Jordan Peterson, Sex and The Patriarchy

Jordan Peterson has been attacked for associating the masculine principle with ‘order’ and consciousness, and the feminine with ‘chaos’ and darkness. This may seem a bit chauvinistic in our post-feminist age—even if there is nothing particularly wrong with chaos in itself. Of course, Peterson also knows that women have forever been symbolically associated with positive qualities like soul, psyche, wisdom, nature, energy, beauty, compassion etc. as well.

Perhaps there is a remedy to this conceptual confusion. What if we say that if the male principal is ‘consciousness’ then the female principal is ‘being’? And by ‘being’ I mean everything that is, that is alive, that is embodied — the world of form. In any case, it is important to remember that men and women have equal symbolic weight and gravity. Being and consciousness arise together: they are complementary.

Consciousness, symbolically speaking, is the head, being the belly or the Dan Tien in Chinese systems. The heart then, is the central matrix where being and consciousness, man and women, spiritually speaking, meet. Of course, every person has a belly and a head, and every person has both masculine and feminine qualities. In a man the masculine qualities are usually dominant, in a women the feminine…