Feminism Against Humanity

Review: Feminism Against Progress, by Mary Harrington

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Discussed in this review essay: Mary Harrington, Feminism against Progress (Regnery Publishing: April 25, 2023).

“My boyfriend's cancer battle was ruining my mental health so I left him – now I'm running a marathon in his honour,” read the headline of a recent viral story from the “Femail” section of the Daily Mail. An example of what now seems to be a developed genre in the mainstream press, the piece celebrated a 32-year-old woman’s choice to move to Thailand and prioritize her self-care over her long-term partner’s actual care.

Interestingly, this year the UN’s annual State of World Population report, published at the same moment as the Daily Mail story, also struck an oddly strident note on the moral primacy of choice. Titled “8 Billion Lives, Infinite Possibilities: the case for rights and choices,” it decries growing concerns about rapid demographic collapse across the developed world as highly problematic. “Interventions aimed at influencing fertility rates” are “never the answer,” it says, as, “Population ageing is a sign of strong economic and social progress,” and this “is a march of progress that must continue.” Dubiously assuring us that “societies can thrive, whatever their fertility rate may be,” the report is adamant that all other possible considerations must remain secondary to the “essential goal of empowering women and girls to exercise choice over their own bodies and futures.” The real issue, says UNFPA Executive Director Dr. Natalia Kanem, “is about rights and choices. Who has them? Who doesn’t?” I.e., “can everyone exercise their fundamental human right to choose the number and spacing of their children?”

Sometimes, as when reading trendy accounts lauding selfishness as empowerment, or on learning that the official global position is now that even extinction would be preferable to any possible discouragement of infinite autonomy, some of us can’t help but wonder if, somewhere along the line, liberal feminism might have gone a bit off the rails… and whether this could even have something to do with its hegemonic obsession with “rights and choices.”

Enter UnHerd columnist (and Upheaval interviewee) Mary Harrington with her daring new book Feminism Against Progress, which tackles this question head on (and is now available in the United States and UK). Many readers here may already be familiar with Harrington’s style, including her unmatched skill at compellingly using the personal as a springboard to dive into and surface much deeper political, cultural, and material undercurrents at play in our society. This is exactly what she does with characteristic brilliance in Feminism Against Progress, investigating just what, when, and why something may have gone wrong with feminism, and how it might be maneuvered back on track. Herds of sacred cows are wittily and mercilessly machine-gunned along the way. Unfortunately, things also necessarily get rather dark.

The book’s title reflects Harrington’s apostasy from what she calls “Progress Theology,” or the “more-or-less religious framework that governs much of modern culture in the West” and claims “there’s a ‘right side of history’, and things can go on getting better forever.” Even mildly questioning this theology is liable to produce reactions, from political left and right alike, quite as hysterical as if one had set a holy book alight in public – as she has already found. Nonetheless, to explain her personal loss of faith she walks us briskly through her own story: struggles with embodied identity as female early in life; an education in feminist post-modern critical and queer theory that sent her “a bit loopy”; founding a tech start-up, and its subsequent collapse alongside the rest of the global economy in 2008; and finally a new life forged in the crucible of becoming a mother and finding she had “comprehensively questioned more or less everything I had thought up to that point,” including Progress and the direction of feminism.

The only problem with the title is that the book isn’t really about Progress, whether or not it exists, or whether one should be against it. Losing faith in Progress is merely a starting point. The book’s actual core subject is wrestling with the idea of “rights and choices,” and the consequences of feminism having made them into a golden calf placed before all other human values.

Harrington’s broader argument starts with the fact that feminism is not – as usually evangelized today – a story of women progressively winning more and more rights, equality, and inclusion from a male-dominated society, including space in the workplace. Rather, it is better understood as the story of women adapting to changing material conditions in society, and attempting to maximize their interests amid those new conditions. Notably this story begins well before the hazy era of the founding myth of today’s feminism, the 1960s, when we’re told women suddenly rebelled against the totemic oppression of 1950s housewifery and forced their way out of the home and into economic life, thereby claiming their full and equal humanity from the Patriarchy.

Rather (to attempt to summarize Harrington’s detailed account) the isolated “housewife” was a brief historical anomaly produced by industrialization. Pre-industrialization, women and men were both fully engaged in work, together, within the home, which was the site and fundamental unit of economic production. The sexes had different roles (“men’s” and “women’s work”) structured by the need to accommodate women simultaneously caring physically for children, but both had to work to survive, and women were “as indispensable as men to the overall functioning of the household.” Thus embedded in “communities where men and women genuinely depend on one another,” a level of mutual respect was, generally speaking, the necessary norm. The idea of one sex being exclusively capable in this environment of “exploiting” the other (as in “the Patriarchy”) was nonsensical.

This balance was torn apart by the 19th century’s industrial revolution, which relocated production from the household to the factory. Suddenly men were uprooted and pulled out of the home and into wage labor in the market economy. Women could not effectively follow, because someone still had to care for children. Life began to stratify into separate spheres of “public” (economic production) and “private” (care and consumption at home). Sex had become economic.

