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Feminism Against Progress
Modern feminism increasingly benefits only a small class of professional women. There is no reason to sacrifice everyone else's happiness for their sake.
Mary Harrington shows that women's liberation was less the result of moral progress than an effect of the material consequences of the Industrial Revolution. We've now left the industrial era for the digital age, in which technology is liberating us from natural limits and embodied sex differences. This shift may benefit the elites, but it also makes it easier to commodify women's bodies, human intimacy, and female reproductive abilities.
"Feminism" has been captured by well-off white-collar women, who use it to advance their own economic and political interests under the pretense that these are the interests of all women—all the while wielding the term like a club against anyone, male or female, who dissents.
Feminism against Progress is a stark warning against a dystopian future in which poor women become little more than convenient sources of body parts to be harvested and wombs to be rented by the rich. "Progress" no longer benefits the majority of women, and only a feminism that is skeptical of it can truly defend their interests in the twenty-first century.
Mary Harrington shows that women's liberation was less the result of moral progress than an effect of the material consequences of the Industrial Revolution. We've now left the industrial era for the digital age, in which technology is liberating us from natural limits and embodied sex differences. This shift may benefit the elites, but it also makes it easier to commodify women's bodies, human intimacy, and female reproductive abilities.
"Feminism" has been captured by well-off white-collar women, who use it to advance their own economic and political interests under the pretense that these are the interests of all women—all the while wielding the term like a club against anyone, male or female, who dissents.
Feminism against Progress is a stark warning against a dystopian future in which poor women become little more than convenient sources of body parts to be harvested and wombs to be rented by the rich. "Progress" no longer benefits the majority of women, and only a feminism that is skeptical of it can truly defend their interests in the twenty-first century.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 2023
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April 12, 2023
A few months ago, I got in to a debate with a woman about whether men and women were any different. Whether masculinity and femininity were things that existed.
She said, and I quote, "I'm a professor, I need my students to see me as a person, not a woman," implying women aren't people. In order to be seen as respectable and intelligent, this woman believes she has to, in the words of Lady Macbeth, unsex herself. And that is exactly the issue Harrington gets to the heart of here.
Where I Agree
I am a feminist, and have been since my youthful riot grrl phase in my mid-late teens. However, when I use the term now, I use it in a much different way than I used it back then. I no longer believe in about 80% of the beliefs of modern, mainstream feminism, and this book gave me the vernacular to express why. There is an almost unquestionable dogma in mainstream feminism in which any idea that masculinity and femininity may be useful concepts, or that men and women are different in any significant ways, is quickly shut down and shamed. I call it the Cult of Androgyny, Mary calls is Meat Lego Gnosticism (sick metal band name, btw). The older I got, the more I began exploring what it truly meant to be not only a woman, but a woman who wanted children, a woman who was, well, very feminine, more feminine than most of the women I was friends with (and that's okay- not all women have to be super feminine). My explorations of all sides of the 'are men and women different?' argument eventually lead me to the firm conclusion that, well, yes. Definitely. We're more alike than we are different. Not all human characteristics have to be put in either a feminine or masculine box. But there are significant ways in which your sex influences how you move through the world, what your priorities are, what will benefit you, for the vast majority of women. This is what this book is about.
Much of feminism, as Mary explains, from second wave onwards, has been directed by a specific class of women: upper middle class (and higher) women who work in the knowledge sector. Many of these women were childless, or if they weren't, could afford high quality, private childcare. Having well-educated, successful women guiding society isn't inherently a bad thing at all. Whether some self styled 'trads' want to admit it or not, men and women share the same capacity for intelligence. Women aren't academically inferior to men, and we can see that in the fact that women, now that they've been given the opportunity, are now outperforming men in universities and knowledge-sector jobs. This isn't inherently a bad thing, like I said. but it does come with some social and political trade-offs. Because the upper classes set the tone for the rest of society, that's how it's always been. And in these women's world, because being female has had little to no effect on their career success, they assume that, emancipated from patriarchy, men and women must be virtually identical and interchangeable save from what's between our legs (an inconsequential bit of 'meat lego'). But the further down the class hierarchy you get, you see that the implication that men and women are exactly the same begins to harm both men and women. Women are expected to share intimate spaces with male-bodied trans women and nonbinary individuals, endangering their safety. Working class boys and men are expected to share their spaces with girls and women because the idea of men's spaces is now seen as regressive and misogynistic. Teenage girls and women are socially expected in 'sexually liberated' society to practice a gnostic-style form of body denialism and material escapism in order to have sex like men: aka without the risk of pregnancy. Mothers are forced back in to work before they're ready and expected to hand over their toddlers to total strangers for 5 days a week. Most of the mothers I know have told me they wish they could spend more time with their young children- and these are left leaning, feminist women. It may not be politically convenient to the aims of mainstream feminism but when a woman becomes a mother, that becomes the most important thing in her life, her entire purpose for living. It's the same for fathers, I think, but the role of a father and the role of a mother are not interchangeable (even in gay couples I've often observed one who takes more of the nurturing role and one who takes more of the provider role because it simply makes the most sense to divide the labor in order to maximise the effectiveness of each role- a jack of all trades is a master of none. If both partners are coming home from work exhausted and tired there is less getting done in the domestic sphere which is important and necessary work for the wellbeing of a family unit).
A lot has been said, especially by progressives, about the 'naturalism fallacy'. The idea that if something is 'natural', it must be good. Murder is natural, for instance, doesn't mean we should do it. But there is a tendency for progressives and Meat Lego Gnostics to go too far in the opposite direction- where what's natural is actively bad and something to be overcome and conquered. While Harrington's book mostly explores the effect this has on sex, there's a lot to be said about transhumanism in general and how we may be legitimately losing what makes us human. Transhumanists such as Grimes and Elon Musk may view this as a good thing, but it utterly terrifies me. It's bad enough that people who don't own smartphones are beginning to be unable to participate in much of society, if they start telling us we can't enter certain stores or entertainment venues without a microchip in our wrist its all over. I will absolutely move to a bog in the woods and become a feral swamp woman at that point.
'Let Men Be' was a great section. I work as a Girl Guiding volunteer (one of the organisations she mentions) and have frequently expressed to my mother that it is hypocritical that boys no longer have their own space in Scouting. You can't argue for female only spaces while treating male only spaces as regressive and sexist. Men need spaces to socialise with other men. Not having this leads to malignant and genuinely harmful male spaces like the young, angry, bitter men sitting around in podcast studios lamenting that 'bitches' are no longer 'submissive' and that women are property who shouldn't be able to vote. Young men need older male rolemodels. Men need friendship, brotherhood and solidarity away from women. I think about the Mythopoetic Men's Movement and how second wave feminists and the profeminist men's movement relentlessly bashed and smeared these men for DARING to *checks notes* hold men's gatherings in the woods where they discussed healthy masculinity vs toxic masculinity (this wasn't always a liberal feminist buzzword and was actually coined by the MMM, it's a Jungian concept that I think still holds a lot of value when used correctly, we can acknowledge different kinds of masculinity, it's no different than the idea of the abundant Great Mother vs the Devouring Mother), held spiritual male rituals and ceremonies, told stories, etc. I didn't agree with all of Bly's takes when I read his book, but a lot of the backlash he received from second wave feminists was absolutely unwarranted. I wish there was still a man's movement like that around today, as opposed to the bitter and hateful 'redpill' and 'manosphere' movements.
Louise Perry's incredible The Case Against the Sexual Revolution discusses the idea of marriage as both feminist, and beneficial to both men and women. Harrington touches on this too- the idea that marriage is the ultimate act of solidarity between the sexes. She said something I cottoned on to a while ago: Both feminist female separatists and MRA male separatists treat marriage as if it's some sort of scam to oppress the other sex and force them in to submission. Their ideologies are very much aligned, in that regard. "Men hate women, women hate men, so let's all retreat in to separate spheres forever and don't interact past what's absolutely necessary". I don't think that's healthy at all. For many heterosexuals (whom are most of the population) and many bisexuals, the desire to fall in love and start a family with a member of the opposite sex is somewhat integral to their life plan. It's alright to tell women 'they don't need a man', as has often been told to me by well-meaning older feminist women, but it doesn't take in to account the fact that many women want one, and that's a completely healthy, normal desire. A lot has been said about the masculinist 'redpill' community and how they brainwash men in to thinking women are all gold digging, manipulative succubi but as a feminist I was brainwashed for years in to the radical feminist dogma that marriage is bad for women and that most women are unhappy in them. And yet, I look at my friends who are doing the best in life, and most of them have two happy parents who are still in love today. I genuinely believe, upon spending years re-evaluating my ideologies, that marriage is the best option for most people (including gay people- which the tradcons and the 'queer theorists' alike are likely to hate).
I LOVED that Mary draws a distinction between the 1950s housewife archetype, and preindustrial womanhood. Most 'trads' long for the days of Stepfordism and women being entirely confined to the private sphere while men are out in the public sphere, but many of these women were absolutely miserable (as were men, as Robert Bly and the Mythopoetic Men's Movement pointed out). What they're advocating a 'return' to is not traditional enough. The preindustrial model in which men and women both worked largely from the home and both participated in their communities selling wares and such is much more 'feminist' whilst still meaning women are able to stay close to their babies. In this model, we find much more of a balance between gender equity and gender polarity, but I still think there is something Harrington is missing. See below.
Where I Disagree
I do have some issues with Harrington's takes- I think there are some areas where the pendulum begins to swing too far in the other extreme direction and points that are downright antifeminist. However, I don't want to make assumptions about what it is she actually believes in these areas without further clarification. I do not mean to bash Mary with the following, I'm just sharing some thoughts and ideas.
I think one of the reasons most feminists bristle against the idea that your sex will occasionally affect your goals, needs and life path in some way is because under extreme patriarchy, the fact that men and women are different is often used to imply women are inferior to men and that the feminine 'private' sphere should be an ancillary accessory to the masculine 'public' sphere. But it doesn't have to be this way. I think there's a very real case to be made that we could have a matriarchal society in which the division of labor and gender roles were largely the same, but the maternal/feminine role would simply be seen as superior to the paternal/masculine one. I used to want that, I no longer do. I simply want a world where matriarchal and patriarchal values (in their higher, nobler aspects) are balanced evenly. And there's where I may disagree with Harrington, who doesn't seem to address the genuine downsides of patriarchy for women. I admit that, in its higher aspect, there are benefits for women under patriarchy: protection, provision, chivalry, etc. But it doesn't take in to account that relegating the feminine to an entirely private sphere with no material power has its downsides. Why do most of the mainstream religions bar women from spiritual leadership, despite the fact that in the pre-Abrahamic world, women were priestesses, oracles, shamans, matriarchal spiritual leaders? Why does patriarchal philosophy often view nature as something to be dominated and conquered? Why did the Mother Goddess become merely the human mother of an exclusively male god? Harrington (pleasantly surprisingly, seeing as she is quite conservative leaning) acknowledges that climate change is real, but many patriarchal conservatives deny this reality because it poses a threat to the Christian (etc) theological idea that the world is just a dead bit of matter that a transcendent, monotheistic, male God and his hands upon the earth (men) can do with as they please. I am actually all for a patriarchal sphere as long as its balanced out by an equally powerful matriarchal one. This, I believe, is known as cultural feminism or ecofeminism. It was popular in the 70s and 80s and I've slowly seen it being brought back to feminist consciousness in recent years. Although many of these women no longer identify as feminists (due to the Cult of Androgyny in modern feminism) they're still speaking openly about the pitfalls of patriarchy for women and the earth. Allegorical figures in classic art being largely female, and the fact that soldiers in many countries fight for a national sovereignty goddess (whether we acknowledge her as such or not), shows the prevailing idea of feminine Forms across Western culture. Where's the spiritual recognition of this? Why do we not celebrate the idea that women are often the empowerers and initiators of men beyond statements like 'behind every great man there's a great woman'? Where are the young women being initiated in to menstrual mysteries by female spiritual leaders in our communities, and instead under patriarchal religion their blood is shamed as something that makes them spiritually unclean? Why, in monarchies, were queens simply the wives of kings instead of ruling over their own feminine public sphere? To use an Arthurian metaphor, we need to acknowledge the Avlonian Lake, not just the Camelot Round Table, in our society more. Purely patriarchal values simply won't do, and I truly believe it's one of the reason that what Harrington refers to as Meat Lego Gnosticism appeared to begin with. The idea that our bodies are something to be rejected in favour of pure spirit comes from patriarchal religious and philosophical belief. I'd love to sit down with Harrington and discuss these ideas because I think she almost touches on some of them, but doesn't quite go all the way, perhaps not to alienate her Christian, propatriarchy audience. I truly believe that in order to combat the Cult of Androgyny we need to return matriarchal- not just feminine- wisdom to the public consciousness, and this may mean Christianity loosens its grip on the spiritual monopoly it has held on the West for the past 2,000 years. I'm not saying include pagan goddess elements in Christianity. I'm saying right wing conservatives need to stop fearing matriarchal, feminine, goddess spirituality and treating it as satanic or a threat to society. At least its acknowledging the differences between men and women. It's simply celebrating the feminine in a way Christianity and patriarchy never truly have (although there have been echoes of it here and there, in art and storytelling, for instance. Fairy Godmothers, anyone?)
Mary in general romanticises life for women in preindustrial patriarchal societies more than is fair, brushing over the abuse and suppression and second class citizenship women endured in those societies. The Middle Ages weren't great for women just because they could contribute to the household and keep an eye on their children at the same time.
I'm also not sure what Mary is proposing we do about the Meat Lego Gnostic Priestesses. She did say near the end that she's not suggesting these women step down, but there will certainly be people who read her book and say 'Well, university-educated, scholarly women clearly pose a threat to society. We must discourage women from entering these fields'. I think the solution is truly just dialogue with the Meat Lego Priestesses, a message that 'your experiences are not universal', rather than pushing any sort of fear mongering about women in positions of power. I don't think that's what Harrington was trying to do, being a clearly intelligent, well-educated, confident woman herself, but I do think it's something she could do with being more aware of. I actually think the world can greatly benefit from more women in academic spheres, especially if these women are bringing a 'feminine touch', but feminism needs to acknowledge that that's not the only way to feel empowered as a woman.
The section against 'Big Romance' was a little vague. People across the political spectrum for years have been saying that marriage isn't always passionate, steamy sex and fireworks. Honeymoon periods die, and sometimes domestic bliss is just sitting on different couches in the same room, drinking coffees, making small talk. But that doesn't mean that the idea of romance and all-consuming, great love is inherently bad. It's normal and good, I think, for women (and men) to aspire to it. That's the thing about storytelling- it's often aspirational. Little girls read stories about chivalrous princes and knights, and being rescued by dragons. Is it realistic to expect a real life prince charming? Probably not. But in a world where young women are expected to date porn addicts who think paying for dinner is sexist, I don't see a problem with 'Big Romance' in the form of movies, novels etc planting the seed that men should be valorous and charming and make you feel like a princess. And don't get it twisted- in this social contract/dynamic, women also owe men a degree of feminine nurturing, a respite from the cruelty and hardship of his outer masculine world (not 'submission'). Married couples who are feeling the spark go out could attempt to regain it by going ballroom dancing, taking a romantic vacation together or renewing their vows and taking a second honeymoon. I don't think the solution to unrealistic expectations is to never expect passion and romance at all in marriage. If the flame dies out, you can rekindle it. It may be a small, modest flame instead of a roaring fire like it was the year you met, but it's worth kindling, anyway.
It's unfair to say all the wins of feminism are down to changing technology. Women having more access to the workplace, consequence-free casual sex, and less domestic duties, sure. But laws around rape, the vote, domestic abuse, and being seen as fully human were all down to women (and the men who support them) fighting to be respected as people, not workers.
Lastly, I'm kind of on the fence when it comes to the question of married women on the pill. I'd have to do more research in to women's experiences with alternate, natural methods of birth control, because if they aren't effective I don't think the answer for most couples is just 'don't have penetrative sex at all, or have 10 kids'.
Conclusion
Overall, I really enjoyed reading this, and think it's something all feminists should read even if they come away from it rejecting most of Harrington's takes. I'd love to hear more from her and I'm excited to see where she goes from here. While I cannot fully commit to 'reactionary feminism' for a number of reasons, I certainly think its an important branch of feminism that is offering something we've not really seen since first wave maternal feminism or second wave cultural/difference feminism.
She said, and I quote, "I'm a professor, I need my students to see me as a person, not a woman," implying women aren't people. In order to be seen as respectable and intelligent, this woman believes she has to, in the words of Lady Macbeth, unsex herself. And that is exactly the issue Harrington gets to the heart of here.
Where I Agree
I am a feminist, and have been since my youthful riot grrl phase in my mid-late teens. However, when I use the term now, I use it in a much different way than I used it back then. I no longer believe in about 80% of the beliefs of modern, mainstream feminism, and this book gave me the vernacular to express why. There is an almost unquestionable dogma in mainstream feminism in which any idea that masculinity and femininity may be useful concepts, or that men and women are different in any significant ways, is quickly shut down and shamed. I call it the Cult of Androgyny, Mary calls is Meat Lego Gnosticism (sick metal band name, btw). The older I got, the more I began exploring what it truly meant to be not only a woman, but a woman who wanted children, a woman who was, well, very feminine, more feminine than most of the women I was friends with (and that's okay- not all women have to be super feminine). My explorations of all sides of the 'are men and women different?' argument eventually lead me to the firm conclusion that, well, yes. Definitely. We're more alike than we are different. Not all human characteristics have to be put in either a feminine or masculine box. But there are significant ways in which your sex influences how you move through the world, what your priorities are, what will benefit you, for the vast majority of women. This is what this book is about.
Much of feminism, as Mary explains, from second wave onwards, has been directed by a specific class of women: upper middle class (and higher) women who work in the knowledge sector. Many of these women were childless, or if they weren't, could afford high quality, private childcare. Having well-educated, successful women guiding society isn't inherently a bad thing at all. Whether some self styled 'trads' want to admit it or not, men and women share the same capacity for intelligence. Women aren't academically inferior to men, and we can see that in the fact that women, now that they've been given the opportunity, are now outperforming men in universities and knowledge-sector jobs. This isn't inherently a bad thing, like I said. but it does come with some social and political trade-offs. Because the upper classes set the tone for the rest of society, that's how it's always been. And in these women's world, because being female has had little to no effect on their career success, they assume that, emancipated from patriarchy, men and women must be virtually identical and interchangeable save from what's between our legs (an inconsequential bit of 'meat lego'). But the further down the class hierarchy you get, you see that the implication that men and women are exactly the same begins to harm both men and women. Women are expected to share intimate spaces with male-bodied trans women and nonbinary individuals, endangering their safety. Working class boys and men are expected to share their spaces with girls and women because the idea of men's spaces is now seen as regressive and misogynistic. Teenage girls and women are socially expected in 'sexually liberated' society to practice a gnostic-style form of body denialism and material escapism in order to have sex like men: aka without the risk of pregnancy. Mothers are forced back in to work before they're ready and expected to hand over their toddlers to total strangers for 5 days a week. Most of the mothers I know have told me they wish they could spend more time with their young children- and these are left leaning, feminist women. It may not be politically convenient to the aims of mainstream feminism but when a woman becomes a mother, that becomes the most important thing in her life, her entire purpose for living. It's the same for fathers, I think, but the role of a father and the role of a mother are not interchangeable (even in gay couples I've often observed one who takes more of the nurturing role and one who takes more of the provider role because it simply makes the most sense to divide the labor in order to maximise the effectiveness of each role- a jack of all trades is a master of none. If both partners are coming home from work exhausted and tired there is less getting done in the domestic sphere which is important and necessary work for the wellbeing of a family unit).
A lot has been said, especially by progressives, about the 'naturalism fallacy'. The idea that if something is 'natural', it must be good. Murder is natural, for instance, doesn't mean we should do it. But there is a tendency for progressives and Meat Lego Gnostics to go too far in the opposite direction- where what's natural is actively bad and something to be overcome and conquered. While Harrington's book mostly explores the effect this has on sex, there's a lot to be said about transhumanism in general and how we may be legitimately losing what makes us human. Transhumanists such as Grimes and Elon Musk may view this as a good thing, but it utterly terrifies me. It's bad enough that people who don't own smartphones are beginning to be unable to participate in much of society, if they start telling us we can't enter certain stores or entertainment venues without a microchip in our wrist its all over. I will absolutely move to a bog in the woods and become a feral swamp woman at that point.
'Let Men Be' was a great section. I work as a Girl Guiding volunteer (one of the organisations she mentions) and have frequently expressed to my mother that it is hypocritical that boys no longer have their own space in Scouting. You can't argue for female only spaces while treating male only spaces as regressive and sexist. Men need spaces to socialise with other men. Not having this leads to malignant and genuinely harmful male spaces like the young, angry, bitter men sitting around in podcast studios lamenting that 'bitches' are no longer 'submissive' and that women are property who shouldn't be able to vote. Young men need older male rolemodels. Men need friendship, brotherhood and solidarity away from women. I think about the Mythopoetic Men's Movement and how second wave feminists and the profeminist men's movement relentlessly bashed and smeared these men for DARING to *checks notes* hold men's gatherings in the woods where they discussed healthy masculinity vs toxic masculinity (this wasn't always a liberal feminist buzzword and was actually coined by the MMM, it's a Jungian concept that I think still holds a lot of value when used correctly, we can acknowledge different kinds of masculinity, it's no different than the idea of the abundant Great Mother vs the Devouring Mother), held spiritual male rituals and ceremonies, told stories, etc. I didn't agree with all of Bly's takes when I read his book, but a lot of the backlash he received from second wave feminists was absolutely unwarranted. I wish there was still a man's movement like that around today, as opposed to the bitter and hateful 'redpill' and 'manosphere' movements.
Louise Perry's incredible The Case Against the Sexual Revolution discusses the idea of marriage as both feminist, and beneficial to both men and women. Harrington touches on this too- the idea that marriage is the ultimate act of solidarity between the sexes. She said something I cottoned on to a while ago: Both feminist female separatists and MRA male separatists treat marriage as if it's some sort of scam to oppress the other sex and force them in to submission. Their ideologies are very much aligned, in that regard. "Men hate women, women hate men, so let's all retreat in to separate spheres forever and don't interact past what's absolutely necessary". I don't think that's healthy at all. For many heterosexuals (whom are most of the population) and many bisexuals, the desire to fall in love and start a family with a member of the opposite sex is somewhat integral to their life plan. It's alright to tell women 'they don't need a man', as has often been told to me by well-meaning older feminist women, but it doesn't take in to account the fact that many women want one, and that's a completely healthy, normal desire. A lot has been said about the masculinist 'redpill' community and how they brainwash men in to thinking women are all gold digging, manipulative succubi but as a feminist I was brainwashed for years in to the radical feminist dogma that marriage is bad for women and that most women are unhappy in them. And yet, I look at my friends who are doing the best in life, and most of them have two happy parents who are still in love today. I genuinely believe, upon spending years re-evaluating my ideologies, that marriage is the best option for most people (including gay people- which the tradcons and the 'queer theorists' alike are likely to hate).
