Feminism Against Progress by Mary Harrington
Harrington is a fascinating writer, who has written a densely-packed book that is full of insightful observations and connections between ideas. She persuasively argues that “progress” is no longer benefiting the majority of women. Modern feminism has increasingly benefited only a small class of professional women. Well-off white-collar women have used feminism and the digital age to advance their own economic and political interests, often at the expense of poor women.
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“For men and women alike, then, the sexual revolution has not delivered in practice. Rather than grant all a marvellous new world of polymorphous sexual freedom, the surface sheen of Big Romance has served to obscure a collapse of human intimacy into the ‘marketplace’. And this hasn’t delivered freedom, or happiness, or even equality, but a mutually antagonistic caricature of those features of male and female sexed difference which persist despite our best efforts.”
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“The replacement of caring with technology and process has freed women to soar – at least those with the resources to make use of it. But while women who are either childless or able to mobilise resources and technology to offload nurture are able to ‘lean in’, as former COO of Facebook Sheryl Sandberg put it, that subset of women who are mothers, and less full-throatedly committed to the atomised world of emancipation, are doing less well – much like those working-class mothers who, as Marx documented in the 19th century, dosed their babies with opiates to keep them quiet while they worked the long factory shifts needed to put food on the table.”
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“We need a movement that honours the interests of women, and of men, as irreducibly sexed fusions of self and body, against an emerging order that seeks to de-sex and disembody us all. One that understands ‘progress’ is now our enemy. A reactionary feminism… if we accept where we are, and pursue instead a story of interdependence, and reconciliation, perhaps we might find another way. That also means learning to live with ourselves, including those ways in which our sex shapes who we are, how we live and what we desire… Feminism against progress, then, is anti-universalist, contextual and relational. This recovery of context and relationships begins with restoring our relationship with ourselves: that is, resisting the culture of chronic dissociation.”
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Harrington goes well beyond the categories of liberal versus conservative, to incorporate the lived experience of motherhood plus the shared humanity of men and women. She argues that the returns to liberation and freedom have massively declined, and have gone negative… feminism responds to the environment of several decades ago.
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“Half a century into the cyborg age, then, whether you view progress as feminist or not depends a great deal on your situation. If you’re female, childless, well educated and ambitious, or wealthy enough to outsource all of ‘care’ to underlings, then current doctrine may indeed appear ‘feminist’, in the sense of serving your interests. If you’re one of the many women who has, from Wollstonecraft onwards, viewed the women’s movement as aimed at seeking a fair settlement between the sexes – including for those women who are mothers – you may by now have some questions.”
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“Side effects of this generalised desertion of interdependence in favour of freedom include widespread loneliness; abuse of the elderly and disabled in care homes; substandard childcare; family breakdown; and the well-documented disadvantage experienced by children in one-parent families, such as greater risk of poverty, reduced life chances, and adolescent mental health issues.”
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“In each case, liquefaction doesn’t free us from normative, embodied patterns of behaviour or inclination. Rather, it dissolves social codes developed over millennia to manage such patterns, and reorders the still-existing patterns to the logic of the market. And while the result may sometimes benefit a subset of wealthy, high-status women in the West, the class interests of this group are increasingly at odds with those of not just many men but also the young, women with fewer resources, and women who are mothers.”
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She sees the pill as the first technology of transhumanism/cyborg revolution (biomedical upgrades of the human body). Poor people’s bodies are being “mined”, for the top 1%/elite:
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“The siren call of atomisation comes from everywhere, and legitimises itself in many ways: girl-power self-actualisation and embittered men’s rights activism, for example, are mirroring ideologies driving the same decline into loneliness and mutual hostility… Happily, on this front there already exists a vintage social technology we can deploy, as a first step in resisting the atomising pressures of cyborg theocracy, if we can only upcycle it for the 21st century: marriage… revisiting the pre-modern approach to what marriage is for: less personal fulfilment, or even romantic love, than an enabling condition for building a meaningful life.”
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Something as powerful as feminism and the Matriarchy deserve to be analysed and criticised:
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“The elite of the United States today is increasingly female dominated: women outnumber men at undergraduate level in most universities, 60 percent to 40 percent in some elite colleges. Even in the once heavily male-dominated military-industrial complex, as of 2019 four of the five biggest defence contractors – Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the defence arm of Boeing – had female CEOs. And the institutions that set and manage social and cultural norms – such as education, media, law and HR – are all increasingly female dominated. Female law students outnumber male ones two to one. Women outnumber men in journalism. Seventy-five percent of nonprofit workers in the United States are female, and the UK proportion is nearly as high, at 68 percent… And if elite progressive graduate women are in charge of shaping public morals via nonprofits and HR departments, they’re also busy doing so for the next generation in schools: here, too, 85 percent of UK primary school teachers are women, and around 65 percent of secondary school teachers.”
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Male/female dichotomy and duality argues for the foundational importance of heterosexual marriage as a social institution. If being a man is so fantastic, then why are there more trans women than trans men (suggesting that more men want to become women than vice versa)?
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“It’s now widely understood that women and men who marry young are impeding their own individual personal growth. Marriage is no longer a foundation and starting point for growth within interdependent family life, but tacitly treated as an obstacle to individual flourishing. This is especially the case for bourgeois women, who face sometimes intense social pressure not to marry young… In bourgeois circles, she tells me, getting married in your early twenties is widely viewed as eccentric, low-status or just outright ‘crazy’. While the culture looks askance at women like Charlotte and Lucy, it energetically lionises those who reject marriage altogether… The business press joins the chorus, with articles celebrating the fact that single, childless women now out-earn single, childless men.”
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There is persuasive evidence that life outcomes for children are significantly worse (in general) when raised in a single parent family, or without a father.
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“According to one 2021 study, in 1990 55 percent of American men said they had at least six close friends. By 2021 only 27 percent reported six or more close friends: half that number. Loneliness has rocketed: 15 percent of American men have no close friendships at all, a fivefold increase since 1990. This leaves many men dependent on a partner for social connection and wider friendship, which in turn leaves them desperately vulnerable if the relationship ends. Suicide is the biggest killer of UK men under 45, and 75 percent of all suicides are men. The highest risk group for suicide in the UK is male divorcees, followed by widowers. In contrast, there’s no correlation between suicide risk and marital status for women.”
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I strongly believe in marriage as the social glue for binding biological mothers and biological fathers to their children. These benefits should be supported for all economic classes of families, not primarily for wealthy/well-educated parents (who are much more likely to marry and stay together). Anglo/Western culture has massively diminished the importance of heterosexual marriage as the basis for raising children, in contrast with other cultures and nationalities… Within two generations the pill became popular for contraception, no-fault divorce was introduced, de-facto relationships gained formal status, gay marriage became law, government attempted to fill the childcare gaps, economic policy focused narrowly on GDP as a targeted metric for growth, amongst many other changes. Most people agree with the direction of travel for these reforms, but the costs and benefits have been unequally distributed – the overall impact has been very detrimental to quality of life and happiness. Raising children is messy and difficult, not easy. Providing an "easy way out" from the hard work of family relationships has been disastrous for millions of children and fathers. Modern relationships are almost unrecognisable to the lifelong religious commitment of our grandparents and great great grandparents. They took it for granted that they would remain married forever, and just got on with what had to be done. That mindset served their families well.
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