In response emerged feminism. Or more accurately, two feminisms, in tension with each other: a “Feminism of Care,” which responded to marketization by valorizing “shadow work” in the private domestic domain of care as equally deserving of societal respect as wage labor, and a “Feminism of Freedom,” which demanded escape from the domain of care and entry into the public domain of visible economic production (the market) as necessary to achieve equal individual autonomy with men.

These two feminisms waged a century-and-a-half struggle with each other until the 1960s, when the Feminism of Freedom achieved total victory with the invention of the birth control pill. In this battle the pill proved as decisive as the atom bomb because it seemed to straightforwardly solve the problem of industrialization: suddenly without the restraint of needing to worry about having children, women were now fully “free” to escape the domain of care and achieve equal status by breaking into the market and joining men as members of homo economicus.

The crux of Harrington’s book is the argument that this was a gigantic wrong turn, with unfolding consequences that could prove existential.

First of all, women fell right into the trap of liberalization and surrendered every previously sheltered domain of private life to the marketplace. Everything from regular community and charitable involvement, to romance and sex, to family life became subject to commodification and predation by the inherent ruthlessness of the market and its mindset. Harrington decries this as a foolish mistake that has helped produce general alienation, atomization, and immiseration for both sexes.

But there were far deeper consequences as well. Harrington argues that the pill was an absolutely pivotal moment, not only in the direction of feminism but in human history. It was, she points out, the first truly transhumanist technology: a “medicine” taken not to cure something that had gone awry with the natural functions of the human body, but to “improve” on the body by deliberately changing how it naturally functions. Its widespread adoption therefore signaled the end of the industrial era and the start of a new, even more disruptive revolution: what Harrington labels the cyborg era.

What did this revolution really mean for women? Look again at the UN’s line that women have a “fundamental human right” to “choose the number and spacing of their children.” Before the invention of the birth control pill (i.e. all but the tiniest fraction of human history), this statement would have been unintelligible: unless remaining wholly celibate, a certain – indeed significant – level of risk and uncertainty around the “number and spacing” of pregnancies was simply a biological fact of life. So if the opposite is now a fundamental human right, it is a right created spontaneously and entirely out of the application of modern technology.

Consider the full implications of this: to fully exercise her fundamental human rights – that is, to be fully and equally human – it is no longer enough for a woman to occupy the body she was born into. She must utilize technology to overcome a fundamental aspect of her embodied nature as female. If she does not, if she risks becoming a mother and thereby being “tied down” by an interdependent relationship with a child, it is her very femaleness that inhibits her from becoming fully “human” (i.e. fully free to be a completely autonomous economic actor, like an unattached male). The liberation this “human right” offers is to leave behind being female.

Harrington perceives that the fateful consequences of this technological reasoning have today penetrated throughout society, having been only further accelerated by the digital revolution. The iron logic of its slippery slope means that modern feminism has come to disdain and fear femaleness and femininity as much as it does maleness and masculinity; both are limits to be overcome in the name of pure choice. In fact, as Harrington has pointed out elsewhere, complaints today about “Patriarchy” can be reliably translated as aggrieved references not to oppression by some male-controlled system, but to any “immutable sex differences that I don’t like.”

In this regard feminism has merged seamlessly with our era’s defining spirituality: the endless crusade of the modern self. This obsession with discovering and manifesting our “fullest self” – some mysterious truth or pseudo-Platonic form discoverable only inside our own heads – means that any restraints on the choices that flash forth from our pure will become a kind of unconsented-to oppression, from which we may justly seek liberation. From this worldview – which Harrington has in the past cheekily compared to Satanism and its worship of raw will to power – any conflicts or constraints imposed on choice, such as by a significant other with cancer, or by reality itself, become intolerable, as by limiting the will such constraints appear as literally existential threats to the sovereign existence of the self. Thus the world must be remade to fit the self, rather than the self fit to the world.

Accordingly, feminism has today joined up for a wholesale post-modern “War on Nature” that seeks to liberate us from all the immutable constraints of biology and the physical world. This “biolibertarian” feminism embraces technology as a means to allow the material body to be endlessly customized at will to fit the conceptions of the free-floating self – a quasi-religious vision that Harrington, astutely noting its similarity to ancient Gnostic mystic cults, labels “Meat Lego Gnosticism.”

Whether Satanic or not, this “cyborg theology” – now perhaps the defining cultural force and moral code in the West, relentlessly enforced as it is by a unity of state and non-state elite power, or what Harrington calls the “Cyborg Theocracy” – is already leading to some very dark places.

In the book’s most affecting series of chapters, Harrington lays out the reality of the world this cyborg theology is creating. This includes the already huge global commercial surrogacy industry, which allows the rich to rent out the wombs of not-so-rich “gestators” in the developing world. Whether because they’re infertile, gay, or, increasingly often, simply don’t want to bother with the inconvenience of pregnancy and childbirth themselves, those with sufficient money can now through the magic of IVF technologies have genetically customized babies produced for them as made-to-order product. The role of “mother” is thus removed from “woman” and relocated to the market; from intimately embodied human experience to object of pure consumer choice. The needs of the product-child and any two-way bond between it and its mother are cast aside from consideration, much as the forgotten laborers in an iPhone supply chain. 

