Critiquing 'Feminism Against Progress'

The Case for Wild Women

Wherever Mary Harrington’s columns appear, whether on Unherd, or on her own substack, Reactionary Feminist, men flock around like pigeons pecking at the cobblestones beneath the statuary of some medieval public square.

That should arouse suspicion.

Could it be that men love the premise of her 2023 book, Feminism Against Progress, that feminism is responsible for transgenderism/transhumanism?

In the book Harrington posits a timeline that begins with women’s responses to the industrial revolution, which “negotiated a tension between individual freedom from the ways we’re shaped by our biology, and woman-centred accommodation by both sexes of our embodiment.” So, she sees a tension between women’s desire to be free of the consequences of having a female body, and their desire for male and female society to find a way to support women in their bodies. (This is all about pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood.)

It’s free and always will be free.

The first she calls “Team Freedom” or “bio-libertarianism” – freedom from biology. Freedom from the consequence of fertility via the Pill, naturally leads to total freedom from biology for all, she says. She calls this “meat lego,” where men and women are interchangeable and we can all add or subtract bits of anatomy depending on personal preference.

For Harrington, “this is a logically consistent feminist stance,” but I submit this is really going from zero to a hundred in ten seconds flat, flying past the potholes of logical fallacy, and puddles of red herrings.

For one thing the Pill was not a replacement of biology with technology. The Pill tricked the body into believing it was pregnant already, so conception would not occur. This is more like using beneficial insects to control crop pests than like dumping man-made chemicals onto them. It made use of biology to control biology, much as women in the past made use of breast-feeding to delay conception.

She might as well have said that the first human use of the stick to dig up grubs or to fight led step by step to transgenderism.  Sure, human ingenuity has taken and will take us to many dark and dangerous places, especially when that ingenuity doesn’t solicit or respond to women’s needs and interests.

Harrington is also postulating that women are pretty much solely responsible for our headlong rush into our own erasure. In blaming the Pill without considering the underlying cultural context, which I will call “patriarchy” as a sort of short cut, she has written a curiously woman-blaming book.

Is Hogwarts the Model for the Trans Glitter Utopia?

Like other inventions, the Pill was developed neither by women nor in consultation with the sorts of feminists who could measure it against women’s needs, desires and interests. It was created by the labs of the patriarchy with a distinctly masculine agenda, and presented to women on a platter of lies.

Women were never told the side effects on emotional or physical health. Women were told we now had what we had always wanted, and the male agenda to quickly have access to all the “good” women previously kept from them by the threat of pregnancy was hidden.

A men’s sexual rights movement slid in right behind the Pill, using the false banner of “free love.” But love had nothing to do with it. The Pill made it almost impossible for women to refuse sex.

I suggest there is a reason for that. Most civilizations had strong motivations for women to remain chaste until marriage. In the west, religion was the most powerful agent of female repression, both preaching the “sinfulness” of female lust and punishing women who disobeyed with exile from their families, from polite society, from any kind of livelihood except prostitution. Rape was not distinguished from consensual sex and the best a violated woman could hope for was forced marriage to her rapist.

In that context how could women develop an ethics of sexuality? How could women, who had always used the threat of pregnancy as an excuse not to have sex, find other motivations for not giving in to their own sexual appetites, or to men pushing them to give in and “give it up”?

Requiem for the Corpse of History

It didn’t take long for most women to realize that casual sex was often unsatisfying and demoralizing. And to realize that many men mocked the women who gave in, and even condemned the women that had said “yes” to them. It didn’t take long for women to give up the whole project of saying “no” and develop an ideology of bravado in the face of the inevitable. That was third-wave feminism, celebrating women’s “agency” and “choice”, pretending there was no power asymmetry or no difference in how women and men experienced the sex act.

But for Harrington, men seem to bear no responsibility for what I am going to call the descent of women into masculine patterns of sexual license. They are peculiarly absent, even at the sentence level.

Look, for example, at this sentence: “The expectations set by free-access porn now routinely result in teenage girls enduring acts they don’t enjoy, in exchange for the barest signs of affection.” Someone has expectations, someone commits acts women don’t enjoy, someone gives little sign of affection – but who? Where the word “men” should appear, there is only a ghostly vacancy.

The next sentence is even more torturous. Try to find the agent, or in the language of crime fiction, the “unsub” here: “One teenage girl was reported in 2019 to have been left with anal injuries so severe, after trying to imitate pornography, that she will need a colostomy bag for life.”

Was she alone? Was she, herself, trying to imitate porn by shoving inanimate objects into her own anus? Did she do this to herself? It takes work to produce a sentence that so totally eliminates the destructive agent, and I have to wonder why.

It is illustrative of her thesis, in which the patriarchy is itself almost, well, castrated.  While she acknowledges the role played by millionaire individuals, foundations and NGOs, by online sociality and Marxism in universities, she insists that none of these bear sole responsibility because this obscenely wealthy, global but nevertheless impotent patriarchy requires the ministrations of women -- “the truth implicates all of feminism.”

And by feminism, she means well-educated, financially successful women: “for a minority of women the idea that we really can detach self-realisation from biology remains both plausible and compelling.” These are the beneficiaries of second-wave feminism, the women who found themselves liberated from the domestic sphere, free to pursue education and careers within the still fully functioning patriarchal public world.

