'Feminists against progress': article from Prospect magazine

So removal of the article rather than just editing it & adding a footnote explaining the edit - how interesting that they chose such a definite action 🤔

Removed: Feminists Against Progress
This article has been withdrawn due to an error
The article “Feminists Against Progress”, published on 28th January 2026 online and in the March 2026 issue of Prospect, included a quotation falsely attributed to Louise Perry and her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Because of this error, the article did not meet Prospect’s editorial standards and so it has been removed. We regret the error and would like to apologise to Perry and to Prospect readers.
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/philosophy/gender/feminism/72304/removed-feminists-against-progress

That’s a good point. Though the plan seems to be less about telling and more about ‘make it socially unacceptable to acknowledge those things’. Which has success for a short time, but eventually reality will reassert itself. What’s the plan then?

These people remind me of the types of politician you sometimes see who appear to have no beliefs and no policies of their own – only this is on a micro scale. Like half a nation full of dinner guests who talk and talk but with nothing to say. They’re happy if they’re in charge, and they don’t particularly care of what.

’Change’ is ideal for such folk because then the conversation is terra nullius – they don’t have to wrest control away from anyone else

Evolving thought, especially if you can show your workings, is really important. If we're talking about male thinkers on the right, I learn a lot from Peter Hitchens, who's rejected most of what he used to believe, and writes a lot about why he now thinks he was wrong. I learn a lot less from Ben Shapiro, who is a gifted communicator but seems to have sprung from the womb fully primed to DESTROY the libs with FACTS and LOGIC, and never seems to have had to rethink anything.

That might be what I like best about Harrington - she shows her workings.

I find it hard to think of any liberal/progressive/left thinkers who have that quality. Mostly they seem to feel they've arrived at the most advanced point of human thought and don't have to examine their assumptions.

Personally, yes, I've had that feeling of "if they've got this wrong, what else have they got wrong?" and I like to feel as if I've gone on a journey with someone and seen them reflect critically on what they thought they knew.

The strange thing is, someone like Bloodworth who got his training as a Marxist (though in the eccentric version of Marxism retailed by the Alliance for Workers Liberty) should be a philosophical materialist. But philosophical materialism is very unfashionable on today's left. I think they prefer to see us as Force ghosts, like in Star Wars.

The great thing about seeing humans as beings of pure spirit, rather than slightly advanced chimps, is that you can divorce human nature from biology, and then modifying behaviour should be really easy - though for contrary evidence, ask any former polyamorist who thought it was easy to overcome sexual jealousy, and then realised it wasn't.

I wouldn't see Perry's and Harrington's evolution as thinkers as the result of audience capture. Actually Harrington has written about this, and about resisting the blandishments of audience capture, and losing subscribers when she wrote a piece expressing support for Britain's abortion time limits to stay where they are.

What I see in both of them is that once you have started to question the liberal hegemony, there's a domino effect. Because liberal-progressivist ideas are a world view, once you stop believing in one bit of it, everything else begins to look a little less secure, a little less like common sense. Gradually the Jenga tower begins to look extremely shaky, and eventually it falls.

What I personally like about Mary Harrington is that she is not afraid to explore ideas to their maximum. I don't she is making prescriptions for others to live by. But she's also lived the left wing utopia for herself, including having identified as a boy called 'Sebastian' and I give her credit for that.

She also has her own unique vocabulary and style and has coined some new terms which personally I find useful. I don't think she was part of 'a zeitgeist'; rather she caught an approaching wave, which is why her words have resonance for many. And she's honest that she's reacting and responding to what has gone before. Reflecting upon it.

I can't read it but I knew it would be Harrington. I really think she is very overrated as thinker and writer. She was just lucky to ride the zeitgeist of something and get a book and something of a career out of it but much of what she says doesn't stand up to scrutiny. I think she is popular here due to her anti-trans stance which as someone gender critical I agree with but she was largely just rehashing what Jennifer Bilek had already said years ago and also borrowing from other reactionary thinkers such as Paul Kingsnorth who I do think is interesting.

I do think Perry is a more credible writer but and I think her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution makes some fair point but after its publication I believe she did fall prey to a degree of audience capture which has since led her down a certain path, perhaps similar could be said for Harrington. In one sense you might consider them as a in a sort of "intellectual only fans" space in that they cater very directly to their audience's proclivities.

And of course all that change really does is bring about a whole new set of conditions to deal with; replace the old set of conditions with a new set of conditions. And then when "nothing really changes" we seek even more change.
Seeking novelty and newness.

Yes, the idea that history runs in a straight line towards a certain destination and all we as human beings have to do is determine that destination. Yet this ignores that time and history does not operate in this way at all; patterns often repeat; the same ingedients are always there even if you arrange or add them in a slightly different order or amount. There is nothing entirely new in human nature.

In a Marxist kind of way - all that really changes is the means of production or the technology available. The only way to ensure, or fix certain 'enlightened' conditions is for an authority to impose them and punish those that infringe them.

I always find myself wondering when reading people like this - and this article was no exception - what their actual plan is to change human nature.

If it is "resignation" to say, you know, the sex drive is an extremely powerful motivator for men, and also in somewhat differernt ways for women, and this will cause certain kinds of issues to come up between the two groups, what is supposedly the "solution" to this?

If it is the case that women carry babies and have a strong instinct to care for their infants like most mammals, and it is not that hard for men to abandon mothers and babies because of the fact that they only need to make a short term contribution well before the baby appears, how is the author here planning to change that reality?

It often seems to come down to "just tell people not to do that." Like - is that seriously the solution?

