Peterson's 12 Rules For Life, have you heard of this?

[bennyboy]

I do not own the book.  Would you mind giving one or two examples?

As I've shown a couple of times in this thread, googling some of the "controversial" things he's said immediately brought up a lot of confirming evidence, much of it written by women in a professional setting.

Are you sure he's not just telling the truth as he has learned it in an academic capacity, and that people aren't comfortable with it?

The book is saturated with it. One of his main themes is to equate chaos with the feminine, and order with the masculine. He starts off talking about symbolism but quickly dives into the literal.

Ah. He's referring to the Apollo/Dionysus dialectic found in literature and to some degree early psychology.

I'll type up most of the second paragraph, from p41:

Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection. Women are choosy maters (unlike female chimps, their closest animal counterparts). Most men do not meet female human standards. It is for this reason that women on dating sites rate 85 percent of men as below average in attractiveness.

...

It is Woman as Nature who looks at half of all men and says, "No!" For the men, that's a direct encounter with chaos, and it occurs with devastating force every time they are turned down for a date. Human female choosiness is also why we are very different from the common ancestor we shared with our chimpanzee cousins, while the latter are very much the same. Women's proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are. It is Nature as Women who says, "Well, Bucko, you're good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation."

As well as being misogynistic tripe, this is also a complete load of balls. The idea of women saying "no" and men respecting that is a very recent concept, so can't possibly have accounted for our evolution in the way he claims.

Mate selection is one of the central features of evolution, especially for mammals. Peterson is saying that women have had a large active role in our evolution as a species, rather than being passive victims through it all. I think you'd find it pretty near impossible to find any evolutionary scientist who wouldn't see it that way. I also don't see how, once such a view is adopted, it could possibly be seen as misogynistic-- rather, it attributes to women their rightful place as important participators in the development of humanity. It is YOUR position that women have been too weak and helpless to do that, so I'd have to say that you come across as the more misogynistic figure.

You can see the power of selection perfectly clearly all around us, where nice girls often end up with perceived bad boys: physically fit, arrogant, confident, charming. Intelligence is chosen over kindness, power over sexual faithfulness, over and over and over again. The pudgy, dull, kind man has very little chance of genetic success unless he has found a way to get power, perhaps by getting rich. There's a conversation going on right at the genetic level which completely subverts and bypasses what people think or say they want, generation after generation.

Don't believe me? Ask single women if they're looking for an asshole or a nice guy, and take a tally. Then see what kinds of guys they actually end up falling in love with and reproducing with. These numbers are going to be light years apart. Why is this? Evolution has only one answer-- that's the behavior that has, throughout history, been successful for the DNA of the females. Choice matters. And sexualized displays, in the context of evolution, have a very obvious goal-- of increasing the pool of interested males from which a discerning female will be able to choose.