Confronting Jordan Peterson with a statement he says he didn't make, Michelle Goldberg says "Google it!"

This video Googles it for you:



Via the Jordan Peterson SubReddit, which I'm reading this morning because it was linked in something I was reading at Slate, "Jordan Peterson Seems Like a Terrible Therapist/Therapists are supposed to empower their clients, not use them to support their own worldview."

I'll transcribe Goldberg: "Recognize how threatened some women feel when, for example, the kind of, you know, best-selling and most prominent intellectual in the world right now says in an interview, maybe if women don't want the workplace to be sexualized, they shouldn't be allowed to wear makeup."

Peterson says he didn't say that, and Goldberg's response is, "It was a Vice interview — Google it!" Okay, now I've Googled it and come up with the relevant clip:



Peterson says it's hard to know if men and women can be in the workplace together, and "We don't know what the rules are." Then he snaps out a little Socratic test: "Here's a rule: How about no makeup in the workplace?" The interviewer giggles and brushes away Peterson's suggestion that makeup is "provocative." Peterson presses him: "What's the purpose of makeup?" The interviewer professes to have no idea why women put on makeup (though I assume he's just thinking that women should be free to wear makeup if we want and it's not his place to inquire into why). Peterson sticks in his intense, crisp, challenging mode: Women wear lipstick because lips "turn red during sexual arousal." Peterson then makes it clear that he's "not saying that people shouldn't use sexual displays in the workplace." And then, on the prompting of the interviewer, he agrees that women who don't want sexual harassment in the workplace are" hypocritical" if they wear makeup.

So Goldberg did misspeak and left herself open to attack, but she would have been fine if she'd said: "if women don't want the workplace to be sexualized, they are hypocritical if they wear makeup."

How would that revised, accurate statement connect with the idea of "how threatened some women feel"? It might connected better! The disallowance of makeup in the workplace is annoying and repressive, but is it "threatening"? And yet, is it "threatening" to be called a hypocrite? Well, what's threatening is the idea that women bring sexual harassment on themselves by doing anything to make themselves sexually attractive. That really is repressive.