Mary Harrington's 'Feminism Against Progress' book is out.

[ArabellaScott]

Looking forward to this one. I know she gets mixed responses; I find her work really interesting.

swiftpress.com/book/feminism-against-progress/

About the pill not being an unalloyed good:

www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/23/should-i-worry-about-the-cancer-risk-from-hormonal-contraceptives

I'm not actually divorced as for a multitude of reasons it's safer and easier to just be separated right now. But I separated from my XH a decade ago and my life has been immeasurably better since then. Especially since I finally gave up caring whether or not he ever got sober or, to be totally frank, lived or died. He made me more miserable than I understood at the time and life has been such a joy without him.

Funnily enough, it was having a child that freed me, because I could have sacrificed my whole life to help my XH. But there wasn't a chance in hell I would let my baby live through it. (That whole thing that so many men do of ramping up awful behaviour once their wife is pregnant, backfired for him completely.)

But the things that helped the most when I left him were the fact that I was able to buy a house, had access to a reasonably generous social care system and most of all. An incredibly supportive family. They have made a huge difference to my life. So I get what she is saying about the need to stay within marriages if that social care system collapses. Buying a house was only possible for me as the time I needed one coincided with the bottom of the housing market. There are very few women today who would be able to manage that. Even finding a reasonable rental is incredibly difficult. So we need very strong familial bonds going forward, as I do think we're in for a very rocky economic period in the near future. It doesn't necessarily have to be marriage but if not, it probably needs to be close family. Because friends are great but the ones who can step in and support you financially and or practically are few and far between.

Just gotten round to the latest Triggernometry interview. I find Mary Harrington a really interesting and provocative thinker but definitely hits notes that make me wince. She's at least very interesting to disagree with - she's sort of orthogonal to the what I think about left and right so it's always a new perspective.

Some thoughts in order - first, the negatives

• As other posters have said - I would not class the pill as the first medicine to alter "normal functioning" considering recreational cocaine prescriptions in the past. Also does this cover other contraceptive technologies, like condoms or IUDs? The large change is that the pill was very good at it.

• Prostitution boomed after the pill - compared to when? Lots of eras like the Victorian had high percentages of prostitutes (and babies born out of wedlock/abandoned/infanticide/sent to foundling hospitals). Men did not forgo careless sex even if their wives were able to refuse, and underclass women bore the brunt of this. Stories abound of serving girls getting in the family way by the master of the house.

• "Controlling fertility commodifies fertility" - I would argue that commodification of fertility has always taken place and the technology for control offers new avenues of doing so. Marrying barely mature girls to adult men is a commodification of their fertility, giving him the monopoly on her maximum fertile lifespan. Today we have surrogate factories in Ukraine, but previously unmarried mothers were cloistered away and provided fresh, healthy infants for families who wanted to adopt. Private and international adoptions have always worked as a commodity with hefty sums changing hands, funnelling babies from poor mothers to rich is nothing new.

• Romanticising the past and how much control women had over their husbands, sex lives, and fertility. Not even that far in the past - Angela’s Ashes, the mother after yet another child has died, tells her husband “no more children” (no more sex). He rails against this, as it’s a wife’s duty to meet her husband’s needs.

• "The logical critique of transgenderism needs to start with a critique of the pill/abortion" - this is not coherent to me. The earliest forays into cross sex hormones/sex change operations predate the pill, the earliest examples of “cross gender roles” go back much further. Use of contraception and abortifacients also go back very far, examples of use by Egyptians and Romans. There are trans treatments available in many places abortion is totally illegal.

• Marriage is good - I see what she means about marriage of building a household rather than seeking big romance but I don't see much of that in practice. I think many women seeking divorce, if not most, would be ecstatic with an equal household partner they're not sexually thrilled about, but divorce someone who absolutely will not pull their weight. As a previous poster said, bringing down the divorce rate in this case would involve men taking up a much greater share of domestic labour or women acting as the constant shock absorbers for a large share of misery. I'd even argue most women DO put up with substantial inequality in mental load, childcare, domestic labour because they don't want to break up their families.

• The feminist case against the pill - I'm very much in favour of women being fully aware of the downsides of the pill and giving this the research funding it deserves, and for hormonal methods with serious effects to not be the first port of call. You can take my copper IUD out of my cold, dead, hands, however. Also "only a serious scumbag" would ignore the risk of pregnancy for sex? Has she... met men? I feel Harrington is wildly optimistic about how much pressure women would be under in relationships as the gatekeeper of fertility.

