Feminism Against Progress with Mary Harrington

shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free this is irreverent faith and current affairs [Music] welcome everyone to this very very special episode of irreverent faith and current affairs I'm so pleased to say that I am joined today by Mary Harrington who is the author of a wonderful new book which I have very much enjoyed I've been wrestling with this book I have it's called feminism against progress and it's it's quite a short book isn't it Mary but but it's it's uh it's definitely value for money I can I can certainly I can certainly say that in terms of the ideas and the depth of ideas that's gone into it so I'm really I've been really excited about this conversation and um thank you Mary for for being with me today thank you for having me oh it's great it's great to have you Mary and uh genuinely I think you're you're one of the most interesting voices on on the scene um one of the most interesting intellectual voices uh speaking about these these crucial issues but not from a sort of you know um Anodyne Progressive perspective but from a critical perspective uh albeit one which is not um you know I know you I know you actually describe yourself as a reactionary but not reactionary in in a bad sense let's say um so uh Mary I thought it'd be really interesting um to start with the sort of autobiographical element of this book because I think this is one of the things that makes it so engaging is that your your journey um particularly as regards feminism and your view of the world has really been has really been shaped by your own experiences beginning at University and then um your your experience of becoming a mother and then reevaluating your ideas and everything like that so um why don't we start why don't we start with that when you were you were at Oxford as an undergraduate weren't you and you talk about that in a book so tell us a little bit about about that what it was like and and and what the what what you were taught at Oxford and how that shaped your view of the world well um I'll start a little bit before that and I had a I suppose you could call it a fairly recognizably classical education although a slightly eccentric one um but and it all which was very radically disturbed by coming across critical theory for the first time at Oxford now I mean just the 20 years have elapsed give or take since more actually since I went up to Oxford and in the intervening period the critical theory which was taught to me as a bolt-on is has now consumed the pretty much the entire Academy yeah um so but we're now somewhere quite different but I was there I suppose fairly close to the start of that process um I remember reading reading the post-structuralists and thinking Christ quite just my goodness this has just eaten the enlightenment this is Enlightenment um I said it was clear to me even even then that a set of a set of basic premises for the entire the entire Paradigm that I've been living in up to that point we're just no longer tenable if you took these ideas seriously um I mean you wanted an engaging personal story and this all sounds very dry but I suppose I'm not at all um what I really want to underline is that was this wasn't a sort of intellectual thing I mean you know I suppose the characteristic of undergraduates is that they take ideas very seriously or should anyway if you're doing it right you take you take the ideas you know you sort of rhapsodize over Shelly or whatever and just get far too into it and that's why English students are so annoying um so there I was being annoying in exactly that way and taking these ideas very seriously you know as is I sort of felt they should and if you take those ideas seriously it basically throws the entire base the the entire foundational premise of modernity out of the window leaves you with a wealth that leaves you with what um that's that's really a question which I spent a lot of time and bandwidth on pretty much ever since yeah and what I've tried to underline in the way I've told the story in the book is that that's not just a sort of abstruse intellectual thing that you kind of play with a bit and then you go on get on with being a Management Consultant order always it can be I mean some people really did just treat it like that um but for me it just wasn't like that it was a very personal thing I found it devastating actually to have had my you know the the foundational sort of the structure of My reality more or less just dismantled underneath me and replaced with nothing very substantial and certainly nothing very comforting you can ask about that yes I'd love to just jump in here because uh this this fascinates me when you say that you found it that you found it devastating because I think on some level I I was um I was English literature student as well um as an undergraduate I'm sure you were less annoying than I was yeah I just pardon me I didn't hear I'm sure you were less annoying than I was I may have I I was I I was probably less hard-working than you were I I imagine um but but the thing about it is is I I was um maybe because I wasn't as hard working and I didn't go to as good a university as an undergraduate as you but but um but uh I I I've never had that experience of um of of being attracted to this way of thinking if you see what I mean I've I've I've been I've been aware of this way of thinking very aware of it but I've never I've never seen the attraction in it and the thing the thing I love about literature is the sense of it being a gift you know something which is given to me and from well it can be from the present but but often from the past something that is that is passed on from one generation to another is something which is a which is a treasure to be loved and it seems to me that that kind of you know what what the late Roger scooter would have called that sort of debunking attitude is is is almost is almost completely the opposite of what what literature offers to the world you know it's it's it's it's about it's about identifying the sort of power structures that underlie the the production of this material and and and and um exposing them for what they are so that you can see the truth about these things the corruption that's inherent within them and then and then you can sort of not be manipulated by it and you can sort of you can overcome it or transcend it but I I guess my question is what's attractive about that is it just that you sort of thought it was it was true or what can you tell me well I mean we're confusing we're confusing a set of the the summary that you're given is good um I agree with it but we're sort of getting ahead of ourselves a bit here and we're definitely not on feminism which is fine um so this is the especially especially when I talk to men and women of the cloth this is the interesting stuff this is the crunchy stuff um you're conflating the in your summary which is accurate for in terms of where we are now with postmodernism 2.02 two distinct things at least in terms of how I've made my piece one is one is the basic Insight that the world isn't something that we can stand outside and have and have a neutral opinion on that's the that's the basic Insight um and also that language and a number of other things that or at least and and this this idea that you can stand outside the world and have a neutral opinion on it obscures a number of things about how reality is put together it obscures a number of it it hides a lot of the stuff which is under the Bonnet um but what you what you then do what you then make of you know perhaps take lifting the bondage and having a look at what's underneath what you do with that and how you how you interpret that and how you how you make that how you make that make sense um is is a completely different ball game um and it doesn't necessarily follow for me that just because you can look under the Bonnet of the sort of rationalist neutral neutral Observer idea and discover that there are that in fact language shapes meaning and that systems of power or indeed material realities shape meaning it doesn't follow from that that it that this is something that we can or should try and escape to me um it just didn't it all that follows from that is that in a sense we're inextricable from the world in a way which isn't which which seems seems not to be the case in the in the sort of Enlightenment Paradigm does that make sense and it but it's but the everything all of these sort of nihilistic interpretations of that which have come later and which have turned into what scrutin calls this debunking attitude those are not necessary that's not the direction you have to take it in that that's just the direction which is congealed on top of the basic Insight okay so so I mean this is this is where I've sort of this is the point I've arrived at after you know two decades of trying to make sense of it all yeah yeah yeah and then I think I think um yeah I think what you're saying makes sense and and you're right we we shouldn't jump ahead of the story because I think you know people we've we've missed out um yeah yeah we've kind of gone straight to the sort of um theorizing analytical bit which is where which is where um I think we probably naturally both of us pretend to go but tell us tell us what changed to you then you know you you were you were at University you had this profound experience that I mean I I one of the images that stuck with me is this this thing you said about uh the the spiers of Oxford