We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emil Jasinski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts as well. Today I
could possibly could not possibly be happier than to be joined by Mary Harrington,
the author of the fascinating new book Feminism Against Progress. Mary is joining us
here in person today at Federalist HQ. Thank you so much, Mary,
Thank you so much for having me, having these great to be here.
Of course we were just talking. You're on a tour of the Acela Corridor
right now. I was so tempted to get one of those US stadium rock
Till Tye t shirts printed. You should have actually with with with all of
my tiny stadium dates and then like proper gothic head Metallica type writing. I
was just going to ask, what is the mask out of reaction ary feminism?
Would what would the illustration be? I think that's a question. You
now have to figure out what it's. It's it's Artemis. She is the
original the og Kuma remover. That's somehow perfect it is. And I mean
she she's the og Kuma remover. She she was spotted bathing naked with her
nymphs in the forest, and so she had that she turned the guy into
a stag and had him hunted down by his own hands. I mean,
it doesn't get much more reaction to feminist than that. That's exactly goddess of
chastity, chastity and childbirth. It's artemists. I'd like to know that was
just on the tip of your tongue. I've given this some thought, Emily,
someone's gonna have to make them. Now. I want to talk about,
obviously, the I want to start at the beginning of the book.
Your introduction is a beautiful piece of writing in and of itself. It's a
really fascinating personal history that then gets mixed into the kind of cultural history.
But I wanted to start by how you're right on being kind of intoxicated by
Judith Butler. And I think that's so interesting because it's, as our former
President Trump would say, many such cases, many people have been fallen under
the spell of Judith Butler. For you, not just Butler, but that
sort of school of feminism. What do you think it was, as you're
a young student kind of in that end of history period that jumped or grabbed
you about that kind of writing at the time. I mean, strictly speaking,
only some feminist would say Juth Butler isn't really a feminist, she's she's
a queer theorist, just on a point of pedantry. Although I mean,
it's it's very hard to tell the two if you're if we're talking liberal feminism
is very hard to tell disaggregate quite a theory and libal feminism now, but
I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit there. They would say that's impossible.
They would say, yeah, yeah, And you know, if my
feminism is not an inclusive of X, Y and Z, including men,
then it's not feminism. That's not really my take, as you probably,
But what was it that intoxicated me about it? Um? Very straightforwardly most
of the way, most in most respects, you know, thinking back to
how I was in the world at that point, being female seemed to me
more of an impediment than anything else. I struggled to see the upsides and
I could. I could count very m I could list, I could I
could spend hours listening the down sides. I mean, from being physically weak
as to being perceived as sexually passive and being objectified sexually within the culture as
a whole, to people making assumptions about what my social role is likely to
be, or what my behaviors or you know, life path was going to
look like, through to just straightforwardly being disliked because I have because female.
I couldn't I couldn't see very many, very many obvious upsides to being a
woman, and and the yeah, the penalties seemed many and just arbitrary and
unfair. So, you know, and then I I encountered Judics Butler at
university, who who proposes this world view in which all of this, all
of this stuff, all the way down really to bodily sex is culturally constructed,
you know, that is socially constructed, and it's it's imposed by these
sort of you know, this dark matter of near, these these matrices of
power. But but implicit in that idea is the possibility that we might be
able to escape that, or we might be able to remake it, or
we might be able to just demolish the whole, the whole infrastructure and start
again. As kind of free, self creating individuals. No, no,
no, I found that really appealing. I couldn't see from from a position
where being female had all of his upsides, why shouldn't I create my create
my own self and my own reality. And you've got to remember as well,
that this was this was the era, the era of I mean,
I don't know if you remember the shortly after the rat War, that famous
statement from the White House Aige who says, you know, we're an empire
and we create our own reality. You know, when when we act,
you know, we make history. And that's just what the world is now.
And you guys, you just you just respond to that. And I
sort of feel like that that was just in the air in the naughties.
In a way, it's sort of difficult to develop capture now. And there
was this there was this really heady sense between really between nine to eleven and
the Great Crash. There was this really heavy feeling that came with Web two
point zero and with the this sort of apparently never ending economic boom, and
you know, this this real kind of high point of peak progress and double
liberalism and the idea that progress could go on indefinitely It's as though that there
was this feeling that we really could just create our own realities just x Nielo
and and it would be it would be magnificent. You know, if only
we could throw enough will and enough vision and enough commitment and passion into it,
we could all just create our own realities. And for me, that
just felt like an intoxicating idea, you know, particularly because I'd never seen
anything really to really that was worth it was beneficial or positive about being female.
So I was there for it. And that, you know, we
didn't have this word in circulation as much at the time. But I think
there's a which is the fundamental question of your book, which is feminism kind
of as transhumanism, because you get into surrogacy, you get into transgenderism,
you get into all of these different sort of escaping the female body, which
is much more, I think in this world than maybe you would say in
an industrial capitalist world, going to be much more appealing than escaping the male
body. And that's sort of where you see this happening in particular on the
female side. But is that it was that heady sense something that prevented us
or lulled this in this false sense of comfort about what we are actually doing.
I think so yeah. When we take the birth control pill, when
we take when we industrialize abortion, for instance, I think so yeah.