For some radical feminists quoted by Harrington this is only a start; they dream of a righteous future of “full surrogacy,” in which no human need any longer to suffer under the role of motherhood, instead outsourcing reproduction entirely to machines and the state. The original limiting flaw of the “second sex” will then finally have been overcome entirely. But for Harrington, who writes movingly (from the very first line of the book) about how the experience of becoming a mother and coming to feel “like I wasn’t a separate person from my baby” revealed the inescapable interdependence of human beings, this world of pure choice promises only a dehumanizing dystopia.

It gets worse, though, of course. The fullest expression of the War on Nature and the complete sanctification of “rights and choices” today is without doubt the transgender movement – and the “gender confirmation surgery” it proffers to the cyborg faithful. It is here, when describing the reality of how this “drive to liquidate the relationship each of us has with our own bodies” inevitably manifests in bloody Frankenstein horror, that Harrington’s pen reaches peak passion and intensity. Severed breasts. Castrated minors. Children’s genitals so shrunken by chemicals they can no longer be used as “material” as intended.  “Penises” carved out of a chunk of forearm flesh and made erect only with an implanted artificial stiffening device that comes with “high infection and failure rates.” “Neovaginas” constructed out of extracted colon tissue. Lifetimes of regret. This is the living truth of a worldview that “imagines us all as pure, disembodied selves, our bodies… mere parts to be disassembled and reassembled at will, like Lego bricks made of meat.” The gap between cyborg theology’s gleaming utopian vision and “its messy, fleshy execution is the stuff of nightmares.”

Is there a way out of this abyss? Having just offended all the relevant zealots anyway, Harrington does not hesitate to offer a few recommendations that some could consider controversial. These include: defending men’s right to single-sex spaces again (e.g. men’s clubs), in part so as to defend women’s single-sex spaces (and the whole broader concept of sex differences as a whole); rejecting “Big Romance” – that is, romance as self-actualization – and embracing marriage and parenthood as a practical foundation on which to (re)build households as coherent economic units capable of serving as cells of resistance against the commodification of everything; and – doubtless to receive the most pushback – abandoning hormonal birth control as a first step in reclaiming both genuine sexuality and humanity.

Each of these steps aim to help advance Harrington’s self-described “reactionary feminist” effort to revive the old “sex-realist” Feminism of Care that once flourished before the Feminism of Freedom crushed it and established our present Cyborg Theocracy. (I suppose “Feminism Against Freedom” might have been too provocative a title for even Harrington’s brave publishers to tolerate.) Yet, Harrington is so successful in describing the sheer depth of the challenge facing us today, and its stakes, that I honestly couldn’t help coming away from the book feeling like, if anything, perhaps she wasn’t quite reactionary – or radical – enough in her proposed solutions.

Feminism Against Progress is forceful, eloquent, and an almost unmatched guide to understanding some key aspects of our present crisis and its origins. Anyone concerned about where we’re headed should read it. In fact, if thrust into every young person’s hands it might even help save us.

But as Harrington herself points out, the Feminism of Freedom and the transgender movement it helped produce is a straightforward onramp to transhumanism and a post-human future – to the final “abolition of Man” that C.S. Lewis warned us of, in which the worship of the subjective self and technological control transform human beings from something inherently sacred and possessing inherent value into mere raw material to be manipulated and reshaped at will by the powerful.

Harrington, then, is valiantly attempting to salvage a feminism that has turned against humanity. Amid the great anthropological struggle of our era, however, is such a rescue mission really the best strategy? No one is more capable than Harrington of steel-womaning the best possible case for feminism: that, today more than ever, the reality of immutable sex differences often necessitates sex-specific advocacy, not vague “humanitarianism.” But I’m not sure I’m convinced, at least on the branding. The abolition of Man does mean the abolition of us all. And there is nothing sex-specific about the black hole of unanswered suffering, nihilism, and hatred of creation that now seems to occupy the spiritual center of our civilization and which is dragging us step by step towards self-abnegation.  

In the face of this assault, men and women will have little choice but to stand together, shoulder-to-shoulder in a united front, determined to remain human together; human forever. It’s worth asking if in fact “feminism” (describing an ism – an ideology – built to advance women’s interests alone) can today, at the violent dawn of the cyborg era, serve as anything more than an obstacle to that endeavor. I might gently suggest that perhaps it cannot. Feminism emerged, Harrington tells us, as a product of industrialization and the deracinating atomization of zero-sum marketization. But there was a time before then – a time that, despite its own flaws, possessed human virtues that she openly regrets the loss of and argues we must reclaim. This was a time that existed before the tides of Progress had yet brought us the word “feminism” at all. And – at the risk of sounding like a reactionary – it’s possible that was a past in which we were all a bit better off for its absence.

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