• Okay that sex isn't as intense without the danger? This one is just bizarre to me. Nothing about the risk of pregnancy has given danger a positive aspect to me it was just scary and stressful with no upsides. We know what happens when we remove contraception - we see more pregnancies, and especially more teen pregnancies. Women bear the brunt of the shame, the stigma, abortions, pregnancies, and single parenthood.

And the positives -

• Class issue and who is affected by the downsides of abolition of sex, and how the knowledge class/elites are most effected.

• Tension between the feminism of care vs feminism of freedom and the motherhood blind spot.

• That there are no universals of women's rights - positives for one class of women can be negatives for another class.

• That there is no progress, just changes + consequences.

• That we need to strengthen our connections for our own and societal stability - agreed. Although I think focusing on building strong familial connections are at least as powerful as putting all one's eggs in the marriage basket, and a lifeline if a marriage turns sour.

• The benefits for men of their own single-sex spaces, and how men civilise other men, which I roughly agree with (except I don't think men in women's prisons is equivalent to women trying to not be blocked from the levers of power from single sex clubs). Also, boy's clubs still exist? Male sports teams still exist?

• The potential of work from home, flexibility and motherhood. Stay at home mums being treated as thick and uninteresting by the culture at large. Mixing work and home and the benefits of that for families and also wider society. How trad wives are not actually trad at all.

I'm 3/4 of the way through 'Feminism against Progress' and have to say I'm really appreciating Mary Harrington's ability to conceptualise, and arrange into some kind of observable model, similar insights and pre-occupations which I've been experiencing myself over the last year or so.

I've become very interested in boundaries and borders, and in the liberating potential of embracing constraint and limitation. Acceptance of the nature of flesh and of embodied life on earth. That it is not all just about us as individuals on ajourney towards selfhood - but about building something lasting and meaningful by accepting that all is not possible or achievable.

I like her analogy, and use of, 'de-transitioning' as an exemplar for how meaning in life can be achieved by re-gaining acceptance of one's body and through the realisation that the self is not separate from the body.

The end point of liberal feminism is sex denial and disembodiment - certainly for the privileged class of women who are most keen to promote it; but in denying their sex in anticipation that this might signal liberation - they do violence to not only themselves, ultimately - but also to all other women.

I've always suspected that those women who are most keen to embrace and push transgenderism are those who cannot come to terms with, or accept, the facts of their sexed body and what this body implies in social /relational terms.Though many seem happy with the marketisation of their own body and sexuality and that of other women too. I'm thinking of women like Ash Sarker with her 'luxury communism'.

I'm also appreciating her description of how 'cyborg theocracy' like any other religion relies on its priests, its clergy, its inquisitors, its saints -to further its assimilation and adoption.

Maryhas been 'cancelled' from her book launch in the U.S:

https://compactmag.com/article/i-was-canceled-for-saying-sex-is-real

I think the U.S must now surely reached the height of trans craziness; what with Dylan Mulvaney and Sam Brinton, the assault of Riley Gaines et al......and the push-back really seems to have begun in earnest.

So long as it has a grip in the U.S it is always goingto be an issue here

https://open.substack.com/pub/reactionaryfeminist/p/parentcare?r=clsg2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

A review on the book by Robert VerBruggen at The Washington Free Beacon:

https://freebeacon.com/culture/the-reactionary-feminist-vs-the-meat-legos/

I've only ever heard her talk. I've felt uncomfortable listening to her because some of what she says goes against what I've believed for many years and I'm really anxious not to get suckered in by an extremely persuasive but apparently essentially conservative philosopher. But I can't find many obvious chinks in her arguments and I don't have the time to dedicate to a close reading and pick her apart. I'm waiting for someone more on the ball than me to do the work! Of course she may be right and I may need to think again about the positions and opinions I hold.

I think we all need to do that now and again. Review our positions in the light of new circumstances.

Mary Harrington was certainly not always conservative. She's run the full gamut of left/radical/progressive lifestyles and views and has the badges to show it. To be honest, I think some of the most interesting thinkers have done just the same as her. Travelled and found themselves somewhere they hadn't been anticipating.

I agree that being open to changing one's position as the world and personal circumstances change is something we could all benefit from and many of the issues we face in society arise from unthinking adherence to outdated ideas.