And of course for a great many people, the upsides still look like they're
outweighing the downsides. And what I've tried to pick apart in the book is
the fact that the shadeoffs land very asymmetrically. And this is one of the
reasons why this this order is still holds because the trade offs mostly collect at
the bottom of the social scare. The negatives, the negative externalities are mostly
landing amongst the poorest, you know, where radical atomization is just horrible and
they and whereas the benefits really they float to the top. And you know
your your high flying girl boss, you know, lean right, Lean and
feminists are doing are doing great. I mean the I read the other day
that Alyssa Haines shied I think that's how you say her name. She has
been in the news somewhat recently, as I'm sure you're aware, who for
four platforming the Tictole influencer Dylan mulvaney as the new face of bud Light,
you know, prompting a certain amount of discourse. We might say it transpired.
I discovered. I discovered the other day that she she she's a mum.
She had her three children by surrogacy. And at the moment I read
that, I was like, right, oh, yeah, of course she
did. It's just an of course moment because from the perspective of somebody who's
outsourced, who's so radically outsourced for maleness that she's even outsourced subcontracted gestation,
it really would seem plausible that Dylan mulvaney is a woman in the same way
as she is, because Dylan mulvaney kind of is a woman to the to
the same extent that she is. And like, it's so far collapsed the
distinction between a male woman and high flying gestation subcontracting female woman that you know,
it's the difference, the difference comes to seem negligible, So yeah,
it tracts. And then where and where and where the negative externalities fall out.
Just to just to round that picture off, is that somebody, somebody's
still doing the gestating and more often than not, you know, these these
are women who are doing so because they need to make rent. This is
a great quote from your Brocky rate if liberation for everyone means the radical separation
of selfhood from embodiment, what does that mean for those who have to stay
embodied? Who cleans the toilets? Two birds as the babies requiring the dilemma
of my adolescence? Who tis the dishes? There's a lack of class awareness
in contemporary feminism, and I guess the minism on the on the radical emancipatory
model is fundamentally a Ponzi scheme. You know, it's it's great if you
got in early and you're right at the top, but but some someone,
someone down at the bottom, is still doing the messy work. It's great
to be Erica, right, It's not that's so nice, not not so
much to be a working class woman in a world where it's not it's presumptively
the case that all all sexual encounters are hookups. You're you're it's difficult to
find a partner will stick around. You know, it's it's it's normative in
your in your communities for people to have multiple children with multiple partners, and
to to to scrape along in in in chaotic environments. It's probably not great
for your kids either, were to have to have a string of a string
of transient men coming through the house. The statistics on that are not great
in terms of the safety of children. Yeah, and well, but but
right right at the other end of the scale, where you know, the
daughters, the descendants of Erica Jonga a flourishing. Some of them are flourishing
anyway, you know, broadly speaking, broadly speaking, all of those,
all of that sexual liberation will still culminate in something something not too similar to
the traditional model. You know, those people are not walking the walk.
They're saying, oh, you know, you do, you do whatever you
want. But they still get married and they still stay together, but while
paying lip service to the idea that actually family, family doesn't matter and commitment
doesn't matter, and that message is only really being lived out at the bottom
of the social scale. And it's because of its entanglement with the left.
Feminism has long purported to be class conscious, class conscious, and I wanted
to ask them how you think it is women kind of got hoodwinked by a
fairly anti woman ideology, despite the fact that they were intentionally trying to have
a class consciousness about their worldview. How does it come for them to end
up being both so anti woman and like anti and probably that's a really just
in question, how how do we how do we end up here? There's
sort of different different ways you could different ways you could take it. Probably
probably the probably the most useful lens here is to is just to broaden the
picture out just beyond women and to think about the class divide which has emerged
since the digital revolution more generally between people who work in the world of ideas
and people who still work in the world of stuff. NS Lyons, who's
who's a sub stacker who I really rate, wrote a fantastic piece about this
not long ago. He characterized these these I think the piece is called reality
honks back, and it was about the Canadian truckers and the conflict which was
which was at play there, and his his thesis is that the class war
which is emerging, you know, across really the developed world, is between
people the physicals, as he calls it, people who work in the world
of stuff, such as truckers, and people who work in the world of
ideas, such as accountants or lawyers or well, yeah, I can think
of a great many other examples. And the class blind within feminism maps onto
a much broader class blindness. I mean, we saw, you know,
a variant of this. This dispute played out over the course of the pandemic
between the hard core lockdown advocates, most of whom were knowledge workers who who
could do just fine working from home, and people who still work in the
world of stuff, some of whom, many of whom lost their livelihoods and
whose interests were largely steamroller or just ignored or produced as as you know,
you want to murder Granny by by people who who didn't really stand to lose
nearly so much. So there's a there's a much bigger picture, a much
bigger cleavage at work there, which is really it's been ecceratically accelerated by the
digital revolution and the fact that we can now work remotely. And I guess
I'm I'm in a sense, I'm a class traitor really even to be thinking
about this stuff, because I mean, I wouldn't be here if it was
I'm a laptop class. I'm a writer, like I do my work at
a laptop. I work from home remotely, and I wouldn't be here talking
to you in DC were it not for the when I live in Britain,
were it not for the fact that all of all of these things are in
place, but it's also it's also very clear to me that those those those
affordances play out very different differently if you're a manual laborer, and to a
great extent they the negative externalities land among among people who work in the physical
world, and I think so so I think we if you map that onto
onto the women's movement, you can see that those women who are virtuals are
still broadly net beneficiaries of what what what I see and I argue as a
radically anti women model of female emancipation, which is really is much more of
a kind of libertarianism of the body. And if you're a knowledge class woman,
you know, libertarians and the body sounds great. But if you're you
know, if you're if you work in the real world, you know there
are there are ways that sex really still matters. The Watched On Wall Street
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wherever you get your podcast. It sounds great, and then you know,
you get situations like there was a BuzzFeed article published a couple of years ago,
probably two and a half years ago now about how gen Z is turning
on sex positivity. That was the headline, and I think BuzzFeed ultimately watered
the headline down. They must have gotten backlash for it. But you have
these women who said, you know, sex in the City girls, these
shows really did a number on me. HBO really did a number on me.
