Marching Backwards
Mary Harrington’s proposed solution to the excesses of modern feminism is an overcorrection.
A review of Feminism Against Progress by Mary Harrington, 224 pages (Forum, March 2022)
The biggest misogynists, the ones who really hate women, are contemporary progressive feminists. That idea alone might be enough to summarize Mary Harrington’s new book, Feminism Against Progress. It is difficult to disagree. Harrington persuasively argues that much contemporary feminism has a hatred of women’s bodies and of motherhood in particular. The goal of feminist politics, activism, and propaganda has been to defeminize women and emasculate men. The result of this reprogramming of the human is a dreary androgyny that is infinitely malleable by corporate and market demands.
Women’s issues are not being addressed by either market policies or by sex-positive feminism, Harrington contends. We have erased ourselves, becoming workers instead of women. Feminism’s hostility to anything that is particularly feminine, she argues, has resulted in what she terms “Meat Lego Gnosticism,” a posthuman world in which individuals are separated from their bodies and invited to rebuild and reconstruct them at will—with the help, of course, of heavy pharmaceuticals and medical technologies.
In response, Harrington recommends a return to nature, a “rewilding” of women. Like the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone Park to enable the entire ecosystem to flourish again, we should reintroduce women to their natural instincts and bodies so that she-wolves can run free in our modern landscape. This includes renouncing birth control and reorienting ourselves to domestic life and to what Harrington calls radical solidarity in marriage: you get married, and you stay that way. Harrington’s book has much to recommend it. Her discussion of how posthumanism is likely to create new forms of exploitation is especially important.
But Harrington’s solution moves too far in the other direction, becoming regressive rather than reactionary. Her call to rewild women’s bodies is a pill I can try to swallow, but it only goes half of the way down.
Ever since the appearance of Simone de Beauvoir’s landmark 1949 text The Second Sex, progressive feminism has been hostile to motherhood. Harrington is correct to point out that it isn’t really “The Patriarchy” from which we have wanted to be liberated, it is from our own bodies, and most particularly from our own reproductive role, assigned to us by Mother Nature herself. We can see this in public opinion surrounding abortion. The recent overturning of Roe v. Wade in the US elicited apoplectic reactions from feminists crying foul against the patriarchy. But polling in the US has consistently found that men support abortion almost as much as women do; the difference is usually within a five percent margin between the sexes, with around 58 percent of men and around 63 percent of women saying it should be legal in all/most cases. The fault line on this issue isn’t between men and women, it is between women and other women, men and other men. But you wouldn’t know this from the hysteria of social, or even traditional, media, which lost its mind arguing that patriarchal—even misogynistic—lawmakers, were taking away the rights of women.
Harrington sees this differently. On one hand, she argues, we have Team Freedom, and on the other, Team Interdependence. The market versus the family; the corporate versus the baby; big tech versus the female body. Harrington traces the cultural history of this divide well, and she makes a compelling case for female rights, not the right to be free of the female body. Reading this, I was reminded of a conversation I had recently with a woman seated beside me on a domestic flight. My neighbor—knitting, kind, probably around 65 years old—told me she had completed her master’s in Women’s Studies in the 1990s, after her children became school aged and her time was freed up. Her research looked into the policies surrounding parental leave. “The policies around family leave all expect women to stay home with their babies,” she said. “Yes, but don’t they?” I asked her. “Yes, but the policies shouldn’t expect it.” “So you wanted to change the policies so that women won’t be expected to stay home.” “That’s right!” “What should the policies expect?” I asked. “That leave is equal,” she said. “Even though it’s not,” I replied. “Even though it’s not,” she conceded.
Harrington believes that policies should reflect what actual women tend to do, expected or not. Desexed policies of the kind my flight companion was demanding risk corporately maneuvering women into acting contrary to their natural preferences and inclinations. What Harrington writes about female-specific needs and about feminism’s antagonism of those needs is of crucial importance to our cultural moment in general and to the current struggle over trans rights in particular. The pressure to view anyone as a woman who merely self-identifies as such needs to be subject to careful and compassionate scrutiny, she writes. This means feelings might get hurt, and we might have to face some uncomfortable decisions surrounding contemporary trans ideologies, or what she terms “cyborg theocracy.”
