A thousand good plumbers beat a thousand incels. Every single time.

“Be a Plumber, Man” Still Stands

Why, as feminist as I am, I admire Dr Jordan Peterson

Be a plumber, man — image created by @Author using Artlist

Our house is very old. The first thing we changed when we moved in was the electric wiring. Everything was so old we were afraid it could start a fire. So we reached out to some friends to give us some contacts and, in a week, we had someone coming to fix that.

That fixing? To this day, I have his contact in my phone as “the butcher.”

We made the mistake of paying most of the money upfront, so we ended up with an incredible sore eye, signalling the importance of research before any project.

Mildly traumatised after this experience, we took another risk, and we changed the kitchen sink plus a cupboard. This time we went to a construction shop, and we asked if they had someone to install what we bought. Same story, bad disappointment again.

So bad that for a few weeks the sink was not functional; we had to use a bucket to collect the water and discard it in the garden.

One day, while waiting for the bus, I saw one of my neighbours bringing his teenage daughter to the bus station. He was wearing those overalls, with paint and cement marks, the mark of someone hard-working.

I loved seeing him doing his job.

It had that feel-good energy someone loving his work has. I could let him alone to do his job; no supervision needed.

The way he treated every detail was something I could recognise: Golden Rule in action, in real time, each step taken with the same consideration as if it were for himself.

I found myself singing “Be a plumber, man” and laughing in relief. My bad strike was broken.

Since then, we called him for anything we needed. Some smooth process every time. No hollowness, no empty claims, only a careful plan, formulated and explained step by step, clear costs, clear deadlines, flawless delivery. A delight.

Yes, both he and “the butcher” would tell you that they are the ones to fix the broken things in your house, but when it comes to results, they were worlds apart.

The thing that made me furious for months, when thinking back at the incredible lack of professionalism of the latter, was that he brought his son with him to teach him the quirks of the job.

If that was the standard that he was passing on, maybe his son would be way better off as a barman. Or accountant. Or anything, really, as long as he does not learn from him.

Or maybe not; maybe the son already internalised the same attitude toward work, and he will do a bad job no matter what he does in the future.

And here is the part where, as a feminist, I am very grateful to Jordan Peterson for the work he has done to shake off the victim energy making young men join those self-absorbed trends like incel-ism and tateism.

He is right about competence, responsibility and meaning. And about how important what we are telling young people is.

I grew up surrounded by bullies. Not many things are more harmful than a bullying parent or teacher, someone who uses their authority to dismantle the self-esteem of a child… To this day, the name of my 1st–4th grade teacher tastes bitter in my mouth…

The more responsibility you take on, the more meaning your life has… There’s deep meaning in it. And young people are starving for that because no one ever tells them that. It’s like, you’re way more than you think, man. Stand up, do something difficult. (Jordan Peterson)

Can you imagine the healing effect Peterson had on me? I spent weeks watching his online classes, marvelling at the richness of the subjects and their entertaining quality.

It gave me that nostalgic feeling that made me question how different my life might be if I had had more teachers like him.

Of course I bought his books. “We Who Wrestle with God” is now on my wishlist. Not an urgency, I’ll give you that.

I do not wrestle with God, nor with the Goddess. They are a part of my life as stable and real as the earth I am walking on.

I do not need to wrestle with that, only to pay attention and avoid stepping on a glass shard or something.

My favourite is 12 Rules for Life. I bought the audiobook — and listened to it at least 4 times.

OMG, how I love that book! There is a part where he talks about fights between family members — mostly parents, but it can extend further — and his advice was something like:

When this happens, you two idiots go your separate ways and ask what your part in it was. Then you can go back to your partner and reveal why you’re an idiot, and apologise sincerely, and that person can do the same for you, and apologise sincerely, and then you two idiots will be able to talk again. Perhaps that is true prayer: the question, “What have I done wrong, and what can I do now to set things at least a little more right?” (imprecise quote from 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson)

The moment I heard “idiots,” I started crying. All my life I heard my father, who was barely able to read, calling me an idiot. The tone of his “idiots” was kind and caring, and it landed on top of my father’s insults, washing them away.

It was the beginning of a healing process I will be forever grateful for.

The only way to capture what happened then was with another quote, this time from a Romanian story, where a wise old man is humiliated by a prideful nobleman:

“Unde te-a scuipat boierul, te-a pupat împăratul și a șters rușinea” — “Where the boyar spat on you, the emperor kissed you and wiped away the shame.” *From the story Moș Ioan Roată și Unirea, where the king himself kissed the wise peasant, erasing the shame and dissolving the labels.

So imagine my dismay hearing that people hate him. I could not figure out why, so I started investigating.