you know yes exactly penetrating the the sky or whatever it might be this kind of you know the sort of um I don't know re-uh re-reading uh alternative reading of of the uh the architecture of the Oxford uh Skyline um but that was a very powerful image so what changed what what happened well I I suppose the short answer is I found the off switch right um you know I I I I found I figured out how to how to function in ordinary life without always looking at it like that okay you know I don't you know I'm still partly I'm I I can still look at the world in those in that sort of deranged kind of semiotic way if I want to but I've also figured out that a you need an off switch if you're going to function on an everyday basis and B um e you don't you don't have to you don't have to be paranoid about uh but you know just in more concrete terms um I did my best being somebody who takes ideas very seriously um a little laugh at myself a bit in that way but because I think most most sensible people really just get on with life but I take ideas very seriously for my sins um so I set about sort of trying to apply the postmodern insights to everything you know and I I I don't know I mean maybe I'm maybe I'm sort of back rationalizing a kind of basic unemployability that was there for other reasons I've no idea anyway I was I was functionally unemployable right in my 20s my dad saying to me with some uh frustration at some point I do wish Mary that you'd apply your not inconsiderable intelligence to the business of owning a crust which is you know and it was a fair point because I was I was just chronically sketchy right um you know I I cyber loafed in all of my jobs um you know quiet quitting was my sort of default setting you know long before it became a thing um I spent spend all of my time noodling around on the internet my interests just weren't weren't very very compatible at all with you know doing anything useful that read that anyone was willing to pay anybody for um which which was obviously not ideal from the point of view of you know having a stable place to live or building up any kind of a sort of solid functioning foundation for adult life I was I was just and I suppose that the the kind of the the unifying ironically either what what all of these what all of these sketchinesses had in common was a sense that there could there couldn't be anything permanent when even though you know the fabric of meaning itself was moving around underneath me then you know the idea that anything that of making a permanent commitment to anything just seemed absurd well that was a permanent commitment to somebody else or a permanent commitment to even you know as permanent commitment as taking on a mortgage or taking on you know making a making a determined choice in favor of this this career or that career I just yeah all of it felt like anathema to me ironically you know assuming that attitude is as it turns out you know with the benefit of hindsight is itself a choice yeah of course um that leaves you leaves you with a with a reduced set of options in other ways but I mean that was that didn't cross my mind at the time yeah um anyway we are where we are as they say in the foreign office yeah and and sorry carry on the and the upsholder of all of this was well I after a while um via all these various experiments in living experiments in being experiments in yeah I I had a I had a group of friends who were doing vaguely vaguely sort of media art experimentally stuff and a web startup sort of coalesced out of that and out of common interest with a group of people and we set about trying to make it happen and I thought well actually maybe this is something which is sufficiently um aligned with the way of the way I've been approaching up to the world the world up until now to to make for it for that to be a good fit so I sort of threw myself into that um but I brought all of my all of my chronic sketchiness with me and as as a consequence of that was um fairly fairly Central to the whole to the whole project falling apart you know I take a lot of responsibility for what went wrong um it was devastating it happened at the same time as the great crash in 2008 um and it left me it left me asking whether any of the stuff that I believed or taken seriously up to that point was really um any of any value at all um not least not least because what I'd been trying to what what I've been trying to Grapple was um this this Revelation which comes out of critical theory about systems of power um which had left me with a sort of visceral a very visceral aversion to parodynamics in any way shape or form right um and a real and a deep rooted commitment to trying to live you know in a way which wasn't just complicit in all of those well all of those things um in a way which you know it's recognizably consistent with what with the the the world view which now gets called woke right right yeah I mean you'll you'll recognize what I'm talking about I'm sort of telling the story from from the inside out a bit but it's you know this is what gets critiqued by the people who don't like work yeah this basic aversion to power structures and a desire to dismantle them or you know in some way challenge than Dynamite them and Route random yeah um and I don't maybe maybe people are better at it now than they were than I was but or maybe not I don't know but in any case it I having having tried very hard to avoid or Dynamite or dismantle or destroy parodynamics wherever I found them I I found that really at in Arcadia ego they they don't they can't be done yeah and all that happens when you destroy overt hierarchies is that you end up with covert ones right and that's that's the fundamental insight and and again and that was that was you know every bit is every bit is shocking and disorienting um as the the original post-modern Insight but it left me it left me really grappling with how should I how should we you know if it's not possible to dismantle if it's not if if bringing bringing power structures out into the open and challenging them explicitly doesn't make them go away then how should we relate to power yes that's the question you know I don't I don't have any very definitive answers to it yet um yeah but but I decided to experiment with just just trying to be yeah you know if if being normal if being normal is in fact um no worse where it comes to being being imprisoned Within These power structures if it's actually no if it doesn't make any difference how hard you try and avoid all of these all of these um all of these things then why not just be normal these people seem to be having a generally much easier time of it than I am so so I said and it turned out that actually not not everything which I've been um which I've been fighting against was well some of some of the things which I've been doing doing my best to fight against turned out to be not that bad after all yeah and some of the things I've been fighting against I still think are pretty bad right um but on but but do doing that thought experiment what happens what happens if I just lean into being normal you know as somebody who's totally committed to the postmortem project I mean what happens if I just try do my do my damndest to be normal and see what see what's so great about all in all ways of doing things um as it turns out there are there's lots to be said for lots of them you know it turns out that having a stable home and a committed relationship is great actually um and there's plenty more I can say about that also turns out that having kids is great actually yeah and suppressive at all and it turns out even as I discovered that being a stay-at-home mum has a lot to recommend you know with some caveats which I've addressed in the book so why not just be normal um turned out well I'm I'm my grandmother saying to me when I was in my late 20s um I think you should I think you should grow your hair and get married married um by which which was basically you know grandma-ish Grandma is for can you just be normal please Mary um it was good advice it was good advice you know you can be as it turns out that it's you know if you if you do your best to look and act normal you can be as bunkers as you like under the surface and it's it's much and and it's yeah it's it it's less it takes less effort and in some ways you can be more eccentric yeah yeah absolutely well and I find that in many ways being being normal is a is a kind of rebellion in in many in many contexts imagine wearing a dog collar must must give you give you a certain amount of cover to be yourself as well yeah I think yeah I think so I feel very I feel very rebellious you know um I'm I'm married I've got four children and I'm a thicker in the Church of England you know it's not and I'm in my mid-30s it's not the it's not and I you know I I'm broadly speaking what you would call conservative or tradition in my Outlook so I'm very very unusual but I kind of like that in an ironic way um it's kind of our thing on this podcast as well to be to be perfectly honest um but I mean this thing about power it's it's it's it's really interesting to me and I've seen this a lot I mean you say you said earlier that this kind of way of thinking about things has permeated the academy um which I've seen but I've also seen that I think it's permeated the church as well and um I definitely saw this when I was uh when I was at theological College it seemed like everything was about this kind of question of power and and the patriarchy and and so on and