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Mary Harrington: Feminism against progress — Transcript

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0:02Hello everyone and welcome to UnHerd. I am Freddie Sayers. If
0:07you haven't heard of Mary Harrington, then the first thing
0:10you need to do after this interview is race to UnHerd.com
0:13and sign up for our daily newsletter because she is one of
0:16our star columnist. She started writing for us in 2019 and has
0:20grown into a bit of a cult figure since then, with her
0:24fearless, provocative, brilliant columns that she writes for us
0:28every week. She is a feminist, but of a very different type.
0:31Think not Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, bra burning, no.
0:36She is the High Priestess of a new kind of philosophy she calls
0:40'reactionary feminism'. Today, she launches her first book,
0:44Feminism against Progres and she's here in the studio to talk
0:48about it. Welcome, Mary.
0:49Thank you for having me, Freddie.
0:51Mary, congratulations on your book. It is looking beautiful
0:54here, standing in between us. There's a lot in it. Some of it,
0:58the themes UnHerd readers might be familiar with, but there's
1:02also quite a lot of new ideas there, throwing things forward.
1:06I guess we should start with a little bit more about you
1:09because your history, as you've described it in this book is
1:13quite an important part of the evolution of your ideas. You're
1:18thought of as a conservative at this point, whether that was
1:21always true., I guess it wasn't. Tell us in a kind of summary,
1:27what journey you've been on since your 20s. You talk about
1:30having lived in a lesbian commune at one point.
1:34That probably gets overstated. It was a house chair with
1:38pretentions is probably fairer but we were we were genuinely
1:43trying to live communally. It was all women. It was an
1:48experienced. There were lots of things were nice about it. It
1:53fell apart. I'll start with some of that was my fault and I'm not
1:57going to say anymore about how why but some of it was my fault.
2:01That was a contributing factor. I suppose I've shared that about
2:06my life because it was one of many, many, many fronts on which
2:12I was trying to live my ideas about how the world ought- my
2:17ideals. I wanted to live non-hierarchically, I wanted to
2:20live experimentally. I wanted to live differently. I didn't want
2:26to be trapped in the bourgeois patriarchal heteronorm. I was an
2:32early adopter of many of the ideas which are now very, very
2:37much a part of mainstream culture war, I suppose.
2:40So what would you have called yourself back then? Were you a
2:42socialists, were you an anarchist? How would you
2:45describe yourself?
2:46I think I was so anti all of it that I would have rejected the
2:51idea that I had to have an 'ism'. I think I would have
2:53thrown that scornfully back in your face.
2:56Not even a progressive at that point?
2:59Were people identifying as progressives at that point?
3:02Maybe not.
3:06It's a popular term of art now, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure
3:09that was that was a thing in quite the same way in the early
3:11noughties.
3:12And so in way, you anticipated a lot of these reality bending
3:17ideas that are sometimes called 'woke' or hyper-progressive.
3:22I was a fully, fully paid up believer in most of the things
3:25which have been institutionalised, I think in a,
3:28sadly, very reductive form, and get complained about as
3:32'wokeness'. I was woke.
3:34And that's throughout your 20s. What happened? Was it a sudden
3:39switch?
3:40It also it all fell apart at once or slowly and then all at
3:44once. All my experimental living situations seemed to end badly
3:52and although some some of that was probably a me problem, I
3:57don't think it was just a me problem. There was something
3:59about trying to live non hierarchically that never seem
4:02to work out that way and I began to feel as though all it was
4:06doing was serving to obscure actual power dynamics, which
4:09were actually much more intractable than I had hoped. So
4:13that was, you could say, the first red pill, this idea that
4:19really there are enduring obdurate power dynamics, which
4:24you just can't get rid of and I started to wonder if maybe I was
4:27thinking wrong about things. I was thinking about powe wrong
4:30and thinking about where that comes from, and how we navigate
4:34these things and maybe I was just coming at it wrong.
4:36So was it a hurtful period?
4:39It was devastating because it wasn't just that. It wasn't just
4:43my domestic situations that fell apart. The startup that I was
4:47involved in, it wasn't so much that it fell apart, although it
4:51didn't end up becoming the stratospheric thing we'd hoped,
4:54but that enterprise it brought together a lot of very noughties
4:59ideas. It was an incredibly Third Way project. It came out
5:04of this real optimism, which I remember and I think you and
5:07I've spoken about before, you remembering as well. There was
5:10this genuine, deeply felt optimism that it might be
5:12possible to square the circle. It might be possible to both to
5:16get filthy, stinking rich, and also to save the world.
5:19Be a great person?
5:19Yeah and to be a nice person. That's the essence of the of the
5:23New Labour: aspiration. You can be intensely relaxed about
5:29people getting filthy, stinking rich, as long as they pay their
5:31taxes. And social enterprise was the way forward and if we only
5:37unleashed the creativity of the market, into the realm of making
5:40the world a better place, then that's what would happen.
5:43Actually, with hindsight, that's really the inception of 'woke
5:46capital', isn't it? That's that idea, just writ large, and
5:51somewhat bastardise. That 'woke capital' there. And so I was
5:54there at the beginning of 'woke capital'.
5:56You were ahead of the curve.
5:57I joke sometimes that I'm this chronic political hipster, and
6:01that I find myself they're slightly ahead of things which
6:05haven't quite happened yet. And then they happen and I'm like,
6:08'well, that's not really what I was hoping for at all.'
6:10Well, in a way,this book is a prescription or an idea of how
6:18the rest of the woke community might be going to catch up with
6:21you on your journey in some way. So let's complete your your
6:25journey, since that's what I started with. So you became
6:28disillusioned.
6:29I lost my faith in progress and it happened slowly and then all
6:33at once. The house share with pretentions imploded and then
6:38the startup imploded, or rather, I was expelled, I think that's
6:41probably more accurate. I was expelled for just being
6:44impossible to work with, which I was. That's just true, I'm
6:49probably unemployable in any capacity apart from being an
6:52UnHerd collumnist.
6:54And the lesbian relationships?
