Rebecca Traister Quote

Women’s anger, publicly and loudly expressed, is all of that: unnatural, chaotic, upsetting to how power is supposed to work. Women’s determination to voice that fury toward men in 2017 and 2018 had led those men to feel some fraction of the anxiety that nonwhite non-men feel daily. That these men experience any anxiety or discomfort is intolerable enough that in 2018, a Canadian clinical psychologist named Jordan Peterson became a mega-bestselling author of a kind of men’s manifesto, called 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Order is where the people around you act according to well-understood social norms. . . . Chaos, by contrast, is where—or when—something unexpected happens. And just in case it wasn’t clear, Peterson sexes both sides of the paradigm; according to Taoist symbolism, he claims, Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart. Chaos is the thing that Peterson and his devout readers were searching for an antidote to in their struggle to reimpose . . . order.