How do I feel about his teachings, and why? Book in hand, I went through the twelve rules the way I go through everything — looking for what’s actually there, what those rules mean, how I feel about them and why.

And, as usual, I applied my most trustful filter: the question “If this rule, this behaviour, would be adopted by everyone else, would the world become a better place or a worse one for doing that?”

Stand up straight with your shoulders back. Treat yourself like someone you’re responsible for helping. Make friends with people who want the best for you. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to a stranger’s highlight reel. Don’t let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. Set your house in order before you dare criticise the world. Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient. Tell the truth, or at least don’t lie. Assume the person you’re listening to knows something you don’t. Be precise in your speech.

And my favourites:

Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.

Let them fall. Let them get back up. That’s how they learn where the edge is. Let them discover who they are; don’t force them to become something else to fit in your story about them.

And yes, I know it is a hard rule to follow.

My son loved to skate as a teenager. Seeing him attempt all those tricks made me wish to buy him 3 sets of protective equipment and insist he should wear them all at once.

But how else can he learn who he is and what he can do without experimenting?

Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.

Because even in the worst of times, we need reminders that something in the world is still soft, and still worth stopping for.

Go an extra mile for the black ones. They had it rough enough because of our irrational fears; humans and cats would equally benefit from our attempts to stamp out those fears.

Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street — image created by @Author using Artlist

I want my son, and every son I can think of, to grow up into a confident adult who knows how to make and maintain friends, keep his urges under control, keep his house in order, have meaningful goals, tell the truth or at least not lie, listen to learn and understand, know what he’s talking about, think with his own mind, and know how to find joy in small things. Something was not adding up.

So I followed his advice: “Watch them. Watch them like a hawk.”

Set against the sheer brilliance of Potential and the warmth of 12 Rules for Life, the arguments of the other side made me cringe — because they were all from the same bag of tools: labels, complaints, and attacks, badly disguised as care for women and children.

“Tot în boul care trage, tot în ăla dai mai tare” [The ox that pulls hardest gets hit hardest], “amărâtă de atâta nerecunoștință” [worn bitter by so much ingratitude] — “nicio faptă bună nu rămâne nepedepsită” [no good deed goes unpunished]… and just like that, a chain of associations, most of them people I’ve read about and deeply, unconditionally admire: Nicolae Iorga, Corneliu Coposu, Alan Turing — all what I call White Giraffes:

We are the only species on this planet constantly subjected to a negative, unnatural selection. If Nature favours the fastest, the strongest, or the most caring — depending on which trait is most desirable — we humans do exactly the opposite: the moment something stands out, that someone is in danger.

I said I deeply and unconditionally admire those people above, and I stand by that, despite knowing how flawed some of them were.

Because this is the point: we all are flawed.

And if we find someone seemingly flawless, that should alert us. After all, the Zen masters gave us the koan of “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him” for a reason.

It’s not literal violence; it’s about not clinging to any external figure — even an enlightened one — as an idol. The moment you turn a teacher into an untouchable authority, you’ve stopped seeking truth yourself and started worshipping the finger pointing at the moon instead of the moon. “Kill him” means dissolve the attachment, refuse to freeze the teacher into someone beyond question.

Back to Jordan Peterson and his teachings: From a feminist point of view — from any honest point of view — a future where young men choose competence and responsibility over self-pity and entitlement is the future to dream of.

A thousand good plumbers beat a thousand incels. Every single time.

There is no scenario where I would choose the incel path for a man. None.

It isn’t a competition. Give us the man who shows up, tells you what he’s going to do, does it, charges you fairly, and when he finishes, everything works as it is supposed to.

Give us a thousand of him. (And yes — fine — if he’s also easy on the eyes while he does it, nobody’s complaining. We contain multitudes.) That man is not a threat to anyone. He never needed to be.

What we do not want, what nobody sane wants, is a thousand men convinced the world owes them something it never promised, standing around a forum comparing grievances instead of comparing invoices.

Peterson’s whole “hierarchy of competence” pitch is, at bottom, a pitch against that — go be good at something real, get paid for it, earn the respect instead of demanding it. That’s not a men’s-rights argument. That’s just — good advice. For anyone.

And then, here you have the most precise dismantling of one of the most toxic myths of our culture, the woman-blaming part of the Fall:

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That part lecture, part rant — starting from “it’s Adam who comes across as really one sad creature in this story”?!

That’s sheer brilliance! Go back and listen to that part if you don’t believe me!

It’s like, first of all, it wasn’t him. It was the woman, and second, he even blames God. It’s like, it wasn’t just the woman; it was that woman, and you gave her to me.

