But here’s the rub – what if women were to choose being single over being paired with undesirable men? What if, even in a society with balanced sexes, with restricted sexual activity, and men bestowing attention on a limited number of women, some women didn’t seek partnership and marriage? Then no matter how much you valorise monogamy as opposed to polygamy, low-status men would lose out because some women may choose singledom over low-status men. So in what situation will these low-status men be chosen? Simple. If women are put in a situation where they have to pair up in some form, and even mating with the most undesirable man is a better option than remaining single. That, you see, is the real problem for men like Peterson. That women can choose to reject all the men available to them, and that society should accept it. His suggestion of socially enforced or incentivised ‘monogamy’ would be useless to incels as long as there are even some women out there who, let alone choosing a particular form of marriage, reject marriage itself.

It is this freedom that Peterson attacks, which he feels must be undone – the ability of women to say no to marriage, and socially compelled mating itself. His problem isn’t just with women choosing only high status men, since such men are an exhaustible number. But if women, unable to attain such men were to withdraw to choosing none – what happens to low-status men? His problem, therefore is with women being able to be single, and thus men having to be single. He makes that clear in his preceding position in the Times piece, that “society needs to work to make sure those men are married.” I am aware that Peterson has refuted that he suggests a scenario akin to the Handmaid’s Tale or ISIS. Why should he? Society has always found ways to prioritise male demand for sexual access and a mate without it.

Peterson has cited anthropological literature to substantiate his argument, insisting on the evidence that when men are in monogamous relationships, they’re less violent, less prone to conflict etc to persuade on the necessity to find men mates. I’ve got news for him. We know. For feminists, and really anyone who tries to understand why women were enslaved and oppressed the way they were (and are) this is hardly earth shaking. A superficial investigation into any patriarchal society will quickly lead one to this conclusion – that quite a few of the elaborate social structures devised in patriarchal societies were precisely in response to this need – that men without mates are a source of social upheaval and chaos. Male dominated and led societies, therefore, responded not with blatant laws backed by the state, but through ‘culturally inculcated’ customs, cloaked with the mysticism of religion and ancient wisdom, that compelled and exerted pressure with the use of such venerable concepts.

You don’t have to take my word for it – take a gander at the societies, that are most repressive. In such societies, this is still a reality, where social norms and cultural pressures make it worse to be an unmarried woman than to be dead. A variety of social structures effectuate this, the most effective being arranged marriage coupled with crippling social death for the unmarried or single woman. In such societies, where, as Peterson pleads, ‘societies work to make sure men are married’, women die, get raped, and live their lives without hope when their worth as human beings is always tied to their worth as wives. I would know. I’m from one.

Arising from this realisation that many men without mates, are, apparently, loose cannonballs, a society structured to facilitate male needs formulates the evergreen cultural notion, repeatedly enforced in patriarchal societies, that men calm down and become responsible when married. This is no myth, and most of you reading this would have heard this at some time. A momen’t reflection into what could have given rise to such a notion will lead you to this same conclusion. I’ve personally witnessed this rhetoric dozens of times. “Get him married, and he will settle down” is a common wisdom of elders in such societies, who place a premium, as Peterson recommends, on getting men married. Needless to say, women married to such men suffer endless abuse, marital rape, and, all too often, death. These statements aren’t accidental. They are part of a carefully cultivated cultural belief that men become adults when bedded, and so they have to be provided with wives. This manifests in disturbing ways.

When it is socially and culturally ‘inculcated’ to frown upon women for being single, several other consequences follow. Modern criticism of sex inequality feeds the perception that it is a view of women as chattel which facilitates forced marriage/arranged marriage. This is wrong – it is not because they were viewed as chattel that they’re treated as such – it was the graduatl reduction of women as mere wives and mothers that cemented their status as chattel. When society makes it so that the woman’s worth is determined by her marital state, she becomes a bargaining chip, a promissory note. Society’s imperative to get the women married off therefore, is a godsend for ‘low-status’ men, since the woman is viewed as more of a burden the longer her unmarried state extends, and the family and friends of undesirable men can leverage the fear on the woman’s side to procure a marriage.

Another chilling consequence of a society where social norms ‘works to make sure that men are married’, is the plight of the unmarried woman. Not only is she ostracised and looked down upon – the mere existence of the adult, unmarried female is deemed to attract the violent attentions of men, who would, naturally, target the single woman. Without a ‘man’ in the house therefore, society’s prevailing belief is that the single woman will be left vulnerable to predatory men, particularly in poorer societies – hence even the presence of an alcoholic man, useless though he may be against an actual attacker is believed to send the requisite social messages to protect the woman. This fear also means that women stay with abusive men, and parents procure a marriage that can give their daughter a cloak of respectability and safety, if not life.

Years ago, a woman told me that she had arranged a marriage for her daughter, then just out of school. I recall being outraged, asking her why, since she’d reported that her daughter did well in school. I recognised the groom-to-be a man who had already been in trouble with the police, dropped out from school, and had since taken up alcohol. She just shrugged, saying that at least her daughter wouldn’t be attacked. When a society works as Peterson suggests, to make sure that men are married, the life of a female is only worth the marital mark she bears, and a bright-eyed, intelligent 17-year-old would sooner be married off to an alcoholic young man shaping up to be a troublemaker than be single. Three years later, she had two kids, calloused hands from hard labour, and a resigned smile about her husband.

As I read the piece on Peterson and his suggestion of ‘enforced monogamy’, I remembered the faces of the countless women I’ve known in my life, particularly from the lower economic strata, who live his suggested reality every day – hard-working, smart, resilient, women. For many such women, their husbands were drunkards, alcoholics who abused their wives, failed to provide for their children, and flaunted their infidelity. These women, who toiled day and night in hard labour to keep a roof over their heads for their children, inevitably had to go home to these men and would return with stories of abuse, of their husbands using their earnings on alcohol or causing a disaster that the women would have to pay for. I questioned how they ended up married to these men, who should have been social rejects.

By socially endangering the unmarried female, though, even the most degenerate male earned a wife. As poor young girls, the priority had been to get them married to someone, anyone who would have them. When social structures decree that being single for men is acceptable, but not for women – this is the outcome. Anyone will do – and the younger the girls are married off, the better. For anyone wondering how child marriage comes into existence, it is like this.