Mary Harrington joins the podcast to discuss her new book Feminism Against Progress, in which she makes the case that modern feminism increasingly benefits only a small class of professional women. We not only unpack that premise but also detail how the digital age has changed life for women. Is technology really helping us, or is it disregarding natural limits and sex differences?
Mary Harrington, a self-described “reactionary feminist,” is the author of the book Feminism Against Progress. She is a contributing editor at UnHerd and writes a weekly Substack, Reactionary Feminist, on culture and politics in the cyborg era. She was born in the United Kingdom and graduated from Oxford University in 2002. Her work quickly drew attention from the UK’s Unherd, and she has since appeared in First Things, American Affairs, the New York Post, The Spectator, the New Statesman, The Times of London, and the Daily Mail.
TRANSCRIPT
Beverly Hallberg:
And welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg. And on today’s episode, we have author Mary Harrington with us to discuss her new book, “Feminism Against Progress,” in which she makes the case that modern feminism increasingly benefits only a small class of professional women. We’ll not only unpack the premise of that, but also detail how the digital age has changed life for women. Is technology really helping us or is it erasing natural limits and sex differences? Mary Harrington is a self-described reactionary feminist and again, she is the author of the new book, “Feminism Against Progress,” which comes out April 25th. You can find it on Amazon or any other place you buy your books. And a little bit more information, she is a contributing editor at Unheard and writes a weekly Substack called “Reactionary Feminists on Culture and Politics and the Cyborg Era.” And it is such a pleasure to have you on She Thinks today, Mary. Thank you for joining us, especially since it’s very late there in the UK, so we appreciate your time.
Mary Harrington:
Thank you for having me.
Beverly Hallberg:
The first question I have for you is for you to define the term reactionary feminist for us. This is how you define yourself. What do you mean by that?
Mary Harrington:
Do you know, it started as a joke? It started as a signal scrambler. Well, actually, it started as a long-running argument with a great friend. I used to call myself a post-liberal feminist, and he slid into my DMs one day to say post-liberal doesn’t mean anything, it has no content. You should call yourself a reactionary. We had a huge long argument about it and in the end, I conceded. I was like, okay, you win. But I didn’t tell him that. I just changed my Twitter bio to reactionary feminist just to see how long it would take him to notice. I think it took about three days. Anyway, after that, First Things wrote to me to say, “reactionary feminist, that’s kind of interesting. What do you mean by that? Would you like to write something?” And then I had to figure out what I meant by it.
Beverly Hallberg:
And so what did you come up with? What do you mean by it, other than-
Mary Harrington:
What do I mean by it? It’s very simply, very simply, the short version of it is it’s what a feminist looks like if you don’t believe in progress. It’s what it looks like if you still think women’s interests sometimes need defending as distinct from those of men, but you don’t believe in progress and you don’t believe in the progressive program, which I guess is where I found myself. Having experimented at length with the progressive program in my own personal life, I came to the conclusion that it was not delivering for me, certainly, and I don’t think it’s delivering for the world generally. But if I don’t believe in progress and I don’t believe in the progressive program, does that mean I’m not allowed to be a feminist? And I was like, no, this doesn’t work, because I still care about women’s interests and I still think they need defending as distinct from men’s sometimes. So what does it look like to be a feminist if you don’t believe in progress? And the very long answer to that question is the book, which comes out next week.
Beverly Hallberg:
And there’s so much to unpack there.
Mary Harrington:
But in the very short term, sorry, go on.
Beverly Hallberg:
No, one of the things I just want to unpack a little bit with that term, reactionary feminist, is I do think that a lot of women find themselves in the position that you found yourself in, which is, well, I’m thankful that we do have equal rights in many areas, especially for single women, that I can provide for myself, that I don’t necessarily have to be married in order to provide, but that doesn’t mean I dislike men or don’t want to get married or don’t want to have kids. And so I think there are a lot of women who fit into this camp. IWF, of course, is a reflection of that, that women can be many things. You don’t have to be just this box that feminists want to put you in. And so I hope you could unpack a little bit your journey, you just mentioned it there, that you had a change of mind, because you didn’t fit this mold. When did you first call yourself a feminist and how did the change happen?
