Jordan Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and may be known to some of you here, but I don’t want to get into what he’s most known for. Rather, on his youtube there are excellent lectures about personality, which I would highly recommend. In my estimation he’s one of the scientists that pursue scientific truth (he’s also highly cited, see his google scholar page) and spends a great deal of effort in making sure that his arguments are correct - so I take his analysis to be very close to a good analysis of the scientific material, i.e. mostly true.

Lecture 17: Agreeableness and gender differences

This lecture deals with a lot of things that lie at the basis of disagreements here on ppd. I’d recommend to watch the whole lecture, but I’ll focus on one part that is especially relevant here.

1 hour mark, mate choice

Here he starts talking about mate choice. Bear in mind that my summary here is very short and imprecise and watching the lecture part is much better to understand his arguments.

Males choose fertility (waist to hip ratio, youthfulness, neoteny), which is mostly accepted here I think. (1:04:00) Why are some men insanely productive? Probably because it increases sexual success, where this doesn’t have to be a conscious reason on the man’s part. Men are more competitive and more disagreeable (half a standard deviation), and if they are more disagreeable they do better in their jobs and women are more likely to pick men like that. (1:07:00) Further, male sexual success is very unevenly distributed at the extremes. For females, not so much. Moreover, male/male-aggression in a society seems to be related to reproductive opportunity for men. The rest is also interesting (especially wealth being not an ideal marker for status, i.e. useless rich guys are unattractive).

In summary, women’s sexual choice rewards the winners of male/male-competition, which is not a conscious fact for both genders presumably because these are old systems even on a evolutionary timescale. So while I disagree with (/am not sure about) a lot of RP specifics, it seems to have a solid scientific basis. In short it tells guys: "You have to compete to get women, here is how you properly compete." However, if men see no opportunity to succeed, then they get more aggressive and ultimately try to bring down the whole system. This would maybe partly explain the ideas and language seen on TRP and incel communities.

I suspect a lot of (mainly BP-leaning) people here would disagree with this in some way (based on their opinions here) and I’d like to see their arguments.