I recently read and loved Mary Harrington's 2023 book 'Feminism Against Progress'. It was fascinating on many levels and personally encouraging to hear her say something in chapter 6 that I recently wrote about as well (although she says it much better than I!).
Harrington takes the reader on a journey showing how and why she converted from radical, gender deconstructing, feminism into what she terms 'feminist against progress'. She argues that concern for women's rights needs to go hand in hand with having a concern for women's interests.
Largely she argues that womanhood can't be disentangled from motherhood, or (if not from motherhood) at least from our embodied differences. Attempts to do so are leading to situations that are harming and harmful for women. Harming them physically in the cases of male rapists in female prisons, domestically in the case of only recording our labour force (and thus making non-market contributing females personas non grata), and psychologically in much of the attitudes toward sex and intimate relationships.
The final three chapters outline her 'manifesto', a summary of what she thinks needs to be done about it:
- We need to recover the significance of marriage
- Men should be permitted more 'male only' spaces
- Women should stop taking the pill
Numbers 2 and 3 were unexpected and something I've not heard before. I'm not overly convinced by '2' (it seems that what's needed isn't 'male only' clubs but a greater emphasis on male to male friendship) but '3' offered a fascinating insight into the impact of the pill, and her critique of it made sense.
Harrington argues that the ubiquity of young women being on the pill has put more pressure on them to have sex (out of politeness if nothing else). This is an example of where the 'rights' of women works against their 'interests'. By creating a world where most women are on the pill, we created a world where women can 'have sex like a man', and we thereby reduced many of the physical restraints imposed on a woman by her biology.
Women have more sexual 'rights' than they used to, but is this working out well ? She argues that by commodifying sex (the result of market forces invading the bedroom) men are now behaving worse with women than before - see the rise in pornogrpahy inspired sexual violence. The pill has also led to women having 'worse sex' since being on the pill reduces their enjoyment of sex, so she says.
Consider as well this illuminating comment by a female British journalist about the Pill: "With every man knowing you were armed with the pill, pregnancy was no longer a reason to say 'no' to sex... I mainly remember the 60s as an endless round of miserable promiscuity, a time when often it seemed easier and, believe it or not, more polite, to sleep with a man than to chuck him out of your flat."
It occurs to me that numbers 1 & 2 pop out of scripture as well:
"keep the marriage bed holy." Hebrews 13:4
"As iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another." Proverbs 27:17
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I underlined a large proportion of the book. Here's a few highlights:
Where Couples Meet
Couples who met online were rare in the 2000s, and those who had were often faintly embarrassed to admit it.
It's now the norm. According to one 2019 Stanford study, 39% of couple today met online, compared with only 22% doing so via friands.
Limbic Capitalism
I've written before about personal experience and what often feels like the deliberate (and cruel) hijacking of men and male sexuality for profit. Harrington quotes the historian David Courtwright who's put a name to it: he calls it 'limbic capitalism' in which 'commerce hacks pre-rational pleasure and reward systems and re-orients them to commercial ends.'
I always find it helpful to realise that I'm not going mad(!). We are living through the hacking of human psychology that treats human beings themselves, and their attention, as the 'product' to be bought and sold. What porn, and images of naked women, does to men Instagram does for girls: 'we make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls' said one internal presentation.
Ambiguous Complementarity
I loved this idea. Correcting the marxist revision of history that says women have always been the subjugated and oppressed sex Harrington instead argues that, prior to the industrial revolution, the sexes worked together in their households much more interdependently than is often appreciated. Here's a quote from a 14th-century poem:
The goodman [husband] and his lad to the plough are gone,
The goodwife had much to do, and servant had she none,
Many small children to look after beside herself alone,
She did more than she could insider her own house.
Harrington writes:
"The idea of mutual love coexisting with hierarchy is alien to a modern perspective, in which all such asymmetries are treated as exploitative by definition. But it was a familiar idea in the medieval world... within that worldview, Christian teaching held that higher rank implied not simply a relation of domination and control, but one of service and sacrifice."
She admits: in practice of course, the ideal and reality often diverge: there were no doubt many household tyrants.
but concludes: "in communities where men and women genuinely depend on one another to perfrom work that's indispensable for the survival of the community, the idea that one sex could be uniformly 'exploited' by the other makes little sense."
and again:
male supremacy in theory must be set against interdependence of the sexes in practice
the challenges addressed by feminism are "less evidence of eternal male animus than effects of material changes."
