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QuestionDarkhorse Podcast with Mary Harrington
I follow Bret and Heather on YT, below is Brets chat with Mary Harrington, whom I don't know a lot about, but the chat was very interesting and well worth a listen, she has just released a book called "Feminism Against Progress" which I am considering buying. Would love some feedback on her, as I know very little.
She writes forUnherd, has a substack, and has a variety of wonderful pro-women articles. I don't know if identity matters, but she comes from wealth, went to Oxford and had a period as non-binary and has been in same-sex relationships. She's coming from a Catholic past, whether or not she's culturally or religiously Catholic now isn't clear.
She writes against transgenderism and transhumanism. She's written against sex positivity and surrogacy and porn and female erasure and male violence and sexuality and liberal feminism. I'd suggest checking out some of her work is very, very solid. She was also one of the women called out in the recent JCJ zine for doing feminism wrong. My guess is she's probably going to go through the roof in popularity in the very near future as she's functionally looking for a feminism that has space for women and families. She's speaking in NYC, DC and Boston this week at places like both the Heritage Foundation and Harvard.
(I don't work for her, I've just greatly appreciated some of her articles over the years - ha!)
She thinks that birth control & abortion is paving the way for transhumanism. That sex without the possibility of reproduction, say by using birth control, is bad for all of us. And that women who are mothers should not be working outside of the home.
I believe she said that pathologizing periods and medicalizing a normal body function was a first stop on the way to medical care on demand, or transhumanism.
Where did she say that women who are mothers should not be working outside the home? Or that sex without the possibility of reproduction is bad for all of us?
In her talk with the iwf-, https://www.iwf.org/2023/04/21/mary-harrington-modern-feminism/ She said: "And then point number three is I think we need a feminist backlash against the pill, the pro-sex case against the pill. If we want to take sex seriously again, we need to put the danger back in and we need to put what it’s for. We need what it’s for back into the picture. And to the extent that we’re willing to do that, we’ll be able to bring the seriousness, and with that, all the beauty and the intensity, and frankly, the Eros, which has been attenuated by big porn and by treating it as a trivial leisure activity in a way which it just self-evidently isn’t."
we’ll be able to bring the seriousness, and with that, all the beauty and the intensity, and frankly, the Eros, which has been attenuated by big porn and by treating it as a trivial leisure activity in a way which it just self-evidently isn’t."
What is wrong with this statement? Is sex not considered trivial these days? The dating apps have cemented sex on the first date as norm.
I think her point on the pill is misunderstood. She's coming at it from two perspectives - a medical-harm standpoint - she's rebelling against women taking all the risks in pregnancy prevention. She's against the medical harm the pill does to a great many women (physiologically and psychologically) while the male pill was scrapped after the testing subjects complained of headaches. She's also from a background where the women of that community are more in tune with their natural cycles. Modern Catholics no longer have a ton of unplanned pregnancies. Modern libfem (which is the feminism she rails against) no longer talk about things like that because of the pill, and many have lost the knowledge of their own fertility.
When I was a young, young thing I went to medical because I had a large discharge. I was told if I were sexually active to get checked for STD every six months, and the discharge made me concerned. Of course, I was totally shamed for being there for an STD check, and the discharge wasn't discussed. Turns out, you have a large discharge when ovulating. I'd never noticed before, but years later after I had trouble conceiving, we learned about the discharge/ovulation tie from a Catholic friend, lost the concern unresolved from years prior and got pregnant quite quickly.
Anyway, I've been reading a lot of her work, and she quotes Dworkin and is coming from a radical base. She's not even close to saying we should all get back barefoot and naked in the kitchen, but she's allowing for women who do want to primarily be caretakers of their children, and many, many women do, but we don't talk about child raising in feminism. We never have, but there are a great many feminist mothers and a great many women who want to primarily be caretakers of their children, but there is no space for discussion about that in feminism, so I'm pretty glad she's instigating that conversation.
Also in her article: https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-cost-to-us-all-of-mums-who-go-out-to-work/ "It used to be mothers who did the lion’s share of voluntary work that kept civic society going. Now, mothers go to work. As a result, our institutions are imploding. Politics, church, youth clubs – no one of working age has time to run them."