Mary Harrington:
Well, I guess I’ve read feminist theory since I was in my early teens. Actually, I told the story in the book, and it was a real moment for me when I sort of got to my, I suppose, to my early teens, and I realized that every day when we sat down for a meal, my mom would set the table and we’d all eat, and then my dad would get up and just leave the table and leave the dishes on the table for her to clear up. And after a certain age, I noticed that my brothers would get up and leave the table and leave her to clear up their dishes as well. And I remember really wrestling with the dilemma of what I should do, because on the one hand, this seemed unfair to me that she should be clearing up the dishes, having done everything else, and I felt I should show solidarity and support.
But then I thought, in fact implicitly, the statement that my brothers and my dad were making were this is beneath me or we’re not required to do this simple chore in the house. And given that I’d felt that my status ought to be equal to theirs in the house, ought I not to get up and leave the table and leave the dishes for my mom to clear up? But then if I did that, then what did that say about what my role would be like if and when I ever became a mother myself? And what did that say about how I saw women and what did that imply about how I would then perceive myself? It was a really thorny dilemma and it’s the kind of thing that a tortured teenager is going to spend a lot of time ruminating over, especially if you’re a ruminator like I am.
But that was the dilemma, which I still don’t really have an answer to, which started my lifelong interest in feminism and started me reading feminist theory. I got hold of somewhere in a secondhand bookshop, a copy of “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir, and read that in my room and sort of got angrier and angrier. I mean, I’m at a point now where I question a great deal of what Simone de Beauvoir said and thought, and I’ve argued against her about a few points in the book, but it was my entry point into a whole field of women who’d done their best to think and wrestle with these questions, some of which really don’t have very easy answers.
And how did I fall off the wagon with liberal feminism? Probably, I mean, it’s a very long story, but the thing that really pushed me off the wagon for good was having a baby, and realizing that the liberal atomized ideal subject is just not compatible with being a mum to a baby. Because you don’t want to be atomized when you have a small child to look after. You grow a child in your actual entrails and they’re not quite a separate person to you for a very long time. And then they’re born and they still don’t feel very completely separate to you. I mean, I remember I used to routinely wake up in the night just before my daughter woke up needing a feed, and I don’t know how I knew, I just did. I call it the mum Bluetooth. I know mums, breastfeeding mums who would experience a milk letdown even if they were several miles away from their hungry child.
And I don’t know how that works, but it’s a recognized phenomenon. There are all sorts of, very subtle interconnections between a mother and a baby, which just give the lie to this sort of Rousseau-esque fantasy that we’re separate by default, and the only connections or obligations or bonds that we should feel obliged to embrace are the ones that we’ve chosen. That doesn’t compute if you’re a mum. It makes no sense at all. And that left me having to re-examine my entire philosophical paradigm. As you can see, I get stuck with having to think things all the way through. And I was thinking, well, does this mean that I have to agree with Rousseau, that women just need to be excluded altogether from the ideal liberal subject? Because he really did say the quiet part out loud. He was just like, yeah, no, men can be all of this stuff.
Women should just be compliant, charming, support humans who bear the babies and raise the children. And apart from that, they don’t get to play. And he’s kind of right. If your paradigm for what a person should be is radically atomized by default and only accepts bonds and obligations on an opt-in basis, then that categorically excludes mothers. It excludes women except to the extent that we’re willing to suppress our distinctive female reproductive role. And that really is the entry point into a critique I hear often from the right about the feminist movement, which says, oh, feminists just want women to be more like men. And it’s kind of true. If you’re drinking the Rousseau-esque liberal Kool-Aid, then it has to be, because there’s no other way to be that, other than just to erase or abolish or otherwise minimize your reproductive role.
