Mary Harrington - why progress is bad for women - thoughts?

[Digitalhen]

This was an incredibly interesting discussion and I really enjoyed listening to Mary talk. She is very concise, thoughtful and gets straight to the point. I’d never considered the contraceptive pill as the first step towards trans-humanism but she makes an awful lot of sense. I’ve just finished binge reading many of Thomas Sowell’s books and he makes a very interesting point concerning that data around sex Ed in schools (along with the ‘sexual revolution’: women give away sex to men with no demands ever made on them but this is somehow marketed as ‘liberation’ for women) being the pivot towards an increase in sexual activity, abortion and hormonal contraceptive being sold as ‘women’s rights’ and Mary takes this further by saying if reproductive decisions fall to women all responsibility does too. Hence the decline in marriage, shotgun weddings and the rise of single parenthood (because men can just say - it’s a woman’s decision about keeping a pregnancy and then vanish guilt free) Sowell also documents this State-side too.

What are your thoughts on Mary’s work?

Sowell excerpt on the failure of sex Ed in school:

I will come back and read the article later. But I’m curious as to what is her solution?
Maybe return to a time:

• where women have to stay in terrible marriages because of the stigma of divorce?
• Where women are forced to have multiple births that they do not want because they cannot say no to their husband?
• Where women who enjoy sex are put in mental institutions for being deviant?

It seems that any way we structure society around sex, that women lose. Our notions of female sexual purity come from the Victorians. Their belief was that women should be pure and be the gatekeepers of sex against randy men. If sex occurred it was the woman’s fault for not stopping it. Before the Victorian’s the prevailing view in 16 and 27 C was that women were filled with unnatural sexual lusts and men were the innocent victims. If sex occurred it was the fault of the wicked lust filled women seducing poor unsuspecting men.

Basically any way you shape society, misogyny prevails. That’s what we need to tackle.

I too have not watched the video and probably won't, articles ate much more accessible for me.

However the headlines OP pulls out are interesting to me.

I'm very uneasy with the view that women are giving away sex to men with zero requests in return. This has it all wrong IMO. Surely the ideal is that women enjoy set and have it, as an equal, when they want to? That was certainly how i felt in my slightly more promiscuous 20s. Mary's phrasing seems very victoriana and sets women up as prostitutes to my mind.

It's also very easy to latch onto the downsides of contraception and ignore the many many positives. My mum was a teen jn the 60s and the availability of the pill gave her immense freedom.

A balanced discussion of the pros and cons of the sexual revolution sounds interesting but it would take a loooong time and need a lot of different voices to contribute. There would be huge class differences in the opportunities vs costs due to the pill.

In reality though, we're not going to undo the 60s so it seems much more relevant and useful to focus on improving sexual equality for women now. Things like the orgasm gap, pregnancy choices, child maintenance for absent fathers, fair and beneficial joint custody rulings, and empowering women to maintain sexual boundaries - the cotton ceiling stuff really worries me and feels like a very slippery slope. Also the pushing of sexualised content into minors and the pushing of women allowing men into single sex spaces.

There is lots to work on in the current era, Mary sounds like someone trying to make money from her similar spending name to Mary Whitehouse tbh.

I've found her work fascinating and I agree with so much of what she is highlighting.

That the move to industrialisation removed women's ability to work and care for children in the home e.g. lacemaking, and forced a change where only the men were able to work followed by child labour outside the home.

The point about the pill was that the social contract of abstaining from sex due to the risk of pregnancy which was always reason enough to say no was removed. This pressured women to have unwanted sex because it eroded their ability to refuse. This was undoubtedly damaging to women and beneficial to men.

She's a fierce warrior on Twitter.
Love her.

Watch her triggernometry interview on you tube.
It's illuminating.

I don't do videos, so am just going on the headlines. They look like a very narrow and reductive view of feminism, and I suspect a lot of the argument hinges on how you define 'progress'.

There are certainly aspects of modern life, and of the sexual revolution, that are problematic for women. But those aspects aren't necessarily progress, or related to the goals of feminism.

Taking a wider view than just sex and reproduction, both 'progress' and feminism have left women in a far better position than they were for most of history. Still shit, but a whole lot better than it was when we were property rather than people (and many of the remaining problems are down to residual attitudes that still see us as property).

I just watched it and found it fascinating.

I was ready to disagree with everything she was saying, but actually, I couldn't.

She's right in a lot do things, it has come at a cost. How many women feel pressured to have a successful career before they have children, then find themselves in a position where they are struggling with fertility? Oh but it's their fault they should have frozen their eggs. They can use a surrogate.

I don't necessarily agree with her on all of the next steps, I think I need more time to think about it....