so forth and so when I guess when you were talking that I mean I really want to talk about your your experience of motherhood so um I I think it would be great to talk about that but just just one sort of I guess it's an observation or a question or I don't know really what it is but but um it seems like what you're saying is that um Power hierarchy structure all of these things these are these are simply a fact you know they are they are a reality and their reality not just in the the human and Human Social world but they're also a reality in in the biological world as well um so that so all these hierarchies and these structures of power exist um and you've got to you've got to really accept that if you're gonna you're gonna live in the real world and so I guess that's the first stage and then I I suppose and I do have some thoughts about this relates to marriage and so on but I suppose the second the second stage is well once you've accepted it then how do you actually how do you how do you how do you hallow it how do you make it something which isn't evil and wrong and bad but how do you use it in a way which is good do you see what I mean it's not really a question I'm just throwing that out there to see to see what your response is no no well yes there's a shorter I mean this is this is the hard question right you know it's particularly it's the hard question for the church um and I think probably the question for for people of faith in my view you know at the risk of getting sidetracked into Theory and you know and I'm not I'm not a theologian but I think I think there's a way back to I think there's a way back to some version of natural law via this route um I don't think I'm I'm not nowhere near theologically well read enough to be able to to to do it to do that in all of its individual steps but but I think there's a way there right I'm hoping hoping that we'll get a theologian um who's capable of reasoning that one out yeah that would be nice it would be nice because because I think I think we can get there I mean if you look at I mean I I look at I I look at how how ecosystems emerge and I just see the hand of God very straightforwardly I mean how could you not it's just there yeah um and I don't see I don't see why we should be I was watching this program so I'm skipping about all over the place at the moment I was watching this program about Chaos Theory as as one does my husband put it on it was this this great uh this great scientist from the University of London I think who was doing a documentary about touring and mandelbrot and um or all of these guys who developed chaos mathematics um and then and they they got from that to talking about Evolution and the way and the the the ways the ways that different species interact with one another and over the course of evolution and certainly are automata and how these extraordinarily complex and beautiful patterns could emerge via really quite simple equations and at every point they were saying well of course this is an unconscious process and of course this is a blind process and of course I'm like well you don't know that do you um yeah well I mean we don't we don't we don't we just don't know either way yeah um and at some point at some point I suppose you know you either you either have the leap of faith or you don't but yeah I think there's a I I think there's a route back to the Transcendent via an understanding of how meaning making isn't just something that we do it's something that the world does in relation to itself yeah it's something it's something inherent within the process of the process of Nature and as as you as you sort of dive down and deeper and deeper beneath beneath the surface of things as a as they as they do with with Chaos Theory or I think of something like um you know the quantum theory or the uncertainty principle or whatever it might be it seems like um it seems like what they reveal is kind of on on the surface this kind of seemingly chaotic and random World which we observe with our senses but underneath it really something which is is more like the platonic Realm of the forms you know there's a there's a kind of pattern an ability that underlies it which is amazing you know with chaos theory if I'm not mistaken I think it's something that can only be really um it can only really be mapped after after the event itself it can't be predicted um but sorry someone trying to ring me um but but nevertheless once once once it has been mapped you can see these patterns in these forms which actually underlie everything and and to my mind it seems like a it seems like it seems like a yeah honestly what is wrong with people you know they ring once and you hang up and then they ring again it's like you know um yeah it's it so there's a there's a pattern that underlies reality and it seems to me to be to be quite it could be quite the Assumption to say that this is you know that this is some some kind of sort of um I don't know sort of an Epi phenomenal byproduct of of a natural process it seems to me to speak of a of a of a realm of being which um which which underlies undergirds and gives shape to to this to this realm I understand we're very we're very very far away from from feminism here um it's interesting but not actually we're not really all right okay you know I don't think I I don't know if I can do I don't know if I can do the the Wormhole between them in three sentences but in my viewers that there's the feminism is really just one one cut at the larger problem of how how we make sense of our of our thrownness in the world yes you know specifically for women yes but but just to finish off that thought you know Yuval Noah Harari who is um lovely man lovely man um he's the the subject of multiple memes by the sort of great reset and paranoia discourse um also an interesting and observed I mean his his conclusions about what is or isn't good are different to mine but his analysis is is similar in lots of ways okay um and and one of his one of his his famous aphorisms is that modernity the the essence of modernity is that humans decided to give up meaning in exchange for power okay um and and I would I would propose that actually what we're talking about when we talk when if you want to talk about trying to hello this this discussion of you know throwneness and meaning and you know the the natural order um what's important to realize is that systems of Power are systems of meaning that's just that's just a you're just looking at it inside out if you look at it as a system of power you know meaning making is exclusionary by definition because if if something means something it can't mean all the other things you know the simplest level you know if I'm if I'm one thing I can't be all the other things in the world and the only way for the only the only way for something to be completely um inclusive is for it just to be formless gray goo right so yeah given that given that the world is not made of formless gray goo all of all of its systems of meaning making are are power of our systems of power and what's what's happening and what happens in the in the course of modernity is just a modernity is a commit a commitment to seeing to seeing those not in terms of not in terms of meaning but in terms of power and rather and and wherever possible to liquefy those those systems of meaning um in in exchange for Mastery over them okay exchange for power over them and I mean that's really the trajectory in specifically in the context of women and specifically in Con in the context of the human body and the human soul that I've I've tackled in some depth um in the second the second part of feminism against progress okay so so let's let's just um let's bring that um let's bring that to Earth a little bit um and clarify clarify it um we're doing the whole book backwards it's fine it's fine you know it sounds good I like I like the conversation going going uh taking its own course um so so to to my mind this the one of the key Central distinctions you make in the book is between two different types of feminism right and you can't you call them team interdependence and team freedom and your kind of genealogical reading of feminism is that these these have been advocated at different times um through um through the industrial area and modernity and so on but really it's team Freedom that's one out and by team team Freedom you mean and it relates it's a far bigger issue than just with with feminism although obviously that's a significant issue in itself but it relates to everything really but but really what it's about is it's about wanting to be free from limits from free from limitations right so I shouldn't be limited by the fact that I am a woman you know that's that's the that's the kind of the basic um rallying Cry of this kind of team Freedom thing and you you just suppose that with the team interdependence which I think is is um well we can talk about that later but I think that's that's kind of what you what you're talking about there isn't it that this idea of being this sort of it seems to me to be a really simple and yet clearly attractive idea that we can be we can be free from any kind of limitations like reality has no limitations for us and anything which anything which imposes a limitation on us us be it um are biological sex you talk about transgenderism as well be it our gender uh or whatever it is our body the body itself um be it our social situation be it our race or whatever it might be these things just should not be a limit