I dissent from that. I sat and thought about all of this and I thought, well, I’m either going to have to abandon liberalism or I’m going to have to abandon feminism because obviously, the two don’t really work together. At least not if I want to be a mum. And I think of the two, I think I’d prefer to retain feminism. I just have to rethink what it means to be a feminist, if I’m rejecting the liberal paradigm for what people are and how people can flourish. And so I said about thinking through what that could look like, and landed somewhere, I guess, much more realist about who and what we are as humans in an embodied way and in our distinctively dimorphic ways as men and women.
Beverly Hallberg:
And there’s so much that feeds into this these days, because it’s also what we’re dealing with with the transgender issue. And you will hear a man who identifies as a female saying that they can have kids too, or trans women can have kids as well, even though it’s a biological man. And I think that this idea of childbearing, obviously, is so intrinsically tied to women, and I would think that most feminists would be offended and upset by this. Are you surprised the feminist movement, so-called modern feminist movement, hasn’t spoken out more against what we see in the trans movement?
Mary Harrington:
Well, what I would emphasize at this point is that the situation’s quite different in America to what it is in the United Kingdom, where the pushback against gender ideology has come loud and clear from a fairly well-established network of radical feminists who have been at the forefront of pushing back. And I don’t understand why America doesn’t seem to have radical feminists like the British ones, but the situation just seems to be different. And the mode of feminism, which appears, from my observation, to predominate in the United States, seems to be very, very much one which is fully on board with the liberal paradigm and the liberal project of individual emancipation at all costs and in all areas, including from all of the constraints of our bodies. And in “Feminism Against Progress,” I’ve set out, well, I’ve drawn a straight line from the origin point of entry, the point at which that strand of feminism became dominant, which was in the 1960s, during the sexual revolution.
And I’ve set out to show that really, there was much more of a back and forth between what I suppose we could call sex realist feminists, who wanted to defend women as mothers and women as embodied sex creatures and to assert our equal dignity and standing with men in positive relationships, the equal dignity of both, but not necessarily the identical behavior and preferences and inclinations of both. And in particular, asserted the importance of areas of activity which had historically always been female, the sphere of the domestic, the importance of motherhood, and so on and so forth. And this is very much, today, that doesn’t read as feminism. The modern feminist historiographers will tell you that that was just patriarchal false consciousness, and these women were just pumping out propaganda for male supremacy. But this is just not true in the context of where they were.
And in their historical context, they were straightforwardly making feminist arguments in defense of motherhood and under the circumstances of the industrial revolution. But what changed, and on the other side of the ledger, you saw the feminists of freedom who were saying, well, being a mum and being a woman is all very well, but I want to go and get a job, and I don’t want people to treat me differently in that because I’m female rather than male. And so these were women who were making, under the circumstances, equally justified case for women’s entry into the market on the same terms as men. And both of these, both of them had a measure of justice, and both of them had good cause to make the arguments that they did. And between them, they made for a very rich political argument, which it was women’s specific response to the way life changed over the course of the industrial revolution.
But in my view, the sexual revolution was not the beginning of feminism, it was the end of that feminism. It killed that feminism stone dead, because the feminists during the sexual revolution, the feminism of freedom won. It won the argument, where previously, there’d been a back and forth between the women who wanted to defend women as mothers and as our distinctive embodied selves. The feminists of freedom who just wanted all people to be interchangeably, indistinguishably human were the ones who won the battle. And they did so via another technological change, which was the arrival of legal birth control and subsequently of abortion. And I mean, people of good faith differ on the rights and wrongs of legal abortion, but I think wherever you stand on fetal personhood and so on, it’s difficult to disagree that it’s about the strongest statement you could make in favor of freedom over your obligation to a dependent other, to say, my freedom is so important that I can choose to sacrifice a life that depends utterly on my physical body, in order to defend that freedom.
