Perhaps that was a sensible duck and weave by the interviewer. After all, the response to this interview reached fever pitch even when compared to the standard response to a Peterson interview. Online chat forums were filled with people claiming that he had said that women who wear makeup and high heels at work are asking to be sexually assaulted. Parts of the media followed suit. And moments like this are interesting. Because if somebody says that opening this discussion up does not mean women shouldn’t dress how they like, and yet still a lot of people hear (or claim to hear) that this is exactly what Peterson is saying, and what’s more that he is excusing sexual assault, then something is clearly going badly wrong. This is not about mishearings or misunderstandings. It is more likely an example of people deliberately and lazily adopting simplified misrepresentations of what other people are saying in order to avoid the difficult discussion that would otherwise have to take place.
There are no end of difficult discussions to be had around this subject. If a culture lands on the idea that women must always be believed in cases not just of sexual assault but of unwanted sexual advances, then this must generate some confusion in society. What are people to think about, and how should they react to, those occasions when they have experienced women doing that female thing? How are they to reconcile the information that women must always be believed with the fact that there are entire industries set up to help women fool men? Or – to put the most positive spin on it – to entice them. After all, what are all those summer advertising campaigns about that invite women to ‘turn heads this summer’? Whose heads are they being invited to turn? Any and all passing women, hoping to purchase, say, the same dress or bikini? Or men?
Make him Drool
The manner in which marketing addresses women tells us a great deal about what women are actually motivated by when they think men aren’t watching. Consider the endless numbers of advertising campaigns and pieces in women’s magazines dedicated to motifs like ‘Make him drool’. If car advertisements or shaving products aimed at men were pushed with the suggestion that the object, if acquired, would make women drool, it would not just be condemned but might well fail to appeal to men. Google is a hive of assistance in this regard. Typing the words ‘Make him drool’ turns up reams of articles, adverts and online discussions. The words ‘Make her drool’ by contrast throw up a host of articles ranging from how to stop drooling during sleep to explanations as to why some cats dribble from their mouths.
All this suggests our societies have arrived at a stage of seemingly industrial-strength denial. We have decided to forget or completely edit out things that were recognized to be valid the day before yesterday. And we seem to have decided that the individual complexities which actually exist not just between women and men but within men and within women can simply be pushed to one side with the assumption that they have all been overcome.
Or perhaps this whole pretence is in fact built upon an impossibly large landmine. After all, a man trying to work out what a woman wants today might be forgiven for being racked with confusion. A young man starting out on his attempts to understand the opposite sex currently has to face a world which tells him that he must have consent classes in school, and in university, that dictate exceptionally precise rules about what does and does not constitute inappropriate behaviour. And yet he can go online or down to his local bookstore – if he can find one – and discover that the books which have recently sold in the greatest numbers to women (including those of his mother’s age group) are ones centred around women’s rape fantasies. Fantasies that could not possibly be discussed or attempt to be understood but which are so public that the books in question are also made into movies showing in cinemas and grossing profits to date of around half a billion dollars. Is it groups of men who go to the cinema to see Christian Grey tying his girlfriend up for sex and then being redeemed by her? Or is the demographic more female?
There is a song by Nicki Minaj which perhaps inadvertently sums up the deep confusions of the current settlement. The song is called ‘Anaconda’ and it was released in 2014. Anybody who hasn’t seen the video should join the hundreds of millions of people who have watched it online. To say that Minaj’s video is sexual is like saying that her lyrics are banal. These ones start with ‘My anaconda don’t, my anaconda don’t / My anaconda don’t want none unless you got buns, hun.’ Anybody in doubt about what ‘buns’ she is talking about will work it out from the fact that the first three minutes of the music video consist almost entirely of Nicki Minaj in a bikini, in a jungle setting, wiggling her bum for the camera. Sometimes she has a group of other women with her similarly dressed who wiggle their bums for the viewer too. The wiggling goes on and on. If anyone hasn’t got the point they can get it from the chorus:
Oh my gosh, look at her butt
Oh my gosh, look at her butt
Oh my gosh, look at her butt
(Look at her butt)
Look at, look at, look at
Look, at her butt
Other than wiggling her butt alongside her girlfriends wiggling their butts, and sometimes playing with each other’s butts, the only other things that happen in the opening three minutes of the video are Nicki Minaj suggestively eating a banana, then spraying a can of squirty cream onto her cleavage, then wiping her fingers across her breasts and feeding the cream to herself in a sequence that is obviously impossible to interpret.