they should not be a limit and we we need to we need to just clear all this clear all this aside I mean is that is that the way you see it or have I got that right more or less yes okay and and obviously that's much bigger issues and feminism but I I would I would say that it's in in it's through it's via feminism and in in the women's movement that's probably been most most fully developed right some come most fully to fruition and I mean very very simply the the story that I've told is of the women's movement emerging as uh just and appropriate response to the way when his lives changed under industrialization because essentially because work left the home and women's women's equal economic engagement in the work of a productive household was replaced by a new set of dilemmas depending on your economic situation and so on about how how to how to meld um getting by with the care of children which of which threw up a whole a whole you know previously previously not you know a whole new set of questions about about women's participation in public Life Women's legal standing um women's you know how how marriages worked and women's legal personhood um and and also of the relative importance of participation in the market or um or the the obligations of motherhood you know all of which had been had been understood quite differently before because they hadn't seemed they hadn't seemed to be so the the tensions just hadn't been there in quite the same way and it in the course of that um what I call the feminism of care and the feminism of Freedom both emerged now the way the way the story is told by feminist historiographers what I what I read is the feminism care of care doesn't doesn't stand out very sharply because most of it just isn't interpreted as feminism now the entire Cult of Domesticity quote unquote or what's being you know slightly you know critically called The Cult of Domesticity which is women's women's what women's writing to valorize the domain of the domestic domain housewife and so on um all of that and to me is straightforwardly it's a version of feminism this is saying no actually this stuff still matters you know it's a bit different to the way it was when we were all um you know peasants agrarian peasants but you know they keep raising children you know creating a nice home you know caring and caring for children you know the moral education particularly of children was taken very seriously by by these writers um all of this stuff is really important um and also and creating a space that's a space outside the market is also really important and then there was the other side who also for very legitimate reasons not least um that the cultural domesticion only really works if your husband isn't abusive or neglectful or Bronco um impoverished or whatever said no actually what what we need is not this sort of second second class second class support human role where where you know we're entirely at the mercy of our economically or powerful husbands who could just um who can be tyrannical and you know here are some examples um what we actually need is is the freedom to participate in in this new form of public life on the same and then and then sought to address all of the all of the again new problems that this threw up for women um where children are concerned with by suggesting for example um Central socializing socializing all of the socializing the domain of the home I think the Marxist feminists were particularly keen on this but also Charlotte Perkins Gilman was suggesting in the late 19th century centralized kitchens and fresh facilities so that women could get on with with girl bossing I guess gestational communism you call it just well no that's Sophie Lewis's phrase I mean she she oh is that oh okay yeah yeah um she she sees all of this but you know thinks it's good actually that's yeah yeah yeah because why why would you go why why uh what could be more attractive than to go through nine months of of pregnancy um and the the the the um the absolute Havoc that reeks on your body and the pain that you go through um if not to um donate your baby to the state I imagine that's a very um attractive Prospect to lots of women yeah um yeah the law commission is doing its best to because it's doing its best on that front even as we speak yeah they're proposing they're proposing a change to the law which would oh I don't really go down this week commercials that they're pushing for commercial surrogacy in the United Kingdom right and essentially yeah no it's changed the law such that um a baby there's a baby that's been commissioned um should be presumed the property of its parent of its of its Commissioners from birth rather than with a waiting period of a couple of weeks during which the birth mother is is still understood to be illegally the mother which as a as a feminist as a feminist I suppose who takes care seriously I'm not keen on this at all as you can imagine yes because I I stand for the given relationships and the given nature of our embodiedness as women yeah and I think any any law that sets out explicitly to undermine uh the Givens of Womanhood is profoundly anti-feminist yes yes yeah I'm getting I'm getting off track um no no it's great what what we're talking about really again it's the it's of uh the feminism of Freedom set out to to give up meaning in exchange for power and by meaning I mean those those ways in which um being a woman came with a given set of social roles and so on and the feminism of Freedom really is about challenging all of those you know to the extent that we that we our lives become meaningful by being bounded um but become Freer by being unbounded um or or that we we increase we we gain more autonomy by being unbounded which is sometimes true um it would it's a it's it's a worked example of giving up meaning in exchange for power yeah is giving up the meaning of of motherhood yeah meaning of femaleness in exchange for power in ways which now another generation a new generation of gender political feminists has some has some questions about yeah and I mean that's sort of the point I got to by the end of part two I guess whether whether in fact we reach a point where we've given up so much meaning um in exchange for power and actually what we need to be looking at is where where in fact though that meaning was was still important to a lot of people and who who's ended up with the power and who doesn't have any yeah well I mean the thing about the the question of Freedom it seems to me that there were there were two distinct um uh understandings of Freedom that are at play in a conversation like this um maybe more I don't know but but one of them is definitely about about um freedom from limitation you know having no having no um boundaries and being um not not obligated to to anyone or anything um but then there's another there's another form of Freedom which is which is um I'd I'd identify in in the Christian tradition definitely which would be about um the freedom to be um to be the thing that you are meant to be you know like so as a human being if you're meant to be a certain thing you've got a teleology you've got a kind of ends you've got a purpose and and to be free is to live towards that purpose and to to inhabit it and um you know this is a this is a type of Freedom which we all recognize even if we never articulated it when you look at something like a skill you know like being a musician or something like that you're not free to play the piano unless you've actually become a musician you know and then you're free you know so it seems to me like there are there are two different versions of Freedom which are profoundly um well I don't want to say at odds with each other but they're profoundly different and and it when you apply this to to questions of of the family and and children and things like that it seems to me that if you if you operate with that first understanding of Freedom you can have a real problem being married and and having children because you're you're not free I mean I've got four children and I'm not and my wife my wife and I are four children I shouldn't be so possessive and patriarchal but you know what I mean I'm not free at all hardly ever you know I have to I have to constantly serve my wife and my children but I you're not being free in that way I'm I'm becoming free in another sense which is that I'm becoming free of my own my own and my own selfishness and my own egotism and my own sin you know my own uh my own um desire to to to think about myself all the time and it's being a parent exposes these things and changes you and and then you're free from all those those things and that's that's what bondage really is I don't know if any of that makes sense it does it does and I hi everyone it's Reverend Jamie here just interrupting my own interview uh to bring you this short message now you'll notice we don't have any adverts on this podcast we don't want to be selling things to you or in the pockets of any corporations or anything like that we want to give you this podcast free and as a gift but we are coming up to a time when you have a really exciting opportunity to partner with us in the next stage the next phase the next step if you like of this podcast um I am coming towards the end of my curiosity and for my next job in the church I'm continuing to be a vicar but I'm actually going to take what's called a house for GG post where I'm I'm giving a house by a church but I'm not giving a stipend which is um the salary and so