And I’ve drawn from Erika Bachiochi, who wrote a wonderful book about the legal history of how we got to that point, the rights of women reclaiming a lost legacy. And she makes the case for a lost feminism. And I’ve drawn from her argument, really, to make the point that this was where one vision of feminism comprehensively triumphed over the other. And when the right, in particular, critiques feminism, what they’re talking about is the feminism of freedom, and mostly the feminism of care, the feminism of motherhood, and sex realism has just been memory-holed, or it’s been canceled. It just doesn’t exist anymore in the history books and it’s not even taught.
Beverly Hallberg:
And so I want to-
Mary Harrington:
These things just don’t …
Beverly Hallberg:
And ask something about that, because I think you make an important distinction, because I think most women would say that there have been many positive changes for women in the past decades when it comes to, let’s say, work, the ability to work, to be treated equally in the workplace, let’s say. But where feminism went wrong was to say that men and women are exactly the same and that there are no differences whatsoever. And the women who embrace that, this freedom, to try to free themselves with what makes them uniquely female, the ability to have children, was in many ways, a huge cost and a huge trade-off. You talk about this in the book. You can’t have freedom without some type of element that you’re trading off. I want to talk a little bit more about that freedom. I’m sure women, many women, still think and did think at that time that birth control was great, because it didn’t tie them to having children without a man that was going to help them. In your opinion, how has the pill been something that has brought a trade-off that hasn’t benefited women?
Mary Harrington:
Well, this is a very incredibly complicated picture, because it’s indisputably the case that the pill brought a huge dividend of freedom, as you said, certainly for ambitious middle-class women who had visions of what they wanted to do with their lives. Being able to control fertility was obviously a huge plus. And with the arrival of the pill, you see women entering universities and pursuing higher education in suddenly burgeoning numbers. You see women entering the workplace.
Because straightforwardly, those women who wanted to pursue activities other than motherhood were suddenly in a position where they could plan, which just wasn’t the case before. You either had to be extraordinarily self-disciplined or you had to be willing to abandon whatever it was you were doing at the drop of a hat, because you’d become pregnant and then there were obligations attendant on that and so on. And so there was a huge amount of freedom that came with the arrival of the pill. But the difficulty is everything else that came with the pill, and in particular, what came with that freedom was the entry of commerce into new areas where it had just simply not been allowed to tread before.
Just to see if I can illustrate this a little bit more, prior to the pill, women’s sexuality had not been women’s private business. It just wasn’t thinkable to imagine that my body was purely my own business. Because if there’s a meaningful risk of pregnancy, then everybody around me really does have skin in the game in who I have sex with, because otherwise, everybody else in my village or my small town or in my community is going to have to decide what happens to the baby. So inevitably, under those circumstances, you end up with an immensely complex moral code that manages human sexuality, and that’s particularly stringent in the way it controls women’s sexuality, because women are the ones with the material risk of getting pregnant. When the pill came along, all of that disappeared. Not quite overnight.
It took a couple of decades to disappear substantially. But in effect, it became thinkable for the first time that who I chose to have sex with really was my business and nobody else’s, and in a way that just wasn’t imaginable for women before. But the thing about my body being only mine and nobody else having a stake in what I do with it, is that if I own something, I can do what I like with it, and including buying and selling it. So along with the immense opportunities that the legal contraception afforded to women, we also saw a libertarian defense of the sex industry. And it’s not a coincidence at all that less than a decade after the arrival of the pill, radical feminists were protesting against the proliferation of pornography. By [inaudible], there were demonstrations across the country over how grotesque and degrading and pervasive pornography already was, within a decade. And this is forwardly downstream of the pill. I have a horrible feeling my AirPods have just died. Can you still hear me?
Beverly Hallberg:
Oh, no. Can you hear me? Hello?
Mary Harrington:
Yeah. I can still hear you.
Beverly Hallberg:
Let me go ahead and ask you this question, because this is one of the main premises of the book, which does tie into what you were just saying there, which is you make this case that modern feminism increasingly benefits only a small class of professional women. What do you mean by that?