Most people fall somewhere in the middle of the trans debate. We don’t want to be intolerant of or cause harm to someone suffering from gender dysphoria, but we also recognize that women’s sports need to remain closed to biological males, that female prisoners need to be kept separate from their biological male counterparts, and that young girls in changing rooms and showers should not be made to share those facilities with biological males. None of which implies hostility to trans individuals—it is simply an acknowledgement that sometimes life is complicated, demands and values conflict, and not everyone can get their way all the time. We may feel uncomfortable saying such things out loud, Harrington contends, because they seem to contradict what we’ve learned from “Team Freedom.” The solution to this dilemma is to embrace what she calls Reactionary Feminism.
It is almost certainly true that women should be women and not androgyns. But what does it mean to be feminine? This is something about which Harrington seems to be more certain than I am. I found it difficult to relate to her description of womanhood, and particularly of motherhood. Harrington writes that being a stay-at-home mother was something she wanted: “I actively enjoyed belonging to my daughter.” When I read that, I almost physically recoiled, for I experienced the opposite. Although I love them dearly, and would have died or killed to protect them without a second thought, I disliked the tedium of actually looking after each of my two baby girls. I didn’t like either one as a person. Babies are painfully dull. Even now when I see a newborn, I experience a measure of PTSD. This isn’t because I suffered from postpartum, or even from excessive loneliness. It’s just that I couldn’t wait to not belong to someone so uninteresting.
Harrington writes about how much she enjoyed the experience of staying at home with her child and of not wanting to be separated from her:
When she arrived, it wasn’t even that I saw her as a separate entity, who needed caring for in some abstract way. It was more basic than that: like having grown an extra limb, and finding that limb suddenly, unnervingly, separated from my own body and needing constant watching and tending to ensure it was still okay. The sense of continuity with my child was all-consuming.
My own experience was the reverse. Even in the delivery room, I felt at once and distinctly that each girl was a complete and separate person from me. This took me by surprise. There were nine people in the room and then suddenly—pop!—there were 10! An entirely new person had appeared—a stranger to me and someone I certainly didn’t always enjoy being around.
Harrington’s rosy view of motherhood is no doubt shared by many other women, but it is not universal—and this troubles her argument against freedom and autonomy. Because she personally enjoyed staying at home with her daughter so much, her experience moves with the current of her argument against individualism: staying at home was her autonomous choice. For many mothers, however, staying at home is both a sacrifice and a role we might prefer to do without, so conforming to that role is all the more radical. It is a cultivated virtue to dislike something and to do it anyway out of love and duty. Being a mother has made me a less self-centered person than I might otherwise have been precisely because the role was thrust upon me in spite of my personal inclinations. One of Harrington’s arguments against “Meat Lego Gnosticism” is that one’s inner consciousness shouldn’t always get its way. This is precisely how I felt about myself while devoting myself to the care of my infants. I am not getting what I want. Thank God.
On the other hand—again, thank God!—I was also given the chance to have some time away from my infants. This was made possible, in my case, because of state-subsidized early-years daycare. Reading Harrington, I am struck by how disadvantaged my daughters ought to be, statistically speaking: they came from a broken home, they were raised by a single mother, and they spent their early years in state daycare. And yet to know my girls—their humour and resilience, their energy and social intelligence—is to see two young teens who are faring no worse than their peers. It is possible that, given optimum family stability, they would be doing even better than they already are. But it is also possible that they might not have the same independence and confidence they do now, quite comfortable in the social jungle of the schoolyard.
Throughout her book, Harrington contrasts pre-industrial family life to the family structures we have now and advocates a return to the former. She correctly argues that the role of the mother has been diminished, not by the patriarchy but by industrial technologies and market demands. But of course, a pre-industrial family would have looked very different to the kind of families we see now. For starters, there would be a lot more children. The average family back then had about six or seven children. My own father was from an agrarian Ukrainian family, and he was one of 13 children (three of whom died in infancy). Positioned somewhere around the middle of the 10-kid brood, he was raised more by his sisters and brothers than by his mother, more by the informal government of the farmyard than by a parent. Harrington doesn’t seem to realize that the type of motherhood she espouses really didn’t exist in the pre-industrial world in the first place, where children spent a lot of their time with other children. To that end, the daycare environment is in many ways more like an older order of things than a contemporary bougie stay-at-home mother and child’s world.