I LOVED that Mary draws a distinction between the 1950s housewife archetype, and preindustrial womanhood. Most 'trads' long for the days of Stepfordism and women being entirely confined to the private sphere while men are out in the public sphere, but many of these women were absolutely miserable (as were men, as Robert Bly and the Mythopoetic Men's Movement pointed out). What they're advocating a 'return' to is not traditional enough. The preindustrial model in which men and women both worked largely from the home and both participated in their communities selling wares and such is much more 'feminist' whilst still meaning women are able to stay close to their babies. In this model, we find much more of a balance between gender equity and gender polarity, but I still think there is something Harrington is missing. See below.
Where I Disagree
I do have some issues with Harrington's takes- I think there are some areas where the pendulum begins to swing too far in the other extreme direction and points that are downright antifeminist. However, I don't want to make assumptions about what it is she actually believes in these areas without further clarification. I do not mean to bash Mary with the following, I'm just sharing some thoughts and ideas.
I think one of the reasons most feminists bristle against the idea that your sex will occasionally affect your goals, needs and life path in some way is because under extreme patriarchy, the fact that men and women are different is often used to imply women are inferior to men and that the feminine 'private' sphere should be an ancillary accessory to the masculine 'public' sphere. But it doesn't have to be this way. I think there's a very real case to be made that we could have a matriarchal society in which the division of labor and gender roles were largely the same, but the maternal/feminine role would simply be seen as superior to the paternal/masculine one. I used to want that, I no longer do. I simply want a world where matriarchal and patriarchal values (in their higher, nobler aspects) are balanced evenly. And there's where I may disagree with Harrington, who doesn't seem to address the genuine downsides of patriarchy for women. I admit that, in its higher aspect, there are benefits for women under patriarchy: protection, provision, chivalry, etc. But it doesn't take in to account that relegating the feminine to an entirely private sphere with no material power has its downsides. Why do most of the mainstream religions bar women from spiritual leadership, despite the fact that in the pre-Abrahamic world, women were priestesses, oracles, shamans, matriarchal spiritual leaders? Why does patriarchal philosophy often view nature as something to be dominated and conquered? Why did the Mother Goddess become merely the human mother of an exclusively male god? Harrington (pleasantly surprisingly, seeing as she is quite conservative leaning) acknowledges that climate change is real, but many patriarchal conservatives deny this reality because it poses a threat to the Christian (etc) theological idea that the world is just a dead bit of matter that a transcendent, monotheistic, male God and his hands upon the earth (men) can do with as they please. I am actually all for a patriarchal sphere as long as its balanced out by an equally powerful matriarchal one. This, I believe, is known as cultural feminism or ecofeminism. It was popular in the 70s and 80s and I've slowly seen it being brought back to feminist consciousness in recent years. Although many of these women no longer identify as feminists (due to the Cult of Androgyny in modern feminism) they're still speaking openly about the pitfalls of patriarchy for women and the earth. Allegorical figures in classic art being largely female, and the fact that soldiers in many countries fight for a national sovereignty goddess (whether we acknowledge her as such or not), shows the prevailing idea of feminine Forms across Western culture. Where's the spiritual recognition of this? Why do we not celebrate the idea that women are often the empowerers and initiators of men beyond statements like 'behind every great man there's a great woman'? Where are the young women being initiated in to menstrual mysteries by female spiritual leaders in our communities, and instead under patriarchal religion their blood is shamed as something that makes them spiritually unclean? Why, in monarchies, were queens simply the wives of kings instead of ruling over their own feminine public sphere? To use an Arthurian metaphor, we need to acknowledge the Avlonian Lake, not just the Camelot Round Table, in our society more. Purely patriarchal values simply won't do, and I truly believe it's one of the reason that what Harrington refers to as Meat Lego Gnosticism appeared to begin with. The idea that our bodies are something to be rejected in favour of pure spirit comes from patriarchal religious and philosophical belief. I'd love to sit down with Harrington and discuss these ideas because I think she almost touches on some of them, but doesn't quite go all the way, perhaps not to alienate her Christian, propatriarchy audience. I truly believe that in order to combat the Cult of Androgyny we need to return matriarchal- not just feminine- wisdom to the public consciousness, and this may mean Christianity loosens its grip on the spiritual monopoly it has held on the West for the past 2,000 years. I'm not saying include pagan goddess elements in Christianity. I'm saying right wing conservatives need to stop fearing matriarchal, feminine, goddess spirituality and treating it as satanic or a threat to society. At least its acknowledging the differences between men and women. It's simply celebrating the feminine in a way Christianity and patriarchy never truly have (although there have been echoes of it here and there, in art and storytelling, for instance. Fairy Godmothers, anyone?)
Mary in general romanticises life for women in preindustrial patriarchal societies more than is fair, brushing over the abuse and suppression and second class citizenship women endured in those societies. The Middle Ages weren't great for women just because they could contribute to the household and keep an eye on their children at the same time.
I'm also not sure what Mary is proposing we do about the Meat Lego Gnostic Priestesses. She did say near the end that she's not suggesting these women step down, but there will certainly be people who read her book and say 'Well, university-educated, scholarly women clearly pose a threat to society. We must discourage women from entering these fields'. I think the solution is truly just dialogue with the Meat Lego Priestesses, a message that 'your experiences are not universal', rather than pushing any sort of fear mongering about women in positions of power. I don't think that's what Harrington was trying to do, being a clearly intelligent, well-educated, confident woman herself, but I do think it's something she could do with being more aware of. I actually think the world can greatly benefit from more women in academic spheres, especially if these women are bringing a 'feminine touch', but feminism needs to acknowledge that that's not the only way to feel empowered as a woman.
The section against 'Big Romance' was a little vague. People across the political spectrum for years have been saying that marriage isn't always passionate, steamy sex and fireworks. Honeymoon periods die, and sometimes domestic bliss is just sitting on different couches in the same room, drinking coffees, making small talk. But that doesn't mean that the idea of romance and all-consuming, great love is inherently bad. It's normal and good, I think, for women (and men) to aspire to it. That's the thing about storytelling- it's often aspirational. Little girls read stories about chivalrous princes and knights, and being rescued by dragons. Is it realistic to expect a real life prince charming? Probably not. But in a world where young women are expected to date porn addicts who think paying for dinner is sexist, I don't see a problem with 'Big Romance' in the form of movies, novels etc planting the seed that men should be valorous and charming and make you feel like a princess. And don't get it twisted- in this social contract/dynamic, women also owe men a degree of feminine nurturing, a respite from the cruelty and hardship of his outer masculine world (not 'submission'). Married couples who are feeling the spark go out could attempt to regain it by going ballroom dancing, taking a romantic vacation together or renewing their vows and taking a second honeymoon. I don't think the solution to unrealistic expectations is to never expect passion and romance at all in marriage. If the flame dies out, you can rekindle it. It may be a small, modest flame instead of a roaring fire like it was the year you met, but it's worth kindling, anyway.
It's unfair to say all the wins of feminism are down to changing technology. Women having more access to the workplace, consequence-free casual sex, and less domestic duties, sure. But laws around rape, the vote, domestic abuse, and being seen as fully human were all down to women (and the men who support them) fighting to be respected as people, not workers.
Lastly, I'm kind of on the fence when it comes to the question of married women on the pill. I'd have to do more research in to women's experiences with alternate, natural methods of birth control, because if they aren't effective I don't think the answer for most couples is just 'don't have penetrative sex at all, or have 10 kids'.
Conclusion
Overall, I really enjoyed reading this, and think it's something all feminists should read even if they come away from it rejecting most of Harrington's takes. I'd love to hear more from her and I'm excited to see where she goes from here. While I cannot fully commit to 'reactionary feminism' for a number of reasons, I certainly think its an important branch of feminism that is offering something we've not really seen since first wave maternal feminism or second wave cultural/difference feminism.
May 28, 2023
This book was a real mixed bag for me. There are lots of parts that I liked and agreed with, for example, the (one assumes) unintended side-effects of attempting to desex the human body (primarily the female one, it must be said); the truly disgusting goings-on of the surrogacy industry; the damage to us all of the hellscape we call the current dating scene (although, Louise Perry’s book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution was much, much better at handling this subject, imo); even how hormonal birth control has hurt women. But there were also chunks that left me trying to figure out how her suggested changes might improve things for women or for society as a whole.
I completely agree with Harrington that men’s clubs are not inherently bad and men should have places to socialise together. I think she was a little misleadingly myopic in how she suggests there aren’t places for men to come together. There are many male dominated guilds and clubs, church/religious groups, and male sports teams. Men do actually have to look, and if there aren’t any, try starting them. It’s easier than ever, and — somehow — women manage. I don’t see how men struggling to make friends is a woman’s responsibility. And actually, she seemed keen to absolve men of responsibility for improving their lives or maintaining clubs.
The Shropshire men’s club (unfairly) denied lottery funding could have fundraised themselves. If this club is so valuable to these men that they don’t want to see it go mixed-sex, why not fundraise the required money? 300 men voted, if they each donated £100, their fundraising goal would be more than half met before they started asking other people. Women’s groups managed without lotto funding or government support, they operated on shoe-string budgets, often out of the homes of members, even when under fire from incredibly dangerous and violent men. So why can’t men do a bit of fundraising?
And the example of the agricultural discussion club was so weak. Mostly because the association wasn’t a ‘men’s club’ and women can be farmers too. In fact, the number of female farmers is growing in the UK, and even male farmers often have wives who are involved, in some capacity, in farm work. Why should they be excluded? The club wasn’t a men’s club, nor was it a mens’ mental health club, and they could have still held specific talks and sessions just for men so they could have these conversations that they apparently can’t hold in front of women. Or are we to believe all these farmers talk about is suicide and depression, never anything else? (And if they do, call it what it is: a mental health group, not an agricultural discussion association).
I found the section in which she discussed the long-term side-effects of industrial childcare to be interesting. Her suggestion that it creates insecure attachments intrigued me and I would love to see proper epidemiological studies on this. What she’s saying tracks with the highly-sensitive young GenX cohort, Millennials and Gen Z’s we’re seeing, but, if she is correct, then she might as well just turn around and blame working mother’s openly. Them going back to work requires formalised childcare, which then screws up their kids’ attachment styles. Mum’s to blame, yet again. I guess the solution would be forcing women back into the home… you know, for the sake of the kids.
Her rose-tinted lip-service to pre-industrial life is charming but incredibly myopic. I don’t disagree that we, as a species, are more suited to it, but barring the damn apocalypse, we’re just not heading back there. It seems a waste of time to harp on about how things would just be better “if only…” when those things aren’t happening. No government, global economic system or industry is going to voluntarily put us back there, and most people can’t afford to opt-out and do it themselves. Not to mention, with our population being what it is, we just don’t have the room for everyone to do so. I think it’s also worth pointing out that ore-industrial life was not some kind of paradise or utopia. Pre-industrial men still beat their wives, raped their wives, abused their wives. They still abandoned families and harmed their children, cheated, acted irresponsibly. Of course there were wonderful men who adored their wives before the industrial revolution, but there are men who currently adore their wives and we all have the gift of washing machines and indoor plumbing and equal access to education (in many parts of the world, it must be said).
I liked the little vignettes of the two couples who are leading different lives, but they are so (painfully) unrealistic for almost all of us. How many artisanal carpenters can we support if we’re all aiming to be similar? How many of us can afford to bugger off to Uruguay and buy land and teach part time? I would love to have a small-holding and live a rather more bucolic ideal, but the only people who can afford this are those with serious cash in their pockets or live in places where land is, forgive the pun, dirt cheap (and who already have trade skills we rarely get taught).
At the end, she talks about how well-educated women being excluded from the kind of clubs where career-networking occurs — the old boy’s network is alive and well — and how, if women want female only spaces like rape shelters and bathrooms, it’s fair to let men have male only clubs.
But fair for whom? I’m not one of these high-powered women Harrington seems deeply uncomfortable with (because she failed to truly become one herself, perhaps?) and I don’t see how I ever would become one, but why should they lose out on the off chance that it, somehow, benefits women more like me? The wealthy male elite don’t seem to give a damn about working class men (unless they can weaponise it against women, if anything the wealthy do little but look down on the working class), why it is, yet again, the job of women to sacrifice for people who don’t return the favour?
In a way, it felt a lot like she was saying ‘if you uppity lot don’t want men in women’s prisons or sports, then you can’t argue with men excluding you from their clubs. It’s fAiR’. And I disagree. One is about safety, the other is about excluding women from career opportunities. Men should be welcome to male-only sports clubs and mental health groups and shelters, but why on earth does Harrington include clubs like Garrick? Are the men in those hallowed halls discussing (and preventing) male suicides, taking in drug-addicted homeless men, counselling male rape victims? Something tells me that is not the topic of conversation, and even if it were, why is that a fair trade-off? An improvement for men, a potentially massive loss for women, and women are supposed to suck it up? Harrington states men losing out and women gaining isn’t fair, but doesn’t explain why women getting the short-straw is.
I also found the chapter about Meat Lego Gnosticism’s priestesses to be frustrating beyond belief. Not because I disagree that some of the movement’s main devotees are from this section of society, but does Harrington really think that, if this ideology challenged the status of those in power it would have become so influential. Where is it really coming from? Why is it being supported? She just doesn’t dig further, quite happy to blame women in middle-management for society’s ills. Why does it have society in a chokehold? It took decades of campaigning to outlaw marital rape, but mere years to entrench transgender ideology, why? She doesn’t answer.
And the suggestions for how we might handle this? Oh, there aren’t any. But I’m sure the reader can come to the obvious conclusion of too many women in positions of middling power — fewer women in these positions, of course! After all, it seems so vexing to her that women outperform men in middle management jobs. But why? Maybe women are just better at men at these things… she seems to have no issue with the opposite.
I’m glad that Mary Harrington has, presumably since and because of having a baby, discovered that she is, in fact, female not an unsexed human body, but this isn’t exactly a brand new feminist position. She’s right that mothers as a group aren’t treated well by society, but nor are childfree women. I think her heavy focus on women as mothers is unhelpful. More women, now they actually have the choice, are opting out of having children altogether, and while some of this might not truly be their choice, for many women, it is. Screwing all women over to support mothers is a sure-fire way to get one hell of a backlash. She moans about how how “only” 27% of women stay home with their kids and how desperately new mothers need support networks. Nearly a third of mothers isn’t a tiny segment, maybe she could have found a few of the (many) mother/baby groups that are literally everywhere. Does she expect them to be dropped into her lap, ready made? How much of an effort did she make to form these intimate support networks? Because if she didn’t strive for it and didn’t attempt to build them, is she not also part of the problem?
And frankly, the chapter abut abolishing Big Romance (and I can kind of get what she’s saying) makes perpetual singledom or a stiff prison sentence sound more appealing. I say this as someone who thinks a marriage based on mutual values and goals, such as raising a family, rather than highly-fleeting ‘sparks’ to be the ideal. But men in arranged marriages between two highly compatible people based on shared goals are abusive just as often as ones of passion are. Why are women any better off in emotionally-lacking marriages?
The reasons offered by the woman who divorced the husband despite still loving him to help with ‘self-actualisation” seemed like gag-worthy pretentious navel-gazing (and dare I say it, very liberal upper-middleclass nonsense), but for the author to then condemn companionate marriage… I mean, when the kids move out, what’s left in these other marriages? Goal completed, what now? She also makes a lot out of the third of divorcees who regret divorce, but that means over 65% DON’T regret it.
The idea of being stuck in a lousy marriage is enough to make me not want one at all. I think many feel the same. Marriage is no longer a social ‘requirement’, and if you don’t want kids (as more and more people don’t) why take the risk? And then there’s the fact childfree unmarried women live the longest and report the highest happiness levels. So much for marriage and kids being the be all and end all. I believe marriage to the the bedrock and cornerstone of stable societies, but lord, she makes them unappealing.
And finally, her dislike for birth control and desire for us to reclaim the “risk” of sex… I get what’s being said. Divorcing sex from procreation has definitely changed the sexual landscape, and not necessarily for the better, but deliberately reclaiming risk? Why does there need to be risk for sex to be good? She claims to be against BDSM, but her unquestioning acceptance of the “need” for some kind of risk or danger for sex to be good suggests some concerning underlying views.
Her desire to reclaim the risk of pregnancy (as if controlling her own fertility isn’t one of, if not the most important ways to liberate women) is easy for a woman who’s no longer able to have more kids to say, isn’t it? Harrington laments how she’d have liked another kid but left it all too late (duped into believing she could ‘have it all’, apparently), and I really sympathise, but she certainly wasn’t embracing the risk of contraception-free sex when she was younger. No, she didn’t like much of the sex she had, but would choosing not to use the Pill have made her strings-free sexual dalliances better? Would it actually have curtailed them? Would she have felt anymore empowered to say no? (And isn’t it awful that women need to choose to to use contraception as a way to avoid unwanted sex? Louise Perry discusses this in her book, and perhaps because I read this one straight after, I found the treatment in this book of commitment-free sex to be really lack-lustre). Again, it’s easy for her to stand high and mighty and point fingers now she’s married, stable, and has a kid, but she wasn’t practicing this when she was younger. Do as a I say, not as I did?
Let’s say we follow her ideal and marry young — before we’re 25, say. There’s then at least 15 years of fertility between marriage and not having to be concerned about becoming pregnant. More, really, because many women get pregnant in their early forties. Even if you are the world’s most reliable condom and NFP user, that’s the potential for a lot of kids. Plus, I guess using condoms just reduces that all-important risk anyway and should be avoided. Best hope you and hubby are okay with long periods of no sex, and you want the job of obsessively charting your fertility. Assuming you’re listened to when you refuse sex, of course.
Man, these marriages are looking more and more desirable, aren’t they?
I’m glad I read this book as there were definitely bits I agreed with and other sections where I appreciated the perspective offered, but so much had me trying to figure out how on earth women would be better off, or how her perspective could really be considered ‘feminist’, which I found odd, as the overarching idea Harrington is supporting is definitely my kind of thing.
I completely agree with Harrington that men’s clubs are not inherently bad and men should have places to socialise together. I think she was a little misleadingly myopic in how she suggests there aren’t places for men to come together. There are many male dominated guilds and clubs, church/religious groups, and male sports teams. Men do actually have to look, and if there aren’t any, try starting them. It’s easier than ever, and — somehow — women manage. I don’t see how men struggling to make friends is a woman’s responsibility. And actually, she seemed keen to absolve men of responsibility for improving their lives or maintaining clubs.
The Shropshire men’s club (unfairly) denied lottery funding could have fundraised themselves. If this club is so valuable to these men that they don’t want to see it go mixed-sex, why not fundraise the required money? 300 men voted, if they each donated £100, their fundraising goal would be more than half met before they started asking other people. Women’s groups managed without lotto funding or government support, they operated on shoe-string budgets, often out of the homes of members, even when under fire from incredibly dangerous and violent men. So why can’t men do a bit of fundraising?
And the example of the agricultural discussion club was so weak. Mostly because the association wasn’t a ‘men’s club’ and women can be farmers too. In fact, the number of female farmers is growing in the UK, and even male farmers often have wives who are involved, in some capacity, in farm work. Why should they be excluded? The club wasn’t a men’s club, nor was it a mens’ mental health club, and they could have still held specific talks and sessions just for men so they could have these conversations that they apparently can’t hold in front of women. Or are we to believe all these farmers talk about is suicide and depression, never anything else? (And if they do, call it what it is: a mental health group, not an agricultural discussion association).
I found the section in which she discussed the long-term side-effects of industrial childcare to be interesting. Her suggestion that it creates insecure attachments intrigued me and I would love to see proper epidemiological studies on this. What she’s saying tracks with the highly-sensitive young GenX cohort, Millennials and Gen Z’s we’re seeing, but, if she is correct, then she might as well just turn around and blame working mother’s openly. Them going back to work requires formalised childcare, which then screws up their kids’ attachment styles. Mum’s to blame, yet again. I guess the solution would be forcing women back into the home… you know, for the sake of the kids.
Her rose-tinted lip-service to pre-industrial life is charming but incredibly myopic. I don’t disagree that we, as a species, are more suited to it, but barring the damn apocalypse, we’re just not heading back there. It seems a waste of time to harp on about how things would just be better “if only…” when those things aren’t happening. No government, global economic system or industry is going to voluntarily put us back there, and most people can’t afford to opt-out and do it themselves. Not to mention, with our population being what it is, we just don’t have the room for everyone to do so. I think it’s also worth pointing out that ore-industrial life was not some kind of paradise or utopia. Pre-industrial men still beat their wives, raped their wives, abused their wives. They still abandoned families and harmed their children, cheated, acted irresponsibly. Of course there were wonderful men who adored their wives before the industrial revolution, but there are men who currently adore their wives and we all have the gift of washing machines and indoor plumbing and equal access to education (in many parts of the world, it must be said).
I liked the little vignettes of the two couples who are leading different lives, but they are so (painfully) unrealistic for almost all of us. How many artisanal carpenters can we support if we’re all aiming to be similar? How many of us can afford to bugger off to Uruguay and buy land and teach part time? I would love to have a small-holding and live a rather more bucolic ideal, but the only people who can afford this are those with serious cash in their pockets or live in places where land is, forgive the pun, dirt cheap (and who already have trade skills we rarely get taught).
At the end, she talks about how well-educated women being excluded from the kind of clubs where career-networking occurs — the old boy’s network is alive and well — and how, if women want female only spaces like rape shelters and bathrooms, it’s fair to let men have male only clubs.
But fair for whom? I’m not one of these high-powered women Harrington seems deeply uncomfortable with (because she failed to truly become one herself, perhaps?) and I don’t see how I ever would become one, but why should they lose out on the off chance that it, somehow, benefits women more like me? The wealthy male elite don’t seem to give a damn about working class men (unless they can weaponise it against women, if anything the wealthy do little but look down on the working class), why it is, yet again, the job of women to sacrifice for people who don’t return the favour?