There! Imagine watching that scene, imagine Adam trying to get away with what he did. One moment and you can feel it:

“It is not me, it is her, you gave her to me, it is you, but I cannot say that, I am too afraid, maybe you made her wrong, it was something wrong with her, and now with me, from the beginning”

That was the birthing moment of the original sin. And that, my friends, deserves an article on its own.

And she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. It’s like, so, hey, Adam’s all innocent, except now he’s not only is he naked… and disobedient and cowardly and ashamed, he’s also snivelling, backbiting fink. He rats her out, like the second he gets the opportunity, and then he blames God. It’s like, and that’s exactly right. (Jordan Peterson about Adam and Eve)

And then he goes on, linking Adam’s choice to all the bitter men out there, on those incel forums, sending us to check those threads complaining about women there: That’s exactly right, man. You go online, and you read, you read the commentary that men write about women when they’re resentful and bitter about women.

(…) It’s like, It’s not me, it’s those bitches. Okay? That’s right. It’s not me, it’s them. And not only that, what a bloody world this is in which they exist. It’s exactly the same thing. It’s exactly the same thing, and it is absolutely pathetic. All right.

If this is not an attitude we should celebrate in men, I don’t know what it is.

I hope what I wrote above is successful in expressing my admiration and support for Jordan Peterson.

Maybe even to the point that the reader will suspect me of being biased pro-him in my thinking. Because now I will change the register and switch to the part he doesn’t cover in his teachings.

My pleasure at finding someone so professional that made me sing along “Be a plumber, man” comes from the recognition I feel when I meet someone like our neighbour.

I recognise them because I am like that, and there is a click there, a deeper trust created on the spot. You know, all of us share a secret, a joyful, empowering one: we love our work!

We are a little baffled at how people see work as a burden; for us is our chance to take our small corner of the Universe and make it a little better. Brighter. Happier.

But you know what we do not share, no matter how much we love our work?

The fear that I can be sexually harassed/abused/dismissed because of our gender. I am very good at what I am doing. And yes, this might sound self-praising; that’s fine with me, modești să fie cei ce au de ce (let the ones that have reason to be so).

As a therapist trained both in tantra and somatic massage, any of my massage sessions can be a real-time demonstration of what consent means.

Working like that with a woman who might never have heard someone asking for permission to touch and checking every step how she feels- let me tell you, that is one of the most healing experiences someone can have.

Despite all of that, I am still struggling on my path.

First: I had to prepare to be looked at with suspicion, maybe even contempt.

I’m fine with that; I had my share of that; it is funny now. If anybody believes that they can top up my inner critic at his worst, that’s a very ambitious goal, and I admire that. I would gently suggest they focus that ambition on something worth the effort, and that would be that.

Second: There is a real danger in what I am doing. The internet is full of stories of clients wanting more than a massage. It happened to me once. I cut off any interaction with that client on the spot.

And that is where the discrepancy begins:

Yes, the world is a better place with any man (and woman, for that matter) who takes responsibility, who owns their mistakes, and diligently works toward a better self and a better future. With any hard-working person who avoids the trap of bitterness and chooses a better life.

But that’s not enough. Yes, I can assume some responsibility for the would-be abusive client, like the fact that I had a bad feeling about it and I still accepted him as a client because “he needs it.” But that’s not the point here. The point is that all that work to become the professional I am now, all those studies, even the jiu-jitsu classes that I took, were not enough to keep me safe from this type of parasitic exchange.

And for the ones reading and thinking “it was not your fault, you don’t have to take responsibility for him being a jerk,” please stop — that goes nowhere. Labelling him as a jerk and skipping over does nothing productive.

It is my duty to play and replay that episode in my mind until I extract every bit of wisdom from it, filed properly and used as reference material when needed.

So here is where Jordan Peterson falls short.

First, this should be publicly admitted — that type of trigger alert that he sneers so much about. Imagine his talk going this way:

Be a plumber, man, or an accountant, or a waiter, a good one, you know. Be proud of your work, your achievements.

And remember that no matter how good you are, your female co-workers might be as brilliant as you, because they achieved the same post while having to fight an army of shitty, pitiful guys acting like they are better than them only because of their genitals.

Cut them some slack, man; they might be too tired to be nice. Learn to accept rejection. Sometimes it’s not about you; it’s about that self-called alpha who sent her a dick pic.

Try to put yourself in her uncomfortable shoes (oh, how I hate those fanciful torture devices that fashion is selling as shoes today) and imagine how life is for her.

And one day, without doing anything on purpose, something about you shifts, and the woman who was avoiding you all the time will start greeting you with a smile.

That, that would be so much more healing than his actual approach! And this is why this omission is so tragically sad. We could have had a dialogue, instead of a critic-and-blame match.

