been the focus of psychological research and practice as a normative referent for behavior rather than as gendered human beings (O’Neil & Renzulli, 2013; Smiler, 2004). In the past 30 years, researchers and theorists have placed greater emphasis on ecological and sociological factors influencing the psychology of boys and men, culminating in what has been termed the New Psychology of Men (Levant & Pollack, 1995). For instance, socialization for conforming to traditional masculinity ideology has been shown to limit males’ psychological development, constrain their behavior, result in gender role strain and gender role conflict (Pleck, 1981, 1995; O’Neil, 2008; O’Neil & Renzulli, 2013), and negatively influence mental health (e.g., O’Neil, 2008, 2013, 2015) and physical health (Courtenay, 2011; Gough & Robertson, 2017). Indeed, boys and men are overrepresented in a variety of psychological and social problems. For example, boys are disproportionately represented among schoolchildren with learning difficulties (e.g., lower standardized test scores) and behavior problems (e.g., bullying, school suspensions, aggression; Biederman et al., 2005; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2015). Likewise, men are overrepresented in prisons, are more likely than women to commit violent crimes, and are at greatest risk of being a victim of violent crime (e.g., homicide, aggravated assault; Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2015).

Those are facts: boys exhibit more learning disabilities, men are more likely to commit violent crimes. Why? The APA argues (and backs up with literature citations) that one source of conflict in the lives of boys and men is the social constraints we place on them — that we socialize boys to belittle education and to deal with conflict with violence. Peterson knows this is true; he’s bragged about wanting to beat people up. These are also real problems that, if you are genuinely concerned with the welfare of boys and men, you ought to want to address.

So what is Peterson objecting to? He wants to insist that the nature of boys is instinctively aggressive.

First, there is no scientific evidence that aggression, per se, is learned. Like fear, pain, hunger and thirst, rage is instinctual. The biological evidence for this is crystal clear and unshakeable.

Whoa. It is definitely true that anger has biological correlates — sure, take blood samples from people in fights, their adrenaline is way up, as is their blood pressure, etc. I don’t even know what he means by “instinctual”, but he seems to think it implies a response that is ungovernable by reason. But that isn’t true! If someone steps on your foot, do you instantly ball up your fists and punch them in the face, in the same way that you’d pull your hand back from a hot stove? You might “instinctively” feel anger or distress, but normal men and women don’t respond automatically with aggression…and you probably also cool quickly if the offender expresses remorse and an apology. You know, those learned responses we have to help diminish aggressive reactions, so we don’t end up in jail or in a bloody melee. I think it’s crystal clear that most of us have social and psychological mechanisms for reducing violent responses, which is a good thing to encourage.

But let’s play Peterson’s game. Let’s give him the idea that males are naturally, biologically, fixedly aggressive, and that you can’t unlearn it. Then where’s the harm in raising them in an environment that encourages peaceful resolution of conflicts and teaches alternative methods for cooperating? If he’s right, it won’t make a bit of difference, that boys will be battering each other and assaulting the girls, and he and his culties will be standing smugly aside giving the thumbs up to all the helter-skelter viciousness. Boys will be boys, you know, and if the APA wants to try and civilize the little thugs it won’t change a thing.

But Peterson wants to also argue that better behavior can be taught — it’s just that the only way to do that is via traditional masculinity, taught by men, and that the real problem is all those fatherless families where the boys are being let down by their mothers.

So the idea that aggression is learned is not only wrong, it’s backward. Aggression is easy. Civilized behaviour is difficult. It is the integration of aggression that is learned. And it is primarily men who teach it, particularly to aggressive boys.

To back that up, he points to the elevated rates of social problems in fatherless families, which is true. He doesn’t seem to appreciate the compounding factors involved here: that these families are often also produced by economic stress and disruption, that fathers are often the ones responsible for the abandonment of their families and failure to teach that “integration of aggression”, and that he doesn’t show how enforcing traditional norms somehow corrects the problems. Nope, none of that. Blame for any problem of learning disabilities or increased incarceration rates falls only on those single mothers — the ones who typically step up and take the majority of the responsibility for raising the kids in those fractured families, for which the fathers are blameless.

And also the APA is the problem. Look at the venom frothing in this characterization:

The primary axiom of the ideologues who generate this kind of propagandistic discourse is that Western culture is to be regarded as an oppressive patriarchy: unfairly male-dominated, violent, racist, sexist, homo-, Islamo- and trans-phobic — and as uniquely reprehensible in all those regards. There is no doubt, to give the devil his due, that human history as such is a blood-drenched nightmare — and that is also true of Western civilization. However, to view humanity in general or the West in particular as solely characterized by its pathology is indication of a profound and fatal failure to discriminate good from bad.

Wait. The APA guidelines are some horrible propaganda that blames all of Western culture, and only Western culture, for oppression, and that it holds all men at fault for this “blood-drenched nightmare”? Wow. I’ve gotta read this dramatic story of feminist accusations against the whole of Western civilization. So I did.

I was disappointed.

Rather than raging against the patriarchy, the document is strongly and appropriately centered on the welfare of men and boys. It’s a set of reasonable suggestions for how psychologists ought to regard the role of men and boys in their lives, and it’s essentially entirely positive. This is a pro men paper, that encourages professionals to respect and treat the unique problems of men and boys. I read it looking for any hint of a “kill all men” attitude, or any sign of victim-blaming, and it just isn’t there. There also isn’t anything about blaming only Western culture.

It’s a long document, so I’ll just pull out the 10 short guideline recommendations. You tell me where this looks anything like Peterson’s mischaracterizations. I tried hard to find the all-out assault on masculinity or the reprehensible, infuriating and disheartening content.

  1. Psychologists strive to recognize that masculinities are constructed based on social, cultural, and contextual norms.
  2. Psychologists strive to recognize that boys and men integrate multiple aspects to their social identities across the lifespan.
  3. Psychologists understand the impact of power, privilege, and sexism on the development of boys and men and on their relationships with others.
  4. Psychologists strive to develop a comprehensive understanding of the factors that influence the interpersonal relationships of boys and men.
  5. Psychologists strive to encourage positive father involvement and healthy family relationships.
  6. Psychologists strive to support educational efforts that are responsive to the needs of boys and men.
  7. Psychologists strive to reduce the high rates of problems boys and men face and act out in their lives such as aggression, violence, substance abuse, and suicide.
  8. Psychologists strive to help boys and men engage in health-related behaviors.
  9. Psychologists strive to build and promote gender-sensitive psychological services.
  10. Psychologists understand and strive to change institutional, cultural, and systemic problems that affect boys and men through advocacy, prevention, and education.

OMG. Boys and men have multiple aspects to their social identities? Horrendous. Everyone knows we should make The Hulk our ideal at all times and in all situations.

“Encourage positive father involvement…”, how evil. Oh, wait. Except that’s what Peterson thinks is good, too.

They want to reduce aggression, violence, substance abuse, and suicide? WHERE DOES THIS INSANE ANTI-MEN AGENDA COME FROM? Probably feminists.

We apparently need a stronger call for gender insensitive psychological services. Men thrive when treated insensitively. Because we’re tough.

I think the real objection Peterson has is that the APA doesn’t endorse the reductionist biological determinism that he, a non-biologist with a demonstrable ignorance of biology, wants to assign to human behavior. The APA doesn’t subscribe to his crackpot theories, imagine that.