In a way, it felt a lot like she was saying ‘if you uppity lot don’t want men in women’s prisons or sports, then you can’t argue with men excluding you from their clubs. It’s fAiR’. And I disagree. One is about safety, the other is about excluding women from career opportunities. Men should be welcome to male-only sports clubs and mental health groups and shelters, but why on earth does Harrington include clubs like Garrick? Are the men in those hallowed halls discussing (and preventing) male suicides, taking in drug-addicted homeless men, counselling male rape victims? Something tells me that is not the topic of conversation, and even if it were, why is that a fair trade-off? An improvement for men, a potentially massive loss for women, and women are supposed to suck it up? Harrington states men losing out and women gaining isn’t fair, but doesn’t explain why women getting the short-straw is.
I also found the chapter about Meat Lego Gnosticism’s priestesses to be frustrating beyond belief. Not because I disagree that some of the movement’s main devotees are from this section of society, but does Harrington really think that, if this ideology challenged the status of those in power it would have become so influential. Where is it really coming from? Why is it being supported? She just doesn’t dig further, quite happy to blame women in middle-management for society’s ills. Why does it have society in a chokehold? It took decades of campaigning to outlaw marital rape, but mere years to entrench transgender ideology, why? She doesn’t answer.
And the suggestions for how we might handle this? Oh, there aren’t any. But I’m sure the reader can come to the obvious conclusion of too many women in positions of middling power — fewer women in these positions, of course! After all, it seems so vexing to her that women outperform men in middle management jobs. But why? Maybe women are just better at men at these things… she seems to have no issue with the opposite.
I’m glad that Mary Harrington has, presumably since and because of having a baby, discovered that she is, in fact, female not an unsexed human body, but this isn’t exactly a brand new feminist position. She’s right that mothers as a group aren’t treated well by society, but nor are childfree women. I think her heavy focus on women as mothers is unhelpful. More women, now they actually have the choice, are opting out of having children altogether, and while some of this might not truly be their choice, for many women, it is. Screwing all women over to support mothers is a sure-fire way to get one hell of a backlash. She moans about how how “only” 27% of women stay home with their kids and how desperately new mothers need support networks. Nearly a third of mothers isn’t a tiny segment, maybe she could have found a few of the (many) mother/baby groups that are literally everywhere. Does she expect them to be dropped into her lap, ready made? How much of an effort did she make to form these intimate support networks? Because if she didn’t strive for it and didn’t attempt to build them, is she not also part of the problem?
And frankly, the chapter abut abolishing Big Romance (and I can kind of get what she’s saying) makes perpetual singledom or a stiff prison sentence sound more appealing. I say this as someone who thinks a marriage based on mutual values and goals, such as raising a family, rather than highly-fleeting ‘sparks’ to be the ideal. But men in arranged marriages between two highly compatible people based on shared goals are abusive just as often as ones of passion are. Why are women any better off in emotionally-lacking marriages?
The reasons offered by the woman who divorced the husband despite still loving him to help with ‘self-actualisation” seemed like gag-worthy pretentious navel-gazing (and dare I say it, very liberal upper-middleclass nonsense), but for the author to then condemn companionate marriage… I mean, when the kids move out, what’s left in these other marriages? Goal completed, what now? She also makes a lot out of the third of divorcees who regret divorce, but that means over 65% DON’T regret it.
The idea of being stuck in a lousy marriage is enough to make me not want one at all. I think many feel the same. Marriage is no longer a social ‘requirement’, and if you don’t want kids (as more and more people don’t) why take the risk? And then there’s the fact childfree unmarried women live the longest and report the highest happiness levels. So much for marriage and kids being the be all and end all. I believe marriage to the the bedrock and cornerstone of stable societies, but lord, she makes them unappealing.
And finally, her dislike for birth control and desire for us to reclaim the “risk” of sex… I get what’s being said. Divorcing sex from procreation has definitely changed the sexual landscape, and not necessarily for the better, but deliberately reclaiming risk? Why does there need to be risk for sex to be good? She claims to be against BDSM, but her unquestioning acceptance of the “need” for some kind of risk or danger for sex to be good suggests some concerning underlying views.
Her desire to reclaim the risk of pregnancy (as if controlling her own fertility isn’t one of, if not the most important ways to liberate women) is easy for a woman who’s no longer able to have more kids to say, isn’t it? Harrington laments how she’d have liked another kid but left it all too late (duped into believing she could ‘have it all’, apparently), and I really sympathise, but she certainly wasn’t embracing the risk of contraception-free sex when she was younger. No, she didn’t like much of the sex she had, but would choosing not to use the Pill have made her strings-free sexual dalliances better? Would it actually have curtailed them? Would she have felt anymore empowered to say no? (And isn’t it awful that women need to choose to to use contraception as a way to avoid unwanted sex? Louise Perry discusses this in her book, and perhaps because I read this one straight after, I found the treatment in this book of commitment-free sex to be really lack-lustre). Again, it’s easy for her to stand high and mighty and point fingers now she’s married, stable, and has a kid, but she wasn’t practicing this when she was younger. Do as a I say, not as I did?
Let’s say we follow her ideal and marry young — before we’re 25, say. There’s then at least 15 years of fertility between marriage and not having to be concerned about becoming pregnant. More, really, because many women get pregnant in their early forties. Even if you are the world’s most reliable condom and NFP user, that’s the potential for a lot of kids. Plus, I guess using condoms just reduces that all-important risk anyway and should be avoided. Best hope you and hubby are okay with long periods of no sex, and you want the job of obsessively charting your fertility. Assuming you’re listened to when you refuse sex, of course.
Man, these marriages are looking more and more desirable, aren’t they?
I’m glad I read this book as there were definitely bits I agreed with and other sections where I appreciated the perspective offered, but so much had me trying to figure out how on earth women would be better off, or how her perspective could really be considered ‘feminist’, which I found odd, as the overarching idea Harrington is supporting is definitely my kind of thing.
March 26, 2023
Oh thrilling! I find Mary's analysis of feminism convincing; she recognises it not as the march of moral progress as it is often framed, but more as the varied responses to massive technological and economic changes (the Industrial Revolution and the widespread use of the pill being most significant). She also dismisses 'pop' feminism's scapegoating of the patriarchy as far too simplistic a metanarrative to explain women's historic and continuing woes.
Instead, she sees that things are often more complicated. Today though, she argues that the dominant strain of feminism's quest to emancipate women from their bodily limits is doing far more harm than good, and only serves the interests of an increasingly small group of wealthy elites.
It was so refreshing to read someone argue from the starting point that 'we are our bodies', and to suggest that unlimited freedom may not, in fact, be a great thing. She makes the case for relationships of interdependence with great heart and feeling; in her words we should treat marriage as a covenant, not a contract, and she longs for a world where every child is wanted.
This was though, at many times, a grim and terrifying read, and I question whether even a feminism against progress as she articulates it can bring into being a world without unwanted children. The problems at play here are so great; they need much bigger solutions. This was written with passion and an invigorating common sense, but that is not enough to deal with the heart problem at the base of our desire for untrammelled freedom.
Instead, she sees that things are often more complicated. Today though, she argues that the dominant strain of feminism's quest to emancipate women from their bodily limits is doing far more harm than good, and only serves the interests of an increasingly small group of wealthy elites.
It was so refreshing to read someone argue from the starting point that 'we are our bodies', and to suggest that unlimited freedom may not, in fact, be a great thing. She makes the case for relationships of interdependence with great heart and feeling; in her words we should treat marriage as a covenant, not a contract, and she longs for a world where every child is wanted.
This was though, at many times, a grim and terrifying read, and I question whether even a feminism against progress as she articulates it can bring into being a world without unwanted children. The problems at play here are so great; they need much bigger solutions. This was written with passion and an invigorating common sense, but that is not enough to deal with the heart problem at the base of our desire for untrammelled freedom.
March 23, 2023
I definitely do not agree with all of Harrington's arguments, but this book is undeniably well written and superbly reasoned. Her arguments are so contrary to liberal feminist ideology (not that I'm a libfem- far from it, in fact but it is unfortunately the dominant form of feminism) that it's going to take some time for me to fully digest and consider her POV. Brilliant book, one that challenges groupthink and forces you to consider alternatives.
June 8, 2023
When one surveys the landscape of contemporary gender discourse, the most striking feature is the near-universal absence of any spirit of solidarity between the sexes. While the prevailing liberal feminism seeks to maximize women’s autonomy by eliminating the social, cultural, and, increasingly, corporeal entanglements of female embodiment and relationality—while in practice either offloading these traditional obligations onto women further down the socio-economic ladder or merely alienating them from “embedded” life, to be repackaged and resold as commodities—various corners of the “manosphere” analogously decry the fetters of marriage and the supposed injustices of family court, or trade in preposterous misogynistic stereotyping, likewise eschewing any claims that social responsibility—or love—might make upon their independent agency.
As autonomy has superseded solidarity as the governing principle for relations between the sexes, the traditional constellation of social customs through which this solidarity was negotiated and maintained, alleviating sexual asymmetries for the stability and perpetuation of society, has evaporated, leaving in its stead a rivalrous “sibling society” composed of self-centered individuals seeking self-gratification through the “sexual marketplace.” Rather than uniting oneself to the opposite sex to form a greater whole, the object is to maximize “profits” and minimize “losses” for the individual; members of the opposite sex are reconceived not as partners, but as competitors in a ruthless sexual economy. The sexual stereotypes that liberal feminism hoped to eliminate by dissolving old social norms that were derived from innate differences between men and women have reemerged in caricatured form as the market has replaced custom as the site where these differences are mediated.
Immaturity, distrust, and cruelty abound. And the logic of liberal autonomism doesn’t end with the liberation of the individual will from social embeddedness alone; increasingly it champions biotechnology as a means of eliminating physical sex differences altogether, imagining the human body no longer as an inalienable component of the self, but rather as an infinitely-customizable—and ultimately disposable—avatar for the self-expression of a disembodied mind now conceived as the exclusive seat of personhood. Mary Harrington has an evocative term for this ideology: “Meat Lego Gnosticism.”
Since modern feminism first emerged in response to the dislocations wrought by the industrial revolution, there has been an inherent tension in the movement between what Harrington calls “Team Freedom,” and “Team Interdependence.” In the pre-industrial subsistence economy, husband and wife labored together under a paradigm of “ambiguous complementarity,” performing distinct but mutually necessary roles in the maintenance of the household, which was itself the fundamental social unit and center of economic production. While the husband held titular power over the household, the co-necessity of the female and male spheres of activity as integral parts of a greater whole was a practical reality. Women did not enter the workforce for the first time in the twentieth century; in virtually all premodern societies, all but the most elite women worked, particularly at tasks of care, craft, and cultivation that could be accomplished while also looking after children.
Industrial society produced a rupture in gender economics that was historically aberrational. With the “public” work performed by men increasingly centralized in factories, the replacement of subsistence labor with wage labor, and the general liquefaction of assets, a new paradigm of “separate spheres” emerged under which the production-oriented work of men outside the home was valorized to the detriment of the consumption-oriented domestic work of women. Men monopolized financial and legal power; and the question for the nascent feminist movement was on what terms this new disparity should be equalized. Team interdependence sought a concomitant valorization of the “domain of care” traditionally administered by women, while Team Freedom sought to disencumber itself from this domain altogether and attain the degree of individual autonomy necessary to compete with male labor outside the home. Whereas Team Interdependence wanted industrial society to accommodate women as women, with all the social and corporeal features of traditional womanhood, Team Freedom wanted to utilize institutional—and after the 1960s, technological—methods to liberate themselves from traditional womanhood altogether, and to assume with men an abstract individual freedom belonging not to embodied men or women, but to disembodied, unsexed, and interchangeable “humans.” Since the 1960s, Team Freedom has predominated, coming to rely increasingly on technological solutions—the birth control pill, artificial insemination, cryopreservation, surrogacy, and the like—alongside social ones—institutional childcare—to realize this disincarnate freedom.
The emergent ideology of “Meat Lego Gnosticism,” which wholly subjectivizes “gender identity” and subordinates nature to the bodiless will—reconceiving the body as something we inhabit, like a player character in a video game, rather than an inalienable component of who and what we are—is a natural outgrowth of liberalism’s deracinating impulses. As transgender theorist Martine Rothblatt observed, “freedom of gender is […] the gateway to a freedom of form.” But freedom of form isn’t free. When our embodied nature ceases to be a given aspect of our self-determination, it doesn’t cease to be. Rather, just as sexual ethics are usurped by the market as the center of mediation between the sexes, so will the market become the mediator of “self” and body.
The body is alienated from the self, so that it can then be commodified and sold back to us. “Who we are,” which always demands some form of physical expression, becomes something we have to purchase like DLC. And if that sounds farfetched, consider that “gender medicine” is already a $200 billion industry in the United States; consider how “disembodied” many people (particularly young people) already feel in the digital age; consider that certain champions of this ideology have gone so far as to suggest that all children should be put on puberty blockers by default so that nature will not lock them into a hormonal, sexed body against their will. Just as English farmers were displaced from the commons by “enclosure” at the dawn of the industrial revolution, so are we to be displaced from the “commons” of our own bodies—now no longer inherently ours—so that these too can be exploited by capital.
In such a world, only a small minority of affluent white-collar women can thrive. The further one goes down the socio-economic scale, the steeper the class penalties imposed on women who are still obliged to live embodied lives and to rely on atrophying sexual solidarity—rather than desexed autonomy—to meet their needs. At the bottom of the scale, perhaps, are incarcerated women; who, in a Caligulan display of comic sadism, are increasingly being forced to share cells with violent male criminals despite the obvious dangers of battery and rape, because many prisons now segregate inmates on the basis of gender identity rather than sex.
Harrington proposes several measures by which a reactionary feminism might resist the emerging dystopia: a re-embrasure of the body as something constitutive of the self; a recovery of a more traditional understanding of marriage, not merely as a means of personal self-fulfillment, but rather as “an enabling condition for building a meaningful life,” which can only be achieved through an embedded, embodied (sexed) existence in relation to others; a reorientation of work for both sexes toward domestic life; abstention from birth control and the sexual culture that accompanies it; and the maintenance of single-sex spaces.
What I think it comes down to, in its distilled essence, is that we must remember the critical (if corny) wisdom of generations past: that we need others in order to “complete” ourselves: that the “gender binary” can only be transcended through love: that we cannot replace embodied interpersonal communion—the foundation of a meaningful, fulfilled life—with artifice. To paraphrase Harrington, men and women can only stay human together.
As autonomy has superseded solidarity as the governing principle for relations between the sexes, the traditional constellation of social customs through which this solidarity was negotiated and maintained, alleviating sexual asymmetries for the stability and perpetuation of society, has evaporated, leaving in its stead a rivalrous “sibling society” composed of self-centered individuals seeking self-gratification through the “sexual marketplace.” Rather than uniting oneself to the opposite sex to form a greater whole, the object is to maximize “profits” and minimize “losses” for the individual; members of the opposite sex are reconceived not as partners, but as competitors in a ruthless sexual economy. The sexual stereotypes that liberal feminism hoped to eliminate by dissolving old social norms that were derived from innate differences between men and women have reemerged in caricatured form as the market has replaced custom as the site where these differences are mediated.
Immaturity, distrust, and cruelty abound. And the logic of liberal autonomism doesn’t end with the liberation of the individual will from social embeddedness alone; increasingly it champions biotechnology as a means of eliminating physical sex differences altogether, imagining the human body no longer as an inalienable component of the self, but rather as an infinitely-customizable—and ultimately disposable—avatar for the self-expression of a disembodied mind now conceived as the exclusive seat of personhood. Mary Harrington has an evocative term for this ideology: “Meat Lego Gnosticism.”
Since modern feminism first emerged in response to the dislocations wrought by the industrial revolution, there has been an inherent tension in the movement between what Harrington calls “Team Freedom,” and “Team Interdependence.” In the pre-industrial subsistence economy, husband and wife labored together under a paradigm of “ambiguous complementarity,” performing distinct but mutually necessary roles in the maintenance of the household, which was itself the fundamental social unit and center of economic production. While the husband held titular power over the household, the co-necessity of the female and male spheres of activity as integral parts of a greater whole was a practical reality. Women did not enter the workforce for the first time in the twentieth century; in virtually all premodern societies, all but the most elite women worked, particularly at tasks of care, craft, and cultivation that could be accomplished while also looking after children.
Industrial society produced a rupture in gender economics that was historically aberrational. With the “public” work performed by men increasingly centralized in factories, the replacement of subsistence labor with wage labor, and the general liquefaction of assets, a new paradigm of “separate spheres” emerged under which the production-oriented work of men outside the home was valorized to the detriment of the consumption-oriented domestic work of women. Men monopolized financial and legal power; and the question for the nascent feminist movement was on what terms this new disparity should be equalized. Team interdependence sought a concomitant valorization of the “domain of care” traditionally administered by women, while Team Freedom sought to disencumber itself from this domain altogether and attain the degree of individual autonomy necessary to compete with male labor outside the home. Whereas Team Interdependence wanted industrial society to accommodate women as women, with all the social and corporeal features of traditional womanhood, Team Freedom wanted to utilize institutional—and after the 1960s, technological—methods to liberate themselves from traditional womanhood altogether, and to assume with men an abstract individual freedom belonging not to embodied men or women, but to disembodied, unsexed, and interchangeable “humans.” Since the 1960s, Team Freedom has predominated, coming to rely increasingly on technological solutions—the birth control pill, artificial insemination, cryopreservation, surrogacy, and the like—alongside social ones—institutional childcare—to realize this disincarnate freedom.
The emergent ideology of “Meat Lego Gnosticism,” which wholly subjectivizes “gender identity” and subordinates nature to the bodiless will—reconceiving the body as something we inhabit, like a player character in a video game, rather than an inalienable component of who and what we are—is a natural outgrowth of liberalism’s deracinating impulses. As transgender theorist Martine Rothblatt observed, “freedom of gender is […] the gateway to a freedom of form.” But freedom of form isn’t free. When our embodied nature ceases to be a given aspect of our self-determination, it doesn’t cease to be. Rather, just as sexual ethics are usurped by the market as the center of mediation between the sexes, so will the market become the mediator of “self” and body.
The body is alienated from the self, so that it can then be commodified and sold back to us. “Who we are,” which always demands some form of physical expression, becomes something we have to purchase like DLC. And if that sounds farfetched, consider that “gender medicine” is already a $200 billion industry in the United States; consider how “disembodied” many people (particularly young people) already feel in the digital age; consider that certain champions of this ideology have gone so far as to suggest that all children should be put on puberty blockers by default so that nature will not lock them into a hormonal, sexed body against their will. Just as English farmers were displaced from the commons by “enclosure” at the dawn of the industrial revolution, so are we to be displaced from the “commons” of our own bodies—now no longer inherently ours—so that these too can be exploited by capital.
In such a world, only a small minority of affluent white-collar women can thrive. The further one goes down the socio-economic scale, the steeper the class penalties imposed on women who are still obliged to live embodied lives and to rely on atrophying sexual solidarity—rather than desexed autonomy—to meet their needs. At the bottom of the scale, perhaps, are incarcerated women; who, in a Caligulan display of comic sadism, are increasingly being forced to share cells with violent male criminals despite the obvious dangers of battery and rape, because many prisons now segregate inmates on the basis of gender identity rather than sex.
Harrington proposes several measures by which a reactionary feminism might resist the emerging dystopia: a re-embrasure of the body as something constitutive of the self; a recovery of a more traditional understanding of marriage, not merely as a means of personal self-fulfillment, but rather as “an enabling condition for building a meaningful life,” which can only be achieved through an embedded, embodied (sexed) existence in relation to others; a reorientation of work for both sexes toward domestic life; abstention from birth control and the sexual culture that accompanies it; and the maintenance of single-sex spaces.
What I think it comes down to, in its distilled essence, is that we must remember the critical (if corny) wisdom of generations past: that we need others in order to “complete” ourselves: that the “gender binary” can only be transcended through love: that we cannot replace embodied interpersonal communion—the foundation of a meaningful, fulfilled life—with artifice. To paraphrase Harrington, men and women can only stay human together.
May 19, 2024
Superbly refreshing. Harrington's brilliance lies in her precision, matter of fact-ness, and ability to concisely identify the unwieldy, disembodied angles of modernity. Female embodiment and the world are more intertwined than we often realize (or care to be intellectually honest about). She brings fleshy logic to bear on how the 2nd and 3rd wave women's and gender movements have been more products of the technological Machine than anything, destroying much of everyone's flourishing in their wake. This book was exactly the manifesto and wise guide I expected, after having followed her work for a while.
If I could bundle this book with others it is in conversation with (and sometimes literally is, at least among authors) I recommend:
- Erika Bachiochi's "The Rights of Women"
- Leah Libresco Sargeant's forthcoming "The Dignity of Dependence" (any really everything she's written on interdependence over autonomy)
- Abigail Favale's "The Genesis of Gender"
- Louise Perry's "The Case Against The Sexual Revolution"
- Mark Regnerus' "Cheap Sex"
- Christine Emba's "Rethinking Sex" (the least amazing of the bunch, as it raises the bar from the floor to... slightly above the floor?)
*For a reading compilation on matters related to female embodiment, here is something I put together in recent weeks: https://lifeconsidered.substack.com/p...
If I could bundle this book with others it is in conversation with (and sometimes literally is, at least among authors) I recommend:
- Erika Bachiochi's "The Rights of Women"
- Leah Libresco Sargeant's forthcoming "The Dignity of Dependence" (any really everything she's written on interdependence over autonomy)
- Abigail Favale's "The Genesis of Gender"
- Louise Perry's "The Case Against The Sexual Revolution"
- Mark Regnerus' "Cheap Sex"
- Christine Emba's "Rethinking Sex" (the least amazing of the bunch, as it raises the bar from the floor to... slightly above the floor?)
*For a reading compilation on matters related to female embodiment, here is something I put together in recent weeks: https://lifeconsidered.substack.com/p...
April 4, 2023
..I too believe that surrogacy is the most dangerous damaging outsourcing there can be. I am a believer in sex over gender. And I too am worried about the language of gender ideology. I did, as a very active feminist, choose to leave exciting career to stay at home with daughter for first 4 years...so I understand. And it has little been made.
There is something though not quite right about the tone...but in essence she is one of the only ones saying it...so applaud for that.
