We Are Lobsters, and We’re Ending Our Contract with Dr. Jordan Peterson
By: Jennie Young
Tags: Women, Relationships, Humor, Mens Rights, Psychology

We’ve decided to come forward because this lobster-mascot situation has spun out of control.

Dr. Peterson’s fans, most of whom identify as “men’s rights advocates” but whom we’ll refer to as Incels for the sake of brevity and also for the sake of accuracy, are snatching up “lobster merch” as though their delusional, white-privileged lives depend upon it. There are entire pages on Amazon filled with lobster t-shirts — lobsters telling you to clean your room, lobsters telling you to stand up straight, lobsters stacked in a pyramid to visually symbolize “the dominance hierarchy.” It’s creepy. We do like the fame, but this particular fan base is getting too weird.

As you may know, Dr. Peterson uses our species to represent male-female dynamics in human relationships, and specifically how it pays off to be an alpha male because that’s what the ladies go for. He also reveals that big, strong, desirable male lobsters are total dicks. An in-demand male lobster, according to Dr. Peterson, “parades his dominance around his territory, rousting subordinate lobsters from their shelters at night, just to remind them who’s their daddy.” This is ridiculous, of course. Nobody’s “rousting subordinates” or trash talking about “daddies,” for god’s sakes. We’re lobsters. We live in the bottom of the ocean.

This all comes out of Dr. Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (women cause chaos). In the first chapter of the book, he sets up this weird analogy in which lobster sex (or how he imagines lobster sex, which is not even close to reality) reflects human sex and also all of human existence. This is clearly a faulty application of inductive logic, but we’ll return to that later.

In his analogy, there are “winner lobsters” and “loser lobsters” (reductive). The girl lobsters all go after the winner lobsters and “start hanging around the dominant lobster’s pad” and “try to seduce him.” We don’t know what “pad” means, and we find the seduction language a bit anthropomorphizing, but let’s continue.

In the analogy, the desperately insecure girl lobster is still into this egomaniacal douchebag, so she will “disrobe” (WTF? we’re lobsters) in order to turn him on, which transforms him into a “careful lover.”

Jesus Christ. Couple things here. This is how lobster sex works: our bladders are on our heads, and we’re into mutual golden showers. After the golden showers, the male deposits his sperm, and then it’s over. So lobster sex is kinky, yeah, and scientists describe it as “stupid” and “hyper aggressive.” Actually now that we think about it we can totally understand how Incels probably equate this entire scene with “careful lovemaking.”

Dr. Peterson, who eats an all beef diet , also claims that a male lobster who can’t get any tail will get “depressed” and turn into a “drooping, skulking sort of lobster” who is “very likely to hang around street corners, and to vanish at the first hint of trouble.”

That’s just . . . that’s just not how it works. We’re not that complicated. We’re lobsters with very primitive brains. How would you even know if a lobster were “skulking”? And we don’t have street corners because again we are lobsters who live in the bottom of the ocean.

It’s freaking us out how obsessed Dr. Peterson is with us. His website offers a full capsule wardrobe of lobster-printed apparel. It’s next-level twisted, like “Buffalo Bill sewing a suit of women’s skin” kind of twisted. Being a mascot was cool at the beginning, but these people are obsessive and it’s beginning to feel offensive. And again, we pee on each others’ heads.

So we’re asking him to please stop with the lobster worship. Surely there are ways to spew misogynistic pseudo-psychology without dragging us into it. We get that Incels love having us as a mascot because we have scary claws and because angry minds are drawn to mascots over the nuances of, say, unpacking the messier and nonbinary reality of how a full spectrum of humanity exists.

We know it’s easier to grunt and chomp your fingers together in imitation of lobster claws while hollering like cavemen about how women should be subject to “sexual redistribution” so that all you Incels can get laid.

The one good thing to come out of this, though, is that it’s caused us (Lobsters) to take a good, hard look at how gendered, lopsided, and fucked up our lobster-relationships really are. We’re making a concerted effort to address this reality, and we’re now in the process of drafting a proposal to become the mascots for the “Five Love Languages” guy. It’s true that our love language involves acting like macho assholes and then pissing on our women’s heads, but we’re hoping he might consider adding that as the sixth love language.