6:58I don't really know what happened there, except that I
7:02was probably always more bisexual than I was straight up
7:05lesbian. I remain to this day, very grateful to the community
7:12of women who welcomed me and made me feel safe and gave me a
7:17space to be outside the heterosexual dynamics, a lot of
7:23which I found very uncomfortable and unhappy. And I'm very
7:27grateful to those communities for having given me space and
7:30respite for all of those years. And I feel honestly, quite
7:36somewhat embarrassed on behalf of all of the women who are
7:40genuinely just obdurately, they're only ever going to be
7:44same sex attracted for letting the side down.
7:49It's such a distance, isn't it from where you are now. You even
7:52talk about how at one point you went by the name Sebastian?
7:55I did, I changed my name. I was fully into the whole idea that
7:59we can all perform our gender, I was a Butler-ite, a card
8:01carrying Butler-ite.
8:03They would have called you non-binary or trans?
8:07If I were 21 now, I'd be all the way into that. 100% No question
8:12about it. I would never want my story, my account of having
8:19spent some time in same-sex relationships. I'd never want
8:22that to be used to imply that, in fact, everyone's only ever
8:26pretending. I'll make that clear, because I probably don't
8:30spell it out often enough. It would be easy to weaponize a
8:34story like that to say, 'you just need you just need to meet
8:38the right man'.
8:39A type of conversion therapy. Everyone just needs to read
8:42Mary's book and move to Cambridgeshire.
8:44And it seems pretty clear to me that there's a robust subset of
8:52the LGBTQ identified community for whom that's just not true,
8:57who are and will always be just attracted to people of the same
9:01sex and that's just how it is. Those people exist and it as it
9:06turned out, I wasn't one of them. And identity, for me,
9:09turned out to be a much more moveable feast than that. People
9:15say the number of the number of young people identifying as
9:18LGBTQ has grown enormously. I suspect that the absolute number
9:21of obdurately, goldstar, same-sex attracted people is
9:24probably pretty consistent, as a subset of that, but there's a
9:27great many more people who are in the space. I'm not going to
9:32use the word fashion, but the it's much really it's much more
9:35normalised to explore that space now, and I'm willing to bet that
9:41most of the increase is much more in the kind of terrain that
9:44I found myself in in my 20s for better or for worse and people
9:48of good faith may disagree.
9:50And they might then go to where you went in your 30s, which is
9:55what? Tell us that, let's go to decade number three.
9:59By the time I was into my mid 30s, I was married, not living
10:05in London, no longer curating interactive art events and
10:11going to experimental hipster nights and working in web
10:15startups and doing all of that avant garde-ish stuff that I had
10:18been doing.
10:19The opposite almost?
10:21I felt like I'd just been kicked out of that world, or that that
10:24world had fallen apart and turned out to be an illusion. It
10:31just felt as though it had all just been a lie or an illusion.
10:35And you ran away from it?
10:36And actually, I should just just accept the fact that I'm a
10:40normal person, I should just get on with being ordinary and stop
10:43having these delusions of differentness. And so I thought,
10:47well, I'm just gonna get on with trying, doing my level best to
10:49be as normie as possible. All of that just turned out to be
10:53nonsense, I'm just gonna do my best to be normal.
10:55So that involved living in a village...
10:59I mean, that happened a bit further... I was still living in
11:02London but I got a money job. And around the same time I met
11:07the man, I'm now married to. That was a very, that was a sort
11:11of grounding- I try not to share, our relationship doesn't
11:16just belong to me. So that's kind of a black box.
11:20There's one relationship which we have talked about, which is
11:23your daughter and your motherhood because if you were
11:27kind of on a journey already, by this stage of getting married,
11:32what you've written about for us and recount in this book is that
11:35the experience of becoming a mother fast-forwarded that
11:38shift?
11:38It did. By then we'd moved to the countryside. When she was
11:42born, it just completely reorganised how I thought about
11:46everything. Because it had just been an unquestioned assumption
11:50up to that point that the default condition of people was
11:54to be alone, to be separate. Sort of radically atomized, I
11:58always felt fundamentally very alone, as if it was just me and
12:02any iota of connection I ever had with another person was rare
12:06and fleeting and precious. But that it wasn't something that
12:10you could rely on. And it was just different after. I no
12:14longer felt like that after she was born, because she didn't
12:18feel like she was separate to my body. And it was really
12:22disorienting, took some getting used to. It was like I'd grown
12:26another limb, that was suddenly separate from me, but still
12:30needed to be cared for as urgently as if she was still
12:34part of my body. It's very difficult to put into words but
12:38I've compared notes with any number of other mothers who say,
12:42'that's just what it feels like'. And her well-being was as
12:46urgently important to me as if she had been still coextensive
12:50of my body.
12:51So there's a number of things going on there. There's a sense
12:54that your floating, individual identity, atomized, as you call
12:58it, has been challenged because there's now a person to whom
13:02you're physically attached. And there's also something going on
13:05around your body. You're you've described it, how the bodily
13:11feeling of motherhood with everything, breastfeeding, from
13:14the act of giving birth, sort of reacquainted you with your body
13:20in some way and made you more aware of what exactly? Tell us.
13:31I suppose, just by nature, in case you haven't noticed yet,
13:35I'm by nature, just more of a cerebral person. I never
13:40particularly felt very at home in my body. I spent my teens
13:46wishing I could just be a disembodied floating
13:47consciousness, again, in a way in which I've theorised in the
13:53context of the body dissociation, social contagions,
13:58which I see as having swept over the world since the
14:01normalisation of the internet, but this was the default
14:04condition for me was to feel a little dissociated from my body.
14:10And to find myself in this viscerally embodied state,
14:13needing to be viscerally embodied in order to be present
14:17for my daughter, and to be a good mother to my daughter was,
14:21again, it's a new experience, very, very all consuming and
14:25very absorbing very different. Inevitably, being who I am, I
14:34couldn't just leave it at that. I couldn't just think, 'well,
14:36this will this is a bit different' and then get on with
14:37my life. I end up theorising about it because that's just
14:41what I do. I think that was the second ever article I wrote for
14:47UnHerd was about how motherhood nuked to my liberalism, because
14:51it's just not possible to square that experience with the idea
14:57that we're all atomized idea-first subjects, it just
15:03doesn't work.