Women are not a subset of men consisting of commodified body parts...you see that sounds extreme but it's true (what Mary Harrington called meat lego) and it is creeping into the language of the corporates, charities, journalism, and NGO's. Only today I read an article in Wired addressed to 'women and other people with wombs' - who are they??? Oxfam now doesn't refer to 'mothers' as a category as that is seen as transphobic...
What Mary H does deliver on is the complex profound relationship of a mother and child that spans generations and is much deeper than an potential organ transplant or the new change in law where a surrogate mother loses her identity as mother on the moment she gives birth.
Surrogate mothers are now just referred to as surrogates. No maternal relationship allowed or understood. And now not just gay men are using this facility but elite women..eg Paris Hilton has become a mother...by a surrogate because she didn't fancy being pregnant and going into labour. you can easily imagine how impoverished women in the third world will be harvested like livestock with no understanding of the profound effects of bonding that most women experience when giving birth. It is a a dystopia in the making.
There is something though not quite right about the tone...but in essence she is one of the only ones saying it...so applaud for that.
Women are not a subset of men consisting of commodified body parts...you see that sounds extreme but it's true (what Mary Harrington called meat lego) and it is creeping into the language of the corporates, charities, journalism, and NGO's. Only today I read an article in Wired addressed to 'women and other people with wombs' - who are they??? Oxfam now doesn't refer to 'mothers' as a category as that is seen as transphobic...
What Mary H does deliver on is the complex profound relationship of a mother and child that spans generations and is much deeper than an potential organ transplant or the new change in law where a surrogate mother loses her identity as mother on the moment she gives birth.
Surrogate mothers are now just referred to as surrogates. No maternal relationship allowed or understood. And now not just gay men are using this facility but elite women..eg Paris Hilton has become a mother...by a surrogate because she didn't fancy being pregnant and going into labour. you can easily imagine how impoverished women in the third world will be harvested like livestock with no understanding of the profound effects of bonding that most women experience when giving birth. It is a a dystopia in the making.
April 7, 2023
There are few books that are more careful, and more interesting, in their exploration of the fraught topic of feminism and the sexual politics of our day. The first two parts of this book are excellent at identifying the real debates and issues at hand, and giving a vocabulary for understanding these debates. The next section, though less immediately careful than what preceded, does an excellent job of giving real steps for those who have agreed with the prior narrative. Overall, this book is an important corrective to the many false and careless arguments put forward in our day’s sexual politics. If you are mature and interesting enough to wrestle with ideas that contradict the memes Western Culture has taught you, I suggest you read this book.
May 21, 2023
This book was so incoherent. Like a Jordan Peterson benzo word salad!
January 15, 2024
Feminism Against Progress is the kind of brave book that can change history - with piercing insight into both the cause of and the cure for a rotting society.
Mary Harrington came of age in the radical left, gender-queer world of early 2000’s London, questioning whether she was really female and changing her name to Sebastian for a while.
"I was raised to believe in Progress Theology – the more-or-less religious framework that governs much of modern culture in the West. This theology says there’s a ‘right side of history’, and things can go on getting better forever. But one day, about 15 years ago, I realised I no longer believed.”
Progress Theology "takes as its central sacrament the disruption of existing norms, in the pursuit of an ever-receding goal of greater freedom, transformation and progress towards some undefined future goal of absolute human perfection – that we somehow never attain, and whose externalities [consequences] are never counted.”
What caused Harrington to de-convert? Partly, becoming a mom:
"I’d bought uncritically into the idea that individual freedom is the highest good, that bonds or obligations are only acceptable inasmuch as they’re optional, and that men and women can and should pursue this equally. Then I went through the wonderful and disorienting experience of finding my sense of self partly merged with a dependent infant. The kind of absolute freedom I’d accepted as an unalloyed good, pre-baby, was suddenly a great deal less appealing to me than it had been, because I actively enjoyed belonging to my daughter. Pre-baby, I could do more or less what I liked, as a mother I couldn’t very well refuse to get up and feed my crying newborn at 3:30 a.m. just because I didn’t feel like it. Her interests mattered more to me than anything else in the world, including my once-treasured autonomy."
The book is focused on the two camps of Feminism:
Team Freedom - freeing women from care/the household toward individual autonomy
Team Interdependence - upholding the value of this domain of care
The trajectory of team freedom inevitably leads to transhumanism and the rejection of "sex dimorphism itself.” Men and women are not only equal but interchangeable "meat legos.” "Men and women alike [are] raw resource for commodification, by a market that wears women’s political interests as a skin suit but is ever more inimical to those interests in practice.”
In other words: Progress Theology uses women to achieve deeply anti-women goals.
Harrington asserts: Humans can’t change sex. And our sexed differences are important and should be valued.
Harrington tried Team Freedom and not only found it lacking but harmful- ending in loneliness, despair and deep regret. "I’m not on Team Freedom, or at least I have questions about how indisputably pro-women the effort to transcend our sexed bodies in favour of a genderless ‘human’ state really is.”
“The replacement of relationships by individual desires has everywhere been mediated, encouraged and glorified by digital media that have moved swiftly to monetise our every individual longing – even (or perhaps especially) at the expense of interpersonal connection."
That loss of interpersonal connection is especially damaging to women.
To my knowledge, Mary Harrington is not a Christian. But her piercing writing is incredibly amicable to Christianity. Her overall goal seems to be answer the question: how do we, as very-different men and women, "live together in the rubble of absolute freedom?”
The answer: get married, stay married, and have babies.
In our modern world motherhood is an impediment to what matters: making money. President Biden bemoaned this waste: "‘Nearly 2 million women in our country have been locked out of the workforce because they have to care for a child or an elderly relative at home’. The solution, Biden said, was to ‘make caregiving accessible and affordable and help them get back to work’.”
Despite this constant degrading message, Harrington says moms experience a "visceral wish to be close to our babies” which "is powerful enough to induce many Western women every year to opt for life as stay-at-home mums despite near-universal public messaging that valorises more or less any other life choice you care to name."
It’s a worldview that unpaid work is oppressive thus “the work of relationships and caring is intrinsically oppressive, except to the extent that it can be re-imagined as paid work. Mothers are only visible within this market society to the extent that we detach ourselves from caregiving, which is seen largely as an obstacle to that participation, and therefore to self-realisation."
Part of Harrington's solution is to value the contribution of women in care-roles: mothering, caring for the elderly, building relationships in neighborhoods and community. Women are the relational glue that holds together societies and encourage interdependence. We all need "a freedom haircut” and women are key leaders in this movement toward interdependence (partly by embracing their sexed difference).
Mary Harrington came of age in the radical left, gender-queer world of early 2000’s London, questioning whether she was really female and changing her name to Sebastian for a while.
"I was raised to believe in Progress Theology – the more-or-less religious framework that governs much of modern culture in the West. This theology says there’s a ‘right side of history’, and things can go on getting better forever. But one day, about 15 years ago, I realised I no longer believed.”
Progress Theology "takes as its central sacrament the disruption of existing norms, in the pursuit of an ever-receding goal of greater freedom, transformation and progress towards some undefined future goal of absolute human perfection – that we somehow never attain, and whose externalities [consequences] are never counted.”
What caused Harrington to de-convert? Partly, becoming a mom:
"I’d bought uncritically into the idea that individual freedom is the highest good, that bonds or obligations are only acceptable inasmuch as they’re optional, and that men and women can and should pursue this equally. Then I went through the wonderful and disorienting experience of finding my sense of self partly merged with a dependent infant. The kind of absolute freedom I’d accepted as an unalloyed good, pre-baby, was suddenly a great deal less appealing to me than it had been, because I actively enjoyed belonging to my daughter. Pre-baby, I could do more or less what I liked, as a mother I couldn’t very well refuse to get up and feed my crying newborn at 3:30 a.m. just because I didn’t feel like it. Her interests mattered more to me than anything else in the world, including my once-treasured autonomy."
The book is focused on the two camps of Feminism:
Team Freedom - freeing women from care/the household toward individual autonomy
Team Interdependence - upholding the value of this domain of care
The trajectory of team freedom inevitably leads to transhumanism and the rejection of "sex dimorphism itself.” Men and women are not only equal but interchangeable "meat legos.” "Men and women alike [are] raw resource for commodification, by a market that wears women’s political interests as a skin suit but is ever more inimical to those interests in practice.”
In other words: Progress Theology uses women to achieve deeply anti-women goals.
Harrington asserts: Humans can’t change sex. And our sexed differences are important and should be valued.
Harrington tried Team Freedom and not only found it lacking but harmful- ending in loneliness, despair and deep regret. "I’m not on Team Freedom, or at least I have questions about how indisputably pro-women the effort to transcend our sexed bodies in favour of a genderless ‘human’ state really is.”
“The replacement of relationships by individual desires has everywhere been mediated, encouraged and glorified by digital media that have moved swiftly to monetise our every individual longing – even (or perhaps especially) at the expense of interpersonal connection."
That loss of interpersonal connection is especially damaging to women.
To my knowledge, Mary Harrington is not a Christian. But her piercing writing is incredibly amicable to Christianity. Her overall goal seems to be answer the question: how do we, as very-different men and women, "live together in the rubble of absolute freedom?”
The answer: get married, stay married, and have babies.
In our modern world motherhood is an impediment to what matters: making money. President Biden bemoaned this waste: "‘Nearly 2 million women in our country have been locked out of the workforce because they have to care for a child or an elderly relative at home’. The solution, Biden said, was to ‘make caregiving accessible and affordable and help them get back to work’.”
Despite this constant degrading message, Harrington says moms experience a "visceral wish to be close to our babies” which "is powerful enough to induce many Western women every year to opt for life as stay-at-home mums despite near-universal public messaging that valorises more or less any other life choice you care to name."
It’s a worldview that unpaid work is oppressive thus “the work of relationships and caring is intrinsically oppressive, except to the extent that it can be re-imagined as paid work. Mothers are only visible within this market society to the extent that we detach ourselves from caregiving, which is seen largely as an obstacle to that participation, and therefore to self-realisation."
Part of Harrington's solution is to value the contribution of women in care-roles: mothering, caring for the elderly, building relationships in neighborhoods and community. Women are the relational glue that holds together societies and encourage interdependence. We all need "a freedom haircut” and women are key leaders in this movement toward interdependence (partly by embracing their sexed difference).
April 18, 2024
if you somehow manage to finish the 216 pages (not including the afterword) that make up this book, you might find something of value. i didn't. but you might.
May 8, 2023
So this is an unusual book for me. Harrington would commonly be considered a "conservative" in today's Twitterverse politics (at least by the conservatives who glom on to her) - and to a degree, yeah, I can see it. And I always keep the cautionary tale of Russell Kirk in my mind - he wrote beautifully on the permanent things and had me going "yeah, yeah" page after page... and then turned out to be the most garden-variety Reaganite, falling to his knees to pay homage to the neoliberal capitalism that utterly destroys everything he ever claimed to believe in. And she does make a few genuflections to the modern Right - "COVID tyranny", whatever that means, for example.
But the left-right spectrum doesn't work well, especially these days, and when she's right, she's right. Taken instead from an Illich/Polanyi lens of the progressive disembedding of human social structures from each other in favor of increasing economic and (now social) enclosure of the commons in every aspect, there's a lot here. Basically, the thesis is that gender theory and the like have become servants not of any kind of liberation, but of a kind of universal commercialization, everything with its price, with its ultimate destination a kind of dematerialization, a digital apotheosis where the physical world, the body and humanity itself are shed in favor of a disembodied Utopia. For those at the top of the pyramid of class and resources, of course, because servants are still needed to service the rulers and the machines - until they aren't, in which case... well, you can guess what happens then.
I see a decent amount of truth there, but I think her argument gets stronger when zoomed out from gender. My work (and life) has centered around climate for years now, and one of the things that terrifies me is how desperate civilization seems to be for distraction from the abyss it is charging towards. Anything to avoid the conclusion that we must change our lives - or else. If I were more conspiracy-minded - and I'm not really on this, because small cigar-smoke-filled rooms produce pretty inept and easily discovered conspiracies - I'd say that it's not entirely a coincidence that as climate impacts become visible to the naked eye that there would be a concerted effort to get people to "look over there! Get passionate about these other things! Ignore the rain bombs flooding out your home!" And the more disembodied we get, the more focused on ourselves we are, the easier it gets to forget the truth that humans are inextricably embedded in the biosphere and that if it dies, so do we, that we *cannot* exist as we are without a world around us. That in some ways is the danger I most fear - not that we fail to adapt, but that we simply stop caring. We normalize.
The other is what I've seen from where I'm at right now - I used to be a supporter of euthanasia and individual choice on this, but seeing the breakneck speed at which MAiD has been normalized and expanded is terrifying. Poor people, depressed people, vets, all being subtly (or sometimes not-so-subtly) encouraged to just go ahead and die rather than, say, providing disability payments large enough for the disabled to live with dignity on proves the disability organizations and the old religions (I'm thinking of Catholicism here, replaying its opposition to eugenics 100 years ago) but also Islam and others correct in their slippery slope arguments. And the speed at which the general population has decided "yeah, this is all good" is even more terrifying. As someone who walks now with a visible limp and has Parkinson's in his family, I have this uncomfortable Spidey-sense sometimes that I'm moving into the crosshairs of that cost-benefit analysis.
Again, that commercialization of the deepest parts of the self is not leading to liberation - "bio-libertarianism" (a good coinage) leads to very bad places and reopens doors thought shut in 1945 in Germany, for example. And if you think you'll make out okay because you have a good salary or a good position... well, maybe. Just hope you don't make a wrong move and find yourself outside of that fence.
As for solutions... I don't know, to be honest. I'm enough of a non-state leftist to get uncomfortable with some things. I don't have solutions yet.
I am hopeful that people on the left will take up the challenge of finding ways to stop the slide downwards from a left perspective. I really truly am.
But the left-right spectrum doesn't work well, especially these days, and when she's right, she's right. Taken instead from an Illich/Polanyi lens of the progressive disembedding of human social structures from each other in favor of increasing economic and (now social) enclosure of the commons in every aspect, there's a lot here. Basically, the thesis is that gender theory and the like have become servants not of any kind of liberation, but of a kind of universal commercialization, everything with its price, with its ultimate destination a kind of dematerialization, a digital apotheosis where the physical world, the body and humanity itself are shed in favor of a disembodied Utopia. For those at the top of the pyramid of class and resources, of course, because servants are still needed to service the rulers and the machines - until they aren't, in which case... well, you can guess what happens then.
I see a decent amount of truth there, but I think her argument gets stronger when zoomed out from gender. My work (and life) has centered around climate for years now, and one of the things that terrifies me is how desperate civilization seems to be for distraction from the abyss it is charging towards. Anything to avoid the conclusion that we must change our lives - or else. If I were more conspiracy-minded - and I'm not really on this, because small cigar-smoke-filled rooms produce pretty inept and easily discovered conspiracies - I'd say that it's not entirely a coincidence that as climate impacts become visible to the naked eye that there would be a concerted effort to get people to "look over there! Get passionate about these other things! Ignore the rain bombs flooding out your home!" And the more disembodied we get, the more focused on ourselves we are, the easier it gets to forget the truth that humans are inextricably embedded in the biosphere and that if it dies, so do we, that we *cannot* exist as we are without a world around us. That in some ways is the danger I most fear - not that we fail to adapt, but that we simply stop caring. We normalize.
The other is what I've seen from where I'm at right now - I used to be a supporter of euthanasia and individual choice on this, but seeing the breakneck speed at which MAiD has been normalized and expanded is terrifying. Poor people, depressed people, vets, all being subtly (or sometimes not-so-subtly) encouraged to just go ahead and die rather than, say, providing disability payments large enough for the disabled to live with dignity on proves the disability organizations and the old religions (I'm thinking of Catholicism here, replaying its opposition to eugenics 100 years ago) but also Islam and others correct in their slippery slope arguments. And the speed at which the general population has decided "yeah, this is all good" is even more terrifying. As someone who walks now with a visible limp and has Parkinson's in his family, I have this uncomfortable Spidey-sense sometimes that I'm moving into the crosshairs of that cost-benefit analysis.
Again, that commercialization of the deepest parts of the self is not leading to liberation - "bio-libertarianism" (a good coinage) leads to very bad places and reopens doors thought shut in 1945 in Germany, for example. And if you think you'll make out okay because you have a good salary or a good position... well, maybe. Just hope you don't make a wrong move and find yourself outside of that fence.
As for solutions... I don't know, to be honest. I'm enough of a non-state leftist to get uncomfortable with some things. I don't have solutions yet.
I am hopeful that people on the left will take up the challenge of finding ways to stop the slide downwards from a left perspective. I really truly am.
February 24, 2024
This is a fascinating and complex book. In this review, I’ll attempt to VERY CRUDELY delineate its main arguments, though I’m incapable of matching the force or style of Mary Harrington, who is orders of magnitude smarter than me. I'm sketching this in a somewhat hurried way, if for no other reason than to check my own understanding.
As I understand Harrington’s argument, a pivotal point in the history of feminism, and in the history of our species, was an internal debate within feminism that pitted “Team Freedom” vs. “Team Interdependence.” “Team Freedom” valued individual autonomy and self-actualization, and primarily sought access to those spaces and those privileges that had been reserved exclusively for men. “Team Interdependence” sought to carve out accommodations for the natural sexual asymmetries of sexual dimorphism and reproduction, and for those domains of domesticity and the nurture of the young.
It’s no surprise that “Team Freedom” won the day, and the victory was made more sure with the invention of The Pill. The Pill promised to level sexual and reproductive asymmetries, and implied the possibility of the genderless “person.” The feminist woman, relieved of the asymmetries of her corporeal body, could jettison the burdens of womanhood and assume her place as an equal “person”, indistinguishable in every meaningful way from men, who were now her peers and equals.
This is why feminism has historically had relatively little to say about mothers and motherhood. It’s a deeply entrenched, if unacknowledged, assumption that “personhood” is at odds with motherhood, because motherhood demonstrates the vacuity of liberal feminist ideas like independence and autonomy. And so it’s no wonder that so many important feminist thinkers have gone so far as to argue that women should be liberated entirely from the burdens of motherhood, arguing for “surrogacy now” and on-demand abortion as the necessary preconditions to a feminism of individual freedom and autonomy.
These Harrington refers to as “bio-libertarians” — those who believe that true freedom, true “personhood”, can only be accomplished by technological liberation from any and all biological constraints— including, of course, those most burdensome constraints of biological femaleness and pregnancy/reproduction. This “bio-libertarian” logic underwrites or explains diverse cultural phenomena: absolutist demands for late-term abortions; surrogacy, and the purchasing of the wombs of the economically depressed; even gender reconstruction surgery. Biolibertarianism ultimately promises to liberate one's true self from the "meat prison" of the body. This resentment of the body-as-prison, and the idea that the body can be remade according to one's will, or even transcended entirely, Harrington memorably names “Meat Lego Gnosticism", because she sees in this contemporary trend a resuscitation of that ancient Christian heresy.
Bio-libertarianism is related to, or perhaps terminates in, what Harrington calls “cyborg theology” — the idea that because our human bodies are no more than gross, disposable impediments to self-actualization and freedom, progress demands men and women cease being men and women to instead become disembodied “selves” — a consciousness uploaded to a computer, say — or hybrid creatures, more machine than human.
If the Pill ensured the victory of “Team Freedom” over “Team Independence”, it was the Internet that reified the idea that our bodies are nonessential to who we “really are.” According to Harrington, the anonymity afforded by the internet and the ability to appear as a self-styled avatar, made credible the idea that one’s “true self” was unrelated to one’s corporeal self. (Although this argument is interesting, Harrington does not seem to take account of the fact that the most popular social medias are hardly anonymous: TikTok and Instagram, rather than being “disembodied�� or anonymous platforms might be more accurately described as “hyper-embodied.” It isn’t clear how social media could simultaneously be blamed for causing body image problems in young women while also being blamed for causing bodily disassociation.)
There’s a personal aspect to Harrington’s argument. Harrington’s own experience as a mother showed her the bankruptcy of modern ideas of autonomy and independence. The experience of carrying her baby in her womb, and of nursing that young child, marked her indelibly. She felt her individuality dissolve into something more complex; what she experienced was inter-dependence, and this inter-dependence was not a burden but a joy. Drawing on reactionary (?) feminists like Leah Libresco Sargeant, Harrington argues that the natural state of human beings is not as an atomized, autonomous individual, but as an interdependent self. Autonomy is the exception; only in middle age do we briefly experience autonomous individuality of a sort. From birth to death, inderdependence is our default state.
A reactionary feminism does justice to this interdependent reality. A reactionary feminism makes peace with one’s body as essential to one’s self, rather than as a “prison” of one’s true self. A reactionary feminism reclaims the gendered body, the female, and rejects the fungible, neutered, ‘person.’ A reactionary feminism rejects that sexual and reproductive asymmetries can be, or should be, totally erased. A reactionary feminism rejects freedom purchased at the cost of our relationships to one another, or to our own embodied selves.
Harrington calls herself a “reactionary” feminist. If a “reactionary” is one who “holds political views that favor a return to the status quo ante—the previous political state of society—which the person believes was better in some ways that are absent from contemporary society,” one might rightly ask which era she looks back to nostalgically as a model or template for the future. She does not, as some naive conservatives do, look back to the 1950s for inspiration. Instead, she looks back to the pre-industrial age, when men and women cooperated as equal economic partners in “cottage industries.” The pre-industrial woman was not at the economic mercy of her husband; instead, she was economically productive, making food and other products for sale on the market while also looking after her children in the home. According to Harrington, the modern “gig economy” and the “remote work” revolution might make possible again this same kind of economic cooperation between men and women — being equal partners in the work of child-rearing, while also working together in economic solidarity. To make this happen, Harrington says, husbands and wives must resist Big Romance — a cultural meme from the industrial age that has long outlived its usefulness. Instead of making emotional intimacy and mutual self-actualization the primary goal of a marriage, as Big Romance demands, men and women should instead strive to “build” together. The goal of marriage should be working together in solidarity to build a life together.
Marriage is an ancient technology that should be reclaimed and rehabilitated. Ironically, both “incels” and radical feminists portray marriage as a bait-and-switch — no better than prostitution. Not so, says Harrington. Marriage is the best institution to inculcate solidarity between the sexes — and, considering the dire situation we find ourselves in on this planet (dwindling resources, climate change, economic precariousness, pandemics, etc.) our very survival may depend on the solidarity of the sexes.