As the quote of a twenty three year old rape victim in the article.
And that's another question I think this book raises. Are there going to
be more Mary Harrington's outside of just you know the world of media and writing
and all of that. Are there more Mary Harrington's in those marketing jobs in
you know, is this becoming i think visible to people as the experiment sort
of plays out in real time because we lose perspective. We think of like
Gloria Steinham and the second Wave is being old. It's happened over the course
of people's lifetimes. I mean, people are still living in the arc of
all of that. And so do you sense that something is really shifting?
And if so, absolutely absolutely. I mean, my great friend Louise Perry
fantastic, yes, yeah, the case against the sexual Revolution and the response,
I mean, she gets four or five letters a day from young men
and women. Some of them are intensely personal, incredibly, some of them
are really heartbreaking, but but more of the feedback she gets a lot as
you changed my life. I didn't, you know, I felt like something
off and I've made I've made the following changes to my life and things are
just better, you know, thank you for writing it. And her,
I mean, her argument is that the sexual revolution has been negative for women,
and that, in fact, a great deal of what your granny would
have told you to do was actually pretty good advice. Listen to your Yeah,
listen to your mom, listen to your grannie. You know they weren't
wrong, um so so, but yeah, it's it's clear enough and it's
clear as well from the feedback that that that I've had already from the book,
that there are plenty of young men and women who feel very strongly that
there's something off and that they've been lied to. And I think i've I
said at one point in the book, you know, I got here the
hard way by liberaling as hard as possible, and I, you know,
and I reached escape velocity just in time. You know, I was.
I was in my early thirties from when we got married. I was thirty
six when we had our daughter. I doubt I'll manage another one now,
you know, I'll be. I'm grateful for the one I have. And
there are a great many women who reached my age and alot forties and didn't
reach escape velocity. And I think there's a there's a great deal of pain
there, which is yeah, or at least it's not that it's under discussed,
but it's discussed with very little compassion. It's amazing, even when you
read Fear of Flying, Um, how much pain there is in the book
itself, how much pain there is in those decisions. And I hadn't really
thought about this until just now, but it's amazing how people deluded themselves or
sort of squash those voices inside of themselves even to the point where they wrote
them and published them. M but wade that sort of sense of freedom over
that sense of personal U I don't know, personal happiness, personal fulfillment.
It's strange to think back on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
I remember I was. It's fascinating to to think about those writers,
you know, the Erica Young's and the Germaine Griers, as the those women
who are who are trying to apply by the Beat generation's vision of liberty to
women, and just what a what an absurd idea really? I mean,
if you know, if I remember I Loved on the Road when I was
a teenager, I read it as a teenagers, as is often the way,
and I thought he was really cool. And then I read it again
recently I was like, he's a terrible person. He's such an awful person.
You know, he's sort of he's this kind of feckless, alcoholic cereal
shagger who just you know, roans across the country, you know, impregnating
and abandoning women and just generally you know, acting like a complete tool.
He's a terrible person. What sort of a role model is this. But
you know, but at the time and in its content, it must have
read just like the most wild, insane, intoxicating breath of freedom. And
you know, and I'm sure there are a great many women who read it
were like, we want that too. But it wasn't really until the birth
control pill came along that there was It was been in any sense meaningfully thinkable
that women could have that, And when that came along, it must have
been like, yes, it must have must have just been the most thrilling
thing. Right, you can imagine being writing as Simone Abovir and that sort
of the ideas that you're landing on genuinely feeling liberating and not sort of maybe
it's maybe it was just my opic to not or shortsighted in a very reasonable
understandable way to understand where that would go, right right, I mean,
the theme that I kept finding myself coming back to when I was I was
researching all of this is that, again and again and again, when we
have we have these technological we have a new technology comes along that frees us
from what previously seemed like an unavoidable limit, and it always brings a whole
lot of good things with it. Concentration camp, comfortable concentration camp, and
the pilance of Yeah, I mean, you know, there's always a dividend
of freedom, you know, the pill. The pill was great for ambitious
women who wanted to pursue careers and to you know, they flocked to the
universities. It was not it was not very easy to do that before because
you know, unless you really did have a phenomenal amount of self discipline,
there was always a possibility you were going to have to abandon your plans at
the drop of a hat and be a mom um. And then all of
a sudden, this technology comes along. It means you can plan, you
know, for ambitious women. You know, amazing, amazing and the but
but but the thing, the thing about you know, it becomes thinkable for
the first time that my body just belongs to me and nobody else has a
stake in what I do, all with whom. But but the moment something
belongs to me, I can do what I want with it, and so
and at that point I can buy and sell it if I want to.