15:05Just explain that. So for our listeners, explain how becoming
15:11a mother nuked your liberalism. Because there are lots of
15:16liberal mothers out there who might not understand that?
15:19Well, it made me question, a number of very basic assumptions
15:25that I'd had about what a person is, and what the ideal state of
15:30being is, which I'd inherited pretty much wholesale from the
15:37liberal worldview, which we all absorb from the culture
15:40generally, because it's just it's in the water, it's in the
15:44air, it's just the world we grew up with. And just the basic
15:47belief that we're all separate. We're all individuals, we're all
15:53the best, the ideal state to be in, the most dignified,
15:58admirable state to be in is one in which you're independent from
16:01other people, that you can do things on your own, that you you
16:05don't have to rely on other people, that you're not shaped
16:08particularly, you're not influenced by other people, that
16:10you create yourself as it works out of whole cloth, and can and
16:14are self contained. That's a slightly reductive picture, but
16:19it's there in the water. I mean, all the way from kids films to
16:24major world changing works of philosophy. Take something like
16:29that paradigm and try to make sense of how we should live as
16:33individuals or together in a polity based on that fundamental
16:37assumption, that we're all separate by default.
16:40You think of that as quite a central thread in liberalism?
16:44It is a central thread in liberalism and trying to be that
16:49as a woman is central, it's one of the dominant threads in
16:52feminism. How to be an independent person, in that
16:57sense, when you're a woman, and therefore, physically more
17:01subject to male violence, for example, or when you're a mother
17:04and the world expects you to have obligations to your
17:06children, or where you can be impregnated against your will,
17:11for example. These are all these these are all three specific
17:14things that challengethe aspiration to separateness and
17:19independence and autonomy. And there are a great many others as
17:22well.
17:23So then, if you're saying farewell, or you're not so into
17:29this idea of kind of hyper individual, liberal existence,
17:33where we're all negotiating as individuals, what is it that you
17:38became more enamoured by or convinced by? What are the
17:41What it left me asking is, if in fact, the experience of being a
17:41altternatives?
17:47mother has left me wondering if even aspiring to this state of
17:51separateness is desirable, because it suddenly seemed less
17:54desirable to be separate in that way because at the end of the
17:57day, it was no longer meaningful to say, 'I should just be able
18:02to do what I want'. Because if my daughter was screaming for
18:05milk at four in the morning, I couldn't very well just roll
18:07over and say, 'I don't want to'. That felt impossible at a sort
18:12of organismic level to respond like that to somebody who so
18:16radically needed me and to whom I was so devoted in that very
18:19animal way. And I thought, well, if this is the most important
18:25thing to me right now and my entire ideology, up until this
18:29point is saying that actually, this is bad, then is that a me
18:35problem or is that an ideology problem?
18:38But it felt good, is what you're saying? You just knew that it
18:43was good.
18:44Interdependence felt to me more valuable and important in ways
18:50which were just inaccessible from within the liberal
18:53atomistic paradigm.
18:55So that pushes you in a direction, which we're now going
18:58to explore. You've very masterfully given us a bit of a
19:02segue there by talking about liberalism. Having kind of
19:05introduced you with your story, let's now talk to the sort of
19:09first part of your book, which is really a history of women, or
19:13it's an alternative lens to view the kind of progress or not of
19:19women from pretty much mediaeval times through to the present
19:22day. And your very challenging and provocative idea, I think,
19:27can roughly be summed up as, it wasn't just a case of things
19:32getting better and better for women. Your view is actually
19:35that in some ways, what appeared like progress made things worse
19:40for women. So let's start at the beginning because you make quite
19:44a big distinction between the sort of industrial era and what
19:47happened before that in the medieval time. Let's go back,
19:50take us back to 1450. Because at one point in the book, you say
19:54your new feminism is more 1450 than 1950 and we'll come to
19:59that. Let's start there then 1450 what was better for women
20:04in 1450, than it is now?
20:06Well, I'm going to finesse your summary of my re-read of the
20:06So what were they doing?
20:12history of women's modernity, Freddie by saying, it's not so
20:18much that things have got worse, it's more that what's normally
20:24framed as a story of progress, which is to say that the
20:29emergence of the women's movement from Mary
20:34Wollstonecraft onwards, roughly speaking, is it's not just a
20:40story of progress in an absolute moral sense. It's the story of
20:46women's responses to technology and the changes, the radical
20:52transformative effect that industrial technologies have
20:58throughout society, including on how men and women lived together
21:04and how they managed family life. And, there were for that
21:10first industrial period- And I'll come to my subsequent
21:16point, which is that we've now left the industrial era, in
21:21fact, half a century ago. But for the industrial era, perhaps
21:28the most salient transformation that was wrought by technology,
21:34and which was responded to eventually by the women's
21:39movement was the fact that work left the home. That just wasn't
21:42So, very crudely, it varies a great deal according to context,
21:46the case, in the mediaeval era for most people. For most
21:47but very crudely, what tends to happen in an agrarian setting is
21:49men produce raw materials, and the women process them, roughly
21:51people, home and work were the same thing. And women worked
21:53speaking. So for example the men might plough fields and grow
21:56wheat, and then the women might grind it and turn it into bread,
21:57around being mothers, sometimes to young children. For example,
21:59or the men might produce meat or wool, and the women might spin
22:02it and turn it into textiles. And I've taken textile making as
22:03in an agrarian setting, it wasn't as though women sat
22:06a very good example of a field of women's work which was
22:09around doing nothing while the men did all the farming. Women
22:11radically challenged by industrialization, because for
22:14some tens of thousands of years prior to industrialization, it
22:15worked as much as men, they just did different jobs.
22:18had always been women's work.
22:20And still is in the world but it's extraordinary in how many
22:24different types of societies.