Do people like this have no experience of being human and trying to modify their own behaviour? It's often bloody hard. Do they really think society can somehow just eliminate everyone who struggles for some reason?

It is about two current feminists. I'm a current feminist, so are you, so are many women, including all other the ones who post on this board and who tease issues out, change our minds on things, think and analyse. No-one is running feminism as a rules-based cult.

If they think they are, they don't understand how humans work.

That makes me think back to the start of my civil service career a couple of decades ago, where the mantra everywhere was change, managing change, there must be change, etc.

Blair sounded like he had something of a new plan to implement, so it kind of made sense. But your post makes me wonder whether the plan died (or even never existed) but the mantra remained, and in actual fact we’ve been led by the mantra all along.

I get the impression that for a lot of these people all change is "progress", unless it's a change back to a previous state, in which case it's evil.

This kind of mindset very easily leads to the acceptance of the likes of transgenderism: it's something which has never been accepted in our society before, therefore campaigning for it must be progressive, regardless of any other considerations.

Yes, I see your point now. I agree.

The irony I took from it is that he’s the one doing vigilant policing, because progressivism isn’t real. Ultimately reality polices itself.

To put it another way: the discourse does need policing, but progressivism is all discourse.

Isn't the opposite true...... if nature is truly immovable then that is exactly why it requires such vigilant policing. Because nature and the reality of human beings and societies will never conform to the ideological demands imposed upon them.

This is why, in spite of equality measures feminisits are still grappling with the same old issues which seem very resisitant to change. He calls this " resignation", whereas maybe it is simply pragmatism, for the reason that life is limited.

Progressivism seeks to forever push against boundaries in search of the utopian idea of absolute individual freedom.

Unfortunately, ideological group think is the zeitgeist of our time and I suspect it has quite some time still left to run.

He seems unable to step back from his own ideological position for long enough to actually engage with any of the ideas presented. To actively engage with a different set of ideas is seen and felt to be the same as actively endorsing them. Any alternative interpretation becomes very threatening and an automatic adversarialism swings into action.

That’s a useful piece actually, for me anyway. I think it is quite fair to them, and insofar as it reads like an attack it’s because the author (rightly) sees the threat to his own political project, namely Progress.

Consider these quotes:

“they push for a new kind of feminism which, to many readers, won’t sound like feminism at all”

“the class struggle is always sublimated beneath admonitions to accept the world as it is”

“Becoming the ‘thoughtful’ left-winger who is unafraid to confront unvarnished truths about one’s own side can open up a new stratum of influence … I peered over the edge of the precipice myself during the Jeremy Corbyn era”

I’d long realised that certain movements—trades unionism, Scottish nationalism—have been entry’ed and neutered whole by progressivism. But somehow I’d never realised the same might be true of feminism. Maybe we had a movement for ‘women’s interests’ all along, and weren’t supposed to notice as slowly they morphed it into something quite different.

So he makes a great effort to attack the realist parts of their philosophies as unworldly, or at least not in step with what all Good People know to be true, but then closes with this:

“If nature is truly immovable, one wonders why it requires such vigilant policing”

And all I can think is: well, quite.

Agree.

I don’t think it’s word salad. I’m not always following it that easily but then it’s 5 in the morning… it’s a perfectly reasonable critique of a sexually conservative strand of what I will call feminism. It’s true as far as I’m concerned that feminism as a form of analysis cuts across left/right framings. The article certainly engages with quite a lot of detail in Harrington and Perry’s work, a lot more than in this thread.

I’ve seen feminists define abortion as a ‘male solution’ and I have observed female conservatives and second-wave feminists point out some of the political and practical issues with specific issues around contraception (the pill being tested on poor women with minimal information/consent for example). Sexual change has had consequences, including some unequivocally bad ones. However, to define contraception in itself as negative for women is sexually conservative in a way I disagree with and I have no problem with critics pointing that out. I also think that it’s right to point out that the grooming gangs scandal has a lot more going on in it than race and io me, those who insist that race is the only way to define it are as obtuse as those who refused to engage with the racial element of it.

I think what drives me mad in public/media discussions about ‘feminism’ is that critics rarely specify which school of feminist theory they’re referring to when they want to point out something they dislike or they think is crazy. So basically this big amorphous blob of ‘feminism’ now exists in our collective consciousness and attracts hatred and criticism for everything that some people hate about current female (and male) behaviour.

This lack of specific criticism ends up with women and ‘feminism’ always being in the wrong because the goalposts of this criticism of ‘feminism’ are always moving.

There are lots of feminist theories that have benefitted society (suffragettes, second wavers etc) but these always get characterised as basic equal rights, rather than feminism, in an effort to deny ‘feminism’ any positive aspects or achievements.

Does my head in 😣

Whatever its limits, I don't really see why an article about Harrington and Perry isn't about current feminism?

It's been a long time since I bothered with Mr Bloodworth's shoddily-research effusions. Had a bash at this latest dreck & aside from the fact that it ought to be about a third of the length it is, it gave me no grounds on which to alter my view that he's one more opinion piece hack too concerned to keep getting bylines to trouble himself with facts.

Edited for dodgy grammar

The worse part of this is that a bit like twitter the article inflates the importance of women who publish themselves and then others who publish themselves then answer, then some ignorant male assumes this is about current feminsim, or read and devoured by current feminists.

Nobody cares.

If all the time and attention put into these puff pieces were instead put into genuine engagement with other women or campaigning or whatever, many more would change.

This is just armchair nonsense that allows people dont really care about feminism just find a reason not to be interested!

But for those who have the time to while away this is the archive link to the article https://archive.is/sbSBS

(Dont let this man or Prospect think anyone is interested. it only encourages them!)