I like Trig interviews but didn't watch this one because my perception of her is very narrow minded

Contraception as step to transhumanism - bloody hell, is that true of all meds? Bonkers.

re industrialisation - actually, the way it was imposed, much like tech, took freedom away from men and women, but that's where society has to adjust.

Yes same, I expected to disagree with her. But it was very difficult to.

My main takeaway re the contraceptive pill issue is that we live in a culture that seeks to neutralise sexual difference. We halt and stop normal healthy function (like fertility) in order that women can compete/be same as/false idea of ‘equity’ with men (workplace or in casual sexual relations). The drive to nullify sexual difference/create gender neutrality is taking extreme forms currently with trans issues. Mary looks historically at this and at what we’ve been told is ‘progress’ for women but in reality it’s been another form of oppression; to remove our sexual characteristics and differences under the banner of progress. She argues that pre industrial era women worked from the home with their children present in cottage based industry and often had a lot of say over their lives and earnings - as a joint family venture with extended kin close by. When women were shunted into factory work instead they were faced with the new dilemma of what to do with their babies and very young children. In poorer countries peasant women were forced into hysterectomies so that their work would not be interrupted by their fertility.

I don’t think anyone would argue about ‘returning’ to any past era nor would it be desirable, rather worth viewing that the progress we’ve been told we’ve made may not be true. Many of us see and feel it anyway. She has (and rather brilliantly) simply pinpointed how it happened, what we were told and the extension of it through the continued medicalisation of healthy bodies in the name of gender neutrality today.

The medicalisation of healthy women to stop fertility has also resulted in the continued commodification of that fertility.

She argues that pre industrial era women worked from the home with their children present in cottage based industry and often had a lot of say over their lives and earnings - as a joint family venture with extended kin close by

For the luckier members of 1 class, for a few hundred years, in a small segment of the world. That's a tiny proportion of female historical experience. Even if you limit it to post-agricultural Europe only a small percentage would recognise that life.

And men abandoning their children is nothing to do with the contraceptive pill. A quick glance at any set of parish records will show you that. These days - with contraception, abortion, child mainenance rules - women are able to do slightly more about it.

Actually @BinturongsSmellOfPopcorn - it was the poorer classes she was referring to with the home work. Like making fabric, or producing goods from food grown etc. so not the elite at all.

It's made me want to read the book, because whether I agree with all of her conclusions or not, she's given me a lot of food for thought.

@EmmaEmerald

My understanding of her jist is that medicine usually helps something that’s gone wrong - bone setting/pain relief in order to aid healing or manage pain (in the broadest sense of intention). Whereas The Pill is a medical intervention to stop something considered normal and healthy - fertility. So would be considered trans humanist in the sense that trans-humanism is the cyborg/medical intervening in the human in order to alter at whim (like Elon’s neurolink etc). She mentions Martine Rothblatt often (not favourably) and his intentions towards nullifying sexual dimorphism via trans-humanism (I’ve only heard of him via Jennifer Bilek tbh)

Yes, "cottage industry" gave that away.

I didn't mention elite. I said lucky. Lucky members of the poorer (but not very poor) classes would fit that description for a brief period of history.

I am writing this while I am watching the video. I have a lot of issues with women like this. To me she is just a different kind of handmaiden.

She throws all feminism under the bus calling it "cyborg feminism" and not makes a distinction between libfems and GC feminism for example.

She is correct that a lot of policies, like self ID and surrogacy, is pushed by women who are of higher class because they do not realise what men are capable of or how poor women are exploited and treated. They do not understand the complications for these policies on poor women. This is not new.

Everything she talks about is about how feminism has been harmful for everybody and never talks about the huge part that men have played in the exploitation of women whether it be our bodies or our kindness and empathy.

The pill has been a godsend to protect women. But it was invented by men and deemed "safe enough" even with the huge side effects so that men can have sex without consequences. Prostitution and porn did not explode because of the pill. Prostitution, sex trafficking, sex slaves, harems, porn ... this has always existed. Sure it has exploded in the middle of last century but so has every single other business due to wars, radio and television. Coca cola became huge internationally because during WWII the CEO decided all US soldiers should have coca cola.

Women gaining more freedom into their sex lives is not the root cause of more disgusting and vile porn. That is men.

Women getting safe abortions is not a detriment to society. The huge number of abortions is down to 1 reason: men irresponsibly ejaculating inside women. They just refuse to use condoms. Most of us here know this. We all had men really try to get out of using condoms.

Women getting most divorces is not women's fault. Men have become pornsick and have no respect any more for women.

Removing contraception and telling women to stay in miserable marriages with pathetic mediocre men, for the kids, is not as great of an argument that she thinks it is. "Men are miserable after divorce" well boohoo my care bucket is empty.