22:25Textile making is women's work. I found a super historian of
22:32textile making who argues that it tends to end up being women's
22:35work, because it's very compatible with having little
22:37children, in very material ways. You can raise your loom off the
22:42ground. If your child is eating something, it shouldn't, or
22:46running into the fire, you can stop and put the thing down and
22:49go and you can come back to it, it's a social thing to do. So it
22:53works just within the wider material, social context of
22:58being a mother and also being economically productive. But
23:01then under industrialization, this is suddenly something which
23:04is done in a centralised setting, with dangerous heavy
23:07machines, to a shift pattern and all of a sudden, it's just not
23:11compatible with having a toddler underfoot anymore. So what do
23:14you do? And some women responded, some found childcare
23:19or drugged their children or neglected their children.
23:21Drugged their children?
23:22Yes there are reports that in industrial communities, women
23:24who were forced by economic necessity to work would
23:26sometimes give their children opiates, to just keep them keep
23:30them placid, while they of necessity went to work. The
23:34early industrial era was horrendous for women, before
23:38there was any kind of workplace protection for mothers.
23:41So this is then the idea that the industrial revolution in the
23:4518th, 19th century, by creating a kind of technology that only
23:51happened in factories, kind of broke the homestead as a
23:54coherent collaborative project between men and women, and
23:58either made it into the man's job to go and work. Or you might
24:03even say worse, something which the mother had to do, and
24:06therefore find alternative arrangements.
24:08And essentially, under those circumstances, once work has
24:12left the home, women who are mothers have two choices. They
24:16can either find alternative childcare, or cobble some kind
24:20of childcare together somehow, or they can stop working and
24:22And so was born the 20th century feminism. Before I let you get
24:24look after kids instead. Essentially, most women who
24:28could afford to, took option B, or a great many more women who
24:32could afford to talk option B because, given the choice
24:36between working in a textile factory, or looking after your
24:40kids, it's a no-brainer, if you can afford to. There were a
24:44number of consequences downstream of that. One of which
24:48was that effectively under those circumstances women lost
24:51economic agency, and this is the very long answer to your
24:55question of in what ways it made life worse. There are great many
25:00things that got better. Life was less gruelling. For those who
25:04were bourgeois women, life was probably much more comfortable
25:08and materially abundant. There are lots of upsides to
25:12industrialization. It's not as though I'm not unambiguously a
25:16frame breaker, but but there were trade offs. They lost
25:20economic agency because they were no longer equal
25:23contributors to a productive household. The bourgeois
25:27housewife was totally economically dependent on her
25:30husband. And you've got to remember that this was against
25:34the legacy, legal and cultural background in which the basic
25:39unit of society wasn't individuals, but households, and
25:42the man was the titular head of the household. So women lost
25:46their informal economic clout, and gained very little
25:50compensatory clout. It was very difficult to divorce. They had
25:54no right to their children, should they be, should they find
25:58themselves in a difficult situation. It wasn't really done
26:02to work. They had no right to vote and they're no longer
26:06making any direct economic contribution to the household.
26:10So under those circumstances, it's all very well being a stay
26:12to 20th century feminism-
26:14at home mum, provided your husband likes you and is a
26:18responsible husband but unfortunately, there are
26:21situations where that isn't always the case. And so those
26:25women who found themselves very much on the backfoot began to
26:29agitate for property ownership and for the right to work and
26:34for the ability to divorce and for the right to vote. Not
26:38unreasonably, saying that we need the right to be people on
26:42the same terms as men within this new economic order that we
26:46find ourselves in.
26:54There's one more bit but the other side of that, and this I
26:59suppose, this is my counterintuitive argument is
27:04that during the 19th century, the other side of that were
27:07those women who argued in defence of the home, which is
27:11read by feminists historiographers now as false
27:15consciousness essentially, as women who are in hock to
27:18patriarchy and trying to legitimise its oppressive, yada
27:22yada yada. But to me, the so called 'cult of domesticity',
27:27which was a huge body of writing produced by bourgeois
27:30housewives, in praise of women's domestic role under those
27:34circumstances. It reads as feminism. It's just a type of
27:39feminism which is almost illegible from the other side of
27:42the looking glass that we've been through since, because what
27:45they're doing is they're extolling the virtues of the
27:49domestic realm and care, and of this space outside the market
27:53where interdependence is still crucially important. And they're
27:56trying to make sure that even under these conditions where
27:58they've they've lost agency effectively, that what they do
28:02is still valued and important.
28:05So you see the pamphlet writer in the 1860s, who was talking
28:11about the beauty of the homestead and women's role in
28:15the domestic setting, as a type of feminist because they're
28:19trying to defend and get proper value for the work that they're
28:22doing.
28:23Exactly.
28:23So I think we're gonna get on to the 20th century and the 1960s,
28:29and modern progress and the rest of it, but I think probably
28:33people listening to this, if they are fully signed up,
28:36progressives would be kind of throwing things at the screen,
28:40and saying, how can she sit there and romanticise the 1450s,
28:46or the any kind of pre industrial era because this is a
28:49period where, as you say, women had no rights at all. They were
28:55pretty much owned by their husbands in law and how can that
29:03possibly be better? Quite apart from all of the material things
29:08that you've already touched on, the fact that life got healthier
29:11and longevity and improvements in medicine and everything...
29:14What would you say to the person who is gawking at the screen
29:17saying, 'how could she, how dare she?'
29:20My counterpoint to that would be I could probably throw some
29:25counter examples about ways in which we've traded off in
29:28exchange for the dividend of freedom and quote-un-quote
29:31'personhood' that we have now, but bracketing that, because we
29:34can come back to that a bit later. The counterpoint I would
29:37offer to that is that my read of the anthropology of the studies
29:45people have done of agrarian communities, pre-modern,
29:49communities that live in a pre-modern way suggest that
29:53women in those communities very often wield an immense amount of
29:58power, but it's not very legible in terms that we would
30:02understand today, because it happens informally and this is
30:07by no means always-
30:08Is that by controlling their husbands? Or what are we talking
30:11about here?
