Desiree Burch, Katy Wix, Kiri Pritchard-McLean, Lou Sanders, Mike Wozniak, Nish Kumar, Sara Pascoe

photographed by Idil Sukan

Anyway… to answer your question, @mikesmoustache​,

It was worse than I expected based on the title, though I’m not sure if that’s because it was actually worse than what the title promised or just because I wasn’t prepared for how viscerally upsetting it would be to see Russell Howard gazing in awestruck admiration of a guy who has done so much to mess up a lot of people, but particularly an entire generation of teenage boys.

Of course that’s hyperbolic, I don’t know every teenage boy in the world. But as a coach, I work with a lot of teenage boys. And in recent years, we’ve dealt with a lot more problems from them that can be specifically traced back to Jordan Peterson (and Joe Rogan). I know this because when my co-coaches and I try to deal with these issues by talking to them about why they’re showing disrespect that they didn’t used to show to the girls on the team, why we’re hearing more sexist and homophobic comments from them than we used to, why they’re developing an attitude that anyone trying to get them to be nice to people is trying to silence men - they’ll often specifically cite Jordan Peterson (and Joe Rogan) as someone they listened to. It’s multiple times that a teenage boy I coach has said something absolutely untrue about how straight men are victims or whatever, and I ask them why they think that, and they tell me they heard it from Jordan Peterson (and Joe Rogan, it really is those two who come up and over and over).

So I did the thing that I know is bad for my mental health and sometimes I do it: I put way too much time into reading and listening to stuff that’s written and said by terrible people. Because I wanted to understand. I knew generally what Jordan Peterson stood for, but if he was having this big effect on people I care about, I wanted to know what they were hearing. I wanted to see if it was true that there were good messages in the bad.

I watched hours and hours of footage of him giving lectures on YouTube. I watched the full lectures - as I said, I don’t like breaking things down into clips. And oh God, some of them were so long. I read all kinds of articles he wrote. I haven’t read his books, because there’s more than enough stuff to read and watch for free online. This man loves to hear himself talk and put it on the internet to get other people to listen; I don’t need to spend money on his books to find out what he says.

I did that deep dive into the fucked up world of Jordan Peterson a few years ago, and since then I’ve occasionally kept up with more recent things he’s said and done. And here’s what I know: don’t get tricked into doing what I fucking did. Jordan Peterson, and all his fans - that’s their greatest trick. Whenever anyone criticizes Jordan Peterson at all, they say, “Well you’ve only heard about him from biased left-wing sources and you’ve believed all those lies they say about him and anyone who’s actually read his stuff understands how great he is.” And the trick is that you will never satisfy those people. You can say, “Well I did watch this interview he did.” And they say that interview was biased, was edited, doesn’t count, you haven’t heard enough from him. And because there’s so much Jordan Peterson content out there, you have to watch hours and hours and hours of an asshole who speaks in a boring and convoluted way just to be able to truthfully say that you have actually heard from him directly. And then people will say you didn’t really watch it, you didn’t understand it, you need to watch more or you’re not allowed to have an opinion on him.

For the record, I haven’t actually gotten into arguments about Jordan Peterson with anyone except my brother (and it’s been a few years since I’ve done that, I’ve learned to just stop talking about anything political with my brother). When the boys I coach mention him, I avoid discussing Jordan Peterson directly at all, and instead talk about the specific things the boys have said/done and views they’ve expressed, because I don’t think arguing about Jordan Peterson with them is helpful. I’ve never actually talked to the Jordan Peterson fans all over the internet, so I’ve never had them say these things (“You can’t criticize him because you haven’t actually listened to all his hundreds of hours of boring lectures”) to me. But I have read the arguments they make online any time anyone criticizes Jordan Peterson at all. And sometimes they make this argument even when no one has criticized him! They’re not responding to anyone, they’re just talking about how great he is, and they include in this talk some stuff about how everyone who criticizes him hasn’t really listened to him and just believes lies they’ve heard from biased sources. It’s pretty much their  main discussion point.