Female Brain Fallacy
I noticed that she quotes from Germaine Greer something I've heard from sex revisionists within the church as well:
In 1970, Germaine Greer argued that there are no differences between the brains of men and women, and that women have simply been 'castrated' by male stereotypes that force them into a subordinate role.
This was helpful since it sheds light on where this idea came from culturally speaking. It's been a common, and often effective, line of attack from some within the church against the traditional model of role distinction in marriage and the church.
Since the Bible never uses this line of reasoning (that women are inferior to men) I don't think it 'sticks' as a critique of Christian norms. Society and the kingdom of the world will reason from nature and so arrive at unbiblical ideas. Christians are called to 'do different' since we belong not to the city of man but the city of God. We don't reason from nature but from revelation.
Girls and Gender Identity Issues
Harrington's work has fresh and updates statistics on the gender identity struggles faced by an increasing number of young girls:
138 children in the UK were referred to Gender Identity Development services, whereas in 2021 it was 2,383.
This was primarily driven by adolescents, with 15 being the most common age of referral. Similar aptterns are observable in other developed countries including NZ and Canada.
Harrington also shows how and why girls, owing to Instagram's negative impact on the self-image are much more affected by this than boys.
"Since the mass adoption of smartphones, the sex of minors presenting with gender distress has also reversed, from predominately boys to overwhelmingly girls. Children referred to the UK's Gender Identity Development Service in 2011 were mostly boys; but by 2021, almost 70% were female."
Tragically "in the three years ending 2021, at least 776 of the double mastectomies performed in the interests of gender transition were done on minors aged 13-17!
Meat-Lego
What a good phrase that is: 'meat lego'. We now have a much more malleable and lego-ish attitude toward our bodies than we used to, often viewing our bodies as things separate to ourselves. She says "I don't remember when I stopped just being my body..." and goes on to describe a social shift toward a tech motivated gnosticism. In this world "progress means unchaining individuals from the arbitrary nature of bodily sex."
Despite this she quotes Norma Swanson who points out: no one has ever seen such a thing as a 'human' body. Just male and female bodies.
Shocking Stats
There are several sad and shocking statistics and stories relayed in the book. Here's some stand out ones:
"A BBC Scotland survey suggested that over two-thirds of men under 40 have spot on, slapped or choked their partner during consensual sex - with many indicating that this was inspired by porn consumption."
On friendship:
"According to one 2021 study, in 1990 55% of American men said they had at least six close friends. By 2021 only 27% reported six or more close friends: half that number. Loneliness has rocketed: 15% 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. suicde is the biggest killer of UK men under 45, and 75% 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. "
On marriage:
Quoting a relationships counsellor and the changing attitudes toward divorce... "Around half of divorces are... 'low-conflict' marriages: that is, the relationship was not perfect but they muddled along well enough. 'For 55-60% of couples, these are not bad marriages. They are just not ecstatic marriages."
And sadly enough this point is borne out by this:
"a third of men and women who get divorced subsequently regret it."
Misogyny:
The rivalry between the sexes, the shifting market in terms of male and female power has led to the rise of involuntarily celibate groups and the rise of the manosphere who's lives are being lived as protests to and against women.
Between 1989 and 2010 (the year Instagram launched) there were three mass killings whose motives have been attributed to hatred of women. There have been 12 such attacks since.
The problem with 'trad' wives:
"They're not traditional enough. For most of history, men and women worked together in a productive housechild, and this is the model reactionary feminism should aim to retrieve."
On smashing the patriarchy:
Rather than preventing men from behaving badly, the assault on patriarchal constraints and hierarchies has delivered a 'rivalrous' society of 'siblings' in which those men who still want to misbehave are free to do so, without even the constraints afforded by those positive aspects of masculinity that once governed masculine excess: 'the protective faither, the responsible man, the paternalistic attitude that exhibits care and compassion rather than simply places constraints on freedom.'
There's so much good and gold in this book, some really harrowing stuff alongside some really hopeful notes.
Harrington's story from the industrial revolution to our present cyborg reality tells a weaves a convincing tail that mirrors much of Nancy Pearcey's in 'The Toxic War on Masculinity.' Her critique of the Jane Austin inspired 'Big Romance' is on point as well and helpfully shows how and why society has shapeshifted the way it has.
As a disciple of Jesus I'm encouraged by what appears to be happening in secular spaces. What many thought was 'common sense' is increasingly being revealed for what it is: the fruit of Christ's revolution.