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?

Okey, what does she suggest women actually do?
How should we ( women and men) behave and do?
And does she push idea of still continue to date/have sex/ marry/ have kids, or can we finally progress and start doing something else already?
It’s kind of pointless if everything would stay pretty much the same.

Loise Perry is awful, she also said women should marry young and do their best to stay married.
Now, who does this benefit?
Men, and men only.

I don't necessarily agree with marrying young (how young is young BTW?), but it's a good idea to tcc by your early 30's if you want DC. Should n't we all (men and women) try to stay married ? The people whom I think benefit are the children.

If you are childless and plan to remain that way, then fill your boots, marry and divorce as many times as you like.

It's true that never married women are amongst the happiest in our society and divorced men the unhappiest.

It was ok, I like hearing controversial views with substance. She's correct that feminism came about from industrialisation and I think industrialisation has been a big disaster for the world.

However sadly we live in the world that we presently do. I don't understand the black and white thinking that you can't have the pill without also having the trans debate as we did for decades. (I'm not a fan of the pill fyi)

Also as for BDSM being popular because sex is no longer dangerous, I don't see many women wanting to whip and strangle men to bring some danger back into sex. It's mostly men wanting to harm women. The big elephant in the room is that men are pornsick.

Apparently women should stay off the pill, marry and work less, which is fine and I agree, but in the meantime men can't even give up porn for the betterment of society and their relationships. It's a very unfair compromise to ask of women in the society that we currently exist in.

" Whereas The Pill is a medical intervention to stop something considered normal and healthy - fertility"

Having a child every year is not very healthy.

"One inmate was sentenced to 6 months in April for deserting his wife and child. In December of the same year he was sentenced to 12 months for deserting his wife and child."

Ok well he was very determined, but there was obviously a deterrent there. The problem is that you wouldn't want a husband who's only with you because otherwise he'll go to prison or become a social pariah anyway.

Christianity sort of grew out of the ashes of the Roman world. One odd thing about the Roman world, especial in its later stages, is that fertility rates were low and Romans were not really able to reproduce themselves. It's not clear what was going on, but at some level people were choosing to have fewer children, or becoming less fertile (lead in the water?) or both. There are even intriguing hints that the Romans may have chanced upon some sort of oral contraceptive, though nobody really knows for sure. Some Roman emperors even instigated bachelor taxes to try and boost the birth rate.

http://www.rhm.uni-koeln.de/128/Devine.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8567737/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium#:~:text=Silphium%20(also%20known%20as%20silphion,by%20ancient%20Greeks%20and%20Romans.

Christianity probably evolved some of its ideas about procreation in reaction to the issues that it had seen Rome facing.

I like this but she does hit on something very valid.

We know (just liok at the recurring threads here) that women end up doing most of everything. The physical, emotional, the juggle etc. I think her point is that at that time, when/if we are having babies we should not have to do it all. And men should have the means/ability/societal help to participate.

There is something there.

Haven't watched the videos because I'm going to work but, Reading the replies, I think the biggest problem is the way men view women wholesale.

Women can take the Pill. Brilliant! We should do and then we have no reason for denying men sex because unwanted pegnancy is no longer something to fear..

Women can access abortions. Brilliant! Now we have no reason for denying men sex because we have nothing to fear from unwanted children.

It has women competing with each other when it comes to attracting these men or providing sex for these men (how to make it interesting, exciting, how to make sure we look our most attractive, how to make sure we stop our man from seeking this great free sex with another woman). Brilliant! More women available for men to have this more 'adventurous' sex with.

Women are no longer 'past it'. We can be sexy into our menopausal years and beyond if we follow these rules and tips. Brilliant! More women for men to pursue sex with.

What women are forced/prepared to tolerate during sex has changed due to the influence of porn. Brilliant! Now women are ignoring their natural boundaries so that they can keep up with these desires, expectations, demands. Sex for men!!

Women should be able to enjoy sex when ever they want and with whoever they want without fear or high levels of risk of pregnancy and bearing children they don't want. The problem is that men don't see us as having greater freedom, more bodily autonomy, or as more equal. They just see it in terms of how it benefits them.

I don't think it's any coincidence that as women have progressed in terms of sexual or financial freedom the demands and expectations of us behaviourally or appearance wise in relation to sex/men have become more extreme.

What needs to happen now is addressing how women are presented are presented in society and the media. Many women still position/value themselves in relation to men. And men need to understand that women actually are equal to them rather than focusing on a means of achieving an equality that just means men see us as more available to them.