30:11For example, women in a village context might well, they might
30:17not have very much to do with the outside world and they might
30:19not officially take the decision, they might all say,
30:22'my husband is the head of the household'. But if there was
30:24something they didn't want to see happen, they would make sure
30:27it didn't happen. And if there was something they wanted to see
30:29happen, they might well have ways of pulling strings or if
30:34they disapprove of somebody, they might be punished by being
30:37ostracised within the community. They weild power by controlling
30:43access to information, by ostracising people who are
30:46frowned upon by managing who gets access to resources, or
30:53particularly very importantly by controlling the power of public
30:56shame. So if somebody within that community steps out of
31:00line, as far as the women are concerned, there'll be shamed by
31:03everybody. And this is just a fate worse than death.
31:05But that doesn't sound so great to me. We're not proposing to go
31:12No, I'm not well, Is there anything much between that
31:12back to that?
31:23Freddie and what we have in terms of cancelled culture on
31:26the internet today?
31:27But we don't like cancelled culture do we?
31:30I might suggest that we are going to be stuck with it in one
31:34way or another. We're either going to have village level
31:36cancel culture, or we're going to have village level cancel
31:39culture on steroids at the level of the entire internet. And I
31:45would argue that this is just a function of how our communities
31:47work. This is just a function of how groups of people operate.
31:52And you can choose what scale it operates at, but you're not
31:55going to be able to get rid of it.
31:56Okay, so we're into the 20th century.
32:01I suppose the the basic point I want to make here is that power
32:04operates on a number of different levels, and can be
32:07wielded in a number of different ways. Historically, my read of
32:13women's history is that informal power operates in an in a number
32:16of ways which are just less legible to formal
32:19historiography.
32:20And so in other words, the kind of pastiche of this, millennia
32:24of patriarchy with women, only oppressed and always invisible,
32:28always subjugated. It doesn't tell the whole picture and
32:32actually, there were ways...
32:34I dare say that there were a great many women who were beaten
32:38by tyrannical husbands. There are there are still to this day,
32:41a great many women who suffer at the hands of tyrannical
32:43husbands. I would suggest that if you imagine that was just
32:49what it was like for everybody all the time, then... Think
32:53about Chaucer, he wouldn't have written the Wife of Bath, and
32:57had everybody relate to that as an immediately recognisable
33:01character archetype if it were not the case that women had
33:04plenty of ways of asserting themselves.
33:07I'm sure all of our audience have read Chaucer's, Wife or
33:11Bath, but maybe just explain?
33:12The Wife of Bath is one of the characters in Chaucer's
33:16Canterbury Tales written- was it the 14th century? 14th century
33:23and I think she's buried something like three or four or
33:28five husbands. She has inherited all of their wealth. She
33:31basically does what she likes, she's bawdy, she's outspoken.
33:34She's a ferocious, feisty matron, who does what she wants
33:40and has a great time doing it. And she's an incredibly
33:43memorable figure. I've met women like her, these larger than life
33:49older women. I think she's a she's a wonderful character. But
33:52if Chaucer could be writing her in the 14th century, I humbly
33:56suggest that women like her existed in the 14th century, and
33:59if so, they can't all have been all cringing, oppressed
34:05underdogs all of the time.
34:07So maybe it's 1350s we're going back to? So let's go fast
34:12forward now to the 1950s and 1960s because when people think
34:15about feminism these days, that's the sort of lens that
34:20they normally look through. That kind of progress, that kind of
34:26what you might call sex positive, individual liberation,
34:30women's lib. what do you now think of that movement? Was that
34:35a good thing?
34:36Again, it depends a great deal where you're standing. It's not
34:40my position- I call myself a reactionary but it's not my
34:45position that things are just all self evidently getting
34:48worse. That would just be that would just be to adopt the... If
34:52I don't believe in progress, I don't believe in decline either.
34:55Some things get better and some things get worse, and I'm just
34:58interested in disaggregating some of those things rather than
35:02trying to map it all onto...
35:04So what did we lose? What did you lose?
35:07What what was gained was a great dividend of freedom, which
35:10landed asymmetrically, I would suggest much more amongst middle
35:16and upper class women. So there were a great many things that
35:19became easier and better and freer for a great many women
35:23with the arrival of the pill.
35:25The pill, it's the first time you've mentioned in this
35:28interview but that's quite central to your history.
35:30The pill and abortion are to me, in my reading of women's
35:31Because it cut the bodily ties.
35:34history, the arrival of the pill and legal abortion ended a
35:38period of back and forth between the feminism of freedom, which
35:43is to say we must enter the market as atomized persons on
35:47the same terms as men, and the feminism of care, which was
35:51represented by the 'cult of domesticity', which said, in
35:55fact, we need and are needed by and caring and the looking after
35:59dependents and is good and right and proper, and needs to be
36:03valued and needs to be shielded as something which exists and
36:07has importance outside the market and we need to mount a
36:11coherent defence of those spaces. The home, as distinct
36:15from the cut and thrust of individualism and competition,
36:19and commerce and trying to get ahead and climb the greasy pole
36:23and so on. So these are the two poles that really went back and
36:27forth and there's this is a hugely rich, varied and
36:31contested history of women going back and forth over which of
36:35these is more important and how, and depending on the particular
36:40context. And my reading of what happened with the arrival of the
36:44pill and later with abortion was that it settled that debate
36:48conclusively in favour of the feminism of freedom.
36:56It cut the bodily ties. Motherhood was no longer
37:02something which was just irreducibly part of the
37:05condition of being a woman unless you just took a vow of
37:07chastity. Up to that point, it was relatively difficult to,
37:13unless you just forswore having sex altogether. There were
37:17certain things that were just relatively difficult to plan.
37:19You took it pretty much as read that you were probably going to
37:22have kids, if you had anything to do with a man and that way.
37:26But with the arrival of the pill, it cut that tie but it
37:30materially produced a ratchet. The arrival of the pill producer
37:34ratchet towards the legal abortion, because although the
37:39idea was that the number of accidental pregnancies would go
37:41down but in fact, they went up because people were just having
37:43so much more sex. And so then people were still wrestling,
37:48You're saying, there were more unwanted pregnancies after the
37:51pill than before?
37:52Yes. Even though the number of accidental pregnancies per
37:57casual encounter went down, the number of casual encounters went
38:00up so much that the absolute number of pregnancies,
38:01accidental or unwanted pregnancies went up.