`Yes, she's talking about the 80% of unacknowledged/unpaid labor of the world being done by women.
Even if they wanted to, the growing dominance of double-income families has driven up the cost of living to the point where mothers have to work, even if they’d prefer not to. And so political volunteering is a luxury for the wealthy and the retired.
So, she's talking about the economics of families with two working parents outsourcing parenting onto the community. She doesn't say mothers shouldn't work outside the house, but she's pointing out that since both parents have been pushed into work, parenting and then consequently the community support structures that previously were attempts at safety nets for children without stable home lives are also dissolving.
I don't believe she's advocating mothers not working outside the home as she's commenting on the lack of affordability of parenting and volunteer work. I'd wager if you wrote her and asked, she'd be more "pro-paying women for parenting" than "all women should be inside the home."
It’s not axiomatic that those stepping back from ‘productive’ work have to be mothers. But if you gave families a wholly free choice – that is, if they could afford it – I reckon it’d break 70/30 at least for women taking that role. And that’s fine. The key point is that contra our prevailing culture someone has to. Forty-odd years into our experiment in making everyone ‘productive’, the number of people who have time to nurture families and civic society has been below replacement levels for some time.
I like her a lot, too. Don't always agree with her, but I think she's brilliant. Trying to see her at her DC event tomorrow night.
She believes that transhumanism began with legalized abortion and hormonal birth control because it’s giving you unnatural and unprecedented control over your body and another person (the baby). Also— I can’t remember if she’s ever outright stated this, but personally I get a strong impression that she thinks choosing not to have kids is anti feminist for some reason.
Here is a good interview with her that goes into her lefty past background a bit and shows her idealistic fantasy about women just not wanting abortions anymore someday: https://youtu.be/CA1iBq5YbOA
Idealistic fantasy is a great way to describe many of her positions. She is one of those women where you feel like she is so close to getting it. There are so many of her opinions where I just wish she had thought them through more thoroughly.
She is brilliant!! But she's also very Catholic, so she argues, among other things, that birth control and abortion represent regress for women. Just fyi.
I don't really know much about her, but I recently read this interesting article she wrote about the venue for her book launch dropping their event.
https://compactmag.com/article/i-was-canceled-for-saying-sex-is-real
Thanks for all the reply's everyone, the links are much appreciated and I'll def check them all out before I buy the book.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-11791181/amp/I-lived-years-sexually-liberated-lesbian-commune-true-peace-married-man.html This is from the daily mail where she wrote: "Around the same time, I also discovered that the supposedly egalitarian and sexually liberated all-lesbian community I lived in was in fact hierarchical and riddled with competition." Fair enough, people are people. "Even as I wrestled with these discoveries, I met the man who became my husband. Even as my life was falling apart, I had already started to rebuild it — in a different form. Some years into our life together, I have found more peace and equality, not to mention more freedom from futile power games, in the countless ways we co-operate building a home and family than I ever achieved in my progressive 20s, trying to run away from commitment and constraint. As I’ve set about trying to square these discoveries with my previous beliefs, I have come to rethink my previous belief that patriarchy is a mass conspiracy to oppress women. Instead, I have come to see it as the result of historical human efforts to balance the conflicting interests of the two sexes." And more. She did the woke thing, rebellious thing, alternate thing-it didn't work out for her. She does question along some of the same lines as many feminists & others did- the industrial age pushed us out of a home based economy to be cogs in a machine, basically. The sexual revolution benefitted men's sexuality more. Hormonal birth control does cause harm. And in a lot of her writing she basically does the-bourgeoise feminism doesn't care about other women, so feminism bad. She does think that males should have single sex spaces. But thinks it's all or nothing. That lawyers or others who sought entry to all male organizations because that's where professional connections & jobs were kept within the male in groups destroyed social groups like working class groups for men. There is an example of a farm group. The question in stuff like that-is it a social club for the men or are there resources & information that they thus withhold from someone who is a farmer as well, just because she's female? But her hostility to hormonal birth control doesn't seem to be just because it's hormonal-but because it means sex without the possibility of reproduction.