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Mary Harrington interview: the failure of liberation

by
17 March 2023

The ‘reactionary feminist’ Mary Harrington talks to Andrew Brown about the downside of modern freedoms

istock

I HAVE never interviewed anyone who has provoked more argument among my friends than Mary Harrington, whose book Feminism against Progress has just been published. People who find themselves swept along by the power of her arguments get a sudden whiplash at her conclusion — but where else might her premises end up?

But let’s take the argument first.

Before I went to see her, I had been typing out a key passage from the book when a piece of spam email landed and interrupted me — and then, when I read it — made her whole argument in a nutshell. This Mother’s Day, the email suggested, why not celebrate by hiring a cleaner?

She fell on the story with delighted laughter when I told her. “Exactly that! Which mothers? And who cleans? And what is happening to the cleaners’ daughters? They’re not talking about that!”

The passage from the book that I had been typing in ran on: “What’s usually narrated as a story of progress towards feminist freedom and equality can be better understood as a story of economic transitions: in particular, of the transition into industrial society and the transformative effect the shift had on every aspect of how men and women live — whether apart or together — including how we organise family life.”

These economic and social shifts, she writes, have worked very well for rich women, but they have done so at the expense of the poor. The passage continues: “Our bodies cease to be interdependent, sexed, and sentient, and are instead re-imagined as a kind of Meat Lego, built of parts that can be reassembled at will. And this vision in turn legitimises a view of men and women alike as raw resource for commodification, by a market that wears women’s political interests as a skin but is ever more inimical to those interests in practice.”

And what I thought, reading that, was that the poor have always been used like that by the rich, and poor women especially — think of the use of wet nurses. So, I put the objection to her.

She replied: “But I mean in a literal sense. Let me illustrate what I’m talking about. There is a bill going through in Massachusetts at the moment, which would give prisoners a reduced sentence in exchange for donating organs or bone marrow. That’s what I mean by literally a raw resource.”

How is this different, I wondered, from what has long gone on in China, where political prisoners can simply be shot for their organs?

And she said: “The only difference between China and the West on a huge number of these fronts where it comes to commodifying — literally turning humans into parts for a market — is that we give it a bit more of a gloss of being opted into in the West, to salve our own consciences. That’s the only difference, and for the rest it’s the same.”



HARRINGTON grew up in the progressive era of the “End of History”; now she watches and dissects the end of progress and the terrifying resumption of history. Her apostasy from progress was both intellectual and personal or emotional.

In her book she describes how in her twenties the disenchantment of the world seemed absolute, though she longed for something different. “At the age of 11, I remember gazing at a wood and trying to will a unicorn into existence,” she told one audience.

Under the influence of theory and activism, she joined a start-up and called herself Sebastian for a while. Then came the crash of 2008: her start-up went, her social circle, and all her belief system with it. Now she is married, with a child, living in the provinces.

“In the UK, the real hinge moment was what happened immediately after the Crash, when Occupy Wall Street failed. Because that was the death of the anti-capitalist movement, such as it was, which I had been a committed part of in my twenties.

“It was a strange time. Looking back, in the noughties we thought there was an end to boom-and-bust, and social enterprise was a thing. The Crash killed that for me, as well as my faith in progress at all. It all imploded at once on the large as well as the small scale.

“But I think for a lot of people the end of Occupy Wall Street was the death-knell for any left-wing trust that there was a future for the Left outside the market. Since then, the Left has just leaned even ever more explicitly into just being the moral veneer for the market.”

By this she means that the Left has ignored class politics in favour of identity, and that the “inclusive” feminism on display in The New York Times and The Guardian is defined by its exclusion and demonising of the wrong sort of women — the poor, the unfashionable, the middle-aged, and, worst of all, J. K. Rowling.


THERE are two reciprocal arguments running through her book. The first is that she reaches pretty orthodox Christian conclusions by an apparently materialistic route and without using Christian language at all, though she describes herself as “a mildly heretical Anglican”.

She has scaled the North Face of the Vatican without using any of the ropes and pitons left by earlier climbers. It is similar to the attempt Francis Spufford made in Unapologetic to frame Christianity as true to our post-Christian experience. But you could, I think, read the whole book without realising that this is what she is doing, unless you were attuned to Christian thought in the first place.