As for the broader culture, Harrington recommends “re-wilding” sex. By this, she means making sex dangerous again— raising the stakes. She tells women to stop taking the pill! Doing so would not only improve a woman’s connection to her body and her body’s cycles. It would also make her more selective, so that she would only have sex with those men who would make good fathers to her children. It would make sex sexy by making it high stakes and “dangerous.” (Shockingly, she claims that the current fad for BDSM might be a function of how casual and low-stakes sex is, in our current culture. If women stopped taking the pill, she reasons, sex would be dangerous again, and BDSM would disappear overnight.)
Mary Harrington is someone worth reading. She is provocative, for sure. Many will find her offensive. But open-minded readers will find much to mull over, here.
As I understand Harrington’s argument, a pivotal point in the history of feminism, and in the history of our species, was an internal debate within feminism that pitted “Team Freedom” vs. “Team Interdependence.” “Team Freedom” valued individual autonomy and self-actualization, and primarily sought access to those spaces and those privileges that had been reserved exclusively for men. “Team Interdependence” sought to carve out accommodations for the natural sexual asymmetries of sexual dimorphism and reproduction, and for those domains of domesticity and the nurture of the young.
It’s no surprise that “Team Freedom” won the day, and the victory was made more sure with the invention of The Pill. The Pill promised to level sexual and reproductive asymmetries, and implied the possibility of the genderless “person.” The feminist woman, relieved of the asymmetries of her corporeal body, could jettison the burdens of womanhood and assume her place as an equal “person”, indistinguishable in every meaningful way from men, who were now her peers and equals.
This is why feminism has historically had relatively little to say about mothers and motherhood. It’s a deeply entrenched, if unacknowledged, assumption that “personhood” is at odds with motherhood, because motherhood demonstrates the vacuity of liberal feminist ideas like independence and autonomy. And so it’s no wonder that so many important feminist thinkers have gone so far as to argue that women should be liberated entirely from the burdens of motherhood, arguing for “surrogacy now” and on-demand abortion as the necessary preconditions to a feminism of individual freedom and autonomy.
These Harrington refers to as “bio-libertarians” — those who believe that true freedom, true “personhood”, can only be accomplished by technological liberation from any and all biological constraints— including, of course, those most burdensome constraints of biological femaleness and pregnancy/reproduction. This “bio-libertarian” logic underwrites or explains diverse cultural phenomena: absolutist demands for late-term abortions; surrogacy, and the purchasing of the wombs of the economically depressed; even gender reconstruction surgery. Biolibertarianism ultimately promises to liberate one's true self from the "meat prison" of the body. This resentment of the body-as-prison, and the idea that the body can be remade according to one's will, or even transcended entirely, Harrington memorably names “Meat Lego Gnosticism", because she sees in this contemporary trend a resuscitation of that ancient Christian heresy.
Bio-libertarianism is related to, or perhaps terminates in, what Harrington calls “cyborg theology” — the idea that because our human bodies are no more than gross, disposable impediments to self-actualization and freedom, progress demands men and women cease being men and women to instead become disembodied “selves” — a consciousness uploaded to a computer, say — or hybrid creatures, more machine than human.
If the Pill ensured the victory of “Team Freedom” over “Team Independence”, it was the Internet that reified the idea that our bodies are nonessential to who we “really are.” According to Harrington, the anonymity afforded by the internet and the ability to appear as a self-styled avatar, made credible the idea that one’s “true self” was unrelated to one’s corporeal self. (Although this argument is interesting, Harrington does not seem to take account of the fact that the most popular social medias are hardly anonymous: TikTok and Instagram, rather than being “disembodied�� or anonymous platforms might be more accurately described as “hyper-embodied.” It isn’t clear how social media could simultaneously be blamed for causing body image problems in young women while also being blamed for causing bodily disassociation.)
There’s a personal aspect to Harrington’s argument. Harrington’s own experience as a mother showed her the bankruptcy of modern ideas of autonomy and independence. The experience of carrying her baby in her womb, and of nursing that young child, marked her indelibly. She felt her individuality dissolve into something more complex; what she experienced was inter-dependence, and this inter-dependence was not a burden but a joy. Drawing on reactionary (?) feminists like Leah Libresco Sargeant, Harrington argues that the natural state of human beings is not as an atomized, autonomous individual, but as an interdependent self. Autonomy is the exception; only in middle age do we briefly experience autonomous individuality of a sort. From birth to death, inderdependence is our default state.
A reactionary feminism does justice to this interdependent reality. A reactionary feminism makes peace with one’s body as essential to one’s self, rather than as a “prison” of one’s true self. A reactionary feminism reclaims the gendered body, the female, and rejects the fungible, neutered, ‘person.’ A reactionary feminism rejects that sexual and reproductive asymmetries can be, or should be, totally erased. A reactionary feminism rejects freedom purchased at the cost of our relationships to one another, or to our own embodied selves.
Harrington calls herself a “reactionary” feminist. If a “reactionary” is one who “holds political views that favor a return to the status quo ante—the previous political state of society—which the person believes was better in some ways that are absent from contemporary society,” one might rightly ask which era she looks back to nostalgically as a model or template for the future. She does not, as some naive conservatives do, look back to the 1950s for inspiration. Instead, she looks back to the pre-industrial age, when men and women cooperated as equal economic partners in “cottage industries.” The pre-industrial woman was not at the economic mercy of her husband; instead, she was economically productive, making food and other products for sale on the market while also looking after her children in the home. According to Harrington, the modern “gig economy” and the “remote work” revolution might make possible again this same kind of economic cooperation between men and women — being equal partners in the work of child-rearing, while also working together in economic solidarity. To make this happen, Harrington says, husbands and wives must resist Big Romance — a cultural meme from the industrial age that has long outlived its usefulness. Instead of making emotional intimacy and mutual self-actualization the primary goal of a marriage, as Big Romance demands, men and women should instead strive to “build” together. The goal of marriage should be working together in solidarity to build a life together.
Marriage is an ancient technology that should be reclaimed and rehabilitated. Ironically, both “incels” and radical feminists portray marriage as a bait-and-switch — no better than prostitution. Not so, says Harrington. Marriage is the best institution to inculcate solidarity between the sexes — and, considering the dire situation we find ourselves in on this planet (dwindling resources, climate change, economic precariousness, pandemics, etc.) our very survival may depend on the solidarity of the sexes.
As for the broader culture, Harrington recommends “re-wilding” sex. By this, she means making sex dangerous again— raising the stakes. She tells women to stop taking the pill! Doing so would not only improve a woman’s connection to her body and her body’s cycles. It would also make her more selective, so that she would only have sex with those men who would make good fathers to her children. It would make sex sexy by making it high stakes and “dangerous.” (Shockingly, she claims that the current fad for BDSM might be a function of how casual and low-stakes sex is, in our current culture. If women stopped taking the pill, she reasons, sex would be dangerous again, and BDSM would disappear overnight.)
Mary Harrington is someone worth reading. She is provocative, for sure. Many will find her offensive. But open-minded readers will find much to mull over, here.
July 5, 2023
First, even though I didn't agree with about half of the things and solutions proposed by the author, I am incredibly happy that there is a book that challenges the current orthodoxies of the left AND right. For that reason I think everyone should give it a read.
The author takes some of the current cultural debates and examines them from a generalized philosophical stance, which is the progressive left is melding with technological advances and market-driven industrial complexes that pushes towards a certain cyborg future that seeks to transcend nature and our humanities. On the one hand, we can agree that advances in medical technology has advanced healthcare considerably, giving us better quality life and increased lifespans. On the other hand, when does Icarus fly too close to the Sun, and where we play God in tweaking our flesh sacks and soon upgrading our cognitive abilities with Neuralink and other plugins? When do we lose ourselves as humans, instead of products addicted to the dopamine hits offered by services such as social media, video games, porn, casual sex, or plain old shopping in our consumerist society? And who benefits from all these advances, and who are the losers?
The author addresses a lot of interesting questions about where we are heading, though I'm not sure I agree with some of the solutions (stop using birth control seems a rather radical step in trying to discourage promiscuity; Gen Z is already promoting celibacy and an anti-hookup culture without having to recourse to this method). In terms of originality of thought, this is worth a read.
The author takes some of the current cultural debates and examines them from a generalized philosophical stance, which is the progressive left is melding with technological advances and market-driven industrial complexes that pushes towards a certain cyborg future that seeks to transcend nature and our humanities. On the one hand, we can agree that advances in medical technology has advanced healthcare considerably, giving us better quality life and increased lifespans. On the other hand, when does Icarus fly too close to the Sun, and where we play God in tweaking our flesh sacks and soon upgrading our cognitive abilities with Neuralink and other plugins? When do we lose ourselves as humans, instead of products addicted to the dopamine hits offered by services such as social media, video games, porn, casual sex, or plain old shopping in our consumerist society? And who benefits from all these advances, and who are the losers?
The author addresses a lot of interesting questions about where we are heading, though I'm not sure I agree with some of the solutions (stop using birth control seems a rather radical step in trying to discourage promiscuity; Gen Z is already promoting celibacy and an anti-hookup culture without having to recourse to this method). In terms of originality of thought, this is worth a read.
August 1, 2023
I am a lifelong feminist, though I wouldn't say that I ever subscribed to any particular flavor of feminism. Like a lot of feminists who have children, Mary Harrington among them, the process of bearing and raising kids has caused me to rethink some things, but I must say I have come to some different conclusions than Harrington.
Harrington argues that the gains of the feminist movement were more of a result of industrialization and that they have come at a cost of alienating us from our human nature. First, I want to say that I think it is important to consider Harrington's work. There are things I agree with her on, such as the bond between mothers and children being important and the importance of having a supportive spouse as you raise children. What I raised my eyebrows at were the way she came to her arguments and her solutions.
Harrington argues against an extreme version of feminism espoused by Germaine Greer and other "cyborg" feminists who favor artificial wombs and children being raised in communal units. Basically a flavor of feminism so extreme I don't know many people who embrace it. A feminism so extreme it is easy to pit yourself against basically. Feminists I tend to follow acknowledge the bond between mothers and their children as sacred and have concerns about surrogacy and the ethics of artificial wombs. They've been pushing for things such as paid parental leave or more flexible career options. And these flavors of feminism do not appear at all in Harrington's book.
The other thing that struck me is the diversity of life experience people have and how easy it is to cherry pick among them to make your arguments. Harrington argues against the contraceptive pill, saying that it has caused environmental damage in the form of marine life being affected by the hormones women take to control their fertility and that it forces women into sexual situations that they would not otherwise choose and makes them feel pressured to agree to casual sexual encounters they would otherwise say no to. She also argues that the reason BDSM is so popular is because we have separated the potential risk of pregnancy from sex.
Harrington is obviously not trained in psychology. I am. First, people have a diverse array of experiences. I used the contraceptive pill and I have only had one sexual partner my whole life. I never felt pressured into having casual sexual encounters because I was on the pill and I did not feel as though the choices I had were risky intimacy or safe, emotionless sex. Was my experience the aberration, or was Harrington's? Or perhaps given that there are 8 billion people on the planet, roughly half of whom are women, there are going to be a diverse range of experiences?
These are why we need studies to tease these factors out, as well as meta-analysis studies, which were missing from Harrington's work here.
With the exception of the environmental impact of hormonal birth control, which I will have to research more, all of Harrington's arguments against the pill were highly anecdotal and her assertion that embracing natural family planning would connect people with their human natures and increase intimacy reeked of magical thinking. Plenty of loveless, mechanical sex happened before the pill. Plenty of women were sexually brutalized before the pill. The pill did not create those problems and getting off the pill won't fix them.
Her assertion that the rise of BDSM is due to birth control is also meritless. BDSM is a modern phenomenon, yes, but it is one that is more popular among men than women who don't suffer the consequences of an unintended pregnancy the way that women do, and according to current theories results from the modern pressures of having a highly developed concept of the self as independent from others as well as the pressures of having to make big, consequential decisions. Current evidence suggests that BDSM is the way people escape those pressures basically.
Basically Harrington made a lot of psychological arguments that don't hold up to scrutiny and I could write a whole book refuting them.
With regards to single sexed spaces, I think Harrington is right that men are suffering from a lack of social connection, though I think the causes are more complex than Harrington makes them out to be. I do think that men need their own places to socialize with other men, but I also think that when you have groups that own the keys to the ability of people in certain careers to network and advance that these need to be co-ed. It's a messy situation, but one that definitely needs discussion and nuance and I applaud Harrington for starting that conversation even if I don't agree with some of her conclusions here.
All said, I do agree that human nature is stronger than technology and that our modern society does not always honor that and that our technology is advancing faster than our ability to understand that technology and our ability to adapt to it. But I don't see how eschewing the pill and reclaiming single sexed spaces will magically fix everything. I think she puts the spotlight on some areas where feminism has failed but at other times I think she unfairly places the blame on feminism.
And overall, to me it missed the mark completely about how caretaking has been completely devalued by our society and how to fix that. To me, when society recognizes the contributions of caretaking as hard work that is as valuable, more valuable actually, then selling items to generate profit, that is when the promises of the feminist movement will finally be realized. And while Harrington beautifully articulated how care has been devalued in our society, she did little to discuss how to change it.
Harrington argues that the gains of the feminist movement were more of a result of industrialization and that they have come at a cost of alienating us from our human nature. First, I want to say that I think it is important to consider Harrington's work. There are things I agree with her on, such as the bond between mothers and children being important and the importance of having a supportive spouse as you raise children. What I raised my eyebrows at were the way she came to her arguments and her solutions.
Harrington argues against an extreme version of feminism espoused by Germaine Greer and other "cyborg" feminists who favor artificial wombs and children being raised in communal units. Basically a flavor of feminism so extreme I don't know many people who embrace it. A feminism so extreme it is easy to pit yourself against basically. Feminists I tend to follow acknowledge the bond between mothers and their children as sacred and have concerns about surrogacy and the ethics of artificial wombs. They've been pushing for things such as paid parental leave or more flexible career options. And these flavors of feminism do not appear at all in Harrington's book.
The other thing that struck me is the diversity of life experience people have and how easy it is to cherry pick among them to make your arguments. Harrington argues against the contraceptive pill, saying that it has caused environmental damage in the form of marine life being affected by the hormones women take to control their fertility and that it forces women into sexual situations that they would not otherwise choose and makes them feel pressured to agree to casual sexual encounters they would otherwise say no to. She also argues that the reason BDSM is so popular is because we have separated the potential risk of pregnancy from sex.
Harrington is obviously not trained in psychology. I am. First, people have a diverse array of experiences. I used the contraceptive pill and I have only had one sexual partner my whole life. I never felt pressured into having casual sexual encounters because I was on the pill and I did not feel as though the choices I had were risky intimacy or safe, emotionless sex. Was my experience the aberration, or was Harrington's? Or perhaps given that there are 8 billion people on the planet, roughly half of whom are women, there are going to be a diverse range of experiences?
These are why we need studies to tease these factors out, as well as meta-analysis studies, which were missing from Harrington's work here.
With the exception of the environmental impact of hormonal birth control, which I will have to research more, all of Harrington's arguments against the pill were highly anecdotal and her assertion that embracing natural family planning would connect people with their human natures and increase intimacy reeked of magical thinking. Plenty of loveless, mechanical sex happened before the pill. Plenty of women were sexually brutalized before the pill. The pill did not create those problems and getting off the pill won't fix them.
Her assertion that the rise of BDSM is due to birth control is also meritless. BDSM is a modern phenomenon, yes, but it is one that is more popular among men than women who don't suffer the consequences of an unintended pregnancy the way that women do, and according to current theories results from the modern pressures of having a highly developed concept of the self as independent from others as well as the pressures of having to make big, consequential decisions. Current evidence suggests that BDSM is the way people escape those pressures basically.
Basically Harrington made a lot of psychological arguments that don't hold up to scrutiny and I could write a whole book refuting them.
With regards to single sexed spaces, I think Harrington is right that men are suffering from a lack of social connection, though I think the causes are more complex than Harrington makes them out to be. I do think that men need their own places to socialize with other men, but I also think that when you have groups that own the keys to the ability of people in certain careers to network and advance that these need to be co-ed. It's a messy situation, but one that definitely needs discussion and nuance and I applaud Harrington for starting that conversation even if I don't agree with some of her conclusions here.
All said, I do agree that human nature is stronger than technology and that our modern society does not always honor that and that our technology is advancing faster than our ability to understand that technology and our ability to adapt to it. But I don't see how eschewing the pill and reclaiming single sexed spaces will magically fix everything. I think she puts the spotlight on some areas where feminism has failed but at other times I think she unfairly places the blame on feminism.
And overall, to me it missed the mark completely about how caretaking has been completely devalued by our society and how to fix that. To me, when society recognizes the contributions of caretaking as hard work that is as valuable, more valuable actually, then selling items to generate profit, that is when the promises of the feminist movement will finally be realized. And while Harrington beautifully articulated how care has been devalued in our society, she did little to discuss how to change it.
July 31, 2023
This book was hobbled by all-or-nothing thinking and over-correctionism (a term I just made up). Reading this book was like hacking away at noxious rocks releasing sickening fumes to occasionally find a few moderate-quality diamonds. The flashes of brilliance (particularly the chapters Abolish Big Romance and Rewilding Sex) ultimately couldn’t make up for the weakness and indefensibility of replacing an extremist commitment to progress at all costs with an equally extremist commitment to radical reactionism. This approach to feminism has moments of clarity and truth (namely that more moderate approaches can yield longer term and more stable solutions) that were ultimately eclipsed by the pendulum swing in the direction of decidedly not-moderate approaches, and mostly just general throwing-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwatering. The anti-democratic sentiment, lack of concrete policy plans offered to the reader, and failure to see the forest (patriarchy) for the trees (getting mired in equally absurd radically liberal and radically conservative takes on feminism) ultimately made this book a failure in convincing me that reactionism can be compatible with feminism, or that the response to the failures of so-called “liberal feminism” (aka feminism centered around patriarchal values of personal freedom at all cost/extreme progress) should be a pendulum swing in the opposite direction.
December 2, 2023
“There is very little left to conserve, but that in turn means there’s everything to build. It doesn’t matter if your orientation is the personal one of your immediate home and community, or the political one of the social fabric more broadly. The personal and political are, as ever, the warp and weft of that social fabric. And for as long as there’s been a history of women, that history records us weaving.”
In Feminism Against Progress, Mary Harrington develops a complex interdisciplinary argument for feminism as a progress model birthed by the shifts of the markets in the post-industrial era. Guided by a religious belief in the certain morality of progress and what Harrington calls “the cyborg theology”—the ideological moral ethic demanding humans reject all restrictions on self-actualization, including the axiomatic belief in “the nature” as a force acting on the distinct biological entities of both men and women—feminism has argued explicitly for the interests of a small group of elite women—typically westerners in white-collar jobs—at the expense of tangible harm to all other female demographics and men. Harrington looks to the often misrepresented sexual dynamics of the pre-industrial era as a model for the strategies of the reactionary feminist—the human beings that embrace the confines of their sex as a framework for actualized meaning in terms of their contributions to the “commons” of the family and society.
I found Harrington’s argument incredibly gripping. Her introduction effectively attacks the memetic belief that humans are capable of progressing in a moral sense through the passage of time with development alone. Instead, humans are only capable of addressing an injustice through the creation of another. Our history is littered with the tombstones of the sins that plague us. “Feminism”—as we have come to know it—is ready for its place among the specters of civilization.
In Feminism Against Progress, Mary Harrington develops a complex interdisciplinary argument for feminism as a progress model birthed by the shifts of the markets in the post-industrial era. Guided by a religious belief in the certain morality of progress and what Harrington calls “the cyborg theology”—the ideological moral ethic demanding humans reject all restrictions on self-actualization, including the axiomatic belief in “the nature” as a force acting on the distinct biological entities of both men and women—feminism has argued explicitly for the interests of a small group of elite women—typically westerners in white-collar jobs—at the expense of tangible harm to all other female demographics and men. Harrington looks to the often misrepresented sexual dynamics of the pre-industrial era as a model for the strategies of the reactionary feminist—the human beings that embrace the confines of their sex as a framework for actualized meaning in terms of their contributions to the “commons” of the family and society.
I found Harrington’s argument incredibly gripping. Her introduction effectively attacks the memetic belief that humans are capable of progressing in a moral sense through the passage of time with development alone. Instead, humans are only capable of addressing an injustice through the creation of another. Our history is littered with the tombstones of the sins that plague us. “Feminism”—as we have come to know it—is ready for its place among the specters of civilization.
June 8, 2023
An excellent book with meaty food for thought.
I’m going to quibble with her title. As a lifelong Progressive, the author is rebelling against the errors she now perceives being committed by those who call themselves Progressives. And so Harrington imagines her version of feminism as being opposed to “progress.” But when I read her argument, it’s quite clear that she’s not opposed to progress — to making life better for people. She’s opposed to the various forms of theocracy that have taken over certain elements of the Progressive Movement. She should re-title this book: Feminism Against Ideological Fundamentalism.
My biggest critique is that the book is heavy on terminologies which I suspect come out of women’s studies and gender studies departments at universities. The terms are just tossed out without any definition. If you are already soaked in those concepts, you’ll be able to follow the arguments of this book effortlessly. If the terms sound a bit like precious gobbledygook to you, you’ll have to work harder. I was listening to it as an audiobook. That made following the concepts harder, since I couldn’t look back and go over sentences or paragraphs a second time, while driving.
Despite that, I found Harrington‘s arguments compelling.
I loved many of the specific arguments. One was her defense of men being allowed to have men’s only groups. It is important for women to have women only groups, and for men to have the same opportunity. One should not spend all their time in a group of people consisting exclusively of their own sex. But there are certain experiences unique to each sex, and that makes support groups and activities based around those experiences valuable — and sometimes indispensable — to every individual. The one statement she made which I disagree with on this topic is her idea of that even the old Men’s Only clubs in London that were full of MPs and Prime Ministers need to be allowed to continue. I would argue that if a wealthy club of wealthy individuals sitting around in wealthy surroundings is Men Only and contains more than one or two elected officials, judges, C suite executives, or others in positions of extreme power, that club needs to either expel those members, or open its doors to women as well. The same would be true for any Women’s Only club filled with elected officials, judges, C suite executives, and others in positions of extreme power. The purpose of single-sex organizations is to act as mental and emotional support groups, not to build fortresses around power to exclude the opposite sex.