Mary Harrington:
Well, I think we can travel straight from the libertarian defense of the sex industry and the benefits that accrued to bourgeois professional women to see how that could unfold at scale. So on the one hand, you have a new technological environment which effectively flattens the major difference between men and women, which is to say pregnancy risk. And in my reading of what’s happened since the 1960s, this is an unimaginably enormous change that’s been ricocheting down through the culture for the last half a century. This technology, it flattens the most salient difference between men and women and in the process, it emancipates all of those of those ambitious women who now have the opportunity to do 1,001 other things other than becoming mothers, should they wish to. Women can plan. I mean, I’m obviously a beneficiary of all of this.
It’s difficult to imagine me making the case against this kind of feminism on any kind of a national or international stage in, say, 70 years ago, in my grandmother’s time. In so many ways, I’m a beneficiary of the world, particularly of knowledge work which has opened up particularly for ambitious, educated bourgeois women as a downstream of the transformations this has brought, with the now widespread social and cultural flattening of sex differences, and with the now normalized expectation that it’s morally wrong to assume that there are any differences between men and women. It’s more or less a faux pas in cultural circles to imply that there are any intrinsic differences between men and women. I think there are some circles where you’d be considered straightforwardly immoral for asserting that, even though it’s manifestly true. I mean, all you need is eyes and a functioning brain, let alone any one of the 1,001 psychology papers, which also underline the fact that this is the case.
So on the one hand, you have a huge number of professional women who’ve benefited from flattening sex differences and the development of knowledge work in which they can flourish. On the other hand, you have impoverished women at the other end of the scale who are subject to the same moral transformations, but who still work in the material world. So now they might find themselves materially, physically impacted by work expectations, which suggest that there are no physical differences between them and men, and expectations that they should perform the same work to the same physically arduous work as men.
And in fact, there are circumstances where women have been denied workplace protections, because to assert that they should have received those protections on the basis of their sex would be sex discrimination against their male colleagues. And effectively, if you apply in the material world a set of non-discrimination beliefs about men and women which only really make sense in the world of information work, then what you are effectively doing is accruing a huge amount of benefit to knowledge class women like you and me, at the detriment, at the enormous detriment of a huge number of other women who still live and work largely in the physical and the material world.
And this obviously also has ramifications for women who are mothers, for women who are breastfeeding, not to mention for the great many women whose bodies are now increasingly commodified in order to service, whether it’s the sex industry or the porn industry, or indeed, big fertility and big surrogacy. The young girls who are rendered infertile after selling their eggs to fund their college fees, or the exploited women in developing countries who are pressured into renting out their uteruses in order to produce babies for rich infertile couples in the West. I mean, the list goes on, but there’s a very clear stratification where a small number of women benefit immensely right at the top of the food chain, and a great many more women pay the cost.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, it even reminds me of what we see in some of maybe celebrities that we see in the United States. You see two of the Kardashian daughters using surrogacy. Paris Hilton just came out and she said it wasn’t that she couldn’t have kids, but she just didn’t want to go through pregnancy, so she went through surrogacy. And people have lots of thoughts on it, but there’s no doubt it’s become a market. That if you’re wealthy enough, you can purchase somebody to be able to do that for you. So I think we’re seeing firsthand that it’s made its way into our common society. Real quick before you go, just if somebody picked up this book, would they leave with a solution? Or how should we think about this, because it’s complex. You laid out some of the differences very well. What is the takeaway from this book?
Mary Harrington:
I have some thoughts on ways that we could push back against the now radical project to flatten all physiological differences between men and women, which is leading us down the garden path with a gender ideology, which again, is beneficial to a small number and makes a whole lot of money for the pharma industry and leaves a trail of mutilated teenagers in its wake. I’ve suggested some personal pathways that younger men, the last section of my book was addressed particularly at younger men and women. I mean, I’m middle-aged now. I kind of reached escape velocity 10 years ago from a lot of the mess that we see around us. I’ve been happily married for 10 years and I’m kind of okay. But I look at people who are 10, 15 years younger than me, and I see a lot of them very lost and very uncertain as to how to find any kind of a flourishing, or beneficial, or any form of a way of living between men and women, which is mutually beneficial rather than hostile and transactional and mutually exploitative.
