‘Feminism Against Progress’: Has Modernity Served Women?
A review of Feminism Against Progress’, by Mary Harrington (Regnery, 2023).
Mary Harrington has the zeal of the convert. She was a postmodernist, post-structuralist, fuck-the-system genderqueer type who called herself ‘Sebastian’ for a while. Then she settled down, got married, had a kid — and the scales, as they say, fell from her eyes. She shed her previous beliefs so completely that she began to wonder whether history even has a direction. ‘It’s not self-evident that humans have progressed, in some absolute sense,’ she writes. ‘Pick a subject, and you’ll find some things are better, while other things have become worse.’
This is how she opens her 2023 polemic, Feminism Against Progress, in which she argues that the social and technological changes wrought by modernism have not served women and, by extension, men and children. It has only served wealthy liberal women, who have become something like the high priestesses of what she calls ‘Meat Lego Gnosticism’, a strange new theology which, like a schizophrenic, sees the human body as a set of parts, rather than an embodied whole, and the human brain as a machine. These wealthy women are not affected by the changes they bring on to confer status on themselves, Mary claims. Moreover, this ‘bio-libertarianism’ serves their interests, since they can outsource the care of any children they have to paid minders.
She argues that the social and technological changes wrought by modernism have not served women and, by extension, men and children.
The heart of her argument is that the current trajectory of feminist advocacy — in particular, its emphasis on gender fluidity, careerism, and technological intervention in reproduction — neglects the significance of and indeed scorns biological realities and the diversity of women’s experiences and desires. The pursuit of an abstract kind of equality, Mary writes, measured mainly by economic participation and the erasure of gender distinctions, devalues motherhood and the unique contributions of mothers to society. Capitalism cannot even claim it has given women the right to work. In pre-capitalist communities, both women and men also worked. There is even poetry from that time in which women deride their male partners for doing less work than they do—while caring for children.
Technically, Mary cuts a path through a luxuriant thicket of philosophical and sociopolitical debates going back more than 50 years and finds a clearing where her view may be heard loudly and clearly. She describes the difficulties connected to promoting any form of feminism that tries at once to respect both individual choice and communal bonds. The current thrust of feminist though, in her view, does not liberate women but shores up the interests of technocrats and capitalists. Advances in technology, furthermore (most saliently, reproductive technology) have changed the identities of women. It has been noted that despite having more freedom and opportunity than ever before, women are more anxious, more depressed, more angry, more lonely, and sleep more poorly than they did several decades ago. And Mary has noted elsewhere that women are liable to shame one another for the high crime of being devoted, loving mothers who do not (in the narrowest conception of the word) ‘work’.
The current thrust of feminist though, in her view, does not liberate women but shores up the interests of technocrats and capitalists.
Mary argues in an engaging and passionate and unapologetic style about matters that are, to say the least, contentious. She has developed her own peculiar (but fun) lexicography of terms and concepts: ‘Meat Lego Gnosticism’, ‘Cyborg Theocracy’, ‘Big Romance’, ‘rewilding sex’. She combines anecdote, historiography and theory to build up a thoroughly post-liberal philosophy that invites women in particular to rethink their role in the West, and society on the whole to mull over its direction of travel.
I do love a controversial book, but Feminist Against Progress also manages to be compelling. Mary quotes approvingly the final words of the great Colombian thinker Nicolás Goméz Dávila’s The Authentic Reactionary: ‘The true reactionary is not a seeker after abolished pasts, but a hunter of sacred shades on the eternal hills.’ She is not, then, a conservative. But nor—clearly—is she a progressive. She is an individual, with idiosyncratic but increasingly commonplace ideas, and one who, at the same time, argues against individualism, and urges us to consider what we, as human beings, and women, as women, have in common, and how to build a world that reflects that—or stop the development of one that denies it.