One of her concepts which I truly love is the idea of rewilding sex. Sex is, by it’s fundamental nature, dangerous. That’s what makes it exciting. The pill and other attempts to turn sex into a banal, Saturday night entertainment system with rando hookups, are part of what has led to sex becoming so disappointing for so many people. Especially young women. Hearing the stories of young women feeling compelled to have sex they didn’t enjoy — and didn’t orgasm during — with men they barely knew (who definitely orgasmed), in order to “be polite“ on a date is one of the most dispiriting things I’ve heard in a long while. Bringing the wolves back to Yellowstone brought the ecology back to life. Bringing the danger back to sex, will do the same thing for the sex lives of men and women. Sex is not a toy. It’s a life and death biological system. It should be treated with the same gravity as we treat any force of nature.
A compelling book. I recommend it.
I’m going to quibble with her title. As a lifelong Progressive, the author is rebelling against the errors she now perceives being committed by those who call themselves Progressives. And so Harrington imagines her version of feminism as being opposed to “progress.” But when I read her argument, it’s quite clear that she’s not opposed to progress — to making life better for people. She’s opposed to the various forms of theocracy that have taken over certain elements of the Progressive Movement. She should re-title this book: Feminism Against Ideological Fundamentalism.
My biggest critique is that the book is heavy on terminologies which I suspect come out of women’s studies and gender studies departments at universities. The terms are just tossed out without any definition. If you are already soaked in those concepts, you’ll be able to follow the arguments of this book effortlessly. If the terms sound a bit like precious gobbledygook to you, you’ll have to work harder. I was listening to it as an audiobook. That made following the concepts harder, since I couldn’t look back and go over sentences or paragraphs a second time, while driving.
Despite that, I found Harrington‘s arguments compelling.
I loved many of the specific arguments. One was her defense of men being allowed to have men’s only groups. It is important for women to have women only groups, and for men to have the same opportunity. One should not spend all their time in a group of people consisting exclusively of their own sex. But there are certain experiences unique to each sex, and that makes support groups and activities based around those experiences valuable — and sometimes indispensable — to every individual. The one statement she made which I disagree with on this topic is her idea of that even the old Men’s Only clubs in London that were full of MPs and Prime Ministers need to be allowed to continue. I would argue that if a wealthy club of wealthy individuals sitting around in wealthy surroundings is Men Only and contains more than one or two elected officials, judges, C suite executives, or others in positions of extreme power, that club needs to either expel those members, or open its doors to women as well. The same would be true for any Women’s Only club filled with elected officials, judges, C suite executives, and others in positions of extreme power. The purpose of single-sex organizations is to act as mental and emotional support groups, not to build fortresses around power to exclude the opposite sex.
One of her concepts which I truly love is the idea of rewilding sex. Sex is, by it’s fundamental nature, dangerous. That’s what makes it exciting. The pill and other attempts to turn sex into a banal, Saturday night entertainment system with rando hookups, are part of what has led to sex becoming so disappointing for so many people. Especially young women. Hearing the stories of young women feeling compelled to have sex they didn’t enjoy — and didn’t orgasm during — with men they barely knew (who definitely orgasmed), in order to “be polite“ on a date is one of the most dispiriting things I’ve heard in a long while. Bringing the wolves back to Yellowstone brought the ecology back to life. Bringing the danger back to sex, will do the same thing for the sex lives of men and women. Sex is not a toy. It’s a life and death biological system. It should be treated with the same gravity as we treat any force of nature.
A compelling book. I recommend it.
November 12, 2023
A 4-star book because it is a 3-star book and a 5-star book all at once.
April 12, 2023
Reality, like God, will not be mocked. This is the core message of Mary Harrington’s excellent new work, Feminism Against Progress. In challenging and compelling fashion, Harrington shows how so-called feminism destroys women, body and soul. Unhinged worship of unfettered autonomy, the core demand of an insane ideology falsely sold as progress, powers this destruction. True enough, but Harrington’s aim is not mere complaint. Rather it is to tell us that both women and men can truly flourish, even in this age of liquid modernity, by building a new system—one informed by the wisdom, not of the 1950s, but of the pre-industrial age.
The frame of this book is the arc of Harrington’s own life, from a disordered youth aiming to atomize unchosen bonds, to a grounded adulthood as a fully-fledged woman and mother. This frame makes sense, because the ultimate touchstone of reality, most of all when you are drowning in unreality, is always that which you know yourself. In her approach, Harrington is like Samuel Johnson, who when told it was impossible to refute the claim that matter did not exist, kicked a boulder and said “I refute it thus!”
Harrington’s youth was formed by something we all recognize, but to which she gives one of the pithy names that fill her book—“Progress Theology,” the idea that mankind is progressing, through adoption of principles of emancipation and egalitarianism, to an Omega Point of perfection. In pursuit of this goal, reality must and will be bent to our desires. The acolytes of Progress Theology believe that given utopia is just over the horizon, nothing can matter more than fueling the engine that will carry us to utopia—by forcing “the equal right to self-realisation.” That is, every man and woman must live in a state of total autonomic individualism, the rejection of all bonds not continuously chosen. Then, and only then, we are assured, will mankind be happy.
Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, the takeoff of the most destructive phase of Progress Theology, Harrington absorbed it all, and lived it all, as a typical modern feminist. To her, the core of feminism was Judith Butler’s enormously influential (among the powerful) and enormously corrosive (among all of us) claim, first broadcast in 1990, that both sex and gender are social constructs, infinitely moldable in pursuit of Progress. This fantasy took flight both because of the historical moment and because it coincided with the internet, where it became possible to convincingly present yourself as anybody you want, making Butler’s ludicrous rantings seem actually possible.
But none of it satisfied. All of it was fake, and led down paths ending in closed doors and darkness. The priests of Progress Theology, then and now, forbade noticing this problem, but being an independent thinker, the truth gradually dawned on Harrington. The proof is in the pudding, after all, and when she looked around, she saw that the pudding was very, very nasty. Then she married (whom, she does not say, nor describe him, which might have been interesting), and had a baby, very late and with difficulty. Her baby’s breath blew away the final mental cobwebs of feminist fantasy.
Harrington still identifies as a feminist. For her, being a feminist means “I care about women’s interests and think these are often sidelined.” That’s a very high level of generality in definition; it seems to me she, and her ideas, would be better served by using a different term, given what feminism has become. In any case, the problem for Harrington is that today Progress Theology is the chief sideliner of women. Feminism went wrong, long before Butler, when it decided to prioritize and maximize autonomy over women’s real interests. Harrington therefore demands “reactionary feminism,” meaning truly reactionary, reversing the errors introduced in the 1800s. It is not the 1950s we need back, but the 1700s.
We are offered a tour of history, and thinkers from Karl Marx to Karl Polanyi, to show that before the Industrial Revolution, all women outside the upper classes worked. But that work was very differently structured from today. It was, for both women and men, embedded within thick social relationships, both those of the marriage and of larger society. Work naturally divided along lines of competency, with a joint effort to build the family and home. Because it is biologically dictated both by capability and their own desire, women were primarily responsible for child care, although such work was also spread across generations and within the family web. For much the same reasons, men were the public-facing head of the family. This apparent hierarchy actually implied “service and sacrifice” by men, while women in practice had enormous less-formal power, creating a natural and effective balance, sometimes tilted too far in one direction or the other, perhaps, but nonetheless a working system. None of this was exploitation, rather a continual dance calculated to lead to the best chance of individual and societal flourishing.
The Industrial Revolution, the first widespread application of technology, destroyed this partnership by exalting the market as the talisman of every man and woman’s worth. The pre-existing roles that women occupied, with honor, in pre-industrial Western society were denigrated, because they were not market-oriented. This was not only a result of technology, however, but also of the ideology that grew like a cancer during the Industrial Revolution, the so-called Enlightenment, which among other atomizing demands exalted autonomy-granting measurable economically-productive work, while denigrating the embedded work of care and community, of weaving a society together on every level.
Measurable production requires the erosion, or the abolition, of both marriage and the family, which absorb resources yet produce what cannot be measured. The vehicle for this abolition, sometimes deliberate, sometimes as a side effect, was the destruction of the long-standing and very successful partnership between men and women. Textile production, for example, which had always been the domain of women because the work could be fit around child care and other feminine work, became factory work, making children a burden and women unable to do anything else but trudge every day to the mills. As a result, women had far less agency and much more dependence on those from whom, unlike from husbands and family, they had no right to expect anything. To hide this, women were lectured that they were now free, and that their value now depended on what they measurably produced. Contrary to the myth we are fed today, most early feminists fought this reduction of women’s status, not some imaginary patriarchy. That is, industrialization called forth feminism, not because the patriarchy had oppressed women for endless ages, but because systematic oppression only arose with industrialization, and there was no need for organized feminism before that time.
Given the apparent inevitability of industrialization, a defensive reaction taking women in a new social direction emerged in the nineteenth century—“separate spheres.” This was a Band-Aid over the rupture of partnership, an attempt to preserve a feminine space. The world of Jane Austen, with women in search Mr. Right, should be understood as an attempt to ameliorate the damage of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment, not an objectively desirable social system. “Big Romance,” the idea that a woman’s goal in her youth is maximizing romantic appeal to a man with good economic prospects, is not necessary in a world of complementarity, where economic interdependence is the norm. But when the economic partnership that had been marriage largely disappeared, maintaining (or gaining) social position, or even any security, became a function of catching the right man, and then relying on him to maintain you, in order to avoid being cast to the market wolves.
This rearguard action ultimately failed, though it lived until the middle of the twentieth century, and still haunts our dreams. (The 1950s “tradwife” is merely a descendent, and just as artificial.) What ultimately destroyed this “new normal” of romantic marriage was chemical birth control. This disembedded sexuality from the marriage dance, which did not lead to freedom and joy, but commodification and the intrusion of market imperatives into every nook and cranny of how men and women interacted. It (along with its necessary handmaiden, abortion) made it possible to never be bound by unchosen bonds, until then only an aspiration of Progress Theology, and this has not led to solidarity between women and men, always the promised result of frictionless exchange, but disaster. Today, through technology advancing hand-in-hand with ideology, we have reached the logical end of Progress Theology—the treatment of women as “Meat Lego,” to be manipulated by the demands of “bio-libertarianism” in the service of ever-more atomization. Nothing must be allowed stand in the way of Progress Theology, least of all our flesh.
Thus, we now have the “Cyborg Theocracy,” which “seeks to replace embodied men and women with the tech-enabled, self-fashioning, post-human ‘person’ ”. A few wealthy women might, in fact, benefit from this, but most women, and especially mothers, are greatly harmed. And Harrington offers us an unflinching look at the modern parade of horrors. She describes how so-called emancipation has led to a hellscape of relationships, where marriage, especially marriage at any age likely to lead to fecundity, is discouraged, both directly by propaganda and by the frictionless sexual marketplace of the internet. We don’t even get Austen-esque mutual respect and affection as an ideal; we get transactions as an ideal, with self-actualization as the goal of the transaction. We are not now a low trust society as between women and men, we are a zero trust society, at least among the younger generations. We have Hobbes’s “war of all against all.”
Women get the worst of it—sure, they are encouraged to walk away the instant a relationship is not totally fulfilling them, which feels like freedom, but mostly, they just get used and then thrown away, while they pursue hypergamy and end up with nothing. To any woman or man of an earlier generation, that would be no surprise at all; the wonder is that we are surprised, because we have been hoodwinked by lying twentieth-century feminists, who promised us paradise and gave us hell. Harrington, over and over, beats the drum that women simply don’t want the same things as men, in all the areas of life that truly matter. The iron core of this book is sex role realism. Women and men are not the same and they never will be, and until we acknowledge this, nothing can change. (Harrington does not ignore men, though they are supporting players in most of her thoughts. The exception is her full-throated endorsement of single-sex groupings and activities, especially for men, who socialize in very different ways from women, and she links the destruction of men-only spaces to deaths of despair.)
The epidemic of trannies, a tsunami of mental illness, is the inevitable result of “Meat Lego Gnosticism,” with all the force of any religion, here bio-libertarianism taken to its logical end, indulging in insane fantasies such as that a tranny is indistinguishable from a biological original, rather than what it really is, a carved-up walking nightmare. The tranny triumph is partly the internet, and partly the huge money thrown at, and to be earned as the result of, tranny propaganda, but more powerfully, it is the natural end of what feminism has become, cyborg theocracy, complete with a priest class of women who “predominate within the wider ecosystem of institutions that shapes the modern moral universe.” Those women are only a subset of women, but they are the most visible subset, and they have all the power, while the costs are borne by women lower down the social and economic scale. They are the “majority-female mid-tier knowledge class.” Progress Theology seems triumphant.
What to do? Certainly not more of the same. “[T]rying to squeeze a few more drops of freedom from the rotting carcass of the industrial era is not going to help us abolish human nature.” (Sometimes, reading this book, one wishes for a conversation between Harrington and Ted Kaczynski.) Rather, we need to learn to live with who we are, who we always have been and always will be. We need to base our flourishing on reality. “[Y]ou’ve been lied to, [but] another life is possible.” Thus, we need reactionary feminism.
We shouldn’t go back to the 1950s, because that was an artificial world already poisoned. “Traditional” sex roles are in fact “industrial” sex roles. We should build a new world similar to an earlier age, where women and men “work together, in a productive household.” And, in fact, technology is not all bad; it actually makes this more possible, with work-from-home flexibility allowing freedom of location, for example. Marriage should be viewed not as romantic fulfilment, demanding emotional intensity with minimum commitment and the continual option of exit, but “an enabling condition for building a meaningful life,” with very limited option for exit. Children should be expected, desired, and celebrated. Fertility should not be an “optional extra”; the possibility of fertility is what makes sexual contact between men and women both worthwhile and exciting. This requires the rejection (and necessarily, the extreme stigmatization) of chemical birth control and abortion.
This sounds awesome—not utopian, but far, far better than what we have today. Accurately enough, Harrington does not claim there is a political solution—in fact, she specifically disclaims a discussion of political mechanics that might lead to a world of reactionary feminism. Instead, briefly, and with diffidence, she in essence calls for seizing and using power, by implication outside of current political limitations, an action which I wholeheartedly endorse. “There is very little left to conserve, but that in turn means there’s everything to build.” It sounds simple, though it won’t be. But it’ll be worth doing. A new thing, or rather a new old thing, for a new day.
The frame of this book is the arc of Harrington’s own life, from a disordered youth aiming to atomize unchosen bonds, to a grounded adulthood as a fully-fledged woman and mother. This frame makes sense, because the ultimate touchstone of reality, most of all when you are drowning in unreality, is always that which you know yourself. In her approach, Harrington is like Samuel Johnson, who when told it was impossible to refute the claim that matter did not exist, kicked a boulder and said “I refute it thus!”
Harrington’s youth was formed by something we all recognize, but to which she gives one of the pithy names that fill her book—“Progress Theology,” the idea that mankind is progressing, through adoption of principles of emancipation and egalitarianism, to an Omega Point of perfection. In pursuit of this goal, reality must and will be bent to our desires. The acolytes of Progress Theology believe that given utopia is just over the horizon, nothing can matter more than fueling the engine that will carry us to utopia—by forcing “the equal right to self-realisation.” That is, every man and woman must live in a state of total autonomic individualism, the rejection of all bonds not continuously chosen. Then, and only then, we are assured, will mankind be happy.
Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, the takeoff of the most destructive phase of Progress Theology, Harrington absorbed it all, and lived it all, as a typical modern feminist. To her, the core of feminism was Judith Butler’s enormously influential (among the powerful) and enormously corrosive (among all of us) claim, first broadcast in 1990, that both sex and gender are social constructs, infinitely moldable in pursuit of Progress. This fantasy took flight both because of the historical moment and because it coincided with the internet, where it became possible to convincingly present yourself as anybody you want, making Butler’s ludicrous rantings seem actually possible.
But none of it satisfied. All of it was fake, and led down paths ending in closed doors and darkness. The priests of Progress Theology, then and now, forbade noticing this problem, but being an independent thinker, the truth gradually dawned on Harrington. The proof is in the pudding, after all, and when she looked around, she saw that the pudding was very, very nasty. Then she married (whom, she does not say, nor describe him, which might have been interesting), and had a baby, very late and with difficulty. Her baby’s breath blew away the final mental cobwebs of feminist fantasy.
Harrington still identifies as a feminist. For her, being a feminist means “I care about women’s interests and think these are often sidelined.” That’s a very high level of generality in definition; it seems to me she, and her ideas, would be better served by using a different term, given what feminism has become. In any case, the problem for Harrington is that today Progress Theology is the chief sideliner of women. Feminism went wrong, long before Butler, when it decided to prioritize and maximize autonomy over women’s real interests. Harrington therefore demands “reactionary feminism,” meaning truly reactionary, reversing the errors introduced in the 1800s. It is not the 1950s we need back, but the 1700s.
We are offered a tour of history, and thinkers from Karl Marx to Karl Polanyi, to show that before the Industrial Revolution, all women outside the upper classes worked. But that work was very differently structured from today. It was, for both women and men, embedded within thick social relationships, both those of the marriage and of larger society. Work naturally divided along lines of competency, with a joint effort to build the family and home. Because it is biologically dictated both by capability and their own desire, women were primarily responsible for child care, although such work was also spread across generations and within the family web. For much the same reasons, men were the public-facing head of the family. This apparent hierarchy actually implied “service and sacrifice” by men, while women in practice had enormous less-formal power, creating a natural and effective balance, sometimes tilted too far in one direction or the other, perhaps, but nonetheless a working system. None of this was exploitation, rather a continual dance calculated to lead to the best chance of individual and societal flourishing.
The Industrial Revolution, the first widespread application of technology, destroyed this partnership by exalting the market as the talisman of every man and woman’s worth. The pre-existing roles that women occupied, with honor, in pre-industrial Western society were denigrated, because they were not market-oriented. This was not only a result of technology, however, but also of the ideology that grew like a cancer during the Industrial Revolution, the so-called Enlightenment, which among other atomizing demands exalted autonomy-granting measurable economically-productive work, while denigrating the embedded work of care and community, of weaving a society together on every level.
Measurable production requires the erosion, or the abolition, of both marriage and the family, which absorb resources yet produce what cannot be measured. The vehicle for this abolition, sometimes deliberate, sometimes as a side effect, was the destruction of the long-standing and very successful partnership between men and women. Textile production, for example, which had always been the domain of women because the work could be fit around child care and other feminine work, became factory work, making children a burden and women unable to do anything else but trudge every day to the mills. As a result, women had far less agency and much more dependence on those from whom, unlike from husbands and family, they had no right to expect anything. To hide this, women were lectured that they were now free, and that their value now depended on what they measurably produced. Contrary to the myth we are fed today, most early feminists fought this reduction of women’s status, not some imaginary patriarchy. That is, industrialization called forth feminism, not because the patriarchy had oppressed women for endless ages, but because systematic oppression only arose with industrialization, and there was no need for organized feminism before that time.
Given the apparent inevitability of industrialization, a defensive reaction taking women in a new social direction emerged in the nineteenth century—“separate spheres.” This was a Band-Aid over the rupture of partnership, an attempt to preserve a feminine space. The world of Jane Austen, with women in search Mr. Right, should be understood as an attempt to ameliorate the damage of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment, not an objectively desirable social system. “Big Romance,” the idea that a woman’s goal in her youth is maximizing romantic appeal to a man with good economic prospects, is not necessary in a world of complementarity, where economic interdependence is the norm. But when the economic partnership that had been marriage largely disappeared, maintaining (or gaining) social position, or even any security, became a function of catching the right man, and then relying on him to maintain you, in order to avoid being cast to the market wolves.
This rearguard action ultimately failed, though it lived until the middle of the twentieth century, and still haunts our dreams. (The 1950s “tradwife” is merely a descendent, and just as artificial.) What ultimately destroyed this “new normal” of romantic marriage was chemical birth control. This disembedded sexuality from the marriage dance, which did not lead to freedom and joy, but commodification and the intrusion of market imperatives into every nook and cranny of how men and women interacted. It (along with its necessary handmaiden, abortion) made it possible to never be bound by unchosen bonds, until then only an aspiration of Progress Theology, and this has not led to solidarity between women and men, always the promised result of frictionless exchange, but disaster. Today, through technology advancing hand-in-hand with ideology, we have reached the logical end of Progress Theology—the treatment of women as “Meat Lego,” to be manipulated by the demands of “bio-libertarianism” in the service of ever-more atomization. Nothing must be allowed stand in the way of Progress Theology, least of all our flesh.
Thus, we now have the “Cyborg Theocracy,” which “seeks to replace embodied men and women with the tech-enabled, self-fashioning, post-human ‘person’ ”. A few wealthy women might, in fact, benefit from this, but most women, and especially mothers, are greatly harmed. And Harrington offers us an unflinching look at the modern parade of horrors. She describes how so-called emancipation has led to a hellscape of relationships, where marriage, especially marriage at any age likely to lead to fecundity, is discouraged, both directly by propaganda and by the frictionless sexual marketplace of the internet. We don’t even get Austen-esque mutual respect and affection as an ideal; we get transactions as an ideal, with self-actualization as the goal of the transaction. We are not now a low trust society as between women and men, we are a zero trust society, at least among the younger generations. We have Hobbes’s “war of all against all.”
Women get the worst of it—sure, they are encouraged to walk away the instant a relationship is not totally fulfilling them, which feels like freedom, but mostly, they just get used and then thrown away, while they pursue hypergamy and end up with nothing. To any woman or man of an earlier generation, that would be no surprise at all; the wonder is that we are surprised, because we have been hoodwinked by lying twentieth-century feminists, who promised us paradise and gave us hell. Harrington, over and over, beats the drum that women simply don’t want the same things as men, in all the areas of life that truly matter. The iron core of this book is sex role realism. Women and men are not the same and they never will be, and until we acknowledge this, nothing can change. (Harrington does not ignore men, though they are supporting players in most of her thoughts. The exception is her full-throated endorsement of single-sex groupings and activities, especially for men, who socialize in very different ways from women, and she links the destruction of men-only spaces to deaths of despair.)