And what I came to realize is that it doesn't matter what the utopians imagined
about about this this great dividend of freedom because with freedom always comes trade.
Invariably, freedom and trade just go together, you know, like like like
cheese and apple. You know that they're two sides of the same coin.
And the moment that, the moment something is liberated from an apparently given set
of limits, it becomes the market moves in to that space because the moment,
because at that point it becomes it becomes a private it becomes the private
possession of individuals. And this seems abstract when I talk about but it's it's
very clearly evident in what happened with the sexual revolution. You know, on
the one hand, on the one hand, amazing women can go to university.
On the other hand, it's you suddenly have a libertarian defense of the
porn industry, and and and the two the two are just at different aspects
of the same thing. Yeah, it's it's a flaw in my favorite theorist's
work, which would be Camille Palia, who is very much a libertarian sex
feminist. But now I was actually going to ask you, and it might
have believed that Andrew Dorkin was right all along. I mean, now it
looks that you look back on that criticisms of dorkin in this porn saturated culture
that we're in, and Louise Perry is so good on that question, particularly
of how high tech porn is destroying our relationships with each other. But I
mean it was interred working. She was right about some things, definitely.
I mean, she was the kind of patriarchy as dark matter radical feminists.
I don't. I don't believe in patriarchy really, at least I have yet
to find. I have yet to meet a modern context where somebody uses the
word patriarchy that wouldn't make more sense if they said immutable sex differences I don't
like. I mean, I've tried this as a thought experiment on a number
of occasions, and immutable sex differences I don't like it always makes more sense
in that context. That's great. This is one of the most interesting parts
of your book as critiques of Conservatism, and I wanted to conservative critiques of
conservative critiques of feminism to be kind of meta there. This is a great
part of the book where you say where the conservative analysis often fall short,
isn't looking no further back than the mid twentieth century, rather than tracing the
logic of character few by freedom all the way back to its inception in the
material conditions of market society. As such, when conservative call for a return
to traditional family life but mean by this a return to some variant of separate
spheres, whether in its nineteenth or twentieth century forms, this smiss is the
fact that such forms of family life are not traditional at all, but distinctively
modern. And distinctively modern, you would probably says industrial, right industrial or
post industrial post industrial capitalism. They are distinctly capitalistic in the modern sense.
Yeah, can you talk about because you actually spend a good trunk of the
book discussing separate spheres and previous iterations and what that looked like. Can you
just do some background on the separate spheres idea? Sure, I mean,
but I spend the first third of the book I wanted to do a deep
dive into my thesis, which is that feminism as such is not evidence of
moral progress but an effect of industrialization, or rather it's The Women's Movement was
women's aggregate response to the ways that industrialization change family life, particularly by by
moving work out of the home, which created a whole new set of lemmas
and challenges for women, which just hadn't really obtained previously. For example,
the question of balancing work and family life wasn't really a thing when when work
was just what you did to create or or process subsistence goods within an agrarian
household, you know, there is no balancing family and work and family life
because it's all just the same thing. And it's not until work becomes something
that you do somewhere else that you even have to consider the question of what
happened what you do with the kids. So at that point, you know,
those women who could afford to exited the economic sphere, but that had
further downstream consequences because of that. Once you've exited the economic sphere, you
actually lose leverage. So and it's counterintuitive to think that under industrial in industrial
under industrialization, women actually lost leverage relative to their medieval form others, but
that that was effectively what happened because they were no longer co producers within a
productive household. They were they were chief consumer in a private household. And
this and this through up a whole load of intimate challenges to do with you
know, how how do you how do you ensure that your your contribution to
the household is still respected. You know that. Hence the whole, the
entire so called cult of domesticity, which is a huge body of women's writing,
all of which is you know, is committed to making the case for
the fact that women's work is still valuable, you know, under circumstances where
women actually don't have very much leverage. But then on the other side of
that, you have a bunch of women who say, well, you know,
what happens if what happens if my husband This is all fine as long
as I have a husband who loves and respect me, But what happens if
he doesn't. So there you get the temperance movement, which isn't due to
me, reads straightforwardly as feminism. This is, I mean it was.
It was powered by women, and it was oriented towards getting men to drink
less so they wouldn't beat they beat their wives, or drink away the family
wage. You know, it's it's it's it's a form of feminism. And
in response to the and then and then also but then also you have the
feminism of freedom, which makes the case that you know, if if women
are this radically structurally disadvantaged under this new order than in fact, the best
solution is for women, for women to enter the market on the same terms
as men. And that really, I mean that that's the feminism of freedom
which now just dominates everything, and that's usually that, and it's the feminism
of freedom typically that conservatives are angry about because they and I can see why
conservatives would just think that's all of feminism, because the feminists of freedom have
pretty much memory hold everything else. Yeah, you know, they since since
the feminism of freedom definitively one, which was the point of the sexual revolution.
I mean that that was the that was the point where feminism of freedom
just became feminism, and that the rest of it just got memory hold.
