I Have Questions wrote: ↑Tue Oct 17, 2023 9:17 am
At the risk of offending some of my readers: I think that the monthly Playboy [sic] magazine “Playmate” illustrates this very well. The woman in the photograph is perfect. Also air-brushed, posed, and professionally photographed. No real woman — including the one in the photograph — would ever really, lastingly, satisfy. The magazine’s impresario, Hugh Hefner, had hundreds if not thousands of sexual partners.
I wonder how Mrs Peterson feels about her husband scrolling through monthly porn mags, ogling the women pictured, and declaring them to be, in his opinion, perfect?
Yet there is a natural human tendency to try, over and over and over again and quite in vain, to find lasting satisfaction in such things. They cannot and do not satisfy. We are never fully content, and never content for long. There is always a bigger house, greater power to be had, more money, a more desirable mate, some more intense pleasure to be sought, a faster car, more status, more prestige.
Given Peterson's habitual overeating, one can't help but think there's some melancholy and self-loathing behind this passage. He must see the irony of a morbidly obese man pontificating about the ills over overindulgence in an effort to gain lasting satisfaction?
What is really obnoxious is this:
:...The woman in the photograph is perfect....
Really Peterson? Really? And then, to add insult to injury, here is how and why the thing is perfect:
...Also air-brushed, posed, and professionally photographed. No real woman — including the one in the photograph — would ever really, lastingly, satisfy...
I understand he's creating an object lesson. But why? What is it about Peterson that creates this 'thing' in his mind, and calls it 'perfection'? In all his years of a relationship with a real woman, what possesses him that he lingers over these fakes, and declares them perfect, instead of declaring his relationship with a real woman to be the standard?
If we apply these standards of perfection equally, would he object to what women might think about his outward lack of perfection? Or would he assume he would be judged as a human being by his inward qualities, and not by the lack of 'perfection' in his outward qualities?
Peterson wrote:
Yet there is a natural human tendency to try, over and over and over again and quite in vain, to find lasting satisfaction in such things. They cannot and do not satisfy. We are never fully content, and never content for long. There is always a bigger house, greater power to be had, more money, a more desirable mate...
Natural? Human? Why do men like Peterson define their search for "a more desirable mate" as natural and human?? Have they not learned anything about relationships? Are women still just things, ultimately unsatisfying 'things,' to people like Peterson? (And it's clear he is talking about men in this case, otherwise, his Playboy example would be Playboy AND Playgirl.)