We should also keep in mind that daycare workers are not, typically, university-educated women (they’re almost always women, as are all the other caring professions). As such, they don’t share in the ideals of “cyborg theocracy,” nor in the ethic of safetyism that Harrington criticizes in her book. I have some insider knowledge of this, as I sat on the board of my children’s daycare institution for the 10 years they were in care there. Kid falls off a play structure and breaks an arm? A concerning event, but these things happen. A toddler falls and bangs her head on a table corner? A hug fixes it and maybe a little ice. It’s to be expected. A global pandemic is called? Let’s mask staff (according to state laws), but let’s not fuss about forcing masks on pre-schoolers. Need to teach children about gender identity? How about we just make sure they wash their hands after using the toilet—if they manage to make it to the toilet in time in the first place!
Harrington writes about what she calls the “Devouring Mother” of contemporary educational institutions, which she believes are guided by the latest axioms in progressive institutional thought. But in my experience, these axioms do not dictate the predominant ethic of early years daycare. Most daycare workers are immigrant women, working-class women, or older women whose own children are grown adults. And the children who attend daycares are often of the same class: recent immigrants, kids of “essential workers” (non-office work), and the children of single parents. “It takes a village to raise a child,” as they say. I felt this to be profoundly true as a parent to daycare kids. Far from being an instance of unstable attachments, my girls developed lasting friendships with their caregivers and their classmates. They now have aunts and cousins they wouldn’t otherwise have had. And as a mother, I also made friends I wouldn’t otherwise have made.
Daycare made me less lonely and isolated as a parent, something Harrington admits to feeling while staying at home with her child, and this in turn made me a better parent. I am not suggesting that putting one’s children in daycare is superior to staying at home with them. But it does seem as though Harrington has a stay-at-home outsider’s view of early years childcare uninformed by firsthand experience. It is actually more like a pre-industrial and predominantly female working community than even a middle-class suburban or small-town mother-child at home experience would be, which is much more isolated, much more controlled, much less diverse, and certainly much less germy than your typical daycare (by the age of two, my kids had super immunity to pretty much everything, thanks to their early exposure to germs). In reality, probably neither home nor daycare is ideal—both have their advantages, drawbacks, and trade-offs. All growing-up is unhappy in its own way, as is all motherhood—and all fatherhood, for that matter. But rather than acknowledge this, Harrington defends an ideal that has never existed.
This advocation for a lost Golden Age of family and femininity is nowhere better exemplified than in the section of Harrington’s book devoted to “Reactionary Feminism.” Here, Harrington comes out against the oral contraceptive pill and what she terms “Big Romance,” which, as far as I can tell, is just regular romance. Harrington argues for two things: that women “rewild” themselves by giving up the pill, and that we marry for sensible reasons: “settle,” and stay settled. Like other reactionary thinkers, notably Louise Perry and Christine Emba, Harrington stands firmly against the proclamation of the sexual revolution that women can—indeed, should—have consequence-free, casual sex. This, Harrington believes, has made women less happy and relationships less stable; it has not only permitted the worst behaviours of men, but it has also elevated those behaviours as an aspiration of liberation.
The pill, she writes, rewires women’s minds, wreaks havoc with their emotions, and pharmaceutically deadens their libidos. Worse, it also makes casual promiscuity possible. Harrington finds the availability and prescription of the pill to teens particularly troubling. I do not disagree. My own daughter, now aged 15, has told me that most of her friends are already having sex. When we spoke about sex and birth control together, my firm advice was that she is too young to be having sex, and that she should get to know her body before she starts pharmaceutically altering it. A close family member of mine, on the other hand, who is a paediatrician, told me just as firmly that I was being an idiot in denying her access to the pill. “When she is turned on, and with her boyfriend, and full of hormones, she won’t be thinking of your advice. She will be doing what teenagers do, and then you and she will have to deal with a pregnancy.” He may be right. As a mother to teen girls, none of this is merely theoretical to me. There are real stakes involved.