You know. The first wave is barely even taught in women's studies courses now
because it's or it's it's it's heavily footnoted as just being problematic in a whole
thousand and one different ways. It's far too white, it's it's far too
white, it's probably racist. I have no idea, I have no idea,
but it's heavily you know, it's problematic at best, uncovered in trigger
warnings and most of it, and most of it just it doesn't even you
know, the culture domesticity doesn't even read as feminism. Yeah, because it
because it's it's only feminism within within a paradigm, which is which is writing
to your style, to the feminism and freedom. It's almost nietzsche In in
this sense that materialism and hedonism. We live in a just a fully materialistic
rule. Thus the only thing worth seeking is hedonism. So be seek self
fulfillment, seek seek greatness. And a lot of this is emerging at the
same time. And you write so interestingly that you're not trying to stuff feminism
back into its box, if such a thing was even possible. But how
do we moderate temper some of these really bad changes you shifts without not just
stuffing feminism back in its box. But as you say, industrialization back in
its box, globalism back in its box, Well, I mean that that
might just happen of its own accurt you know, so we can't We probably
can't have infinite growth on a finite planet. So eventually the balloon is going
to come down. And I mean, it's all bets are off as to
what happens to family life at that point point. But I kind of kin
a week, Yeah, so that's so, that's the very that's the very
Ted Kachinsky kind of response on one reviewer. One reviewer did say, I
would love to see a conversation between Mary Harrington and Turkchinsky, and I thought,
I'm probably not going to take you up on that, but thank you.
I think definitely a gamplement because how fascinating would that be? Right?
So that's yeah, that that that's the very bleak answer. Like at a
slightly more workable everyday level, I would propose that given given that the transhumanist
effort to to just smash through every single limit of human nature and to abolish
it all in the name of freedom, and probably also trade and comod to
turn turn every facet of our human nature into a supply and demand problem,
then cash in. There's as marketplace, right, it's my favorite fruit.
So the which the ziplus marketplace, right exactly? You know, if if
if in fact, as I contend, this is not very good for women,
and to me, it seems manifestly bad actually for everybody, not just
women, but certainly bad for most normally, you know, everyone except of
a shrinking proportion of the elite who are able to cash in and you know,
subcontract, legestation, et cetera. Then what what we what a feminist
movement, what a pro women, pro human really look movement looks like under
those circumstances, is is insisting on realism about about our embodied nature and the
most the most spirited possible defense of our the fact that we can't be disaggregated
from our bodies. We can't we can't be chopped up into into meat lego
and reassembled at will. That in fact, when you try it doesn't work.
All that happens is that is that you manage to commodify yourself further,
and that so and so what that means leaning into sex realism, you know,
whether you do that whimsically by just you know, whimsical extra sexism just
because it's fun, or I'm not seriously, I'm not seriously advocating that take
kids do and try this at home unless want to, in which case,
good friend. But but but but also a greater measure of realism about the
about the actual limits to making everything co ed, you know, which includes
trespassing into some provocative areas. I mean that there are there are areas of
public service where physical strength still matters. I mean. I did a fascinating
interview for the book with a former a former a former soldier on what happened
to his unit when it went co ed. M It was, Yeah,
it brought a lot of stuff into perspective for me because what really what struck
me about that was that every single one of the every every single one of
the things he described, every single one of the arguments against allowing male women
into female prisons also applies to allowing female soldiers into formerly all male units.
Every single one of the article, every single one of those arguments also applies
in that context. And that that let me thinking. You know, I'm
not saying we should just go back to radical you know, I'm I'm not
the Taliban. You know, I don't think I don't think many women should
just be I'm not I'm not the Taliban, but I think there are we
could. We could usefully be a little bit more realist, realist about the
about the limits to making everything covered. We could also be willing to grant
men more social spaces just for just men because they like it, not not
feel incensed at the possibility that sometimes men want to hang out with each other.
You know, I have no idea what it is they do when they're
all just hanging out with each other. But I'm willing to you know,
I think I'm happy just to be somewhere else when that's happening. The semesteries
are best life well well, but I mean there are there are frequencies which
are just inaccessible to me. I mean an example I've given a couple of
times before. I run a lot and it's you like trails around where I
live, which is quite rural, and sometimes I see the metal detective dudes
out, you know, they all of Britain is full of weird relics and
stuff buried in fields because it's we've been there for a long time. And
these guys out with their metal detectors and they just go across the field doing
the thing. And I remember I saw sort of five or six of these
guys scatter. They're all like, you know, several hundred yards apart,
and I ran, I ran through them, and they're all just doing their
thing. And it struck me suddenly as as I was running through the field
that these guys were socializing. They are they're socializing, and they're doing it
on a frequency which makes no sense. To me at all, And they
probably won't talk to each other much afterwards either, but they'll go home and
they'll have like then that that's that's some nice social time. Like guys sitting
in a row fishing, it's kind of the same thing. Yeah, these
are not frequencies which are accessible to me. There maybe women who feel comfortable
in that setting. I'm not one of them. But I feel like if
we if we try to make everything co ed, something indefinable gets lost,
that that has a cost. And if if we want to rebuild a positive,
human centered solidarity between the sexes, which to me seems woefully missed from
from this this sort of post sex transhumanist quote unquote human, the sort of
d sex meet lego humans. You know, the possibility of solidarity between the
sexes just seems ever more remote, and relationship formation seems ever more under threatened.