At the same time I'm mindful of the shift to the right throughout much of Europe and the rest of the world and I want to take any steps in that direction very slowly and with eyes wide open.

Such shifts tend to happen when things have gone too far in the other direction. It represents a necessary re-balancing. Too much social change too suddenly, or social change without consent will always trigger conservative impulses. To be conservative is to recognise the value of what works and is functional, and to reject radical or revolutionary change just for the sake of it.

I used to subject myself to periodic radical over-throws when younger, but then realised that I then had to spend a lot of time re-establishing a new set of stable conditions. Short term excitement or novelty soons wears off and you are left with the same old issues and problems as before.

I assume these lesbians you modelled yourself on were some kind of separatists? Are you saying they had no male friends or relatives?

I have a lot of lesbian friends (bi myself), most have good relationships with their male relatives. Fewer have male friends bc sadly a lot have had unpleasant experiences with 'friends' who turned out to be hanging around to sleep w them and were weirdly unable to accept their sexuality excluded men by default (I suspect sadly that lesbians by default attract these kinds of creepy boundary-pushers), but several DO have good male friends.

Not forgetting that more gay people in general are adopting kids than ever and having them biologically too- there's plenty of lesbian mothers of sons around-l.

We're not in the 70s separatist phase now,and most lesbians never were (a lot of the most vocal separatists, Jill Johnstone who wrote Lesbian Nation for one, were ironically bisexuals protesting too much).

Zombie thread.

So it is🙄
I've been hoodwinked into ❤ing a comment made by ArabellaScott in 2023!
It was a corker though, and has aged well; it was her objection to hardback books:
I now see paperback isn't out til later in the year ... I hate hardbacks ... they can brain you when you fall asleep reading them in bed.

Still funny after all these years😂

In this podcast she makes a point that I have long thought was the case. A woman who stays at home to bring up her own children, rather than farming out their upbringing to for-profit agencies such as private nurseries whilst herself becoming someone else's employee, has a lot more freedom (given sufficient income and a happy marriage) than the woman who goes out to work for money. I dislike the term SAHM, which I think is demeaning. When I did this I was responsible for the household budget (joint accounts for everything to which I had unfettered access - being a 70s second wave feminist I would accept nothing else, no daft nonsense about an account for bills and the rest of either partner's income being 'theirs'), as well as for the education of my DC. I baked, made bread, preserves, gardened (not well but we had a constant supply of rhubarb and veg in season as well as an apple tree), made clothes and furnishing, wrote (novels, plays, poetry) and painted, ran our social life, took part in political campaigns locally and nationally and in local arts events and was my own boss. I found going out to work considerably less interesting and less liberating and had my work been on a supermarket check-out I would indubitably have stayed at home.
So, all things being equal, the woman occupied at home has a much more satisfying life than one who goes out to work, having to juggle childcare and domestic work (never shared) all the time.

Great post, I agree with a lot. Sounds like you led a v busy & fulfilling life!

Obvs not all jobs require employers, I do dislike when 'reactionary feminists' like Mary act like all jobs are that. But obvs many do. I want to be a criminal lawyer (uni student) now and that does allow quite a lot of control over what you do, at least in some ways.

Otoh being a SAHM is only liberating if you can rely on your partner not to beat you, or run away with someone else. Obvs there's plenty of good husbands,,but otoh reading about women who don't do paid work for years and then find out about a covert affair makes me think the 'liberating' aspect should not be overemphasised.

Grammarnut, otoh if you were writing books and campaigning wasn't this work? Or was it not paid so you wouldn't describe it as work?

Obvs the many freelance/self-employed jobs have their own disadvantages.

Personally I've always felt the Wages For Housework campaign had something to be said for it (I know a lot of them disrupted other meetings in the 70s, that's annoying)

 Maybe something like the old-fashioned Mother's Allowance would be a workable version of that? 

I share a lot of people like DemiColon's feelings about how capitalism downgrades non-monetisable and lower-paid work.

But the fact remains that working for money isn't just about capitalism downgrading SAHMs, or about self-actualisation, it's also about financial independence in case the husband leaves (or is violent or the marriage completely breaks down, though I do agree that often divorces happen which could perhaps have been avoided w mutual work to improve the relationship)

Exactly, but the kind of miserable/abusive marriage you describe shouldn't be what Mary is hoping women will stay in if social care gets harder. That would be terrible. As you say, strengthening family ties is a better option