The epidemic of trannies, a tsunami of mental illness, is the inevitable result of “Meat Lego Gnosticism,” with all the force of any religion, here bio-libertarianism taken to its logical end, indulging in insane fantasies such as that a tranny is indistinguishable from a biological original, rather than what it really is, a carved-up walking nightmare. The tranny triumph is partly the internet, and partly the huge money thrown at, and to be earned as the result of, tranny propaganda, but more powerfully, it is the natural end of what feminism has become, cyborg theocracy, complete with a priest class of women who “predominate within the wider ecosystem of institutions that shapes the modern moral universe.” Those women are only a subset of women, but they are the most visible subset, and they have all the power, while the costs are borne by women lower down the social and economic scale. They are the “majority-female mid-tier knowledge class.” Progress Theology seems triumphant.
What to do? Certainly not more of the same. “[T]rying to squeeze a few more drops of freedom from the rotting carcass of the industrial era is not going to help us abolish human nature.” (Sometimes, reading this book, one wishes for a conversation between Harrington and Ted Kaczynski.) Rather, we need to learn to live with who we are, who we always have been and always will be. We need to base our flourishing on reality. “[Y]ou’ve been lied to, [but] another life is possible.” Thus, we need reactionary feminism.
We shouldn’t go back to the 1950s, because that was an artificial world already poisoned. “Traditional” sex roles are in fact “industrial” sex roles. We should build a new world similar to an earlier age, where women and men “work together, in a productive household.” And, in fact, technology is not all bad; it actually makes this more possible, with work-from-home flexibility allowing freedom of location, for example. Marriage should be viewed not as romantic fulfilment, demanding emotional intensity with minimum commitment and the continual option of exit, but “an enabling condition for building a meaningful life,” with very limited option for exit. Children should be expected, desired, and celebrated. Fertility should not be an “optional extra”; the possibility of fertility is what makes sexual contact between men and women both worthwhile and exciting. This requires the rejection (and necessarily, the extreme stigmatization) of chemical birth control and abortion.
This sounds awesome—not utopian, but far, far better than what we have today. Accurately enough, Harrington does not claim there is a political solution—in fact, she specifically disclaims a discussion of political mechanics that might lead to a world of reactionary feminism. Instead, briefly, and with diffidence, she in essence calls for seizing and using power, by implication outside of current political limitations, an action which I wholeheartedly endorse. “There is very little left to conserve, but that in turn means there’s everything to build.” It sounds simple, though it won’t be. But it’ll be worth doing. A new thing, or rather a new old thing, for a new day.
October 5, 2023
Harrington is a fascinating writer, who has written a densely-packed book that is full of insightful observations and connections between ideas. She persuasively argues that “progress” is no longer benefiting the majority of women. Modern feminism has increasingly benefited only a small class of professional women. Well-off white-collar women have used feminism and the digital age to advance their own economic and political interests, often at the expense of poor women.
“For men and women alike, then, the sexual revolution has not delivered in practice. Rather than grant all a marvellous new world of polymorphous sexual freedom, the surface sheen of Big Romance has served to obscure a collapse of human intimacy into the ‘marketplace’. And this hasn’t delivered freedom, or happiness, or even equality, but a mutually antagonistic caricature of those features of male and female sexed difference which persist despite our best efforts.”
“The replacement of caring with technology and process has freed women to soar – at least those with the resources to make use of it. But while women who are either childless or able to mobilise resources and technology to offload nurture are able to ‘lean in’, as former COO of Facebook Sheryl Sandberg put it, that subset of women who are mothers, and less full-throatedly committed to the atomised world of emancipation, are doing less well – much like those working-class mothers who, as Marx documented in the 19th century, dosed their babies with opiates to keep them quiet while they worked the long factory shifts needed to put food on the table.”
“We need a movement that honours the interests of women, and of men, as irreducibly sexed fusions of self and body, against an emerging order that seeks to de-sex and disembody us all. One that understands ‘progress’ is now our enemy. A reactionary feminism… if we accept where we are, and pursue instead a story of interdependence, and reconciliation, perhaps we might find another way. That also means learning to live with ourselves, including those ways in which our sex shapes who we are, how we live and what we desire… Feminism against progress, then, is anti-universalist, contextual and relational. This recovery of context and relationships begins with restoring our relationship with ourselves: that is, resisting the culture of chronic dissociation.”
Harrington goes well beyond the categories of liberal versus conservative, to incorporate the lived experience of motherhood plus the shared humanity of men and women. She argues that the returns to liberation and freedom have massively declined, and have gone negative… feminism responds to the environment of several decades ago.
“Half a century into the cyborg age, then, whether you view progress as feminist or not depends a great deal on your situation. If you’re female, childless, well educated and ambitious, or wealthy enough to outsource all of ‘care’ to underlings, then current doctrine may indeed appear ‘feminist’, in the sense of serving your interests. If you’re one of the many women who has, from Wollstonecraft onwards, viewed the women’s movement as aimed at seeking a fair settlement between the sexes – including for those women who are mothers – you may by now have some questions.”
“Side effects of this generalised desertion of interdependence in favour of freedom include widespread loneliness; abuse of the elderly and disabled in care homes; substandard childcare; family breakdown; and the well-documented disadvantage experienced by children in one-parent families, such as greater risk of poverty, reduced life chances, and adolescent mental health issues.”
“In each case, liquefaction doesn’t free us from normative, embodied patterns of behaviour or inclination. Rather, it dissolves social codes developed over millennia to manage such patterns, and reorders the still-existing patterns to the logic of the market. And while the result may sometimes benefit a subset of wealthy, high-status women in the West, the class interests of this group are increasingly at odds with those of not just many men but also the young, women with fewer resources, and women who are mothers.”
She sees the pill as the first technology of transhumanism/cyborg revolution (biomedical upgrades of the human body). Poor people’s bodies are being “mined”, for the top 1%/elite:
“The siren call of atomisation comes from everywhere, and legitimises itself in many ways: girl-power self-actualisation and embittered men’s rights activism, for example, are mirroring ideologies driving the same decline into loneliness and mutual hostility… Happily, on this front there already exists a vintage social technology we can deploy, as a first step in resisting the atomising pressures of cyborg theocracy, if we can only upcycle it for the 21st century: marriage… revisiting the pre-modern approach to what marriage is for: less personal fulfilment, or even romantic love, than an enabling condition for building a meaningful life.”
Something as powerful as feminism and the Matriarchy deserve to be analysed and criticised:
“The elite of the United States today is increasingly female dominated: women outnumber men at undergraduate level in most universities, 60 percent to 40 percent in some elite colleges. Even in the once heavily male-dominated military-industrial complex, as of 2019 four of the five biggest defence contractors – Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the defence arm of Boeing – had female CEOs. And the institutions that set and manage social and cultural norms – such as education, media, law and HR – are all increasingly female dominated. Female law students outnumber male ones two to one. Women outnumber men in journalism. Seventy-five percent of nonprofit workers in the United States are female, and the UK proportion is nearly as high, at 68 percent… And if elite progressive graduate women are in charge of shaping public morals via nonprofits and HR departments, they’re also busy doing so for the next generation in schools: here, too, 85 percent of UK primary school teachers are women, and around 65 percent of secondary school teachers.”
Male/female dichotomy and duality argues for the foundational importance of heterosexual marriage as a social institution. If being a man is so fantastic, then why are there more trans women than trans men (suggesting that more men want to become women than vice versa)?
“It’s now widely understood that women and men who marry young are impeding their own individual personal growth. Marriage is no longer a foundation and starting point for growth within interdependent family life, but tacitly treated as an obstacle to individual flourishing. This is especially the case for bourgeois women, who face sometimes intense social pressure not to marry young… In bourgeois circles, she tells me, getting married in your early twenties is widely viewed as eccentric, low-status or just outright ‘crazy’. While the culture looks askance at women like Charlotte and Lucy, it energetically lionises those who reject marriage altogether… The business press joins the chorus, with articles celebrating the fact that single, childless women now out-earn single, childless men.”
There is persuasive evidence that life outcomes for children are significantly worse (in general) when raised in a single parent family, or without a father.
“According to one 2021 study, in 1990 55 percent of American men said they had at least six close friends. By 2021 only 27 percent reported six or more close friends: half that number. Loneliness has rocketed: 15 percent of American men have no close friendships at all, a fivefold increase since 1990. This leaves many men dependent on a partner for social connection and wider friendship, which in turn leaves them desperately vulnerable if the relationship ends. Suicide is the biggest killer of UK men under 45, and 75 percent of all suicides are men. The highest risk group for suicide in the UK is male divorcees, followed by widowers. In contrast, there’s no correlation between suicide risk and marital status for women.”
I strongly believe in marriage as the social glue for binding biological mothers and biological fathers to their children. These benefits should be supported for all economic classes of families, not primarily for wealthy/well-educated parents (who are much more likely to marry and stay together). Anglo/Western culture has massively diminished the importance of heterosexual marriage as the basis for raising children, in contrast with other cultures and nationalities… Within two generations the pill became popular for contraception, no-fault divorce was introduced, de-facto relationships gained formal status, gay marriage became law, government attempted to fill the childcare gaps, economic policy focused narrowly on GDP as a targeted metric for growth, amongst many other changes. Most people agree with the direction of travel for these reforms, but the costs and benefits have been unequally distributed – the overall impact has been very detrimental to quality of life and happiness. Raising children is messy and difficult, not easy. Providing an "easy way out" from the hard work of family relationships has been disastrous for millions of children and fathers. Modern relationships are almost unrecognisable to the lifelong religious commitment of our grandparents and great great grandparents. They took it for granted that they would remain married forever, and just got on with what had to be done. That mindset served their families well.
“For men and women alike, then, the sexual revolution has not delivered in practice. Rather than grant all a marvellous new world of polymorphous sexual freedom, the surface sheen of Big Romance has served to obscure a collapse of human intimacy into the ‘marketplace’. And this hasn’t delivered freedom, or happiness, or even equality, but a mutually antagonistic caricature of those features of male and female sexed difference which persist despite our best efforts.”
“The replacement of caring with technology and process has freed women to soar – at least those with the resources to make use of it. But while women who are either childless or able to mobilise resources and technology to offload nurture are able to ‘lean in’, as former COO of Facebook Sheryl Sandberg put it, that subset of women who are mothers, and less full-throatedly committed to the atomised world of emancipation, are doing less well – much like those working-class mothers who, as Marx documented in the 19th century, dosed their babies with opiates to keep them quiet while they worked the long factory shifts needed to put food on the table.”
“We need a movement that honours the interests of women, and of men, as irreducibly sexed fusions of self and body, against an emerging order that seeks to de-sex and disembody us all. One that understands ‘progress’ is now our enemy. A reactionary feminism… if we accept where we are, and pursue instead a story of interdependence, and reconciliation, perhaps we might find another way. That also means learning to live with ourselves, including those ways in which our sex shapes who we are, how we live and what we desire… Feminism against progress, then, is anti-universalist, contextual and relational. This recovery of context and relationships begins with restoring our relationship with ourselves: that is, resisting the culture of chronic dissociation.”
Harrington goes well beyond the categories of liberal versus conservative, to incorporate the lived experience of motherhood plus the shared humanity of men and women. She argues that the returns to liberation and freedom have massively declined, and have gone negative… feminism responds to the environment of several decades ago.
“Half a century into the cyborg age, then, whether you view progress as feminist or not depends a great deal on your situation. If you’re female, childless, well educated and ambitious, or wealthy enough to outsource all of ‘care’ to underlings, then current doctrine may indeed appear ‘feminist’, in the sense of serving your interests. If you’re one of the many women who has, from Wollstonecraft onwards, viewed the women’s movement as aimed at seeking a fair settlement between the sexes – including for those women who are mothers – you may by now have some questions.”
“Side effects of this generalised desertion of interdependence in favour of freedom include widespread loneliness; abuse of the elderly and disabled in care homes; substandard childcare; family breakdown; and the well-documented disadvantage experienced by children in one-parent families, such as greater risk of poverty, reduced life chances, and adolescent mental health issues.”
“In each case, liquefaction doesn’t free us from normative, embodied patterns of behaviour or inclination. Rather, it dissolves social codes developed over millennia to manage such patterns, and reorders the still-existing patterns to the logic of the market. And while the result may sometimes benefit a subset of wealthy, high-status women in the West, the class interests of this group are increasingly at odds with those of not just many men but also the young, women with fewer resources, and women who are mothers.”
She sees the pill as the first technology of transhumanism/cyborg revolution (biomedical upgrades of the human body). Poor people’s bodies are being “mined”, for the top 1%/elite:
“The siren call of atomisation comes from everywhere, and legitimises itself in many ways: girl-power self-actualisation and embittered men’s rights activism, for example, are mirroring ideologies driving the same decline into loneliness and mutual hostility… Happily, on this front there already exists a vintage social technology we can deploy, as a first step in resisting the atomising pressures of cyborg theocracy, if we can only upcycle it for the 21st century: marriage… revisiting the pre-modern approach to what marriage is for: less personal fulfilment, or even romantic love, than an enabling condition for building a meaningful life.”
Something as powerful as feminism and the Matriarchy deserve to be analysed and criticised:
“The elite of the United States today is increasingly female dominated: women outnumber men at undergraduate level in most universities, 60 percent to 40 percent in some elite colleges. Even in the once heavily male-dominated military-industrial complex, as of 2019 four of the five biggest defence contractors – Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the defence arm of Boeing – had female CEOs. And the institutions that set and manage social and cultural norms – such as education, media, law and HR – are all increasingly female dominated. Female law students outnumber male ones two to one. Women outnumber men in journalism. Seventy-five percent of nonprofit workers in the United States are female, and the UK proportion is nearly as high, at 68 percent… And if elite progressive graduate women are in charge of shaping public morals via nonprofits and HR departments, they’re also busy doing so for the next generation in schools: here, too, 85 percent of UK primary school teachers are women, and around 65 percent of secondary school teachers.”
Male/female dichotomy and duality argues for the foundational importance of heterosexual marriage as a social institution. If being a man is so fantastic, then why are there more trans women than trans men (suggesting that more men want to become women than vice versa)?
“It’s now widely understood that women and men who marry young are impeding their own individual personal growth. Marriage is no longer a foundation and starting point for growth within interdependent family life, but tacitly treated as an obstacle to individual flourishing. This is especially the case for bourgeois women, who face sometimes intense social pressure not to marry young… In bourgeois circles, she tells me, getting married in your early twenties is widely viewed as eccentric, low-status or just outright ‘crazy’. While the culture looks askance at women like Charlotte and Lucy, it energetically lionises those who reject marriage altogether… The business press joins the chorus, with articles celebrating the fact that single, childless women now out-earn single, childless men.”
There is persuasive evidence that life outcomes for children are significantly worse (in general) when raised in a single parent family, or without a father.
“According to one 2021 study, in 1990 55 percent of American men said they had at least six close friends. By 2021 only 27 percent reported six or more close friends: half that number. Loneliness has rocketed: 15 percent of American men have no close friendships at all, a fivefold increase since 1990. This leaves many men dependent on a partner for social connection and wider friendship, which in turn leaves them desperately vulnerable if the relationship ends. Suicide is the biggest killer of UK men under 45, and 75 percent of all suicides are men. The highest risk group for suicide in the UK is male divorcees, followed by widowers. In contrast, there’s no correlation between suicide risk and marital status for women.”
I strongly believe in marriage as the social glue for binding biological mothers and biological fathers to their children. These benefits should be supported for all economic classes of families, not primarily for wealthy/well-educated parents (who are much more likely to marry and stay together). Anglo/Western culture has massively diminished the importance of heterosexual marriage as the basis for raising children, in contrast with other cultures and nationalities… Within two generations the pill became popular for contraception, no-fault divorce was introduced, de-facto relationships gained formal status, gay marriage became law, government attempted to fill the childcare gaps, economic policy focused narrowly on GDP as a targeted metric for growth, amongst many other changes. Most people agree with the direction of travel for these reforms, but the costs and benefits have been unequally distributed – the overall impact has been very detrimental to quality of life and happiness. Raising children is messy and difficult, not easy. Providing an "easy way out" from the hard work of family relationships has been disastrous for millions of children and fathers. Modern relationships are almost unrecognisable to the lifelong religious commitment of our grandparents and great great grandparents. They took it for granted that they would remain married forever, and just got on with what had to be done. That mindset served their families well.
March 12, 2023
Punchy and brave in style and content, this is a powerful manifesto for anyone horrified at the 21st century's assault on the human body. I could not recommend it more strongly.
April 21, 2023
Great analysis if the problems current feminism facaes, but the solution is wrong. Been there fone that! Never ever depend on a man!
January 1, 2024
Mary Harrington argues for a reactionary feminism that acknowledges and celebrates human nature's limits for the good of social bonds, human flourishing, and the environment. Harrington's analysis spans feminism's historical response to industrialization, the subsequent shift toward market-oriented goals, and the contemporary partnership with gender-identity ideology ("that individuals should be free to live as their preferred gender regardless of physiology"). "[T]ransgender pharmaceutical entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt...argues that the quest to master one's sexed body is merely the first step in a far greater quest to master embodiment altogether," i.e., transhumanism, the replacement of nature with bodies that can be bought and sold, like eggs, breasts, organs—(a thriving trade in India), pseudo-phalluses, and babies through surrogacy, especially for the gay and wealthy.
To illustrate the evolution in feminism, Harrington invents but does not clearly define maddening terms reminiscent of Foucault and Derrida and Mary Daly, like
*Bio-libertarianism (which “focuses on extending individual freedom and self-fashioning as far as possible, into the realm of the body,” toward the end of “self-created ‘human’ autonomy”)
*Cyborg Theocracy, "which “seeks to replace embodied men and women with the tech-enabled, self-fashioning, post-human ‘person’"
*Progress Theology, the quasi-religious "framework that governs much of modern culture in the West," whose saints, inquisitors and priestesses are the “majority-female mid-tier knowledge class,” who “have always been the guardians of moral and cultural norms,” and promote transgender and these other trends while poor women are just to be used in any way, from wombs to nannies and domestic servants
*and Meat Lego Gnosticism [and trans ideology] which sees "the physical world is evil and arbitrary and can be transcended through technology." Any change, from pregnancy prevention to renting others' wombs, eggs, sperm, and embryos (and sex and porn) can be purchased in the marketplace. The anecdotes are troubling, like the mother of a five year-old boy who wants to live as a girl who can't bear to tell him he will never become pregnant. Harrington contends that progressivism's pursuit of advancement involves dismantling natural limits, eroding social norms and bonds, replacing them with the market to commodify human attributes.
Harrington avoids easy political categorization, drawing on Marx and Engels to scrutinize the impact of industrialization. She critiques conservative narratives blaming feminism for issues that were actually shaped by societal transformations. Harrington emphasizes the need for a feminism that nurtures inherent qualities.
Irritatingly, despite all the data readily available from any number of sources like https://humanprogress.org/, Harrington truly believes we are headed for an age "characterized by more scarcity and unpredictability than perhaps the decades that have preceded us."
The proposed strategies for reactionary feminism include revitalizing marriage (Chapter 7, "Abolish Big Romance," is delightfully memorable about what marriage should be) as an interdependent, productive partnership centered in the home. Young people today may be so anxious and safety-obsessed because they were placed in daycare settings that had to protect them from all perils in order to avoid legal liability, rather than parents who will kiss a boo-boo away.
Harrington suggests that men and women need our sex-segregated spaces that women fought first to have and then to abolish—women wanted access to men's associations and spaces—and we must reintroduce sex realism in spheres where physical sex matters, like athletics, rape crisis centers, domestic abuse centers, locker rooms, restrooms, etc. Additionally, she advocates for "rewilding" sex by discarding the birth control pill. On that issue, read these two reviews: The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, which certainly makes the case that reducing the probability of pregnancy has had many negative consequences for women, not the least of which is hook-up culture, and This Is Your Brain on Birth Control: The Surprising Science of Women, Hormones, and the Law of Unintended Consequences, emphasizing a pro-embodiment and pro-desire approach. When the CDC reveals that nearly half of all pregnancies in the USA are unintended, despite all the contraceptive methods available, this proposal is simply bizarre, ingenuous, and, frankly, rather nauseating.
It's useful to consider the negative consequences of progressivism's utopian goals. She calls for a feminism that acknowledges and embraces the complexities of sex differences and human and a worldview that supports both men and women, advocates for ideals that help humans flourish (like social bonds and two-parent families) rejects the commitment of the current wave of feminism's project to deny and transcend nature and seek artificial boundless possibilities that remind one of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Harrington urges us to accept and revel in what we are instead of striving to be anything we want to be.
[aside] “[T]his modern era can be called the ‘masculine age par excellence," wrote Valerie Saiving in her ovular article, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View” (1960), a foundational critique of patriarchal religion. This article started with the understanding that “one of man’s strongest temptations is to identify his own limited perspective with universal truth” (100). She went on to state:
This book could have greatly benefited from better editing. Harrington uses the term "liquefy" scores of times, enough to make me want to use Wite-Out to cover the word and supply another. For someone not steeped in academia, this book is likely to be unreadable. To wit:
The point can be made so much more clearly thus: "Society has convinced women that they cannot find fulfillment of their potential in the role of caregiver and should instead find employment and someone else to care for their children. One of the effects of daycare is that children are made more risk-averse and desirous of safety."
It's a shame that the prose is academic and rather opaque, since there are some ideas here that merit consideration and debate, but the style and vocabulary interfere with understanding.
To illustrate the evolution in feminism, Harrington invents but does not clearly define maddening terms reminiscent of Foucault and Derrida and Mary Daly, like
*Bio-libertarianism (which “focuses on extending individual freedom and self-fashioning as far as possible, into the realm of the body,” toward the end of “self-created ‘human’ autonomy”)
*Cyborg Theocracy, "which “seeks to replace embodied men and women with the tech-enabled, self-fashioning, post-human ‘person’"
*Progress Theology, the quasi-religious "framework that governs much of modern culture in the West," whose saints, inquisitors and priestesses are the “majority-female mid-tier knowledge class,” who “have always been the guardians of moral and cultural norms,” and promote transgender and these other trends while poor women are just to be used in any way, from wombs to nannies and domestic servants
*and Meat Lego Gnosticism [and trans ideology] which sees "the physical world is evil and arbitrary and can be transcended through technology." Any change, from pregnancy prevention to renting others' wombs, eggs, sperm, and embryos (and sex and porn) can be purchased in the marketplace. The anecdotes are troubling, like the mother of a five year-old boy who wants to live as a girl who can't bear to tell him he will never become pregnant. Harrington contends that progressivism's pursuit of advancement involves dismantling natural limits, eroding social norms and bonds, replacing them with the market to commodify human attributes.