Yeah, I don't see I don't see the direction of travel there as
having very much to recommend it at all. And if we're if we're going
to if we're going to row back from that, we need to we need
to grant more space for the possibility that, in fact, sometimes we do
socialize in different ways, and that saying so is not well. If saying
so it's sexist, that's not always a bad thing in the On that point,
the double edged sword of capitalism or republicanism smart smart republicanism or liberalism is
that it's supposed to be self correcting. That's the sort of beauty of the
system is that it may, you know, allow for some bad human um
impulses, but then also the good human impulses will eventually went out and self
correcting. So is there kind of a capitalist solution to you? Can you
find a solution to this problem in a capitalist world or do you think economic
changes as they are primal in this telling have to happen first? I don't
know. I guess I have some questions about that framing. I just mean
in the sense that you know, capitalism claims to be self correcting, but
to me it seems it seems more like a shark in the sense that it
swims it has to keep eating. Yeah, I think it's an open question.
Actually, Yeah, to me, this is not that this is it's
not self evident to me that this is a system which is which who's and
that's primarily ordered towards human flourishing rather than just the perpetuation of its own internal
logic. To me, to me, that internal logic doesn't It's not obvious
to me that things that the liquefaction of social norms or or given limits in
the name of freedom and of trade is self correcting, even when that liquifaction
turns out to be that negative. It's not obvious to me that there is
anything self self correcting about it. To me, to me, the that
the the internal logic of never ending, never ending economic growth seems seems very
much more like like a creature that swims blindly and has to keep eating.
And to me, like, what the sexual revolution, you know, it's
it's presented, you know, it flies under the banner of feminism as this
sort of very emancipatory thing, and there are are very many, a whole
a whole load of emancipatory things about it. But it was also the point
where that logic of liquefaction and commodification turned inward to the human body, Like
we ran out of resources out there in the world to strip mine, and
we started strip mining ourselves, you know, and we've we've been burning through
the cultural reserves, you know, like like we've been burning through the oil
reserves. We've we've where yeah, we're but we're burning the cultural furniture to
keep ourselves warm and were and we've started dismantling our own bodies, or rather
the bodies of people who don't have enough cultural political leverage to say no,
and we started turning them into workplaces and products and raw resources. Right,
And yes, that's such a good point. And something interesting, I mean
I thought that I had while I was reading this book is that feminism seems
to be a byproduct of this journey we're on from capitalism, the transhumanism,
and feminism is sort of a stop on the way that it's it's part,
it's an inevitable part, an inevitable part of that journey because with capitalism you
get industrialization, you get high tech society, and as that ball keeps rolling,
the snowball gets bigger and bigger, rolling down the hill. M Yeah,
you end up with some like high tech solutions to what women perceive as
as really very real problems. But then there are moments where you know,
for instance, the new Harry Potter video game is like doing Gangbusters, even
though the entire media and like especially the aiming media said it's you know,
don't buy this. It's associated with this awful person JK. Rowling. It
was a terrible bigot, which is absurd, of course, but it does
seem into your point about Louise hearing from um folks who have been really affected
by her book and the reception that worked, like yours is getting, it
does seem like there is something afoot. It does seem like a pendulum swing
might be in motion in some ways because of the open conversation, to the
extent that it's actually as open as it should be, it does seem like
something's happening. So is it the case that you know, there can be
a solution to this problem in that arena of capitalism that the West finds itself
in. Or do we need like real economic correctives to find you know that
maybe another definition of freedom? I don't know. I mean, yeah,
I guess there's only always to find out which is you know, wait and
see. I mean, if if I was a complete if I was a
total materialist about it, and then totally if I was totally leanhc to the
idea that you know, the it's all about it's all about the macro structures
and we have no agency, then I guess I wouldn't have bothered writing the
book. What even would be the point? You know, it's it's not
I'm not a tech determinist, and I'm not a I'm not a determinist generally.
It's I do think we have some agency, and I do. I
do think, you know, standing up and saying your bit does make a
difference. I mean, I think if we if there is a course correction,
it's it will take. It's not going to happen quickly. You know.
The My template for thinking about this is a superb history book I read
a little while ago about the It's called The Utopians. It's by a British
historian, Anonyma, and she writes about a set of utopian communes which sprang
up between the two World wars. Internationally. There was one in the US,
and there was one in Japan, and one in India, and a
few other player one in Britain and a few other places, and they were
all they were all dedicated to trying to find new ways of living in response
to just how horrific World War One had been. And they all failed except
the Bruderhof which is still going. But but their legacy pretty much wrote the
script for for post war life. You know, the the entirety, pretty
much the entirety of modern culture emerge, emerges. And they all knew each
other, and they traveled to each other's communities, and they were they were
these extraordinary visionaries of yeah, really sort of high modernist life. You know,
it's pretty much a who's who of high modernism, the people who passed
through these communities, and they and they created the modern world, or least
their vision is now the world we live in. And so so I'm thinking
maybe maybe I'm a utopian in some respect. I mean I'm not I'm not
a utopian in the sense that I like, Yeah, I don't believe in
utopias anymore than I believe in progress. But I do think that if you
have a vision for the good, that you should try. And it might
you might not, it might not be realized in your lifetime or in quite
the way you imagined it would be, but you have to try. Yeah.
Yeah, and actually I wanted to see you. Here's so many celebrities
now parking about celebrities and young women talking about how they're really terrified of childbirth.