The second is that she is applying Marxist techniques to produce what will be interpreted as an entirely conservative argument. “To be honest, I find it amuses me to be basically smuggling a piece of fairly straightforward Marxist analysis under the radar into the dark heart of the American Right,” she says.

“I just think that’s funny. It’s a great prank. A lot of people won’t notice [even though] anybody on the Right who actually reads their enemies can see what I’m doing. But sadly, the polarisation being what it is, a lot of people are foolish enough not to read their enemies. . . My rule of thumb is I’ll only read my enemies if they’re good writers.”

She argues that the market has not just dismembered human bodies and turned them into interchangeable commodities — though this is certainly the logic of the sexual marketplace — but it has done the same to the human psyche, too. We are embodied beings, and it is destructive of our personalities to treat our bodies as “meat Lego” fragments to be fitted into others, and then disassembled for re-plugging when a more attractive game offers itself. Only the richest and most attractive are able to strike only the bargains they want to.

On top of this, she is deeply suspicious of the online world. She takes this position from inside it — she says she has been completely online for at least 20 years — but she sees in the Silicon Valley dreams of transhumanism the logical conclusion to the separation of bodies from selves, and the disassembly of both.

In the liberal capitalist view that she rejects — what she calls the world of “Dark Satanic John Stuart Mills” — people are understood as social atoms. Just as with atoms in the real world, it turns out that these, too, can be decomposed for further profit.


SO FAR, I’ve only known people to agree with her, though this is more a measure of my friendship group than of sentiment in the wider world. It’s when we get to the solutions that the women I’ve talked to about it demur.

For Harrington, the contraceptive pill was the first transhumanist technology and remains the most dangerous. It makes casual sex seem entirely logical, which is not the sort that women really enjoy or want. She herself came off it in her early twenties, she says, and felt very much better for it, both physically and psychologically.

“I understand from female friends who are much younger than me, whereas when I was a teenager you had to go and see your GP and persuade them that you had a steady boyfriend et cetera and so on, now they just put 15-year-olds on it as a matter of course.

“This is just something that happens routinely, and there are there are growing numbers of young women who are getting to their early twenties and thinking actually what’s what, and counting the costs and saying as a result of this: ‘I’ve said yes to a lot of encounters which I didn’t really enjoy now. I’ve come off. It I’ve realised that I was I was fat and crazy and it completely altered my relationship to reality.’ I mean, it’s an incredibly psychoactive substance.”

This is the point in her argument when female reviewers tend to blow up in clouds of steam. I am unqualified to pronounce on female endocrinology, but what strikes me as the weakness in her argument is that it relies on individual choice — she doesn’t believe in banning anything — to reverse a change which she presents with her Marxist hat on as the consequence of vast, impersonal, and in some sense unintended, changes which steamrollered individual autonomy.

Her answer is a conditional optimism. “I think it’s possible to make much larger social changes than you might think by the actions of a relatively few individuals. If they’re committed enough, if they believe hard enough and they have enough social status.

“Or, to put it more crudely, it’s one thing if ugly women who have no social clout reject the pill. But it’s another thing if all the hot girls do. Ultimately, pretty much everything is downstream of what the hot girls want, because that’s just how humans work.”


THIS rather fragile optimism seems to me the point at which her thought is most Christian, because it arises from the deepest despair about the way the world works. She praises the work of some of the utopian communities between the wars. They all failed — all but the Bruderhof — but their ideas, which had been ridiculed, survived, and by the 1960s had become a general orthodoxy.

“They all shared the same kind of dream that had come out of the absolute horrors of World War One, and that they were trying to realise in microcosm in these utopian communities, and they all failed. But even though they’ve failed, many of the things which they pioneered are now just the warp and weft of modern life.”

Further back in history, she sees the enclosure of the commons as foreshadowing the enclosure and commodifying of human bodies today. What was good news for the rich was bad news for the poor; good news for Capital, bad news for Labour. But this, in turn, she said, led to a necessary backlash.

“The enclosure of the commons ended up producing the Labour movement as a necessary response, to give voice to the people who’d been dispossessed.

“As yet, we have no equivalent of the Labour movement for the enclosure of the body; but the tenderest green shoots of that are appearing amongst people of faith, and amongst gender-critical feminists, and also amongst some on the Right, although by no means all.

“That’s the kind of outcome that realistically I can imagine contributing to in a small way. I don’t imagine things getting better in my lifetime. I really don’t. So it’s a qualified hope, but it’s better than nothing.”

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