38:04So legal abortion followed on..
38:06It created a ratchet towards women being able to terminate
38:12pregnancies. And wherever you stand on, there's a whole
38:15incredibly bitter and contested discourse around foetal
38:18personhood and it's just immensely complicated area, but
38:22where where I've situated this in terms of the argument between
38:26the feminism of freedom and the feminism of care, is that
38:28wherever you stand on those other issues around abortion,
38:31it's about the strongest statement you can make in favour
38:35of freedom, even at the expense of care. I don't see how it's
38:40possible to make a stronger statement to say, 'my freedom
38:43matters this much that I'm pregnant, if I let this
38:48continue, a new human will result. Right now this new human
38:53is absolutely dependent on my body. My Freedom matters
38:56sufficiently that I'm just going to end that person's potential
39:00life in defence of my autonomy.'
39:05So you this is where you get into really quite dangerous
39:10territory, I will say, as far as at least feminism is concerned
39:14because I suspect most right thinking feminists would have a
39:20polite discussion with you about whether there were things about
39:23mediaeval versus industrial women's experience that were
39:27gained or lost and not come to blows. But if you started saying
39:32that the pill and abortion were bad things, they are kind of the
39:38totemic parts of what being a modern feminist means.
39:42Well, they are. This is because the winners write the history
39:44books Freddie. And if, up until that point, you'd had a back and
39:48forth between the feminism of freedom and the feminism of
39:50care. The fact that the feminism of freedom has so definitively
39:54won is part of the reason why the cult of domesticity is
39:59illegible as feminism and it's also part of the reason why the
40:02proposing that there might be a feminist case for welcoming
40:07every baby is just straightforward anathema because
40:12the feminism of freedom is so entirely swept the board in
40:16terms of defining what it means to be a feminist, that it's
40:20almost impossible to make that case.
40:22And you don't actually make that case, in this book. The feminist
40:26case for welcoming every baby, that's the case against
40:29abortion. You sort of hint at it, but you don't quite go
40:33there. What is your view on that? And what does a
40:37reactionary feminist think about the legal abortion?
40:41I do not think that we could. I would not try and make the case
40:43What would the kind of cultural and technological and societal
40:46that... I'll put this another way. If we were to ban abortion
40:50tomorrow, it would be an absolute disaster for women. As
40:55a feminist and in good conscience, I couldn't make that
40:59case. I think that would just be mad and sadistic and would would
41:04make everything a great deal worse for a great many women,
41:09because the material and the cultural conditions that
41:13surround contraceptive use and sexual norms are all so geared
41:18towards the technologies that we have to prevent pregnancies and
41:23to terminate unwanted pregnancies, that if you just
41:27took away the ability to do that and left everything else as it
41:32is, you'd just create an absolute nightmare scenario for
41:37countless women and in fact, that's what happened in Romania,
41:41when Ceaușescu banned those practices with the intention of
41:46increasing the birth rate, and all he did was produced hideous
41:51deaths, to backstreet abortions and a generation of neglected
41:56babies in orphanages. As a feminist, I can't advocate that.
42:04changes need to be in order to make that endpoint, plausible or
42:10desirable?
42:11Well there are a great many changes which I would love us to
42:16make, all of which would take us in that direction, and which I
42:20would see as being in women's interests whether or not you
42:24would you would advocate ending the practice of abortion which I
42:28think you can make a feminist case for either way.
42:32I'm going to stop you there because once again, with extreme
42:35elegance, you have brought us to the third part of our interview
42:37Mary. It's like you've done this before. We've talked about your
42:41history, we've talked about the history of women over many
42:44centuries. It's now time to look forward. What is the manifesto?
42:51What do your followers, what are you encouraging your followers
42:54to do in this era? In order to get to the future we want. So
43:00tell us what the principles one, two and three of reactionary
43:03feminism are and what you'd like to see women do that they're
43:07not?
43:07I found this bit really difficult to write. I started it
43:12and gave up three or four times because I was trying to write it
43:14for too many different implied audiences. I thought trying to
43:20take into take into account what the well-seasoned feminists of
43:27the 1970s and 80s vintage might think of it and what women my
43:31age might think of. And then, in the end, I threw all of that out
43:33of the window. I thought, well, they're all just going to
43:35absolutely hate all of this. So I'm just going to write it for
43:40me if I were 22 now, and hadn't yet acquired all the battle
43:46scars I've acquired since.
43:48So what would you say are your 22?
43:50What would I tell my 22 year old self? Don't touch the pill.
43:53Don't go on the pill and tell all your friends to avoid it as
43:59well.
44:00So that I just want to pause there.
44:04Mutiny against the transhumanist neutering of women's bodies.
44:10So the first act of rebellion that the modern contemporary
44:14reactionary feminists can do is to stop taking the pill.
44:17To go on strike. Withdraw the labour of your body from its
44:24commodification.
44:27So, women who are on the pill and are having a sex life either
44:31within marriage or a long term relationship or not, and are
44:36happily enjoying their life and pretty pleased to be on the
44:40pill. In the Mary Harrington world, they're just allowed to
44:45carry on?
44:46You don't have to listen to me.
44:49Would you try to persuade them?
44:54If you're on the pill and you having a great time, be my
44:56guest. That's not really who I'm talking to. But there are a
44:59great many women who are perhaps on the pill or feel like they
45:03ought to be on the pill or are pressured by their doctors to be
45:05on the pill, and who are not having great sex lives. Because
45:09my argument is that it's not just an individual decision. A
45:15culturally contracepted set of sexual norms has much wider
45:20consequences than just for me as an individual or for some 22
45:24year old as an individual. It changes the entire field of
45:30relationship formation in ways which I set out in great detail
45:33in part two of the book, and some of the some of the negative
45:36downstream consequences of that, particularly as they've been
45:38accelerated by the digital revolution. And by dating apps
45:42into a sort of general condition of often loveless and
45:47unfulfilling sex, and general and pervasive relationship
45:53impermanence. My good friend, Louise Perry, has made the has
45:58literally written the book on all of the ways that that is
46:01negative for a great many women. So I urge you to read her book,
46:05and just, what Louise says.