They're terrified of pregnancy. And I don't know if folks haven't heard that
look closer, because it's everywhere. There's so many women talking about that,
and it's it's really in straight body horror, right, yeah, right,
And I want to ask if you could talk a little bit about your experience
with motherhood and how it was transformational for you in that space, because I
think it probably would resonate with a lot of other women, and you probably
have already found that it does. Yeah. I used to have recurring nightmares
about accidental pregnancy when I was in my teens, in my twenties. Literally
it was a recurring nightmare like the and it was it was specifically the idea
of this thing just taking inexorably taking taking my body over and just going going
on, and there was nothing I could do about it. There was something
deeply, just incredibly unsettling about it. Yeah, I think it's I don't
think it's a coincidence that the the hr Geiger sort of chest bursting alien has
such cultural impact because because in a sense, it's a picture of the kind
of nightmare, nightmare scenario over pregnant. You know, it's a kind of
hideous antonym of pregnancy, isn't it. You know, there's sort of you
know, the parasite that takes you over and you know, and enforces its
way into you and then you know, just states inside you and kills you
by emerging. You know, it's it's a sort of nightmare, nightmare kind
of you know, parody inversion of what pregnancy actually is. And actually,
you know, I mean, my daughter was born by emergency C section,
so you know, not a million miles from the hr GUI scenario, except
that you know about you know, a bit further south. And I didn't
die luckily, although although actually I came close. You know, it was
not straightforward, and I had complications afterwards, and it was it was kind
of messy, but you know, thank thank god, I'm here. I'm
still here, and so is she. So I'm very grateful to the doctors
who saved both of our lives. But I sort of under like I wanted
it all because I wanted her, and I you know, I was I
was in a situation where I was ready and I was longing for a baby.
I'd been through one miscarriage already, and it was that was the most
brutal experience of one of the most horrible things that's ever happened to me,
And so I was I was like, you know, hit me, I
don't care what I have to go through. This is you know, I'll
take it. But for but for women who haven't quite made that, you
know, or haven't quite just or for for whatever reason, this this feels
like too frightening or responsibility to take on, or too unthinkable for some other
reason, I can see how finding yourself in a position where all of these
are possibilities could just be straight up terrifying. And though, yeah, it
completely rewires your brain, it totally transforms your body, it takes you Yeah.
I've quoted Sophie Lewis, who is a yeah. She she thinks she
thinks we should all treat all pregnancies as surrogacies, and quoted her in the
book You describing it in pretty much straight up body horror terms. You know,
it's sort of takes over your body, hijacks your blood supply, hijacks
your sugar supply, and you know, slowly explodes your internal organs from the
inside. At is it's it's a miracle that people I'm paraphrasing slightly it's a
miracle that and that that we allow this to happen to to people at all.
She finds this an outrageous imposition, and it's like, well, this
is a very strange way of looking at what is just how how people multiply?
This is a this is a you know, because you seem to be
starting from the from from the premise that this might some one day become optional.
You know, is this a sort of structurally you know, her starting
point is as a fundamentally transhumanist one. Yeah, yeah, sheally sort of.
But and I mean this this again, it goes back to the it
goes back to the sexual revolution. Shel Mith Firestone was envisaging the ultimate emancipation
of women is coming via artificial wounds, which would which would liberate women from
from this grotesque invasive business altogether. Um, and when when you and seen
from the perspective of biolibertarian feminism, it makes sense that that that this should
be treated as an outrageous imposition because if you if you see, if you
see the the end the end game, as as all of us being being
totally unconstrained by any limitation of our physiology, then the idea that one sex
and not the other should be subject to this outrageous invasion. Should is just
is just horrifying. And I suppose I completely went through the looking glass when
I when I had my daughter, because I you know, at one point
I would have I would have you know, I'd completely agreed with that perspective.
But then, as it turned out, by the by the time I
did become pregnant, I wanted that, you know, I longed, I
longed for her, and the experience of forming a relationship with her slowly over
nine months before she was even there was it was amazing. I mean,
you know, I went nuts for the hormones, and you know, it
took me a little while to come back from all of that. But but
what really blew my mind was the way I didn't like she was part of
me while while she was while she was just stating, But then the feeling
of not being quite separate from her didn't go away for a very long time
afterwards. It only really I mean, it's the it's the weirdest feeling.
And I've I've heard other other mums described this as well. It's like you've
grown an extra limb or another another part of your body that's somehow surreally separate
from you. Um. You know this it's literally as as much a part
of you as your hand, or your or your knee. But but it's
not part, it's not physically connected to you anymore. And but but this,
this this you know, in much the same way as you you you
go to some lengths to to stop your to stop something terrible happening to your
hand. You go to really very considerable lengths to stop something terrible happening happening
to this this separate individual who feels like part of your body. Um.
And that's it's it's it's so hard to describe on unless it's happened to you,
just how just how visceral that is, and how how brain brain altering
that is, and just how much that's wonderful comes with it, and what
what what looks from the so much of what looks like or from the outside
like encumbrance is is not encumbrance. It's it. It's connection. And you
know, when whenever one's so much about the world just feels incredibly lonely,
you know, and it and perhaps seems seems that much free or or that
much more emancipated for being so radically separate and atomized, and yet there's there's
there's this payload of loneliness that comes with it. Yeah, I want to
make the case for more connection, and I want to make the case for
an interdependence, and I want to be in and for for that visceral,
embodied experience of interdependence. And I can just imagine the rebuttal that you've probably
handled before of contemporary feminists saying, if women don't want to do this,
if there are women who are horrified by the prospect of pregnancy, or applying
that to young girls who are horrified by their bodies, if they're upset about
this, why shouldn't they take medication? Why shouldn't they use an artificial womb?