I work part-time for the church they give me a house but I have no salary now part of the reason we've decided to take this step is so that I can do a little bit more work on the podcast and so that I can do it a couple of other things in terms of public engagement so it's really exciting it's an exciting fighting time but it also represents a challenge as well we're wonderfully supported financially by the listeners and viewers of this podcast already and that's why we felt able to take this next step but what I'm asking people to do in the run-up to this this next step which is happening in 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generous supporters like yourself so if you're watching this podcast or listening to it and you're thinking you want to help please do the revampod.com go on there and support this podcast and let's see what what happens in this next uh exciting phase thank you very much and back to the interview with Mary Harrington my my sense is that in that somewhere beneath the uh the birth rate crisis which we're now talking about a lot um more far more than you know the cost of living um that that dilemma is someone at the heart of it is which which version of Freedom are we actually talking about yeah yeah which which version which version of the good are we actually pursuing um yeah so Mary can you tell us because we haven't really even mentioned it but you you speak about it a lot in your book um about becoming a mother and that being a significant thing uh um you you you talk about the way it challenged the sort of um liberal presupposition that you had that you were sort of radically separate or that you could continue being radically separate as an individual in the world and then you had this experience of having a child um it was a very it was a very concrete and very embodied very literally visceral um challenge to the the the the belief I'd had up until that point that women really could be ideal liberal subjects on the same terms as men which is the basic premise I suppose the feminism of Freedom um you know that women women can and should have the right to enter the market on the same terms as men um and what what throughout and motherhood threw this into question for me because the the ideal liberal subject you know the market homo economicus if you like um we would we sort of take take for granted the homo economicus is sort of atomized by default and you know only opt into relationship you know or transaction more often um and does so in in his own interests and I use his deliberately here um and the the problem with trying to be that whilst also being pregnant or the mother of a newborn is that it doesn't make doesn't it doesn't compute doesn't make sense you know there's no there's no sense it's just not meaningfully possible to say even really that I'm a separate person when I'm carrying another person in my literal entrails um who who's affecting my ability to move around comfortably or but who's you know but I mean obviously I didn't experience that as an inconvenience except that it wasn't inconvenience yeah it was a very welcoming convenience yeah um something that you're willing to take on and I'm speaking but I'm speaking not from personal experience obviously just from what I've observed of course it's an inconvenience but the point you know this isn't this isn't just an emotional this isn't just something which happens up here yeah the the the science the science is all they've done plenty of studies on you know across species but on humans and other on mothers of other species as well which show that that sense of being not not quite one person not quite two person is it has an embodied component as well I mean you you share you share or you share a blood supply with your baby while they're in utero there's an intricate dialogue of of back and forth between my my emotional state of arousal while I'm pregnant with a child of my babies you know they've tested this so you can sort of disturb a baby in utero and the mother will have a sort of secondary response to that and vice versa if you agitate mother it will have an effect on the baby I mean these are all things which are generally understood in common sense and everybody just kind of you know quietly goes on knowing that that's the case and quietly doing their best to think about the fact that this this can't coexist easily with the idea of the radically atomized liberal subject yeah and that that we just sort of we just bracket that and we say well okay let's just um but you know again being being the kind of the kind of unfortunate who takes ideas very seriously I found myself thinking a lot about this yeah um and thinking well you know none of is this is this a problem is this a problem with women or or is this actually a liberalism problem and I decided that you know given that given that there's no other way of having children and having children is probably more important than having liberalism um it was probably a liberalism problem yeah yeah okay so so that's good starting me down a whole nother a whole nother yeah well that's that's where I want to go is so where do you go then from there when you've when you've decided there's a there's some I mean this is a pretty basic tenet of liberalism isn't it that it's about this kind of individual uh this individual autonomous individual Freedom this radical separateness and so on and so forth it's pretty big it's pretty big part of foundation kind of the the big idea I mean Russo Russo said the quiet part out loud all the way back in the 18th century I mean he said that he explicitly excluded women from his ideal liberal subject but yeah he said you know we should just be Charming compliant support humans because because reasons I have no idea why why I can't remember why why Russo thought that but yeah it in Us in as much as women just stoked we just don't fit the Paradigm in the same way and you know as a feminist I'm more inclined to say that's a liberalism problem than that we should accept liberalism and that this is a women problem yeah okay so but where do so yeah I get that and I'm you know believe it or not on the same page but where where do you where do you go where did you go from there well I'm so I said about trying to trying to make sense of trying trying to re-read everything which I thought about feminism up to that point um through this lens and I came to the conclusion I so I ended up with this sort of materialist reread of the history of feminism okay you know something which emerges as much from you know the the interaction of new material conditions with Legacy with Legacy cultural and political realities um which which produced this very rich but dialogue between between independent interdependence and and freedom um and which culminated in the final victory of Freedom over care in the mid 20th century and and the new era that that propelled us into which which is one I suppose I've spent the most time on in the book which I call the cyborg era which elsewhere I've called the transhuman hysteria um which in which to my mind feminism becomes less the the appropriate um the the the the right and just and appropriate response by women to changing material conditions it becomes more something more like a stalking horse for for a program of radical libertarianism of the body um which to my you know it I've as I've argued in the book this libertarianism of the body doesn't benefit women it doesn't really benefit anybody apart from a very small Elite um and it serves mostly the interests of the market right okay um so so where where do you go from there with women I think we need I believe that we need to re-ground our sense of women's interests in in the in the realities of our bodies I mean in as much as and I don't mean by that that we we should we should Retreat to a sort of crude sex determinism but that but that we just need a bit more of a measure of realism about about the givenness of our bodies and the fact that it's just not possible to abolish human nature the way the transhumanists claim that we can and should not not only is it a stupid idea but it's going to produce even more grotesque inequalities and it's not in fact going to be of any benefit to women with the possible exception of I don't know Elon musk's baby mama maybe yeah that's pretty much it yeah and it'll be a disaster for everybody else yeah okay and and against that I've proposed uh a personal and a a personal campaign or an individual level campaign for greater greater realism about our embodied sex selves a defense of a defense of motherhood a defensive femaleness you know our bodies are our bodies are fine as they are we don't need tech fixes yeah and I think we should be starting from that basis yeah so I mean it it's not it's not the same thing as the kind of Cult of Domesticity writing at all but but there is a sense in which it's more like that than the sort of feminism that we're used to today and so far as you're saying you know we need to celebrate um we need to I don't know about celebrate I don't really like this word but we need to we need to promote what it means to be a woman would it be it means to be a mother and and these need to become positive things again and not not sort of arbitrary limits which we which we push back again and push back against sorry um is that I mean is that is that broadly speaking correct well I certainly struggle to see how we can how we can retain any any standing for a great many things which really really matter