I had a very large visceral reaction when she mentioned it's understandable that men react "when its what you pushed for " with men in women's spaces because of how feminists pushed for no more men only spaces. This was not about safety it was about how deals and laws were being made in boys clubs leaving out women on purpose.

I am not impressed with her arguments.

Just 1 bit I'd quibble with in your post, OneMorePlant.

The huge number of abortions is down to 1 reason:

Is it huge? Contraception brings down the number of abortions. More availability (in most places) in modern times means fewer abortions. What has increased compared with historical numbers is not how many women are having them, but how many are having them safely and legally.

a - It is male sperm that should be controlled, and if a male's sperm ends up resulting in a child, he should be responsible for that child as much as the mother.

b - I can see her point that the pill and the shift in society isn't good for women. But the alternative is a society that she herself would rail against. It certainly would not end up in her being able to publish books and be a guest on various you tube and podcasts.

c - It is bad for women because men don't step up, which is not women's fault. It ends up being all on women to do everything and that is not good.

Progress is in some ways bad for women, and so is non progress. So the solution is what?

Personally I like that I could work in construction, and work at a higher level and move into management, meaning I could get an actual proper pension and retire at 53. I'd never have been able to do that had I got pregnant [like many of my school friends did], lived in a council house [my boyfriend put my name down without telling me when I was 16 as he was planning on getting me pregnant] and stayed home rather than go to college. Not having kids was great for me thank you very much Mary.

There was a huge increase in the 70's. She talked about this in the video and it's one of the arguments she was right about. Since the pill more people had sex more freely and removed condoms resulting in a huge rise of abortions because there is more free sex and the pill is not 100% proof. The abortions number has been declining steadily (but lately is increasing again) but 220 000 abortions a year is imho a huge number

I don’t think the huge increase in abortions is a bad thing. Men did not step up just because contraception and abortion weren’t easily available and women did not refrain from sex outside of marriage (though the incidence was probably a lot lower).

My mother, grandmother and great-grandmother all had children they didn’t plan or want. They stepped up and made the best of it, but I would not have wanted their lives. My great-grandmother was abandoned, unwed, by the father. She brought up her child (my grandmother) in her parents home with a father who wouldn’t speak to her or her child. My grandmother didn’t get pregnant outside of marriage, though she did have sex so the risk was there. She had 5 children, one much later in life, and told me once that she loved them all but, really, she was done after 2. My mother had a shotgun wedding but hated it and left after a few years and another unplanned baby. I think they’d have been much happier if they’d been able to access safe contraception and abortion without social stigma or legal concerns.

My grandmother on my father’s side died when he was 2, he was then abandoned by his dad and was brought up by a string of unwed female relatives.

These stories aren’t that unusual.

Also, with the improvements in maternal and neonatal medicine, we need a way to ensure we don’t have children so often when we have sex. We cannot maintain our natural fertility rate when we can keep babies, and the women that have them, alive as well as we can today.

I'll tell you what. I'd much rather be a woman now than a woman 50 years ago. Or 100, or 200.

OP "My understanding of her jist is that medicine usually helps something that’s gone wrong - bone setting/pain relief in order to aid healing or manage pain (in the broadest sense of intention)."

as a childfree woman, my fertility is a problem.

I wonder if she realises a tumour is also natural.

I won't be listening to this - anyone who thinks birth control is bad is not worth the time.

as for women feeling pressured to have careers - what's the alternative? Live off someone else? If you can do that privately, you do you, but why shouldn't women be earning a living like men?

Sounds very out of date - to say the least.

if I take a painkiller to help get rid of my heaache pre period, is that making me a robot too?

i wonder if she's just another person spouting rubbish and getting paid for it.

I am so happy to be living in a age where I can choose to be a single mother, and I also have met many unwanted children, and I genuinely think briniging an unwanted baby into the world is about the worst thing you can do to anyone

There does seem to be a few 'what about the men' women making a decent income from 'whataboutery' these days.

I'm really disappointed in Mary to be honest.

I think she’s great. Don’t agree with everything says but a lot of it is dead right (for all that it’s quite uncomfortable listening sometimes, especially re how middle class, knowledge worker women have benefited at the expense of other women).

Re the sexual revolution benefiting men- both Mary and Louise Perry have written about this, looking at evidence for why no-strings sex benefits men more than women. On average women are must less likely to have satisfying sex on a ONS than men and women are on average less likely to be interested in this sort of sex. That of course doesn’t mean no women enjoy casual sex, only that the availability of casual sex is more beneficial to men. While women bear more of the risk, as ever.

She says very explicitly that she does not advocate for women staying in abusive relationships.

Magaluf the class thing js just stating the obvious

the casual sex thing - at some point, personal responsibility has to kick in. Some people choose casual sex and then feel bad after. So what?

i have read some of her work after seeing this post
not a fan of "woman as victim" as a stance on this.

what does she want btw?