He missed his chance, even if it is not too late to do that now. But us? The feminists? We who are supposedly fighting for a better world?

This is a quote from Luc Olinga’s article, *Jordan Peterson Told Men to Master Chaos. Then His Own Body Rebelled*, describing the internet reactions upon finding out about his health problems:

The internet answered all of this in two registers at once. Thousands prayed, quoted scripture, and wrote personal notes. Thousands of others celebrated: karma declarations, addiction taunts, armchair diagnoses of Munchausen by proxy aimed at the family, anti-vaccine accounts claiming his illness for their cause, and open wishes for his death. Between the camps, there is a thin band of people who simply knew what akathisia was and said so.

Really? Is that the better world we want to create?

One where we take joy in someone else’s suffering? I instinctively recoil just reading the paragraph above.

Forgive me, but I want none of that.

He is wrong in trying to revive only the Spirit of the Father; he is not wrong in his teachings on gratitude.

Karma? You know what karma means? You know the ultimate mechanism it operates on?

It means that every time you choose something harmful, you become the type of person who does that. The more you choose your poison — whatever that poison is, cowardice, revenge toward the ones in a vulnerable position, you name it — you become a little of that.

And the world around you will start to reflect that to you more and more. Nothing mystical in that — only you, lowering your standards, diminishing yourself, going along with the wrong mob, until one day you become the type of person your child self would gasp in horror at meeting.

All of that, for what? For the empty privilege of casting ourselves as victims in the story?

I have great news for you. You might not like it, though… That privilege is worth shit. Not even that — shit can be composted into something useful.

Nu există victime fericite! There is no such thing as happy victims.

The sooner we learn that, the better.

If this sounds like “Stand up straight with your shoulders back,” this is exactly what it is.

Because he is so right about that! Stand up long enough to investigate his teachings. Hai să stăm strâmb și să judecăm drept — this brilliant Romanian saying literally tells us to assume an uncomfortable position to help us judge better. (“Let’s sit crooked and judge straight” — sit however is honest, even awkwardly, so the judgment that follows can be true.)

It saddens me beyond what I can tell that instead of receiving his gifts, we made him a target.

That’s lazy thinking at best, evil intention at worst. I am a feminist with a great depth of gratitude toward Jordan Peterson.

I pray for his recovery every day. More of us should do that. I want him back at his sharpest, giving another book — one on how to choose your leaders.

As for me?

If someone gave me the chance to teach at his academy, that would be the honour of my life. A pain in the ass too — I would challenge every assumption there — but still an honour.

And I will do that while being as entertaining as he is, maybe more, as I will not limit myself to The Lion King and Pinocchio; the world changed a little since then.

Ah, I know that part about modesty. Not me. I am proud of my capabilities; I worked hard to hone these skills.

Since that is very, very improbable, I will give myself the best substitute: an article on each of his rules, dismantling them and seeing where he falls short.

All except pet a cat, of course.

There is nothing to argue against that.

And give them some water — it will help them to face this heat better. After all, we're the ones responsible for it.

Proud mom introducing her little ones — image created by @Author using Artlist

Of course, I know there will be those hating me for this stance, calling me names.

Go ahead. I’ll even make it easy for you.

My ex-partner used to say I am like a sand scorpion, sting full of poison, ready to strike. Made me laugh every time — all I could think of was Gheonoaia, our Romanian enchanted mean bitch of a creature. You can call me that. It’s funny. Or call me a stupid bitch, I’m fine with that too — as long as you remember a stupid bitch is a force to reckon with when protecting her children.

Here’s the thing about labels, though: they only cost me something if I let them. And if calling me a name buys you one extra second of thinking — wait, do I actually have an argument here, or do I just need her to shut up — then we both win. You got your name in. I got you to check your own reasoning before you swung. That’s not me being generous. That’s just good math.

Come with arguments, not just labels, and we’ll actually get somewhere.

And all of us feminists out there who are boy moms should remember that too — no label should convince us our boys are toxic simply for being boys.

Again, I admit, he fails to connect at a deeper level by refusing to acknowledge The Female Pain.

And that's a shame; we could really have had a better way forward if he had done that.

There is a river of tears to be cried and a mountain of stories to silently stay with before healing.

But hitting on the ones that took that first stumbling Indiana Jones step on the invisible bridge between us?

No chance of healing with that attitude, trust me.

Then boys will be boys, and all that shit will stare triumphantly in our faces, one century from now, if this planet still has humans on it by then.

As Daniele would say: abracadabra. The best spells are cast with love and gratitude. I choose mine carefully.

Stick around if you find this useful. There’s more where this came from.

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