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/

As for her anti-abortion stance. The reason women fought for legal abortions was because so many women were dying at the hands of backstreet abortionists. And yes, there is a problem with legal abortion, because nowadays women are being expected to abort any inconvenient child, which was not the original intention

Is she 'anti abortion'?

Exactly.

And I think we are already seeing where the ‘right’ to constant sexual gratification is leading. Just read the latest pronouncement from the WHO on this topic.

As for the rest of it, I’m all in favour of men having their own spaces, just as long as they keep them clean themselves. I would appreciate them returning the favour.

I'm not sure how the casual belittling of motherhood and mothers - speaking of which I see 'brood mare' has already made an appearance - can be entirely pinned onto capitalism?

She talks about this kind of thing a fair bit, but I think would also say that the context in which feminism imagined itself was capitalistic. So it tended to assume or bake in capitalist values within its analysis.

Which would be surprising really if that didn't happen to some extent, that's how intellectual systems work, they reflect the systems they arise from.

Just putting on this old username to note it was a socialist feminist who gave me (and others) this moniker.

It's such a bloody relief to see this being discussed!

I don't think she blames feminism for capitalism. I think she feels that separating sex from social constraints and making it an entirely private and individual freedom matter means that it can be utilised in the market place and commodified. Leading to sex work is work & only fans & porn hub.

Technology has allowed sex and reproduction to be commodities. Capitalism with no constraints will commodify everything it can.

The ubiquity of the pill and the undermining of marriage and the family unit also allow reproduction to be commodified. And if women can be separated from reproduction and the family unit is not important why shouldn't uterus donations to men who want to be women be allowed?

Sex and reproduction are just things women can sell if they have no social meaning.

So yes you get total individual freedom but that doesn't mean the outcomes of that freedom are a net good.

Maybe when there were more social constraints around sex, it was, on balance, better for women.

It can't.

But to some extent governments and business have been very happy to buy into the idea that motherhood is a kind of afterthought, or that its best if much of the work of motherhood is outsources. Because the effect of adding women into the formal workforce is good for productivity.

With domestic work of any kind, the main benefit of the work goes to the individual or family, once that work, even if it is the same work, happens in the formal economy, it also benefits the capitalist and the state in a direct way.

Though lowering birth rates have started to worry some capitalists, I think.

In terms of male spaces she mentions cub scouts. Where boys space was not protected and now the same is happening to girl guides.

I can't follow her argument though on how men's spaces would mean they were better partners? Or any evidence for that?

And although some of her arguments against the pill seem to have some logic, I cannot think through the impact for women of not not being confident they could plan when to have a baby. Life for women would return to an ever present reality of unwanted pregnancy at anytime. Unless abortion was very readily available?

I think the idea is that if you didn't want to risk pregnancy, you wouldn't have sex. Though for some natural planning might be a good option.

I think this is actually where a lot of people get stuck - we're so used to the idea that sex should be pretty readily available, it seems crazy to just not do it to avoid pregnancy. But people used to do it pretty commonly.

I don't remember where I've seen her say this, but I think she takes the view that boys learn to be good men mainly through male models and direct male mentoring.

She talks about a feminism of care vs feminism of freedom and how the feminism of freedom has dominated.

Which is why motherhood has remained a sticky issue, because it cannot be addressed by the feminism of freedom. Motherhood requires interdependence between mother and infant and, mother and other supportive adults.

But unless we address the feminism of care we are not addressing women's actual real life experiences linked to their bodies.

The total freedom from our bodies the pill provides is just a temporary illusion which comes crashing down when you have a baby.

Ah.
Just not having sex hadn't occurred to me 😁

on the feminist / capitalist thing, articles by the Economist about women working have always struck me as being far more about 'just think how much richer you could be if women worked' rather than 'think about how much better women's lives could be'. They're obviously coming from the capitalist angle

(paywalled) example below

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/07/05/why-india-needs-women-to-work

What's wrong with condoms? Protection against STDs, too.

I think a lot of it boils down to the fact that we're these amazing minds riding around in animal's bodies. The human condition basically.

so there's no right answers because we've evolved to want freedom and self actualisation and to be creative and fabulous, and our bodies just don't give a shit about that

In writings from medieval times, ‘sex’ was not just the act of putting penis into vagina as we think of by default these days. There were various other things which fell under this banner - often mentioned in Church admonishments about behaviour which shouldn’t be indulged in.

The inference is that intimate relationships were not dominated by PIV in the way we think of now. There were other ways to share pleasure together which did not result in children and this was commonplace and accepted. Ironically, we are echoing the Church in placing such emphasis on PIV as the ‘proper’ way to do sex - they argued for the importance of it for procreation of course.