But this is not the most significant part of the ‘Anaconda’ video. All of this is completely normal and banal imagery in the world of pop music videos, where female stars tend to dress and dance like strippers. The important part is the last minute and a half of the video which opens with Minaj crawling on all fours in a sexily, darkly lit room. She is crawling towards a fit young man who is sitting in a chair. The lyrics for this scene commence with ‘This one is for my bitches with a fat ass in the fucking club / I said, where my fat ass big bitches in the club?’ Wearing just a bra on top and a pair of lacy and holed leggings she moves around the man, gyrating as she goes. She puts a leg over one of his shoulders. She leans in front of him pushing her famous butt in his face and wiggling it up and down. She adopts pole dancer positions, sliding up and down in front of him. Through all of this he sits still like a well-behaved customer enjoying a show in a lap-dancing club. Eventually as her butt is being waved right in front of his face for the umpteenth time he is clearly getting sexually frustrated. Eventually, having wiped his mouth with his hand he hesitates again before placing one hand gently over her buttocks. At which point it’s over. The vocals go ‘Hey’, Minaj hits his hand away and walks out, flicking her hair back as she goes. As she makes this exit the man leans forward in the chair and puts his face in his hands, apparently mortified at his inexcusable behaviour.
The confusion that Nicki Minaj acts out here is representative of a whole host of other things in our culture. It contains an unresolvable challenge and an impossible demand. The demand is that a woman must be able to lap-dance before, drape herself around and wiggle her ass in the face of any man she likes. She can make him drool. But if that man puts even one hand on the woman then she can change the game completely. She can go from stripper to mother superior in a heartbeat. She can go from ‘Look at my butt, waving in front of your face’ to ‘How dare you think you can touch the butt I’ve been waving in front of your face all this time.’ And it is he who must learn that he is in the wrong. What is the demand that is being made here? The impossible demand that cannot be met but which has been written into contemporary mores? It is that a woman must be allowed to be as sexy and sexual as she pleases, but that does not mean she can be sexualized. Sexy, but not sexualized.
It is an impossible demand. And not just an unreasonable but a deranging demand to make on men. But nobody wants to explore it. Because to explore it would be to uncover a whole world of unremediable, unsolvable, complexity.
The Same or Better?
The belief that it is possible to be sexy without being sexualiz
ed is just one of the contradictory settlements that we have landed on. But there are plenty of others in the air. For instance, there is the one that simultaneously insists that women are in every meaningful way exactly the same as men, possessing the same traits and competencies and able to challenge them on the same turf at any time. Yet simultaneously, magically, they are better than men. Or better in specific ways. All this seems perfectly capable of being held in the same head – contradictory though it all is. So that the current accepted way of regarding women is: the same as men, but different where it’s useful or flattering.
An example of this paradox is often displayed by Christine Lagarde, who has been head of the International Monetary Fund for most of this decade. In 2018, on the tenth anniversary of the financial crash, Lagarde took to the IMF’s website to write about lessons learned from the 2008 crash and reflect on what had been fixed – and what had not – in the decade since. Lagarde used the opportunity to talk about the need for a greater number of women to be on the boards of banks and agencies overseeing financial institutions. And she used the opportunity to repeat what had been one of her favourite and most repeated mantras of the previous decade. ‘As I have said many times,’ she wrote, ‘if it had been Lehman Sisters rather than Lehman Brothers, the world might well look a lot different today.’12 This was not simply a reiteration of the problem of groupthink that had so contributed to the events of 2008. Lagarde was making a bigger point. Not only that women were needed in financial institutions. Almost nobody could doubt that. But that if women were more prominent in that workforce – or better still leading it – then the results and outcomes would be different. And Lagarde was not alone in making this claim. Indeed, versions of it ran throughout the decade following the financial crisis. And they centred on finance as in every other area of public life.
