# Jordan Peterson — "enforced monogamy" > [!quote] "He was angry at God because women were rejecting him. The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That's actually why monogamy emerges." > — Jordan Peterson, New York Times profile by Nellie Bowles, May 18, 2018 ## Context Peterson said this in a *New York Times* profile, responding to a question about the April 2018 Toronto van attack, in which a self-identified "incel" killed ten people. The reporter, Nellie Bowles, framed "enforced monogamy" as the cool, rational solution Peterson offered to the problem of sexually frustrated men. The phrase detonated online. ## Disputed interpretation The **wording is undisputed** — Peterson said it, on the record, and the *Times* quoted him directly. What is contested is the **meaning**. Critics read "enforced monogamy" as women being assigned to men by social or state coercion. Peterson responded that he used it in the anthropological sense — *socially-promoted*, monogamy-favoring norms (the opposite of state-assigned partners), arguing that "socially-enforced monogamous conventions decrease male violence." This entry logs the verbatim line and flags the interpretation gap rather than resolving it; it is included precisely because it is a textbook case of a quote whose force depends entirely on which reading you bring to it. ## Why this matters Peterson is the respectable on-ramp to the [[Manosphere]]: an academic who gave a generation of aggrieved young men a vocabulary that felt rigorous rather than crude. Whatever he intended, "the cure is enforced monogamy" became a load-bearing phrase in [[Incel Ideology]] and red-pill discourse, where it is read straightforwardly as a demand that society redistribute women to men. It marks the seam in this collection between the open contempt of Tate and Roosh and the deniable, intellectualized register that carries the same anxiety about male sexual access into the mainstream. ## Verification - **Primary source:** [New York Times profile, May 18, 2018](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life.html). - **Peterson's response:** [jordanbpeterson.com — "On the New York Times and 'Enforced Monogamy'"](https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/media/on-the-new-york-times-and-enforced-monogamy/). - **Context analysis:** [Maclean's](https://macleans.ca/opinion/the-context-of-jordan-petersons-thoughts-on-enforced-monogamy/). - **Status:** Verbatim, undisputed wording; interpretation contested (see above). ## Related quotes - [[Andrew Tate - when you're a realist you're sexist]] — the crude end of the audience Peterson's framing primed. - [[Roosh V - how to stop rape]] — the same underlying anxiety about male sexual access, without the deniability. - Featured in [[Misogyny on the Right]].