Men who women still don't want to have sex with (the incels) become angrier at women because we can have sex now with whoever we want and we're still not choosing them. That is seen as a woman problem (in their eyes) and they feel no need to make themselves more attractive to women (eg personality). No, it's because women have got too big for their boots with all this equality and feminism and we need to he brought down a peg or two.

I probably haven't articulated any of this very well, like I say, I've got to go to work.

But I do think it's because, whatever advancements we make, men still see us in relation to them. They still value us in terms of how we benefit them. The position and expectations of women was addressed but the position and expectations of men wasn't and women don't exist in a vacuum.

this idea that casual sex is bad for women (on the whole) - depends what you mean by casual sex.
Most women in western society do have or have had casual sex by traditional standards, ie with people they are not married to. most married women had sex before they married. Some women don't want sex with men but with women, and therefore could never have willingly had traditional married sex.

She has this romanticised idea of a loving harmonious traditional family which is great, at its rare best, but is in no way guaranteed or even arguably facilitated by the traditional structures she argues for.

Traditionally, you would have been packed off with your husband with no idea about how it was going to work out and no escape route. Traditional family life involved an awful lot of putting up and shutting up because the alternative was destitution, for you and your children. You were lucky if your husband chose to shoulder his burden of putting up and shutting up and tried as hard as he could be decent. It was purely a matter of choice. and even if he did, you could still just not like him, love him or fancy him and be absolutely stuck with him.

This is a magnificent post and puts the point I was vaguely gesturing at much more clearly - most women in England have no idea what it really means for sex to be stigmatised and no abortion or contraception available. they all casually talk about their adult kids going away with their boyfriend or girlfriends, they all lived with someone they didn't marry, they all have relations in the family who have kids and aren't married (maybe they will one day) - no one has ANY IDEA what they are really playing with when they suggest that it would be better not to have relaxed "the rules".

"they all lived with someone they didn't marry,"

Really, not all. It was stigmatised until the early 90s.

"Most women in western society do have or have had casual sex by traditional standards, ie with people they are not married to. most married women had sex before they married. "

Why would she use the term casual sex if what she meant was pre-marital sex?

You expressed that very well!

I would also like to add that women were not men's property in law until the early modern age, they were treated as separate in the Anglo Saxon era, Green and Roman eras, and in western Europe until I believe the Stuart era

I think you believe wrongly. Women in ancient Greece were chattels -they had no public voice and no public presence at all; women who weren't prostitutes, that is. Those were the only women who had any public life at all. Women have historically been seen as chattels in every society, despite exceptions - they couldn't own property in their own right until the 1880s. (In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall when the heroine leaves her husband, the editor points out that in law everything she has taken belongs to her husband, even her clothes). They couldn't vote, they could be raped by their husbands (and stranger rape in the middle ages was treated as a crime against women as familial property, not as individuals), they could be beaten by their parents and their husbands, they could be given (literally) in marriage and they had no access to contraception nor a right to education and they certainly couldn't enter professions. Life was pretty grim for the huge majority of women.

@trytopullyoursocksup Personally I think we should try at least 50 years of stigmatising male sex, and then reconvene the discussion. Let men who conceive outside marriage or abandon families risk their jobs, reputations and lives. Remove access to condoms, vasectomies and any bodily autonomy, but acknowledge that women have needs that must be met, so the responsibility to be chaste lies entirely with men. Might be an idea to restrict their control over their own income too if possible.

This is very well observed.

I watched the video, and even though I am not with Harrington's work in general, I really did not take from it that she advocates a return to that type of control.

But, I take your point. I grew up in a very conservative family for whom contraception, abortion, and divorce were a complete no. To behave otherwise would be banishment. The cost on my mum and her sisters was considerable. And yet, even then they have difficulty with my belief in the freedom and privacy of choice in those matters!

Did anyone watch Chris Williamson on Diary of a CEO recently? He spoke about the problems with dating - it was really insightful and speaks to some of the points being made in this thread.

I thought it was very good but I'm biased as I routinely watch his podcast. He has had Mary on his own show amongst others. I'm interested to read his book when it is released.

Really interesting interview. I think her argument about industrialisation makes a lot of sense, and also what she said about the loss of men’s spaces and the impact on male socialisation and the importance of men socialising younger men. Her ideas about the pill are completely batshit crazy though, and I think that the idea that if you accept women controlling their fertility, you also have to accept surrogacy and men using science to give birth, is rubbish. They aren’t the same thing at all.