46:07So the modern woman now who stops taking the pill and
46:11withdraws her, as you put it, services from that marketplace,
46:17what is she going to gain?
46:20Well, it's not as though you can't ever have sex again but
46:26you have a fairly robust reason not to have casual sex with
46:29people who are going to leave you feeling used, for example.
46:33And also, although this is not something that's very easy to
46:36talk about, it's an open secret amongst communities who practice
46:41natural family planning, that sex is just better, when there's
46:45a possibility of conception, and this obviously only applies in
46:49the context of a committed relationship. And, communities
46:53who practice natural family planning, will manage their
46:57fertility and space children and so on but it's an open secret
47:01that it's just better and not least, because there's a measure
47:05of trust and intimacy and mutual respect between the partners,
47:08which is only possible to attain, I would argue by putting
47:12the consequenciality back into sex.
47:14So the consequenciality is that a baby might be produced. So
47:20it's not just don't take the pill, it's stop having sex,
47:23outside contexts where you'd be happy to have a baby.
47:26Yep.
47:27Which is-
47:28reactionary
47:28- either marriage or a long term relationship where you're pretty
47:32sure that your husband or boyfriend also wants a baby.
47:37Which is in fact, a pro-pleasure case, as well as a pro-intimacy
47:42case for women. Because the studies show consistently, that
47:46women were far more likely to have an orgasm in the context of
47:51a long term relationship. They have maybe a 10% chance in a
47:53casual encounter, and much closer to 60 or 70% chance of
47:57having an orgasm in the context of a committed relationship. So
48:00if you're holding out for that committed relationship, then
48:02you're much more likely to be having a nice time. And
48:05furthermore, there are other studies that show that it is in
48:08fact, married couples who are having more sex. So this is the
48:13pro-sex case.
48:13I think you might be stretching it with that, that the route to
48:20better sex is to stop taking the pill and only have sex within
48:24marriage, because as you put it earlier, the overall amount of
48:28sex is gonna go down very, very dramatically. and surely there
48:31are lots of examples of what you then get is a no sex before
48:34marriage or near-as-dammit, society.
48:40It's my settled opinion that no sex before marriage is a
48:42feminist position.
48:44So you want society to go back to no sex before marriage?
48:49well, I'm saying that the may well be something in it for
48:52women in terms of pleasure and intimacy and safety, and the
48:58opportunity to have children in a trusted, committed
49:01relationship, Which is currently inaccessible to a great many
49:04women and in a way, which is causing a huge amount of pain on
49:09it, which is an undercounted cost of the pitch of freedom,
49:15we've now arrived at and there may well be women for whom this
49:18is not true. In which case, I say don't listen to me go and do
49:20your thing. The world is set up for you at the moment, knock
49:24yourselves out. Good luck, and I wish you well.
49:27You don't think the result of that would be more unwanted
49:31pregnancies, and therefore more abortions?
49:33To be clear, none of this is a course of action that I
49:36recommend for people with poor impulse control. If you think
49:38you have poor impulse control, please don't listen to me.
49:40Humans have poor impulse control don't they?
49:42I think we can hold ourselves to high standards, Freddie and I
49:46think actually if we're going to be holding people to high
49:48standards, and that's something which has traditionally started
49:51with women. And if women are not willing to hold ourselves and
49:56our menfolk to high standards, then nobody's going to.
50:00Okay, so no sex before marriage or thereabouts as a kind of
50:04societal more. Abortion? Did that feature in the reactionary
50:12feminist programme?
50:13In my utopia. A utopian aim to work towards, I would say, would
50:20be a world where every baby is welcome but we're a long way
50:23from there and there are so many things that need to change on
50:26the way to get there that I would prefer to work on the
50:28things which I can work with ambivalently pro-choice women on
50:32rather than trying to shoot for something which will alienate
50:36others with whom I could otherwise work constructively.
50:39Does that mean you're not pro-choice?
50:43That means I have concerns. I think abortion is a bad
50:48metaphysic which is net-negative for women in terms of the bigger
50:51picture however, it's where we are right now. I would be
50:56extremely cautious about policies which tried to reverse
51:00that without taking into account the immense the immense
51:04importance, or the structural nature of the changes it
51:08enables.
51:10There's a bit in your final section, Which also talks about
51:15men. I think it's called 'Let men be' and how that's part of a
51:20programme of a of a reactionary feminist future is to restore
51:27spaces in which men are allowed to be only men and with it some
51:33sort of programme of rehabilitating the menfolk. Tell
51:37us about that?
51:39At its simplest, this is just a plea, a plea in defence of
51:42sheds.
51:44Sheds at the end of the garden?
51:46Well, that's the minimum viable unit of man space, right?
51:50There's the garden shed, where no scatter cushions are allowed.
51:54I'm being a bit frivolous here but that's the sort of minimal
51:57minimum viable unit but there's something terribly lonely about
51:59sheds, and to my eye there just aren't very many spaces where
52:03men can do shed things in the company of other men with no
52:07scatter cushions. And the women's movement bear some
52:14responsibility for that and I think the costs of that in the
52:19formation of good men is undercounted, and I think the
52:22cost of that in men's loneliness, and the well
52:28documented, higher rate of male suicidality, for example, is
52:31under counted. Now, I'm not saying, to be clear that it's
52:36all the fault of those terrible man-hating feminists that men
52:38and are killing themselves in great numbers. I think that's
52:42far too reductive. But it's an inevitable consequence of asking
52:48not without justice, that spaces where public life and
52:52professional life are conducted, should become co-ed, was that
52:56that percolated all the way throughout the social fabric.
53:00And as a consequence, a number of spaces which had previously
53:03served as community spaces for men who weren't necessarily
53:07running the world, or buying and selling countries or closing
53:10deals, also became co-ed-
53:13Do you mean like working men's clubs?
53:16Working men's clubs.
53:17Or even posh men's clubs, just the idea that there should be
53:20literally places where men can be men, without women. Because
53:24you defend single-sex spaces for women.