for such as the the given bond between a mother and a mother and a baby um unless unless we're willing to do that yeah okay which means which means really flying in the face of nearly the entirety of culture of the sort of general direction of travel yeah the culture in its entirety but yeah well I I don't see how I don't see how we can defend the interests of of babies babies manufactured to order in Ukraine or indeed the women who are economically or or even perhaps just literally coerced into renting out their uteruses or any other body part um I don't see how we can defend those women's interests unless we're willing to to learn to and to know what a woman is yeah really I mean you know this has become absurdly a point of a point of mainstream political debate can you define woman yeah yeah unless and unless we're willing to try um with with the attendant risk that that will sometimes impose limits where we wouldn't like the to be limits um we're not going to be able to defend any of those things yeah and I I it is my contention that that finding ourselves in a position where we can't Define we can't defend any of those things it won't just be bad for women it would be bad for all of us yes yes well absolutely it's another step down the slippery slope to sort of gray goo culture yeah yeah absolutely um and I mean there's so many things I I wanna there's so many sort of directions I feel like I could go in this conversation but I suppose I'm very interested in the in the chapter about men in the book I think that's um you know not to be too egocentric but that that um that I think is is a very important thing and it's something that I ice is absolutely crucial in this whole this whole question is well I mean you can you can you can try and come up with solutions to how to make things better in terms of the relationship between the relationships between men and women but I mean fundamentally if you accept reality as as you say in the book um if men if men want to abuse and mistreat women they will you know because they can you know women can protect themselves and you know but but if a woman entrusts herself to a man in marriage or in a relationship of any kind really the man the man can abuse her because men are metaphysically stronger I mean women have power as well you know it's a different it's a different type of power and but they they have power as well but men have that sort of visceral power to to just to destroy you know physically destroying her and I guess I mean here's just to share something of myself um and this won't this won't surprise you but um it seems to me that this is where um Christianity is so is so helpful because you know I am as a as a man and as a as a as a husband I am addressed by God and and and told you know you must not use your power you must not use your strength for that you must use your strength to protect people who are vulnerable most significantly your wife and your children and um and that that's that's what and anything else would be uh anything else would be abusive and and wrong and would incur the Judgment of God and you know the the image you know to my mind the most powerful image of of marriage in scripture is um given by the Apostle Paul when he talks about um the the husband's role being analogous to that of Christ giving up his life for the church you know that's that's what I'm called to do as a husband is to give myself like that you know to die for my wife you know not to abuse not to not to use my strength to hurt or harm and um I don't know I guess this is kind of one of the things I really wanted to ask about because that I'm not saying look I'm not saying that this is the answer I'm not saying that this solves everything but I am saying that to me to my mind that kind of medical metaphysical framework is the is the only way I can is the only way I can sort of feel really positive about about marriage and the relationships between the Sexes more generally um I don't know I'm just throwing that out there just to see what you think of it really yeah I haven't uh I haven't spent I think I think I've been I've sort of sideled around the whole really important question of Christianity yeah in the book I mean I'm sort of sub-tweeting Catholic Social teaching in a few at a few points I guess somebody somebody accused me of climbing the North Face of the Vatican without ropes or pythons I think it's interesting yeah but anyway I did that I did that for the honorable reasons I just didn't want to blow the book up there was a different case I wanted to make um but I completely agree um that it's it's it's very difficult to it's very difficult it's increasingly difficult to make the case for marriage and for mutually you know Mutual honor in in those relationships without the Christian Framing and actually this is a point that my friend Louise Perry made recently she wrote about um the relationship between Christianity and feminism for I think it was in first things right and she was she was talking about the extent to which um it was the Christian faith actually which tamed a very aggressive um set of sexual Nortons which had been current under in the Roman era which really you know didn't distinguish it didn't really it didn't have a concept of heterosexuality as such it divided people into and fuckies if you forgive my language and the end and the people the people who read as people were if you were a you were just not a person by definition and not non-people non-people were the ones who were who were to be done too in that way yeah um and it was really it was really the Christian the Christian understanding of sexuality which which made the mate which first made the injunction on men to constrain their sexuality and and to to sanctify it really in the context of marriage um so and and Louise's Louise's point is that you know a great a You Know Much More Much More Than really contemporaries feminism wants to acknowledge of the the moral framework which which underpins women's critique of you know of you know rape culture for example you know is founded on that set on that Christian framework yes um and and to the extent to the extent that the women's that feminism in its contemporary form sets itself against Christianity because because patriarchy or or because because Christian patriarchy Yeti Adda um yeah they are effectively sawing off the branch that they're sitting on yeah um and Louise's line which I think really captures what we're talking about is if you if if you hated Christian patriarchy you're going to absolutely hate posts patriarchy yeah I think um you know if whether where this relates to what I was writing about the chapter on menu this is there are whole whole swathes of the internet Badlands which I haven't spent very much time talking about because again you've just gone forever it gets a bit um it gets a bit much after a while but there are there are great great swathes of the of the internet Badlands which are you know fully committed to bringing back post-christian patriarchy or you know I mean they might they'd see it as pre-christians um but they're well where the the the masculinist ideology is explicitly um uh constructed you know in opposition to the Christian idea of complementarity and of you know Mutual service and sanctifying sexuality within marriage and where it's you know the the aim is explicitly to to return to the and the yeah and the non and the unpersonhood of the yeah um and I and I I I do I do wonder sometimes whether whether were the feminists are fighting The Wrong Enemy yeah yeah or really that they they end up conflating conflating uh ideas and um you know group groups of ideas and particularly those that come out of Christianity which are actually you know at a deep level on their side yeah on our side with with a set of a set of others which which pose a much more Insidious danger yeah well I agree with that very and just just jump in I mean the the the if you have a metaphysics which is which basically says that you know underneath everything is just a play of competing forces and and that that's the true expression of reality and that you know we have to we have to sort of mirror that in our in our social dynamics that's you are going to end up with that you are going to end up with a post post-christian patriarchal structure because men have power which women don't have you know it just seems to me to be I mean I completely I completely inter I haven't read that article by Louis I've read her book but I completely agree with what she's saying I think she's 100 right sorry I interrupted as they as the expression has it as Smith Wesson beats four aces at the at the end of the day you know the the person who who can who can bring the violence is is the one who's going to win yeah and and in very unless unless there's some ideological basis to um unless there's some other framework a metaphysical framework that modulates that in some in some way um that's that yeah that's the situation you're going to end up with and I suppose one of the one one of the ways I could critique my own argument my my argument in the chapter about letting men be is that in fact you know if we're if we want to take the idea of a bit more realism about sex and our embodied nature seriously that also means being willing to count some of the undercounted costs of the feminism of Freedom one of which was was making all of society co-ed yeah or you know the the drive to make all of society co-ed and that it came it was with with the laudable desire