Why should this phalanx of female beneficiaries of patriarchal privilege have instigated such a huge “disruption” of “cisnormativity” that has remodelled every single institution in multiple countries?

Harrington’s answer is that “the contraceptive revolution cemented as a core feminist objective a vision of personhood premised on the right to be separate, to not be encumbered, interdependent…”

She offers as an example of such a visionary, Sophie Lewis, a German-born British woman whom she describes as “an accomplished cyborg theologican.” Harrington writes:

From this vantage point [that of bio-libertarianism], pregnancy appears as a monstrous, cancerous, invasive aberration. In the stylised and carefully de-sexed language of an accomplished cyborg theologian, Sophie Lewis captures this revulsion for the visceral, gory, dangerous strangeness of Motherhood. ‘No wonder philosophers have asked whether gestators are persons,’ she says.

So, the desire for liberation from the fact of pregnancy led to the desire for liberation from the physicality of pregnancy and from the ties of motherhood. The Women’s Liberation Movement is stripped of any desire for liberation from patriarchy.

It is true that reproductive control allowed more women than ever before the liberty to pursue their full humanity through education, sport and career. But have a majority of women repudiated the desire for mother-child bonding?

The vocal attempts by mothers to “have it all”, to juggle work and homelife, to find good childcare, to persuade their mates to take on more of the burden of childcare and housework, to lobby for maternity leave suggests this is just not true. Harrington recognizes this herself and details it in a section of her book subtitled “stubborn bonds.”

Nevertheless, she says, there are diehard “bio-libertarians” like Lewis, for whom:

 feminist liberation can only be attained by de-normalizing first the ‘natural’ heterosexual mode of reproduction, second the idea that gestation affords a mother any particular bond with a baby, and finally the idea that gestating, birth and nursing are in any unique sense something done by women.

I think Harrington has misjudged a sequence of events as a causal relationship. Just because reproductive control preceded “cyborg theology” (transgender/transhumanist ideology to the rest of us) does not mean the first caused the second. Lewis is a queer theorist, married to a man who claims a woman-identity (and defends looting), and has been employed as a visiting scholar at the Centre for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies (FQT Centre) at the University of Pennsylvania.

To call Lewis, who questions whether mothers should even be regarded as persons, a “feminist” is a stretch. It has been suggested that she and her partner are trolls, turning out clickbait for coins. If more young women than before are frightened of pregnancy, the cause may well be that pregnant women are no longer ubiquitous. If you’re not pregnant yourself, you could go years without seeing a pregnant woman much less interacting with one in your social circle.

The Problem with Women

Women’s liberty to manifest their full humanity including intellectual attainment and motherhood requires a liberation from patriarchy, indeed the transformation of “father”- dominant society into a human, humane civilization. To replace the feminist goal of “smashing the patriarchy” with smashing the mother-child bond is a deception of the sort practiced routinely by an ideology that has been appropriating feminism at the same time as it has been appropriating womanhood. It is a form of giving in to patriarchy, and to a masculine (mis)conception of a free woman as just a man with a vagina.

Harrington proposes a small portfolio of solutions both to the sterility of sexual license and to cyborg (surrogate) motherhood, which includes de-emphasizing romance, supporting single-sex spaces for both men and women and “re-wilding” sex.

Sex needs to be made dangerous again, she says:

For in de-risking sex, this technology has made it ubiquitous, and in the process stripped desire of anticipation, excitement and mystery: in a word, emptied it of eroticism. In its place we’re offered an increasingly coarse, commodified and grotesque landscape of all-you-can-eat lust.”

Again, we need to ask, where are the men? She says technology has made sex ubiquitous, but is it not more accurate to say that men, beneficiaries of liberated lust enabled by the Pill, are responsible?

Harrington does acknowledge that just as men have lost interest, women have been brutalized to the point of wanting change. By taking the Pill out of the equation, we can return to a more natural sexuality and “heal our polluted erotic ecologies.”

As she points out “pregnancy risk is, after all, a cast-iron reason to reject having sex with anyone out of politeness.”

 In a world in which pregnancy can so easily be prevented, it is also an immature and cowardly excuse. Harrington is suggesting the re-imposition of an external barrier, a crutch, rather than the development of meaningful, ethical reasons for rejection. It does not require women to stop being compliant to patriarchal demands. It does not require women to grow up.

Women can, possibly for the first time, choose to develop an ethics of sexuality that would give them internal, meaningful criteria for choosing whether to be sexually active and choosing whom to be sexually active with. The repressive teachings of religion have waned, the Pill (as well as other devices) makes pregnancy preventable, decades of unsatisfactory sex have shown women the limits of sexual licence, or “sex-positivity”, and the pornification of sex has made it even less desirable. What better context for a serious discussion about why and why not to have sex?

A woman should be able to say “no” for absolutely no reason other than that she doesn’t want to. She should be able to say that confidently, without shame. Why is that still not possible?

I am with Harrington, in that I too believe we need a renewed feminism. We need a feminism that takes up where the second-wave left off, that recognizes women can be equal in some ways without being free; a feminism that refuses to accept the strictures and parameters of a world constructed hundreds of years ago by men and that does not suit women’s needs, desires or interests.

We don’t need to re-wild sex; we need to re-wild women, to transform ourselves from timid domestic mice into fierce lions so that our lives give us self-worth enough to partner with men in mutually nourishing ways. That is the only kind of world that will allow children to flourish and divert us from the death that man-made technology now promises.