I know where the paediatrician’s advice is coming from: liberated young teens are socially permitted and even encouraged to have sex. Often, this permission occurs with a shrug of resignation: teens will do this anyway and to fight it is naïve. But do we really think that women, even young women, do not have the capacity for self-government? Do we really think that teen girls have no ability to self-regulate? Do we really believe that girls cannot say no to sex? If we believe that “in the heat of the moment” it is impossible for a teen girl or young woman to stand up for herself, then feminism has a lot more work to do. But I don’t think we do believe this. Empowering teens and women means expecting them to be able to make choices about sex—yes, even as teens and, yes, even in the heat of the moment. Expectations can function as a guardrail, albeit an imperfect one. If we expect teens to be unable to control their sexual desires, we may enable the very thing we want to liberate them from. Not being on the pill might provide a good reason for a young woman to say no to sex, as Harrington says. Teenage sex being what it is, I don’t think they’d be missing out on much if they say no to it.
But not every woman on the pill is a young teen or even a single woman. Harrington makes no mention of married women being on the pill, nor of women in a committed relationship. Instead, she advocates natural methods of contraception, such as learning the fertile times of a woman’s cycle or relying on the man’s ability to control his orgasm (what we used to call the pull-and-pray method). Curiously, Harrington makes no mention of other non-pharmaceutical methods of birth control, such as an IUD or diaphragm, so we are left with a false choice between pharmaceuticals and high-risk natural methods. Her fondness for the naturalistic fallacy leads me to suspect she would reply that our most reliable forms of birth control, such as an IUD, are artificial prosthetics and therefore also undesirable.
A quick question then: what do you call a couple who rely on natural methods of contraception? That’s right: parents. If Harrington really wants a rewilding of women’s fertility, we should be prepared for the inevitable result. Six kids? 10? In the pre-industrial world, a woman would be pregnant about six or seven times in her life, and often more—if she survived the birthing process. But of course, you could count on a few kids not surviving either, so sometimes things evened out. But I don’t think many of us would truly welcome six kids, or have the space for them, or make the money necessary to feed and raise them all. The pill may not be a perfect solution to managing the unwieldy nature of a woman’s body, but I doubt that having 10 children is either.
It is in the realm of a committed relationship where the best sex happens. And the reasons I am against the pill in teens is the reason I am for it in adults. What we should aim for isn’t free sex but good sex. High-quality fucking. When Harrington comes out against Big Romance, she comes out against the very thing that we should all aspire to and long for, even if it remains elusive. It enriches us when we’re in love and makes us want to give ourselves to our lovers with abandon; it makes us want to be better people so that we might please our beloved more. Harrington quotes Horace saying, “You may drive Nature out with a pitchfork, but she keeps coming back.” But when she writes that marriages should be practical, that they should do the work of building a stable family, and that they should forfeit the idea of Big Romance, she loses me. I’m not about to dismiss the benefits of a stable marriage and a solid family, but to be human means that we long for passion, for erotic energy, for something bigger. Our erotic drive propelled us out of the primordial ooze in the first place, and this desire—the desire to desire and to be desired—drives us still. And it is good.
Harrington seems to want us all to put on our sensible shoes and do away with the glittering allure of the fairytale’s glass slipper. She wants to make sex a matter of public concern, and she wants us to acknowledge that men and women aren’t interchangeable androgyns and that they have different needs which should be addressed. But to do this we cannot exchange the cyborg for the Vulcan, operating as though a rational concern for family legacy is the highest good. We are creatures of too much lust for that—too much passion, too much tragedy, too much ecstasy. In receiving the riches of this life, we are beholden to the god of bad choices as much as to the god of the good ones. Harrington might want to remember that being against progress doesn’t mean being for regress. It might mean doing away with the dialectic of progress and being against it in the first place. To be viable, feminism may simply have to contain contradictory multitudes. And what could be more exuberantly feminine than that?