Shortly after the crash the daytime television host Fern Britton was on the BBC’s main political discussion show, Question Time, and commenting on the crisis she got a round of applause from the audience for saying, ‘It appears that an awful lot of men have been in on this money business and they’ve made a very bad fist of it. If there were some women doing some old-fashioned house-keeping where women traditionally anyway are pretty good at making sure that the money goes in the pot for the electricity and the gas and the phone and the food. We didn’t pillage and rob it and stick it all on a horse to see if the money would come in next week.’13 The Equalities minister in the 2010–15 coalition government in Britain, Liberal Democrat Lynne Featherstone, was an exponent of the same theory. At her party’s conference in 2011 she blamed men for the ‘terrible decisions’ made in the world’s economy and said that men as a whole were the principal reason for ‘the mess the world is in’.
So here is the first conundrum of the current presumption on the position of women as opposed to men in our societies. Women are exactly the same as men – as capable, as able, as suited to the same array of tasks. And also better. Exactly how this is the case is ill defined because it is ill thought through. Nevertheless we have decided to embed precisely such ill-thinking as deep into our societies as we can possibly manage.
Women Mean Business
It is a fine day in the City of London, and at an upmarket hotel just south of the river more than four hundred very smart women are gathered together. Smart, it should be clarified, in every sense of the term. Not only are the attendees all business leaders, from the top of every profession they are in, but whenever the door swings open with another arrival it is as though we are at a fashion shoot. High heels, swishing scarfs, the power clothes of the international business elite: nobody – absolutely nobody – lets the side down. And it is clear from the outset that there most certainly is a side.
The ‘Women Mean Business’ conference has been put together by The Daily Telegraph. Its major sponsors include NatWest and BT. The day is opened by the Minister for Women and Equalities, and is followed by a panel entitled ‘How Work Needs to Start Working for Women’. Many of the most successful and well-known women in business are here, along with several of the country’s most famous female broadcasters. There is a ‘fireside chat’ between the ‘head of enterprise’ at NatWest and the first female Serjeant at Arms at the House of Commons. Then more panels: ‘What are the Real Roadblocks to Women’s Success?’; ‘Closing the Gender Gap’; ‘Are Women at a Disadvantage in a Male-Dominated Investor World?’ The panels that do address the male half of the species have titles like ‘#MenToo: Men’s Crucial Role as Allies for Women’.
It must be said that since all this has been aimed at women and since all but a couple of the people in the room are women, the female focus is inevitable. It is also inevitable that much of the discussion centres around issues to do with women in the workplace, including childcare issues. But there is also a distinct air of alliance in the room. An alliance of people who are put upon. Whenever somebody wants to get a warm ripple of nods or applause from the audience they stress how much we need ‘confident women’. The surest way to get the room to tut volubly is to tell a story involving the bad behaviour of any ‘alpha male’. Examples of ‘alpha male’ behaviour include stories of men dominating things by talking too much. There seems to be a clear agreement in the room that whereas there is a great need for ‘confident women’ there is also a need for ‘less confident men’. As though by these means the sexes might in time meet somewhere in the middle.
There is one other surefire way to get the crowd on your side. And that is for a woman on the stage to express concern, nervousness or a sense of ‘imposter syndrome’. One impressive, smart and striking young woman involved in a start-up business begins her contribution by saying all of these things. She is nervous and feels almost as if she shouldn’t be there, with all these amazing women in the room who have achieved so much. They applaud heartily and congratulate her on her bravery in saying this. Women need to be confident. But it seems that one good strategy for getting other women onside is to present yourself as not being at all confident. Almost as though you fear being shot down, particularly by other women. When it comes to Q and A one attendee sends in a question asking whether any other people in the room haven’t in fact found other women to be their biggest challenge in the workplace. This female remains anonymous.