So. All that to say. If you have ever been frustrated by accusations that you’re not allowed to criticize Jordan Peterson because you haven’t listened to hours and hours and hours of him rambling, I’m going to do you a favour: I have listened to hours and hours and hours of that, I have heard and read the primary sources instead of just biased opinion pieces, so I can save you the time of doing all that and just say yes, he really is bad. By taking my word for it you are getting your information from a secondary source, but it’s a secondary source that’s been informed by a lot of primary source material. So read/watch him if you want, but if you don’t want to - and my God, why would you want to? - you can take the word of someone who did that work for you. Context doesn’t make him less of an asshole. It makes him more long-winded, more annoying, and frequently boring. But all the sexist quotes you’ve heard from him sound just as sexist in context. You can listen to him make an hour-long argument about why trans people wanting their identities respected is actually fascisms, and it doesn’t make any more sense than it does in the out-of-context clips that are floating around. If you ever see someone say that he just looks bad in clips but when you hear his full speech he makes total sense - I’ve checked, and they’re wrong. There’s no need for all of us to check individually, it’s a waste of many hours and we have shit to do.

So that brings me back to @mikesmoustache​’s comment: I completely sympathize with your desire to not watch that interview. In fact, I recommend that you do not watch that interview. I did it for you, and I can tell you: nothing in there made me say, “Oh shit, Russell Howard is right, Jordan Peterson is pretty cool.” There’s also no point in that interview when Russell challenged him on anything whatsoever, in case anyone was hoping (as I was, a bit, though I didn’t expect it given the way Russell’s talked about Jordan Peterson in the past) that maybe he’d bring him on and then ask him to defend some of his more awful beliefs. It was a lot of Russell Howard being very impressed with this man’s very wise self-help advice.

And the thing about Jordan Peterson is some of his ideas are actually all right. It’s not groundbreaking; it’s stuff you can find in any cheap self-help book yet it somehow gets him lauded as a towering intellectual. But it’s still good advice. Cleaning your room is a good idea. Finding something you’re passionate about is a good idea. Taking pragmatic charge of your own mental state is a good idea. The trouble is that people - especially teenage boys - who are lost and having a hard time mentally get drawn in by the self-help advice, and then end up falling down the rabbit hole of all his fucked up beliefs. Pick up any self-help book; it’ll give you tips about how to keep your room clean for a mentally healthier life without also saying women are trying to trap you into sexual harassment lawsuits by wearing makeup at work.

There’s a 3.5-minute YouTube video that collects some of the awful sexist things Jordan Peterson has said, and its description is: “When Jordan Peterson says something particularly sexist, it’s usually buried in an hour long video.  Since I’ve been watching so much of his videos, I decided to start making a compilation of the statements that stand out to me” I quite like that, because it makes me feel like someone else has felt my exact frustration while watching all those hours. The frustration of “context does not make any of this better, if I’m going to waste my time watching all this then I’ll at least distill what I’ve learned so other people can learn it without wading through hours of bullshit, even though I know people will then say it was taken out of context so none of it counts.” The video is not fun to watch, but it does summarize one aspect of Jordan Peterson’s views pretty well. They are clips out of context, but I have personally seen the full versions of a lot of those clips from the original source, and context doesn’t make it better.

For the record, I am thirty-one years old, do not want to have kids, and consider myself a very compassionate person. I have dedicated much of my life working as a coach (I say “working”, but I don’t get paid for it, I just do it because I care about the people I can help) trying to whatever I can to help the kids and teenagers on my team live the best life possible. I care deeply about my friends, my family, and everyone I work with as a coach. I realize I don’t need to defend myself to anyone here; “a woman can be over thirty and not want to have kids but still have a compassionate nature” is not a controversial claim on this website. But I felt the need to express that anyway.