to to grant women access to all of the social spaces where power had been broken before yeah um but one of the one of the side effects of that was eliminating all male social spaces you know as as good as undermine the uh a campaign against the the the the social the legitimacy of all male social spaces if you like I mean it's not as though men don't men don't go off on golfing holidays or stag weekends you know this still happens but but I think so you there used to be a great many more of them and certainly certainly further down the social scale I think that's been a tremendous loss and although I can't prove it my hunch is that it's it has a it has a contributory role in the the very the very marked um prevalent the the the far greater prevalence of mental distress and suicidality especially in working-class men you know especially as men get older everyone talks about the male loneliness crisis and the male friend friendlessness crisis which has been steadily escalating over the last few decades to the point where the the the group at greatest risk of suicide is recently divorced middle-aged men because for the most part they they access their entire you know in as much as they had a social life they accessed it through their life and they didn't have they didn't have a group of friends a group of male friends as such um and I think I think if we're going to if we're going to take the idea of sex realism seriously we need to be able to step back and just say there are there are times and places where men need to be men amongst themselves and one of the pushbacks you could offer against that would be doesn't doesn't this just doesn't this just grant men can't Blanche well at the top of the scale too to power broken without women um for one thing but also further you know to to incubate incubate the kind of noxious misogynies which then end up in and end up in exactly this kind of post-christian patriarchy and I said well well it's not as though those not just misogynies aren't incubating now you know again you don't have to spend very long spelunking in the internet Badlands or indeed looking at the output of somebody like Andrew Tate to see that those those noxious misogynies are percolating perfectly well now yeah um and it's my it's my in in my OBS in my anecdotal observation um in as much as you want men good men to be to become good men rather than selfish men children um that won't happen by women telling them what to do it it happens as a consequence of them being around other good men yeah it does that just seems to me to be observably true yes yeah in a in a in a male environment in a male environment and and I don't I don't really understand the mechanisms for that because I'm not one but it's it's clear it's clear enough to me that that's just how it works yeah and to the extent that women want good men and there's a there's a self-evident there ought to be you know the the the feminist case for Good Men ought to be so evident yeah of course of course in as much as we'd like good men to marry or to be around or just not to be attacked by on dark alleys yeah you know to that extent we need to be we need to be willing to take the risk of letting men be just a bit yeah and you know perhaps quite a bit more than we do as things stand yeah I think I I completely agree and I just think men men need to be addressed you know they need to be addressed by all older men and authority of men they need to be told what to do I mean we really do you know we need to be told what to do and and and and and and Men respond to that you know I mean I'm I'm getting to the age now where I can speak to younger adult men in that way and I recognize a big difference when I'm sort of um soft and fluffy and you know cuddly and I I just hear and I don't really challenge there's a big difference between that and when I say something direct you know because I see this thing when I say something direct to a younger man invariably what I see is a response engagement you know and you think well I'm going to offend this person I'm going to upset them and it really if you do it if you do it in love with with genuine concern for someone it doesn't work that way you know men need men need that kind of Challenge and I really do think I mean I'm convinced that's why people like Jordan Peterson are as popular as they are because there aren't many people who come out and they just say look you need to do X Y and Z like do it now and the results will be good and the the problem with the situation we have at the moment is that internet mentors aren't really good enough internet mentors don't cut it because the the problem the problem you know so some of the advice that they offer may be perfectly good you know a lot of a lot of the clear I mean clean up your room is obviously good advice yeah of course um what's not to like about that but the problem with mentors of that kind is that they don't know their mentees exist yeah yeah um and that's and that that does something toxic to the relationship which makes it very easy for for less less healthful influences to creep in and I mean I'd say you know from from what I've seen of Andrew Tate's output about half of it is just perfectly sensible advice along the lines of clean up your room yeah and the other half of it is just this absolutely violently poisonous misogynistic stuff um which which seems to me to be inimical to to creating and sustaining any kind of any kind of worthwhile um mutually Mutual solidarity with you know which is which is Ultimate you know as far as I can make out what what people of both sexes you know desire and long for and would like to be able to build um so and if we're not going to if we're not going to have the Andrew Tates of this world sort of stepping into that Gap um that there has to be there has to be a space for real world relationships yeah where somebody somewhere where it's possible to speak in love you know in in the you know with the in the context of a relationship to somebody else and say no this is what you have to do yeah yeah absolutely and you can't you can't do that unless the relationship is there in real life and it goes both ways yes Mary let me let me just ask you a little bit further about this so there were sort of two there were two moments in the book where I thought I thought I've definitely got a question so so the the first one I think maybe maybe we've kind of got towards an answer with this anyway but when you talk about sort of um um Solutions you know so so one of one of the solutions oh okay um one of the solutions is about um uh having you know sort of almost a return to the sort of cottage industry thing but you know in a sort of updated [Music] um you know sense of people working you know in their in their own business at home or you know on on or remote working and so on sharing child care no I guess the thing I I sort of thought about that bit is I didn't necessarily have a problem with it and I'd you know I'd support it obviously but is there a sense in which you don't you don't really talk very much about um the fact that you you know it's perfectly possible and in in working class context it's it's absolutely very normal to have um the the dad working and and the the mum staying at home with the kids and and for that to be just something that suits everyone and pleases everyone you know absolutely as an option and then and then so I know I know you have to go so let me ask let me ask the other question as well and you can address them both um I just wanted to ask about the issue of abortion because you seem to be I'm sort of um you you in the book you very much acknowledge the issue with abortion you know that that um it's it's very much sort of um the outcome of a certain you know ideological way of approaching uh feminism and so on and so forth and it seems to me you get to the point of saying well it's a it's definitely a regrettable and a bad thing but ultimately it would be um it would be not the best for women if abortion was illegal and um I guess what I thought about that is um that well firstly it didn't really it it doesn't uh well you didn't mention the the children who actually killed when when abortions happen and and also the issue of you know sex selective abortion and how sort of girls are killed when when when babies are aborted as well so I just wanted to ask you about that so I know I know you need to go and there's a lot there that's fine I've got I've got a few minutes we'll take take them take them in order yeah um on on state monster at her parents and start her mother's I mean I I guess I the last section of the book was it was really challenging to write because there's just so much to say and what is to be done is invariably more difficult than than you know what's wrong um I think everyone who tries to write a critique you know finds themselves fail at flailing a bit more and I felt very vulnerable actually putting all of that stuff down um as well because I was thinking well pretty much it doesn't matter what I say somebody's gonna hate it and tell me everything that's wrong with it and I and in the end in the end what I decided to do was to rather than trying to keep everybody happy because that it turned out trying to do that just made it too long too boring um I I thought well all I can really at this point I'm just gonna have to be much much more narrow about what my implied audience is and throughout most of the book I've got a fairly broad implied audience which which is probably probably