A scarred veteran of the culture wars proposes a return to a ‘feminism of care’

Apr 26, 2023 by Jill

by Margaret Hickey, MercatorNet:

Modern feminism increasingly benefits only a few educated professional women. There is no reason to sacrifice everyone else’s happiness for their sake.

Anyone familiar with Mary Harrington’s columns in UnHerd will know her as a thinker of exceptional originality, acuity and freshness. Her first book does not disappoint her fans. It is an eye-popping analysis of what she calls “reality denying”, woke feminism as it has evolved since the 1960s.

Harrington describes herself as a “revisionist feminist” because she believes the stances of self-declared feminists are inimical to the welfare and interests of most women and that it is people like herself who have a better right to describe themselves as feminists.

Harrington has come full circle from buying into and living the most extreme expressions of the feminist liberation creed. She was, as she acknowledges, woke and radically so before the term was coined. She experimented with “drugs, kink and non-monogamous relationships” in her 20s. She was committed to living in complete freedom and rejected all hierarchies. Her experience of living with other radicals showed her that power dynamics are part of all human interactions and not, as she believed, the preserve of capitalism and patriarchy. That seems to have been her first reality check.

Harrington dates the degeneration of culture to the early 60s when the “first transhumanist technology” revolutionised the lives of both women and men.

That was, of course, the contraceptive pill. It disrupted women’s natural biorhythms and suppressed their fertility, the core and defining quality of femaleness. It was the first wave of what Harrington calls the cyborg revolution which gave women and later men the power to overwrite nature. The pill paved the way, in terms of both biotechnology and ideology, for the developments that now underpin transgenderism and reproductive technologies.

Essentially, it all comes down to understanding human biology as something to be controlled and manipulated, something we define rather than something that defines us. The hormonal suppression of female fertility is on a continuum with transgender hormonal treatments. In both cases, the impact on both the mind and the body as a whole goes far beyond the immediate aims of the treatment. This is acknowledged and sometimes desired in the case of transgenderism but tends to be played down in relation to hormonal treatment intended solely for contraceptive purposes.

[…] Mary Harrington is a compelling writer and speaker; reading and listening to her is time very well spent indeed. For Catholics, she joins a growing list of allies who find their way to the truths of religious tradition via the “steep and thorny path” of testing emerging orthodoxies to destruction. Feminism Against Progress is essential reading for all who battle at any level with the hard dogmas of today’s secular liberals. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

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