Finally, I’m going to end this post with something I find quite therapeutic. It’s an extremely silly comedy song that expresses so well what I think of that whole situation. It captures the frustration of anyone who’s ever criticized Jordan Peterson and been met with the accusation that they’re just listening to lies and ad hominem attacks from biased sources instead of engaging with his ideas. And it doesn’t matter how many of his ideas you engage with - they still find a way to say your engagement doesn’t count and you just hate him because the lying media tells you to and it’s all ad hominem. Ad hominem. There is something wonderfully freeing about listening to a song that says, “You know what? Fuck you. If you won’t accept any of my arguments as having intellectual merit because nothing could have intellectual merit compared to the great Jordan Peterson, then fuck it, I will just do what you accuse me of doing throw a bunch of ad hominem attacks at him. Because that is a better use of my time than trying to engage in intellectual debate with that bullshit. Listen to me fling some childhood insults and then fuck off, I’m tired of trying to argue with you.”

There's an interesting trend in the comment section of people praising how humane and compassionate the interview is. I get where these people of coming from since the present debate culture is so saturated with 'winning points' and 'owning your opponents' lol but there's nonetheless something insidious to me about suggesting the ideal interview with a controversial figure is placidly allowing them to rattle off their talking points unchallenged. Less than a minute in, Jordan Peterson claims that anyone upset about his presence on the show is only angry because they don't know any of his actual points and dislike a caricature of him. Pretty clever to suggest that if you do disagree with him, you're automatically in the wrong for not having bothered to seek out his real ideas. Pretty handily absolves him of having to confront the idea that some people do disagree with him based on the things that he's said. "You agree with me, you just don't realize it yet." As if the right way to engage with his ideas is to make the most charitable possible reading to find what you do agree with him about, agree with that invented reading, and then pass on whatever subtext he's added unchallenged.

That's why the people who follow him insist that anyone criticizing him must first seek out hundreds of hours of lectures. It's not comfortable to confront the truth that people can see, hear, and read the same things as you, and then come to different conclusions. Or it's an excellent display of the variety of human experience, but I guess that depends on whether you see diversity as a threat or a strength.

IMO it's why he's gained the influence he has. He has a pretty effective sell as a misunderstood academic. Britain loves an underdog. and transphobia. If you feel like you've been left behind and don't understand the 'new' identities of trans people, he's great at scaremongering about the pronoun police taking your free speech away. If you're a disillusioned young white guy, well, here's an intellectual older man making a bunch of reasonable talking points that have loads of people offended for seemingly no reason.

In the same way as I believe Russell is trying to do here, there's an urge to try to take him at his word. To believe that he genuinely thinks all the things that he says, that deep down, you probably agree with him, but you just need to dig a bit and ignore a few things to make it all fit. You have to be pretty sure that whoever you're talking to is a liar or a grifter in order to ignore what they're telling you they believe and instead dig into the implications of the way they phrase those eminently reasonable beliefs. More generally you have to believe that there are people who will ardently claim positions that they don't believe in in order to Trojan-horse different ideas into the mainstream; in essence, that some people are trying to manipulate you.

Engaging with Jordan Peterson on his own terms and with his cultivated image as the misunderstood academic who's just like you, fumbling through and doin' his darn best, will be widely seen as the right call to make, as 'trying believe the best of people', but it's also a fucking terrible idea, because Jordan Peterson is a liar. I don't know Russell Howard, but it's not a hard leap for me to make to believe that he wants to take Jordan Peterson at his word and present him in a sympathetic light in the aim of human connection.

Which I guess is the last point I have to make; what the interview was trying to do and what the interview did. Another thing the comments were praising is how two people of different politics could come together for a 'civil discussion.' Of course, this wasn't a civil discussion. Or rather it wasn't a discussion. It was Russell playing the part of a non-entity, feeding Jordan questions and letting him ramble to a platform of millions. Russell's politics never came up. He never challenged Jordan on anything he's previously said.