And that brings us to maybe the most basic question here, which is,
frankly, you know, why is Eddie hearing to those sort of biological
instincts inherently good as opposed to being inherently limiting? Or you know what,
why shouldn't we limit some of those things At the end of the day,
You know, if it's I mean, you do you I guess you know
you know, I'm sorry. I'm sorry to give you such a terrible live
answer. You know, at the end of the day, I mean,
if that's if that's working for people, then okay, But like it didn't
work for me, So I can only at the end of the day,
I only have if I only have my own testimony to go on. But
from from my observation, there are plenty of other people who've who've dronk the
kool aid on this, and for whom it is very obviously not working.
You know who who've who've embraced this this vision of emancipation as radical atomization,
and who are obviously lonely, and who are obviously there's something missing, and
and that's something to me looks a whole lot like radical bodied association. And
I think, if you're well to me, it's particularly in the Internet age,
when everything like that's all the structural incentives are a more dissociation. For
all I can say is that from my personal experience, the more associated you
get, the more miserable you are. And like everybody, I've been extremely
online for twenty years, right, congratulations, I know it's I don't do
I get a medal, but no, But everybody I know who's been extremely
online for any length of time and isn't totally insane. It also has a
very has an equally extreme physical practice. And I think, I imagine,
I imagine you see this as well. People lift, or or they they
garden intensively, or they run, or that they do something, they do
something, you know, they touch grass in a way which is as intense
as their onlineness. And it's the only way to not go insane, you
know, is to be very intentional about grounding yourself back into embodied reality,
into your physicality, and into the limits and the affordances that come with that.
And the only people I know who are online in a sane and healthy
way are the people who are doing that very deliberately and so and so,
really, what all of all I'm making the case for is is being more
intentional about about remaining embodied just as a as a hedge against the sort of
dissociative the centrifugal force of digital first culture, and that inescapably. That has
to include a realism about our sex embodied nature, not just the fact that
we're made of meat. My last question, then, is um I think
about the Christopher Coldweld book on agem entitlement and how that sort of legal distinction
that we made, you know, protecting things to borrow from Title nine language
in the States, the on the basis of sex, and that we've we've
banned sex discrimination and on that question of stuffing feminism back into the box.
Um it raises the challenge of saying, what is the appropriate level of freedom?
At what point are women free and not then limited by freedoms or not
then you know, free to be absolutely misera because men will exploit them and
they will be commodified in all of these different ways. Because you said,
you know, nobody wants to take away women's suffrage. Some people might want
to take away women's suffrage, but some people really do want to take away
suffrage. Right, But what is that? Did we hit you know,
our stride? Was there a peak in terms of like liberalism when we started
protecting people we made sex a protected category? Is that what it looks like
to have a healthy feminism. I don't think there's a universal answer to this
question, you know, In fact, I go as far as to say
I emphatically cancel against trying to come up with a universal answer to this question.
It has to be a prudential one, because you know, if if
My thesis holds that that women's women's interests are contextual and they're informed by material
and cultural factors, then what what constitutes a positive beneficial balance of the interests
of both sexes is going to vary immensely by context, and it will,
for example, that very different in Afghanistan or or sub Saharan Africa to the
to the to the way it looks in Washington, DC. You know this,
this this ought to be obvious. Apparently it isn't We learned them as
lesson right. Also also you might think, I'm not sure that everybody absolutely
did. But but you understand the point that I'm making. It has to
be a prudential question, and it has to be one which is negotiated really
at ground level between the sexes. How you map how you map the larger
infrastructures of policy and institutional power onto that. Again, it's a prudential question.
But I think there's a I think there's a great deal more that could
be done on the where it comes to an institutional support or creating, creating
new institutions or repurposing existing institutions in defense of an embodied realist approach to flourishing
relations between the sexes, because I think that's woefully missing. You know,
the the transhumanist side or institution really pretty well set, and the sex realist
side not so much. I think there's there's a great deal more that could
be done, and of course it's bigger than just being about relations between the
sexes. But I mean, when you have when you have something like title
nine being hijacked from being really about sex to being about gender identity, you
know, you're you're somewhere new and and at that point, at that point,
women who are who are who are advocates for a realist, embodied understanding
of the interests of men and women, you know, may may have some
questions about whether or whether or not this legislation even is still in their interests.
I don't know. I mean, I'm not I'm not an American,
and I'm not very familiar with that debate, so I'm hesitant to say very
much more. But I think it has to be it has to be grounded
in in real real world relations and to be a prudential question. So interesting
the book is feminism against Progress. Everybody is talking about it. Mary Harrington,
thank you for giving us a slice of your time. Really so much
for having me. It's been great. Of course. The book is fantastic.
Seriously, please check it out. You're going to be hearing a lot
about it, I'm sure. I'm em Elijahnski, culture editor here at The
Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of
freedom and anxious for the fray. All right, where are you wrong?