Three principles of reactionary feminism

[MalagaNights]

An article by Mary Harrington.

She thinks women need to:

Focus on the importance of marriage.
Let men have their own spaces.
Stop taking the pill.

She's taken some thoughts I've been having for a few years to logical conclusions, it's given me a lot to think about. I need to get my head around the idea of there being no progress.

It's certainly feels to me a very different approach to gender critical feminism presented on MN as being what feminism is.

https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2023/04/88473/

This is not feminism.

No thank you.

Yes , some people are daft

“Focus on the importance of marriage.
Let men have their own spaces.
Stop taking the pill”

Or

Not get married
Carve out their own spaces
Read Sappho not Foucault

Interesting first post from OP.
So, reactionary feminism = the rollback of women's rights?

Actually if you read it , it sounds like a lot of advice you get on the relationship board.

Hard agree

Gender criticism is not a stand alone school of feminist thought it is part of second wave feminist theory.

I'm OK with saying no thanks to her suggestions.

Sorry I recognise OP's username but not yours.

It's not my first post 🤣🤣🤣

I've been around under this name for ages and other names for even longer.

I think Mary Harrington approaches ideas in a really interesting way and I'm always happy to read her work, even when I disagree with it. The conversation about the pill, and specifically how long-term hormone use can negatively affect women, is an important one.

I also think she is wildly optimistic and unrealistic about how much men will modify their behaviour if women stop taking the pill en masse.

Sure, I imagine some (but not all) will accept a longer timeline to physical intimacy in early dating. But consistently? Long-term? In relationships that span years, or even decades during when a woman is fertile? Once you've had all the children you are planning on having? Women are already highly vulnerable to reproductive coercion and this would only exacerbate this. Men have always looked for ways to avoid taking responsibility for the outcomes of their sexual dalliances and women and children have typically borne the costs.

Marriage benefits the financially weaker party, which is not always the woman.

What is depressing is how much media coverage this writer gets. I wonder why?

But then I did a quick search and it seems more than a few threads have been started about her on FWR ...

Bewildering.

Just because she as an individual chose to backslide into tradition is hardly the basis for proposing a whole new feminism to make her feel less bad about herself.

Because most women are heterosexual and want relationships with men.
Most women want children.
It's better for women to have the support of the other biological parent in the cost intensive raising of children.

Most importantly it's better for children.

I worked out a similar position on marriage as being in (most) women's interests myself. Partly from the stories of young unmarried women on MN.

But the views around 'cyborg feminism' and rejecting the pill are new to me. But I can see logically fits with the rejection of body modification and separation from your body that transgenderism proposes. It's also interesting that she think this would reconnect sex as deep and important, which would make it more pleasurable and in women's interests in relationships. Which makes some sense.

I'm pretty sure she's as against Foucault as the next gender critical feminist.

Someone who so clearly didn't even understand what she was part of, but appearing to think she had to play act a role isn't a very convincing source of viewing the world.

This sounds it was written by some intern doing the plot for a silly comedy:

But I soon learned that membership of the feminist club comes with small print. You cannot pursue feminist goals without signing up to a larger bundle of commitments under the banner of ‘progress’, such as climate justice, racial and gender-minority rights, wealth redistribution and so on. Reject those, and you will be excommunicated from the coalition of the righteous.

I tried living my adult life according to those ideals, pursuing low-carbon life, non-hierarchical social forms and maximum sexual freedom, in a culture hell-bent on individualism and fluid relationships.

By the end of my 20s, however, I had found that being determinedly counter-cultural was taking a great deal of emotional and intellectual effort, for questionable returns. I concluded that sexual freedom brings alienation and that too little interdependence, rather than too much, is actually precipitating a collapse of social life.

I suspect that in a few years there will be another book about how marriage and motherhood isn't a fulfilling as advertised.

MSM love women who lurch from one disaster to another and try to make out that because they are female, they are some how a barometer of actual feminism.

Why would it be bewildering that women want to discuss a take on feminism on the feminism board??

I think too many people think this is the Gender Critical Feminist Board.

It's not.

Starter post then. Beginning post on this thread. You chuck it in like a bombshell, say it fits with your thinking, but don't explain why.

One: if you want to be a mother, marriage is not a patriarchal institution designed to oppress you. It’s the minimum unit for human-scale solidarity. Unless you’re very rich raising kids in this atomized context, marriage is not the misogynist option but the pro-women one.
Two: co-ed social life has lots to offer, but there are times when single-sex social spaces are important. And this goes for men as well as women.
And three: close to the heart of modern women’s dissociation from our own bodies, and the countless forms of exploitation that follow from this, is a technology that was sold as emancipatory to us: the Pill.

I think there is plenty of common ground to be found.
But I fundamentally disagree with her first point- the issue isn’t marriage, so much as the fact that so many men really are very poor quality parents, and partners. Can men (as a group) be leveled up?

"Read Sappho not Foucault"
This on a t-shirt please

Wtf is your problem?

A bombshell 🤣🤣🤣

No need to wonder why. It’s a straightforward “follow the money” question.

Books which criticise feminism get publishers queuing up to publish them. Want a guaranteed platform and profile? Easy: write about how feminism makes life worse for women, how feminism goes against nature in some way, and how much better the world would be if everything went back to how it used to be and women just stayed in their lane.

Don't you basically say that MH's vision of feminism makes more sense to you than GC feminism and therefore most of MN on FWR are ill-advised in their approach? Without any explanation to your thinking.

Your first post comes across as inflammatory, do you need me to apologise that you had a robust response?

I think her argument is that men have become increasingly poor partners and parents because of the lack of expectation around sexual relationships and marriage.

I think she thinks this would be addressed by point 1 & 2.

There feels like there's some truth in this for me based on the numbers of threads I see with women with babies who's partner won't marry them. Or women who's husbands maintain a my money/ your money attitude even when they are caring for a small child.

It does feel like the financial independence mantra and marriage as incidental/ meaningless option are feminist ideas not working out well for lots of women as it allows selfish men to use these concepts to their advantage.

Well it certainly inflamed you.

I think lots of other women are perfectly capable of tolerating a sharing of an alternative viewpoint, and some may even enjoy it. Even if they disagree.

Imagine that.
If you can.

So according to Mary Harrington giving women a greater ability to control whether they get pregnant or not is the root cause of women being exploited? Not male entitlement then? Not the multi billion pound international commercial sexual abuse of women and children industry that is the pornography and prostitution industry? But to fair to her, criticising pornography would make it harder to get a publisher. And make her sound like one of those tiresome old feminists.