But I don't think the commodification of sex and even reproduction is even new. There's a reason they call it the oldest profession (or oppression, depending on your view). https://www.bbc.com/news/10384460 - the women in Roman brothels were mostly slaves and men faced no moral disapproval for partaking. The evidence they're using that the building was a brothel is the pile of dead babies they found there. Sex makes babies!

Technology may have accelerated surrogacy by being able to have the gestational mother not be the genetic mother - this is new. But rich, established couples being able to "kindly" adopt the baby from a poorer, unmarried mother has been going on for centuries, to the point that the religious right to decry that abortion liberalisation is responsible for "the decline in the domestic supply of infants". Guatemala had to ban international adoptions, because when a healthy supply of infants couldn't be found, organisations would straight up steal babies instead. In Nigeria, hardly a bastion of liberal feminism, you've got women and girls being kept in baby factories. https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/tea/rest-of-africa/inside-nigeria-thriving-baby-factories-4111022. I have absolutely no doubt that if it were possible to use technology for surrogate pregnancies the way we do today in Roman times, or Greek times, it would be used on enslaved women.

I find Mary Harrington likeable and a provocative thinker, and agree with her on many things. I agree with her that many changes aren't better, or worse, they are simply trade offs. I think she's completely right that there's a class dimension where the luxury beliefs of privileged women negatively impact those of the working class. Yes, social stigma on unmarried mothers increased the proportion of children raised in two parent families. The trade off was that a great number unmarried and poor women faced social disgrace and had their babies removed from them and given to others. Is that better for women? On balance?

Which is why I find it baffling that she thinks that not using contraception will inspire better behaviour in men - this is the pinnacle of luxury beliefs. You have women still injured and bleeding from birth fending off advances from their husbands who won't wait until she's healed, and you expect me to believe that most men in long term relationships will just accept sexlessness to avoid pregnancy? I wouldn't bet the farm on it.

Is she against all contraception or is she specifically questioning the benefits of the pill? My impression is that it's the second, and I must admit I'm kind of surprised too that, for all the scientific advances of the last 60 years, we haven't come up with anything better.

But like I've said, I find her hard going. I have to read most of her stuff at least 3 times before I start to make sense of it.

I'm not sure Floisme. Nor about where she stands on abortion.

I also find her difficult. Partly why I wanted to explore it with others on here. I think this might be because some of her premises such as progress doesn't exist are very new to me without understanding those her arguments that follow are unclear.

I AM a mother - three times over, all of which I chose. I didn't have 5, 6, 8, 10 babies or more like my ancestors did because no contraception meant we didn't have a choice, and having babies and being wives was all we were expected to do. There was no time or resources to do anything else.

Seeing my desire not to live that way described as "casually belittling motherhood" is EXACTLY what I object to about Mary Harrington's solutions to the problems of modernity. This is EXACTLY the game conservatives play with women - we need to put up and shut up, or we are "belittling motherhood" (and probably neglecting our children to boot). The endgame becomes clear all too quickly.

Dworken was right. The right sees women as private property, and the left as public property. It's a shame to see that after all Harrington's thoughtful critiques of technology and progress, the best she's come up with is that women need to marry well and put childbearing first, or men are basically justified in behaving however they like to them.

I find Mary Harrington likeable and a provocative thinker, and agree with her on many things. I agree with her that many changes aren't better, or worse, they are simply trade offs. I think she's completely right that there's a class dimension where the luxury beliefs of privileged women negatively impact those of the working class

Isn't that the uncomfortable truth ?

the best she's come up with is that women need to marry well and put childbearing first, or men are basically justified in behaving however they like to them.

That's a bizarre reading of her words! Good lord. She's saying that if you want to be a mother then you are best protected by marriage. She may be wrong, I dunno, but in no way did she say that women need to marry if they don't want to. At least, not anywhere I've read, and not in the article in the OP.

Idon't think she has a firm stance on anything; she is just exploring ideas; and the 'idea' is that all pregnancies would be wanted pregnancies ( if women were released from feelng they have to pursue joyless sexual episodes with men who don't desrve it) , hence no need for abortion.

Like most of us she sees earlier abortion as the most preferable - and baulks at the concept of whole term abortions which are permitted in some U.S states.

She also talks about mixed sex regiments and spaces in the military - and how she can see that the aim of the military may be compromised by the presence of women without the necessary strength for certain types of combat role; and the potential for over-protection towards women from male colleagues, rather than focusing on the male fighting unit.

I've always had similar thoughts abut women in the armed forces; plus the feminism I grew up with wondered why a woman would even want to be involved with the military.

In your earlier post you used the phrase 'lifelong broodmare'. That kind of belittling language is what I'm talking about. It happens all the time.