characterized as my unheard readership give or take sure um but but in in the last third of the book in part three of the book I've taken as a much more narrow subset really of I suppose knowledge class young women who are still young enough that their decisions young enough to reach escape velocity from you know the the from cyborg feminism should they wish to um and and who are broadly speaking of the same level of class in education as me and I've just you know I I think I've I think I pretty much spelled that out and I've just been a bit more narrow about the focus that I've taken because otherwise otherwise I was just going to drone on forever and I was reached I was bumping up against the point where I want I felt like the book was long enough yeah yeah um so so yes you're absolutely right to say that there are there are plenty of situations where where in fact you know the the the the the Triad quote-unquote industrial era model works perfectly well and I mean in not so much in the book but elsewhere in my writing I've I've said a fair amount about about how inimical how iniquitous really the sort of the the Tory right liberal model of child care for everybody is feminist blah blah um is actually is actually terrible for those women who have jobs rather than careers yeah because it's just it's it's sold us it's sold as Liberation for everybody but in fact if you're if you're if you're being liberated from from from watching your baby reach his his or her first milestones in order to put packets through a scanner I struggle to see I struggle to see what's so great about that except that Jeremy Hunt gets to see line go up maybe and yeah and as a as a as a very committed advocate of you know a month of babies being good actually I I dissent from the idea that there's anything good about that so yes absolutely I think there's a it should not be beyond the wit of man to to support um or I I think it's uh from on a sort of General policy level I think it'd be great um and ought to be achievable to be to be working towards families generally being able to survive on one income should they I think that would just be generally that's that's just a good a good goal to aim for and then you know if if if one if the caring parent reaches a point where he or she and I say he or she deliberately although it's usually she um once wants to do other stuff in addition to that then then great and you know if they want to do other stuff I'll if they want to do stuff other than that other than mothering you know all the time then but but I think the presumption should be in favor of supporting supporting that models because I think the presumption should be in favor of all of those all of those mothers who have jobs rather than careers and I think we should be we should be rethinking a lot of um a lot of child care policy from from from the vantage point of that group who really are the majority um rather than from from the the much smaller subset of elite women who have fun engaging and who have a much more difficult decision to make yeah I guess between a profession that maybe they've spent five five or ten years training for and where where in fact um you know it's a it's a different set of tensions and pressures but I think you know creating a one-size-fits-all policy on the basis of a fairly small subset of barristers is unjust in general so that's so that that for the first one for from for the for the abortion question I really wrestled with with how to how to square this circle um I mean I've I've made the point you know the my argument in feminism against progress is that about fundamentally abortion is a bad metaphysic you know it's a it's a it's a very you know it's it's the Keystone of the feminism of freedom and it's sort of cyborg um Incarnation so the metaphysical Keystone and increasingly actually an American abortion debates you see that that it's taken on a kind of sacramental quality which I find deeply disturbing in the way it's in the way it's described and in the way it's it's um framed you know as a sort of some something something approaching a sort of ritual sacrifice um for the great broad autonomy I find that profoundly disturbing and and it's traveled a long way in a very short period of time from from the I think much more realistic and grounded and safe legal and rare and I mean people of good faith can probably differ on whether or not that's a that's just a slippery slope that that the yeah and there's there's no there's no firm point of there's no there's no firm standpoint on that slippery slope I don't know the answer to that but where I where I ended up coming down in the book um on the on the question of what we do with that bad metaphysic and what we what we what we understand abortion to mean um is is in saying is in thinking well you know what would happen if we what would happen if the the pro-life maximalists got their way and it was just abandoned and it was just banned across the board tomorrow and I was thinking what would probably happen would be so a variant of what happened under Nikolai Jose in Romania in I think the 1970s where he he made all forms of birth control and abortion illegal because he wanted to see the birth rate go up and that didn't happen because social norms just technology changed and that um and what happened instead was the the horrific you know assorted horrific deaths in Backstreet abortions and you know a plethora of horribly neglected babies you know we've all seen the videos of the Romanian orphanage babies I imagine just that that horrendous crime against humanity so um I I can't I can't in conscience um make the cake I can't easily make the case that that kind of an Abrupt change would would be a program in one I just can't and given that um and yes and I completely take your point about sex selective abortion you know I've I've been very explicit in saying that um you know just because I've been ambivalent about about a kind of about bringing down the Bama Hammer doesn't mean I doesn't mean I therefore tacitly support you know the the ongoing efforts of maximalists to to legitimize um ending a pregnancy at any time for any reason which is a that's a campaign which is coming here Hamza Yusuf has proposed to do to to bring to enact that in Scotland for example yeah he's bringing abortion maximalism to the British Isles and so we I think it's a it's a fairly safe bet that that that that that discourse will be upon us in England as well before long and I think I think there's a very robust feminist case for resisting it for the same reason as I resist um commercial surrogacy and for the same reason as I resist gender ideology that it's a it's a cyborg incursion on given relationships which is profoundly and it's in its wider outworkings anti-feminist but not least because of the war it wages on the on the the feminism of care and on the domain of care um but where I would how I would prefer to approach the question of um addressing what what I what I think of as a very brave you know I think ending a pregnancy is a very great thing to do um how I would prefer to address that would be from from the other direction I I think there's a there's so much we could do as you know that ambivalently pro-life and ambivalently pro-choice feminists we could could work on together in making making the world a more welcoming place for the kind of interdependence that comes with pregnancy and motherhood and I I want to focus my energies as a reactionary feminist on that domain um and I will I'll step back from the question of explicit legal bans and leave that to people who are more who are more up for up for a fight for me yeah but maybe that's merely maths maybe I don't know but I I think I feel like I've I've sort of I've I've declared war on enough people yeah declare war on enough ideas in this book that I'm I'm cautious I'm cautious about um yeah yeah yeah I mean I totally appreciate what you're saying and I think there's um you know to my mind a sort of legal question is a is a separate though related questions the question of the the ethics of the the action of abortion and you know to my mind I'm very very clear on my view of the the ethics side I'm not really sure what that means in terms of legislation I mean clearly it doesn't mean you know and aborting babies when they're about to be born and and um and so on and so forth but how that how that could actually play out you know say um say abortion became extremely unpopular and the majority of people decided actually this is completely immoral and we shouldn't be doing this then there would be a separate question about how therefore should that be reflected in legislation and to be honest with I don't really know what the answer that question is so I I acknowledge this it's it's a it's a complicated one but uh Mary I know you have to go um I've I've really enjoyed this conversation thank you so much for coming on and I hope we can stay in touch and maybe do something again in the future but um thank you for your book which feminism against progress which I think is a really is a real achievement um a really really important um intervention in in the public debate on these issues uh Brave courageous as well and uh wish you all the best with it so thank you Mary thank you so much okay goodbye now [Music] thank you

Channel: Irreverend: Faith and Current Affairs

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Id: RqrWBgPuw1M

Length: 77min 5sec (4625 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 14 2023