‘Enforced monogamy,’ men’s rights activist Jordan Peterson to speak in Indianapolis

Will Higgins | IndyStar

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Few college professors traveling the country promoting a new book would think to tweet: "Actually, there hasn't been a single protestor (sic) at any of my last 30 speaking events (unless I was speaking at a university campus)."

But Jordan Peterson, known for his defense of the patriarchy and widely seen rips on political correctness, is today's hottest controversial academic. The author of the best-selling "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos" will be in Indianapolis Friday for a lecture at the Murat Theater. Tickets cost as much as $100.

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Peterson doesn't think white privilege is real. He has refused to use pronouns as requested by his school's transgender students and staff, a stance he suggested was a resistance to authoritarianism. He offered a diagnosis and cure for Canadian mass murderer Alek Minassian, who deliberately drove his rented van into a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto in April and killed 10 people, most of whom were women.

Minassian "was angry at God because women were rejecting him," he told The New York Times. "The cure for that is enforced monogamy.”

So-called incels embrace Peterson. Incels are a subculture of angry, frustrated men who blame women — and the alpha males they allegedly choose to pursue — for their lack of a sex life. The American right embraces him as well. The 55-year-old Canadian has made multiple appearances on Fox News. Earlier this spring Fox talk show host Tucker Carlson practically blushed over Peterson when Peterson, a guest on Carlson's show, talked about a culture war being waged on men.

But Peterson is complex, as his defense recently of liberal commentator Bill Maher bears out: "Leave Maher the hell alone," he tweeted.

Peterson has 704,000 Twitter followers, an awful lot for a University of Toronto psychology prof and in fact nearly twice as many as the Colts' Twitter-mad owner, Jim Irsay. (Peterson himself follows just 53 people, including many academics but also John Cleese, Bill Gates, Norm Macdonald and The Onion.)

He opened his 17-city "12 Rules for Life" U.S. tour in Austin. Camille Paglia, another well-known public academic who is often critical of modern culture, wrote in a blurb on the book jacket that Peterson was "the most important and influential Canadian thinker since Marshall McLuhan."

At a lecture he gave last year at Harvard, the audience was, the Harvard Crimson noted, "overwhelmingly comprised of white men," Peterson said universities' women's studies programs have "zero intellectual credibility" and should be discontinued.

He is an ardent defender of his own gender, which he considers beleaguered and misunderstood. "Male behavior is often diagnosed as attention deficit disorder," Peterson told Carlson.

"It's easy to mistake masculine competence for the tyranny that hypothetically drives the patriarchy," he continued. "It's part of an ideological worldview that sees the entire history of mankind as the oppression of women by men, which is a dreadful way of looking at the world, a very pathological way of looking at the world."

He said such a worldview makes it hard for boys to succeed. "If your competitive drive is regarded as part of a tyrannical impulse, how in the world are you going to step forward with confidence? Why wouldn't you just step aside and retreat, which is exactly what's happening?"

Contact Star reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter @WillRHiggins.