This is a pervasive complaint I hear now from young men and women in their 20s, that things have become so hostile and attenuated between the sexes that it feels as though there’s very little common ground left at all. And there is increasingly a sense across both sexes that this is, in some indefinable way, downstream of feminism, but it’s difficult to figure out what the causality is. And I’ve set out to clarify that, particularly by giving it the technological read.
And where I suggest that young men and women start is on three tracks. Firstly, to rethink how we understand marriage and to treat marriage not as the capstone, the self-actualizing keystone to a life of individual achievement, but to approach it in a much more pragmatic way, as the foundation for life in common, including when your spouse annoys you and to take a very much more pragmatic view of it, not as something which you discard if it stops being a vector for your self-actualization, but as a very much more foundational and very much more difficult to abandon covenant as the precondition for life in common.
And I think, if the world carries on getting more chaotic, more unpredictable, and as it is for many young people, less wealthy and abundant, it seems straightforwardly just insane to me that the only woman who would want to be a mother would imagine doing that on her own. I think we need to rethink how we’re approaching the institution of marriage and to retool it for an age which is likely to be characterized by more scarcity and unpredictability than perhaps the decades that have preceded us. So that’s point one. Point two is I think we need to reclaim single sex spaces, but for both sexes, which is to say we need to accept that making every space co-ed has had some under-counted negative costs for men in ways, which I think are having further negative downstream effects on the ability of older men to provide positive role models for younger men.
And it’s abundantly clear to me that good men are not created by women. Good men are created by the example of other men. And if we want to create a new space, if we want more good men, then we need to leave, step back. Women need to step back, and leave them more space to form one another. And I also think it’s incoherent to be demanding men’s support in protecting single-sex spaces for women, for example, in sports and prisons, unless we’re also willing to contemplate the possibility that sometimes men might want to just hang out with other men just because they like it. And I think we need to make a little bit more room for that than perhaps the second wave women’s movement did. And this is not to say women should just disappear from public life altogether, but there’s a huge amount of space between saying there should be no women in public life and saying sometimes maybe we should just let them be and not try and get involved in everything.
And then point number three is I think we need a feminist backlash against the pill, the pro-sex case against the pill. If we want to take sex seriously again, we need to put the danger back in and we need to put what it’s for. We need what it’s for back into the picture. And to the extent that we’re willing to do that, we’ll be able to bring the seriousness, and with that, all the beauty and the intensity, and frankly, the Eros, which has been attenuated by big porn and by treating it as a trivial leisure activity in a way which it just self-evidently isn’t.
Beverly Hallberg:
And final question for you, just real quick. This is a cliffhanger. Will people find out when they read this book who should do the dishes? Was that solved in this book as well?
Mary Harrington:
Honestly, I’m not very interested in litigating who does what in any given household.
Beverly Hallberg:
It just helps you think about it.
Mary Harrington:
But well, here’s the thing. Here’s the thing. I mean, if you take the marriage seriously, it actually doesn’t matter, because if you treat it as a covenant, as a sort of human scale communism, which is the only scale of communism that actually makes any sense in my opinion, then it’s all just the work. And it actually doesn’t matter. You negotiate it amongst yourselves according to inclinations and who’s doing what at any given time, and who does the dishes, it’s for every family to negotiate amongst themselves. It’s all just the work.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, it’s all very insightful. Again, I want our listeners to know the book is called “Feminism Against Progress.” It’s coming out on April 25th, so please do pick it up. Mary Harrington, a pleasure to have you on She Thinks. Thank you so much.
Mary Harrington:
Thank you for having me.
Beverly Hallberg:
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