Harrington avoids easy political categorization, drawing on Marx and Engels to scrutinize the impact of industrialization. She critiques conservative narratives blaming feminism for issues that were actually shaped by societal transformations. Harrington emphasizes the need for a feminism that nurtures inherent qualities.
Irritatingly, despite all the data readily available from any number of sources like https://humanprogress.org/, Harrington truly believes we are headed for an age "characterized by more scarcity and unpredictability than perhaps the decades that have preceded us."
The proposed strategies for reactionary feminism include revitalizing marriage (Chapter 7, "Abolish Big Romance," is delightfully memorable about what marriage should be) as an interdependent, productive partnership centered in the home. Young people today may be so anxious and safety-obsessed because they were placed in daycare settings that had to protect them from all perils in order to avoid legal liability, rather than parents who will kiss a boo-boo away.
Harrington suggests that men and women need our sex-segregated spaces that women fought first to have and then to abolish—women wanted access to men's associations and spaces—and we must reintroduce sex realism in spheres where physical sex matters, like athletics, rape crisis centers, domestic abuse centers, locker rooms, restrooms, etc. Additionally, she advocates for "rewilding" sex by discarding the birth control pill. On that issue, read these two reviews: The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, which certainly makes the case that reducing the probability of pregnancy has had many negative consequences for women, not the least of which is hook-up culture, and This Is Your Brain on Birth Control: The Surprising Science of Women, Hormones, and the Law of Unintended Consequences, emphasizing a pro-embodiment and pro-desire approach. When the CDC reveals that nearly half of all pregnancies in the USA are unintended, despite all the contraceptive methods available, this proposal is simply bizarre, ingenuous, and, frankly, rather nauseating.
It's useful to consider the negative consequences of progressivism's utopian goals. She calls for a feminism that acknowledges and embraces the complexities of sex differences and human and a worldview that supports both men and women, advocates for ideals that help humans flourish (like social bonds and two-parent families) rejects the commitment of the current wave of feminism's project to deny and transcend nature and seek artificial boundless possibilities that remind one of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Harrington urges us to accept and revel in what we are instead of striving to be anything we want to be.
[aside] “[T]his modern era can be called the ‘masculine age par excellence," wrote Valerie Saiving in her ovular article, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View” (1960), a foundational critique of patriarchal religion. This article started with the understanding that “one of man’s strongest temptations is to identify his own limited perspective with universal truth” (100). She went on to state:
“[T]his modern era can be called the ‘masculine age par excellence,’ in the sense that it emphasized, encouraged, and set free precisely those aspects of human nature which are peculiarly significant to men. It placed the highest value on external achievement, on the creation of structures of matter and meaning, on self-differentiation and the separation of man from nature [and freeing sex from the threat of pregnancy]…It was a masculine era, too, in the degree to which it devalued the functions of women and children and the whole reproductive process. It thereby provoked a new restlessness in women, too.” (107).
This book could have greatly benefited from better editing. Harrington uses the term "liquefy" scores of times, enough to make me want to use Wite-Out to cover the word and supply another. For someone not steeped in academia, this book is likely to be unreadable. To wit:
"That is: as women have joined men in embracing the Rousseauian vision of autonomous personhood, and rejecting caring obligations as an obstacle to individual self-realization, so in turn care has been institutionalized, proceduralized, and depersonalized—all the way down to infancy. In the wake of this shift, a generation has grown up that regards the suffocating 'care' of a risk-averse, third-party pseudoparent not as the enemy of their individual flourishing, but as its enabling condition" (127).
The point can be made so much more clearly thus: "Society has convinced women that they cannot find fulfillment of their potential in the role of caregiver and should instead find employment and someone else to care for their children. One of the effects of daycare is that children are made more risk-averse and desirous of safety."
It's a shame that the prose is academic and rather opaque, since there are some ideas here that merit consideration and debate, but the style and vocabulary interfere with understanding.
July 11, 2023
A thought-provoking book. Here is one, perhaps unoriginal, thought that I had while reading it. Ideas have to be understood in their socio-historical and cultural context. In our industrialised technologically-advanced society, the traditional roles of men and women, which were originally a product of biological differences, have changed. Men’s work is no longer characterised predominantly by physical labour, and women’s work is increasingly out of the home and away from the children (who now tend to be reared in a more formal setting). That is, the work we do and the lives we live are less dependent on our biological condition. This change of cultural context has forced men and women to think about their bodies less in terms of function and more in terms of aesthetics. This has resulted in insufficient attention being paid to our genuine sexual differences. Accordingly, it is unsurprising that there’s been a significant increase in ‘gender-dysphoria’ and confusion over the concepts of sex and gender.
March 11, 2024
The only reason I finished this book was in order to give a 1 star review. The author went completely off the rails and I saw the transphobic rant coming from a mile away.
On the plus side, the book made a great conversation topic on my holidays where I kept complaining about the author singlehandedly deciding that no one should be allowed to use contraceptives because she really loves her (wanted) child.
On the plus side, the book made a great conversation topic on my holidays where I kept complaining about the author singlehandedly deciding that no one should be allowed to use contraceptives because she really loves her (wanted) child.
September 17, 2023
This book is a tragic example of the self inflicted hatred women have for themselves and each other. I read a chapter and was astonished at just how little care she seemed to have for those different to her. This one went right into the trash.
#feminismisgreat #translivesmatter
#feminismisgreat #translivesmatter
May 21, 2023
I just finished reading Mary Harrington's new book, 'Feminism Against Progress'. I forget exactly when I first came across her writing but it was immediately clear to me that she was not just another cultural commentator. She was willing to say things that were at odds with prevailing orthodoxies and she was clearly well-read. Plus she had a snappy style about her prose that I really liked. Having learned a little bit more about her in subsequent years, I see now why she had these qualities. She was educated at Oxford, went deep into queer theory in abstract and personal ways throughout her 20's, and was then radically re-oriented by her experience of motherhood in her 30's. She is one of those modern writers who has been through the swamp of post-modern ideology and emerged the other side sounding a little bit like a conservative. Well, that's the slur typically deployed against such people; the once-faithful adherents who have abandoned the progressive enclave.
One of the most memorable phrases Harrington uses in her writing is that of meat lego gnosticism. Now that's a phrase that needs a bit of unpacking the first time you hear it, sort of like moralistictherapeutic deism. "Say what now?" Harrington argues that the logic of the current iteration of feminism is leading our society into a tech-enabled dystopia of meat lego Gnosticism: 'meat lego' because we are talking about human bodies that are "liberated" from the biological constraints of gender and sexed differences, and fundamentally reduced to collections of exchangeable parts. And 'Gnosticism' because that ancient (and ever-present) heresy rejected the created goodness of embodied existence and made the internal (or spiritual) self the ultimate authority. So whatever I feel myself to be internally is the north star by which all other considerations are guided.
The myth of progress sold to us centers around the idea that ever greater freedom equals ever greater progress. We have equated those two concepts: freedom & progress. Therefore autonomy is prized over responsibility, and constraints are by definition to be resisted. But having achieved historically unprecedented levels of freedom and opportunity already, the modern woman is faced with the uncomfortable reality that women are not really any happier for all their gains. This is one of the book's strengths: cataloguing all the ways in which a deep malaise haunts men and women who are beholden to this view of freedom-as-progress. So that leaves many in our culture facing the following choice. Either the fundamental promise of liberation was wrong or we just haven't broken through enough constraints and inequalities to usher in the golden age. Folks on "the right side of history" (as they see it) are convinced it's the latter, while Mary Harrington makes the case - rather persuasively to my mind - that it's the former.
There are many other things to commend about this book and Harrington's other writing in general (typically at the website UnHerd, where she is a regular contributor). She is not a conservative Christian like me, but it is precisely due to this difference of theological and cultural location that her particular insights shine brightly. She sees things differently, comes at them from different angles, and has read entirely different kinds of books. Yet I recognize in her that glimmer of common sense, of seeing the world rightly, of following the evidence when it collides with cherished beliefs, and pursuing truth at the expense of cultural capital among the bien pensants.
This book is precisely the thing to give that person in your life who has bought into all the mottos and slogans of modern feminism. This is not a conservative diatribe against feminism. Those books have their place, though usually not in convincing feminists to rethink their ideas. But this book, written from inside the feminist framework, can accomplish exactly that. And as our world hurtles ever on towards the dystopia of tech-enabled bio-libertarian meat lego gnosticism, Mary Harrington will be a thinker who will help us all to think carefully about the choices we face.
As she points out in this book, the greatest thing we may have to fight for in the coming decades is the right to remain fully and truly human.
One of the most memorable phrases Harrington uses in her writing is that of meat lego gnosticism. Now that's a phrase that needs a bit of unpacking the first time you hear it, sort of like moralistictherapeutic deism. "Say what now?" Harrington argues that the logic of the current iteration of feminism is leading our society into a tech-enabled dystopia of meat lego Gnosticism: 'meat lego' because we are talking about human bodies that are "liberated" from the biological constraints of gender and sexed differences, and fundamentally reduced to collections of exchangeable parts. And 'Gnosticism' because that ancient (and ever-present) heresy rejected the created goodness of embodied existence and made the internal (or spiritual) self the ultimate authority. So whatever I feel myself to be internally is the north star by which all other considerations are guided.
The myth of progress sold to us centers around the idea that ever greater freedom equals ever greater progress. We have equated those two concepts: freedom & progress. Therefore autonomy is prized over responsibility, and constraints are by definition to be resisted. But having achieved historically unprecedented levels of freedom and opportunity already, the modern woman is faced with the uncomfortable reality that women are not really any happier for all their gains. This is one of the book's strengths: cataloguing all the ways in which a deep malaise haunts men and women who are beholden to this view of freedom-as-progress. So that leaves many in our culture facing the following choice. Either the fundamental promise of liberation was wrong or we just haven't broken through enough constraints and inequalities to usher in the golden age. Folks on "the right side of history" (as they see it) are convinced it's the latter, while Mary Harrington makes the case - rather persuasively to my mind - that it's the former.
There are many other things to commend about this book and Harrington's other writing in general (typically at the website UnHerd, where she is a regular contributor). She is not a conservative Christian like me, but it is precisely due to this difference of theological and cultural location that her particular insights shine brightly. She sees things differently, comes at them from different angles, and has read entirely different kinds of books. Yet I recognize in her that glimmer of common sense, of seeing the world rightly, of following the evidence when it collides with cherished beliefs, and pursuing truth at the expense of cultural capital among the bien pensants.
This book is precisely the thing to give that person in your life who has bought into all the mottos and slogans of modern feminism. This is not a conservative diatribe against feminism. Those books have their place, though usually not in convincing feminists to rethink their ideas. But this book, written from inside the feminist framework, can accomplish exactly that. And as our world hurtles ever on towards the dystopia of tech-enabled bio-libertarian meat lego gnosticism, Mary Harrington will be a thinker who will help us all to think carefully about the choices we face.
As she points out in this book, the greatest thing we may have to fight for in the coming decades is the right to remain fully and truly human.
November 26, 2023
This has been The Best Feminist Book that I have ever read, the best "essay" I have read, perhaps up there with The Second Sex. Those books definitely bookmark my deep understanding of relations between the sexes and why and how they must be transformed.
Not to safeguard women's interests, as if women's interests could be safeguarded or pursued in a world in which men's interests were entirely sidelined, ignored, or made irrelevant (spoiler: they cannot. Men won't put up with it and they're half the population, AND they're physically stronger. Besides, only lesbian separatists would be able to "enjoy" a world in which men and women's living spheres were completely isolated from one another, and their utopias would end in the one generation, because as lesbian separatists, they would NOT stick sperm into their bodies to have babies, and if they got male babies, they would have to kick them out of the communities at 16 or 18, so, no, in real life, lesbian separatist communities are fine for the present members but cannot serve as a model for feminist society. Feminism cannot bring the end of humanity, nor can it enforce lesbonormativity as a substitute of heteronormativity). Nor to "liberate" women from the biological constraints imposed upon us (spoiler: we are NOT more constrained than men, we are constrained differently. Men are interpersonally stupider, that is a pretty meaningful and significant constraint and it makes me think that they got the short end of the stick, if there is one; not having babies is also getting the short end of the stick, in my view. As sexually dimorphic mammals, humans are complementary in their reproductive roles, and our bodies are designed to and constrained by these roles. The fact that what females can typically do that men cannot typically--or ever--do (grow babies inside them; breastfeed babies; have more empathy and a more well-developed theory of mind; in puberty develop a keen awareness of social relations that encompass both males [potential mates] and females... and all that these female-typical traits/behaviors entail] has been DEPRECIATED, cast as limits, or patriarchal/fundamentalist religious constructs, choices we should avoid if we are to be more modern and more self-fulfilled and more free, is, and has always been, to me, the ULTIMATE TRIUMP OF MISOGYNY. Why else would our societies prize jumping higher, running faster, having more upper-body strength, and having an easier time understanding how to make machines work over making relationships work, over those other things? Hello!??! Why are male bodies regarded as unconstrained, because they cannot have periods and babies and have simpler endocrine systems, and female bodies are regarded as constrained? Personally, I think having erections when you don't want to is a pretty disgusting constraint. Having to force yourself to override your sex drive with reason, is a pretty horrible constraint. But no, the male body has been sold as the ideal, and male-typical traits as human, reasonable and better, and male interests as true interests of the rational human.
And in come Mary Harrington and says, f*ck that sh*t, humans come in two sexes (yes, two. Having disorders of sexual development does not make a person an alien, it just makes them a person with an atypical sexual development and atypical sexual characteristics), and each of these sexed bodies has a set of traits associated with reproduction, and British society at least has a history of having based our relations in a different way, in which women were not in the private domestic sphere doing only reproductive work and men in the public sphere doing only productive work. That tendency has a historical, not a natural origin, and we can build a society in which we recover that complementarity (made up word i know).
And she goes about explaining why she thinks this, what she sees around us that is making us all insane, and I cannot do her justice here and I am not going to summarize the book, I am just so glad to have found a Feminism that I can ascribe to. A feminism that does not regard the female body and its functions as constraints to be overcome but as... as life. Nobody is born into the wrong body, and our female bodies are not to be "overcome", but to be. To live in them.
Thanks so much, Ms. Harrington.
Not to safeguard women's interests, as if women's interests could be safeguarded or pursued in a world in which men's interests were entirely sidelined, ignored, or made irrelevant (spoiler: they cannot. Men won't put up with it and they're half the population, AND they're physically stronger. Besides, only lesbian separatists would be able to "enjoy" a world in which men and women's living spheres were completely isolated from one another, and their utopias would end in the one generation, because as lesbian separatists, they would NOT stick sperm into their bodies to have babies, and if they got male babies, they would have to kick them out of the communities at 16 or 18, so, no, in real life, lesbian separatist communities are fine for the present members but cannot serve as a model for feminist society. Feminism cannot bring the end of humanity, nor can it enforce lesbonormativity as a substitute of heteronormativity). Nor to "liberate" women from the biological constraints imposed upon us (spoiler: we are NOT more constrained than men, we are constrained differently. Men are interpersonally stupider, that is a pretty meaningful and significant constraint and it makes me think that they got the short end of the stick, if there is one; not having babies is also getting the short end of the stick, in my view. As sexually dimorphic mammals, humans are complementary in their reproductive roles, and our bodies are designed to and constrained by these roles. The fact that what females can typically do that men cannot typically--or ever--do (grow babies inside them; breastfeed babies; have more empathy and a more well-developed theory of mind; in puberty develop a keen awareness of social relations that encompass both males [potential mates] and females... and all that these female-typical traits/behaviors entail] has been DEPRECIATED, cast as limits, or patriarchal/fundamentalist religious constructs, choices we should avoid if we are to be more modern and more self-fulfilled and more free, is, and has always been, to me, the ULTIMATE TRIUMP OF MISOGYNY. Why else would our societies prize jumping higher, running faster, having more upper-body strength, and having an easier time understanding how to make machines work over making relationships work, over those other things? Hello!??! Why are male bodies regarded as unconstrained, because they cannot have periods and babies and have simpler endocrine systems, and female bodies are regarded as constrained? Personally, I think having erections when you don't want to is a pretty disgusting constraint. Having to force yourself to override your sex drive with reason, is a pretty horrible constraint. But no, the male body has been sold as the ideal, and male-typical traits as human, reasonable and better, and male interests as true interests of the rational human.
And in come Mary Harrington and says, f*ck that sh*t, humans come in two sexes (yes, two. Having disorders of sexual development does not make a person an alien, it just makes them a person with an atypical sexual development and atypical sexual characteristics), and each of these sexed bodies has a set of traits associated with reproduction, and British society at least has a history of having based our relations in a different way, in which women were not in the private domestic sphere doing only reproductive work and men in the public sphere doing only productive work. That tendency has a historical, not a natural origin, and we can build a society in which we recover that complementarity (made up word i know).
And she goes about explaining why she thinks this, what she sees around us that is making us all insane, and I cannot do her justice here and I am not going to summarize the book, I am just so glad to have found a Feminism that I can ascribe to. A feminism that does not regard the female body and its functions as constraints to be overcome but as... as life. Nobody is born into the wrong body, and our female bodies are not to be "overcome", but to be. To live in them.
Thanks so much, Ms. Harrington.
June 21, 2023
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book - and how meaningful it ended up being for me. I picked it up because I heard the author on the Andrew Klavan podcast a few months ago, and her point of view was interesting, if a bit scattered in conversation. I wanted to hear her out in full.
I have never considered myself a feminist. I'm a woman who loves being a woman, loves men qua men, has no beef with the opposite sex, and tends not to care about so-called systems of power imbalance or any of that stuff. I like making a home for my family, have never felt conflicted about doing so, and, as a general matter, think women tend to bitch, moan, and complain far too much when they should get on with living their best lives. I know Mary Harrington considers herself to be a feminist - that is, she is concerned with the role and sphere of women per se within the context of socio-political-economic reality. OK, that's fine. Though it has never been an interest of mine (I am far more concerned about the cultural and psychological crap show we load onto children - the worst of it often coming from the worst inclinations of modern feminism), I suppose she can ponder what she pleases.
Ah, but Ms. Harrington is a reactionary feminist, and that is a whole different kettle of fish!
As a reactionary feminist, Ms. Harrington rails against the last century's soul-sucking promotion in the West of social atomization (the primacy of individual fulfillment as the telos of life) and argues for societal interdependency and marriage as the cornerstone of that interdependency, rather than a capstone accomplishment. She argues for an embodied experience of our sex in life and work - acknowledging that this means that men and women will have different ways of being in the world and the fundamental goodness of those differences. She champions children's rights to their natural mothers and fathers and thinks through ways that families first and then society can rally around to support those rights.
Ms. Harrington writes from a new and interesting perspective about the ways that industrialization removed many women from their historical place as true helpmeets in the family home (think here of the Medieval peasant wife who tended the home and livestock while watching the children, preparing the meals, and often finding a small industry to bring income as well while her husband worked the fields), and points to a concept she calls "Big Romance" that came to fill the void in the 18th century (men had economic access and women had access to sex and their coming together was a companionate match wherein both had something to gain). She then brilliantly moves into the 20th century where Big Romance's stability fell apart due to the sexual revolution and ready access to birth control, which made marriage less meaningful in the lives of young adults and the implications of sexual difference between men and women a roadblock to individual fulfillment rather than an exciting mystery.
The writing style throughout is both sophisticated and highly readable - breezy in parts and slyly humorous, too (which you'd expect from a Brit). The personal story she weaves into her larger arguments and research are fascinating. Hers was a long journey from a university student so steeped in critical and queer theory that she remarked to a friend that she "experienced the 'dreaming spires' as 'barbed penises straining to f*** the sky'" (p. 6) to a reactionary feminist - still concerned about the rights, roles, and responsibilities of women - who is a happy mum and wife and creative agent in the world. Happiness is highly reactionary nowadays, when the cultural current swirls in rapids of discontent, complaints, and general grousing.
There is so much here in this book, and it is well worth a read and consideration. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
I have never considered myself a feminist. I'm a woman who loves being a woman, loves men qua men, has no beef with the opposite sex, and tends not to care about so-called systems of power imbalance or any of that stuff. I like making a home for my family, have never felt conflicted about doing so, and, as a general matter, think women tend to bitch, moan, and complain far too much when they should get on with living their best lives. I know Mary Harrington considers herself to be a feminist - that is, she is concerned with the role and sphere of women per se within the context of socio-political-economic reality. OK, that's fine. Though it has never been an interest of mine (I am far more concerned about the cultural and psychological crap show we load onto children - the worst of it often coming from the worst inclinations of modern feminism), I suppose she can ponder what she pleases.
Ah, but Ms. Harrington is a reactionary feminist, and that is a whole different kettle of fish!
As a reactionary feminist, Ms. Harrington rails against the last century's soul-sucking promotion in the West of social atomization (the primacy of individual fulfillment as the telos of life) and argues for societal interdependency and marriage as the cornerstone of that interdependency, rather than a capstone accomplishment. She argues for an embodied experience of our sex in life and work - acknowledging that this means that men and women will have different ways of being in the world and the fundamental goodness of those differences. She champions children's rights to their natural mothers and fathers and thinks through ways that families first and then society can rally around to support those rights.
Ms. Harrington writes from a new and interesting perspective about the ways that industrialization removed many women from their historical place as true helpmeets in the family home (think here of the Medieval peasant wife who tended the home and livestock while watching the children, preparing the meals, and often finding a small industry to bring income as well while her husband worked the fields), and points to a concept she calls "Big Romance" that came to fill the void in the 18th century (men had economic access and women had access to sex and their coming together was a companionate match wherein both had something to gain). She then brilliantly moves into the 20th century where Big Romance's stability fell apart due to the sexual revolution and ready access to birth control, which made marriage less meaningful in the lives of young adults and the implications of sexual difference between men and women a roadblock to individual fulfillment rather than an exciting mystery.
The writing style throughout is both sophisticated and highly readable - breezy in parts and slyly humorous, too (which you'd expect from a Brit). The personal story she weaves into her larger arguments and research are fascinating. Hers was a long journey from a university student so steeped in critical and queer theory that she remarked to a friend that she "experienced the 'dreaming spires' as 'barbed penises straining to f*** the sky'" (p. 6) to a reactionary feminist - still concerned about the rights, roles, and responsibilities of women - who is a happy mum and wife and creative agent in the world. Happiness is highly reactionary nowadays, when the cultural current swirls in rapids of discontent, complaints, and general grousing.
There is so much here in this book, and it is well worth a read and consideration. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
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