53:27This, this entire line of thought came for me out of a
53:32retort, which I've seen more times than I can count to those
53:39gender critical feminists who would like to defend, for
53:43example, women's prisons, women's sports, women's refuges,
53:46and so on as single-sex spaces, and to say, no men are ever
53:49allowed here. And one of the one of the retorts that I've heard
53:53from men, is, how can you say that when you've just spent 50
53:59years insisting that all single sex men's spaces should become
54:02co-ed? You made your bed ladies, and now you can lie in it. This
54:07is reductive but that's the essence of the sentiment. And I
54:11was thinking, is there actually is there some justice in that?
54:19So this starts with, it's the Colton club or the Garrick or
54:25one of those kinds of posh men's clubs in London, but it's also
54:28working men's clubs in every town and small town across this
54:31country that have been and, pubs were quite male.
54:36Pubs were all male apart from the slot, the Snug for time
54:40immemorial.
54:40You're not suggesting we go back to all male pubs, though?
54:43No. I think the culture has now changed now and that's just not
54:44There are large parts of the world where sex segregation is
54:49happening again. But we could just not be massively stressed
54:54if men just wanted even the most miniscule space to just be men.
54:57still practised. This sounds almost like some Muslim
54:59I don't see what's so terrible about that and yet, it seems
55:02almost it seems very It seems radioactive to say so but I
55:03countries where places of prayer, for example, are sex
55:05don't see how we can defend the sex segregated spaces for women
55:10unless we're also willing to contemplate the possibility that
55:13sometimes men need single-sex space to do, whatever. I've no
55:16idea what it is that men do. Those frequencies when they're
55:19just amongst one another, those frequencies are not accessible
55:21to me, because they're just not.
55:36segregated, and so are many other areas of social life. That
55:43will spook a lot of people, I think. Is Mary's vision here,
55:48taking us into some sort of place that sounds like a Muslim
55:53country that most people in the West are quite pleased we don't
55:56live in.
55:57Well, do you not think though, Freddie, there's a great deal of
56:00space between absolutely everywhere must be must be
56:03entirely sex indifferent, and even even toilets must be gender
56:06neutral... There's a great deal of space between that and men
56:11and men and women can only interact with men who are in
56:15their immediate family in mixed company and otherwise must stay
56:18segregated at all times. There's a huge amount of space in
56:21between. And I'm suggesting there is a there is a spectrum.
56:24And what I'm suggesting is we could sidle a couple of microns
56:28more towards sex segregation and that would be in everybody's
56:31interest. We could just be a little bit more realistic about
56:34allowing just a little bit of space for for men to be men on
56:37their own and women to be women on their own. And that would be
56:40What about boardrooms? This is a real hot potato at the moment.
56:40okay.
56:46Almost every big corporation in the world is now signing up to
56:5050% women 50% men at the highest level in the boardroom. Do you
56:55approve of that? Or is that another space where you'd be
56:58relaxed if it's more men than women?
57:01I'm not gonna say... Here's what I think about that. The logical
57:09extension of the sex neutrality, everything must be co-ed thing
57:15is that we must be welcoming even to men who are not actually
57:21male and women who are not actually female. So if you if
57:25you pursue the logic of co-ed sex neutrality everywhere, you
57:31end up inescapably at a point where yes, the boardroom can
57:35fill its obligation to be to be 50/50 men and women, and yet
57:41have every member still be male.
57:45I mean, that's sort of a separate issue, though, isn't
57:46it?
57:46Well, no, it's not it's the same issue, because the logic of the
57:50logic of gender neutrality begins with the logic of
57:53breaking down sex segregation. So the almost the 50/50, male
58:02men and women board boardroom, where in fact every member is
58:05male is is a logical extension of the point which makes, which
58:10made all male spaces co-ed to the sort of extreme edge of it,
58:16it's just a bit further down the line of the same logic.
58:19Think a real mainstream question is whether you would support
58:25insisting on or heavily rewarding greater female
58:29participation in things like universities, companies, all of
58:34the engines of our society, the places where decisions are made,
58:38the places where economic power resides? Do you think that
58:43obsession it feels like it's an obsession at the moment, not
58:47only on gender grounds, but now on racial and other grounds, do
58:51you think that whole project is misguided? We Should just let
58:57some sort of natural result happen and be relaxed about it?
59:01Is that the Mary position? So no, no positive discrimination,
59:07no affirmative action of any kind pretty much
59:10I think we could live without it.
59:13In summary, what could be available to women in this
59:19different future that they are missing out on now? Do you
59:23think? How would you pitch it? What is the kernel of what they
59:29could get back?
59:32Relationships. The second part of the book, I've themed 'the
59:41war on relationships', which is to say the in pursuit of
59:45absolute freedom, absolute autonomy, under the sign of the
59:48feminism of freedom we've ended up at a point where we're waging
59:52war on the relationships between men and women, the intimate
59:56relationships with a with a partner if you like. We ended up
1:00:00waging war on the relationship between mothers and their
1:00:03babies, dismantling the various parts of that and offering many
1:00:07of them up for sale and we've ended up waging war on our
1:00:10relationships with our own bodies, embracing a kind of
1:00:14radical dissociation from our embodied physiologies as a
1:00:19precondition of a state of total freedom. And I would humbly
1:00:26suggest that for a great many women, that's just not a happy
1:00:32state of being, you know, to have no stable, loving
1:00:37partnership, to have no children, and to have no sense
1:00:42of connection to her own body is for a great many women, a living
1:00:46nightmare, and it's an it's a reality. And it's an
1:00:49undercounted cost of pursuing freedom, at the expense of the
1:00:53of the many other things that are important and needful and
1:00:56fulfilling as part of our life. So this is a defence and a
1:01:01rallying cry for the feminism of interdependence, and the
1:01:04feminism of relationship as something which is not without
1:01:07trade-offs in its own right in the end, because nothing is ever
1:01:10free of trade-offs but which is full of rich and humanising and
1:01:16rewarding life-giving things in its own right and just just need
1:01:22speaking for.
1:01:23Mary Harrington. Thank you.

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