This is extremely handy for the kinds of people that might like it if Jordan Peterson's ideas gained loads of traction because it accomplished two things at once; first, any fans of JP watching it would have zero exposure to pushback to their ideas. Nobody watching from the right is going to be inspired to seek out what Russell has to say on the subject, because the presentation and editing has made it so that Russell has *nothing* to say on the subject. Second, anyone watching from the left-centre isn't going to have to immediately confront what Jordan Peterson actually believes in any strong terms. He's said nothing provocative, so why are people so upset? Maybe I should see what Jordan actually believes, since apparently everyone misrepresents him and hates him for things he never even said, according to him. Maybe I should watch hundreds of videos, listen to hours of podcasts, and go flailing down the rabbit hole. On paper, it's two people of different political beliefs coming together for a chat. In reality, it's selling a vaguely liberal audience the idea that this guy a lot of leftists really hate is probably actually quite reasonable and Russell respects him enough to have him on the show, so why shouldn't you? EVEN if you KNOW the shitty things he's said! Even if you already hate him! I saw your post and had a genuine moment of "That Jordan Peterson? Who has said the things that I know he's said? No, that can't be right. Has he changed all his opinions? Was I wrong about him?" And I'm a trans Canadian! I and nearly everyone I love is gonna be fucked over the more his ideas gain footholds in the mainstream!

Part of me has an urge to explain it as JP taking advantage of Russell Howard, but that's a pretty faulty excuse. Another part of me thinks Russell should fucking know better. Another part of me knows I do not know Russell Howard or what he believes. Another part of me reckons that the show is produced by more people than Russell alone, with a variety of backgrounds and agendas, and just because Russell's the face of it doesn't mean he should be held to account for the ideas of every person working on the show. I genuinely will never know if it was Russell who went "I know who I want on my show; Jordan Peterson!" and in some ways I just... don't want to know. What I do know is that if it was someone else's idea, and even if he pushed back against it, obviously he wasn't ready to push as hard as he could have to make sure it didn't happen. In complete speculation, I don't believe he did push back against it, because in that case I assume he would have taken his chance in the room with Jordan Peterson to do more than make understanding noises as he talks.

In some removed way, I'm a little pleased with my own reaction because it's very recently that I would have had a small crisis a-la-Robert-Webb-suggesting-a-charity-for-trans-kids-is-part-of-a-nefarious-plot-against-GNC-kids. Probably good that I'm not losing my shit over people I don't know as much as I did not long ago. For my own sanity, at least.

It's still a letdown. I'm assuming Russell's retaining his position that people shouldn't be stripped of their human rights lol. Still, he has now irrevocably and undeniably platformed a man who has influenced a fuckton of people to endanger people like me. So that's not great. But if you're trans or love trans people and generally want to avoid them getting murdered, it's always going to be a crap shoot when engaging with media predominantly controlled by a system that oppresses trans folks. 'Specially british stuff. Kinda sucks that at this point I have to cross my fingers that the people I respect and like aren't ambivalent to the damage they can do to the safety of me and everyone like me, but life's not fair, I guess.

Because we're all long-winded today, a special mention to the people in my life who tell me I should be engaging with things I don't agree with in order to have a healthy media diet. usually after I express disinterest in reading another transphobic article my dad's sending me. Eventually you get tired of listening to people who fundamentally disrespect your humanity. I literally can't avoid people who disagree with me, not really. People whose opinions are well-represented in the mainstream lecturing people whose opinions and identities are already forced into the fringes on 'seeking out ideas you don't agree with' usually miss that we don't need to do any seeking at all. If you don't stay on the fringe, you're gonna encounter someone who thinks you shouldn't be afforded the same rights as the rest of the population. Probably pretty often, too. Not to get into the ~ cis privilege of it all ~ lmao but still - I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that Russell Howard and Jordan Peterson can very comfortably ignore whatever surges of transphobic sentiments, rhetoric, policies, and eventually violence that his continued influence engender. I imagine it's a damn sight easier to be oblivious to it when it's abstract ideas and newspaper articles and not your sister and your best friend, and y'know, you.

I made this map of the places where comedians grew up. Then I downloaded it as a KMZ file so I could open it in Google Earth and jump around to the different places. It’s an entertaining way to pass the time while I listen to a new audiobook. Here are some pictures I took of the hometowns/cities/tiny collection of barns (Josh Widdicombe) of various comedians. I mostly went with people who’ve built at least some of their comic personas on the location and socio-economic class in which they grew up. It’s interesting to me to compare that persona to where they really came from. And it’s just interesting to me to virtually travel to lots of bits of Britain (and Ireland, Aisling Bea, and Malaysia, Phil Wang).