As one of the few men asked to speak on the day, I find myself on a panel entitled ‘Is the Focus on Promoting Women Holding Men Back?’ Our chair is a journalist from The Daily Telegraph. The other panellists are a British MP called Craig Tracey who heads a Parliamentary group supporting women, the female ‘Chief People Officer’ from The Daily Telegraph and the ‘UK Head of Female Client Strategy’ at J. P. Morgan. The consensus in the room is the same as the consensus that has emerged in nearly all public discussion, and is clearly in need of disrupting.
The most striking thing is that there appear to be a set of confusions centring around the issue of ‘power’. Every discussion so far has centred on a presumption that almost all relationships in the workplace and elsewhere are centred around the exercise of power. Knowingly or otherwise these women have all imbibed the Foucauldian world view in which power is the most significant prism for understanding human relationships. What is striking is not just that everyone seems to have paid lip-service to this, but that these women are focused only on one sort of power. This is a sort of power which – it is presumed – has historically been held solely by mainly old, mainly rich, always white men. It is why the joking and berating about the behaviour of ‘alpha males’ goes down so well. There is a presumption that if the alpha and maleness could be squashed out of these people, in some great majestic social-justice blending device, then the power squeezed out of them might be drunk up by women like those in the room today. That it will be used to nourish, and grow, those who deserve the power more.
Here are deep waters. But I suggest in my contribution that our conversations are being limited by this misunderstanding. Even if we concede – which we should not – that power (rather than,
say, love) is the most important force guiding human affairs, why are we focusing only on one type of power? There certainly are types of power – such as rape – which men can sometimes hold over women. And there is a type of power which some old, typically white, males might be able to hold over less successful people, including less successful women. But there are other types of power in this world. Historical old white man power is not the only such source. Are there not, after all, some powers which only women can wield. ‘Like what?’ someone asks. At which point, having waded in this far it only makes sense to wade further.
Among other types of power that women wield almost exclusively, the most obvious is this. That women – not all women, but many women – have an ability that men do not. This is the ability to drive members of the opposite sex mad. To derange them. Not just to destroy them but to make them destroy themselves. It is a type of power which allows a young woman in her late teens or twenties to take a man with everything in the world, at the height of his achievements, torment him, make him behave like a fool and wreck his life utterly for just a few moments of almost nothing.
Earlier we heard from the young, attractive woman, who was heading a start up, that she had a couple of times in her search for capital received inappropriate advances from men who were potential funders. The room had understandably tut-tutted. For that would indeed have been an abuse of power. But there is unspoken knowledge – and there are unspoken hypocrisies – beneath all such tut-tutting. Was everybody in the hall – including the tut-tutters – absolutely sure that the woman in question did not also wield some power? Are they certain that she would have been able to raise an equally large amount of capital if instead of looking rather strikingly like an international model she had (while equally smart and savvy) more closely resembled Jabba the Hutt? Or a mangy-looking old white man? It is no disservice to the abilities of the woman in question (and no let-off for any man behaving badly) to say that even the prospect of being in future proximity to such a person may not have worked entirely against her. Studies repeatedly show that – all else being equal – people who are attractive manage to climb higher in their chosen professions than their less attractive peers. Is physical attractiveness plus youth and womanhood such a negligible set of cards? Might not one or more of the men among her investors have thought at some point that even if nothing could, would or should ever happen between them, at least investor meetings with her would be looked forward to slightly more than another investor meeting with an elderly white male? And is this not – unpleasant as it is to admit – a type of power? One which is either denied or harnessed only outside of the realms of current mentionability, but a power that exists in the world nonetheless?
The Madness of Crowds Page 10