Feminism Under The Microscope with Mary Harrington

welcome to another episode of conversations with Coleman before today's episode I'm excited to announce that fans of the show now have an opportunity to get some brand new merch to go with my new book coming out in February I call it the color blind collection and you can find it on my website at Coleman hw.org it's pretty cool merch so head over to the website right now and place your order or simply follow the link on the description below okay now on to the [Music] episode welcome to another episode of conversations with Coleman my guest today is Mary Harrington Mary is a writer and contributing editor at unheard she's the author of a great book called feminism against progress in this episode we talk about her General critique of feminism we talk about what she calls progress theology we talk about the changing social status of motherhood we talk about the Barbie movie gender dysphoria and much more I've been wanting to talk to Mary for a very long time so this was exciting for me I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did so without further Ado Mary [Music] Harrington okay Mary thanks so much for coming on my show thank you for having me so I was just telling you before we started I first heard you on the Red Scare podcasts and I found your uh formulation uh about modern feminism to be fascinating uh before we get into all of that and and your book book great book uh feminism against progress let's just get a little bit about you for my audience like uh how how did you come to through your personal life experiences reformulate your take on on feminism maybe just take me back to when you were um um you know college age and how how you thought then and walk me through a little bit how you came to be who you are now I guess the very short version of the story is that when I was when I left University I was a card carrying queer Theory spouting Judith Butler right and but a series of accidents turned me into kind of the opposite of that um the slightly longer version of the story is I guess I grew up in the in the middle of the end of history and like that context is probably important in the sense that you know when when I was a teenager it was the mid 1990s and I think pretty much everybody took for granted at that point that we we kind of done all the history stuff like people really it it really felt true you I think back to it now it really felt as though shopping malls and you know self-expression through clothing choices and really nothing very exciting ever happening again was probably just it you know we'd reached the Pinnacle of human civilization we weren't going to have any more Wars and just liberal democracy and consumerism and McDonald's was kind of that that was it we were done um I mean haha L as it turns out um but but Ian but that as a frame in device as a framing for where I was with feminism I guess you know I first met feminist ideas in my early teens and and in the book I've I think the first my my moment of coming to feminist Consciousness was the moment when I realized that I have I have two brothers and I've described this this moment in the book because it really stayed with me and still does as a as a dilemma that but I have two brothers one older one younger and there was a point when I was in my early teens I guess when I realized that um like my mom would set the table every every evening for dinner she was a she was mostly a homemaker um and then at the end of dinner my dad would get up and leave the table and just leave all the dishes on the table this was he just took it for granted that you know de dealing with the table just wasn't wasn't part of what he did that wasn't his contribution to the family and once after a certain point my brothers started to copy him and I was watching them thinking this is this doesn't seem fair like this is this doesn't seem right why why are they not helping one to clear the table and and then I I realized I had a dilemma um do I a um because it's what it seemed to say was this is beneath me um this is this is below my pay grade um somebody else can deal with this implicitly my mom who is therefore implicitly a lower lower class of human who just has to do all the menial stuff and everybody else can get on with fun things like I don't know watching telly or making Lego or whatever and I was I was my my moment of coming to feminist Consciousness in the I guess the early 1990s was thinking okay so do I assert my equality with my brothers um in feeling entitled to say this is below my pay grade and I'm just going to leave the table and go and do Lego or draw pictures of unicorns or whatever I wanted to do or do I express solidarity with my mom as the only other woman female in the house and help her do the dishes and I was thinking this is a really unfair position to put me in and like but but it's it's stuck with it stayed with me um as well I mean I I'll come back to the qu who does the dishes is kind of The Perennial question I think you know that that opens out into much bigger terrains of you know who who does the who does the Dirty Work and who who does the care Ing and this is something I've I've thought I've said and thought a lot about since um but at the time I don't I mean I wasn't really thinking about it in Grand historical terms as I do now and I was just thinking of it in terms of this is really unfair and that led me to read Simone deoir who wrote a very famous um early 20th century book The Second Sex um which which explores a lot of these questions and that was that was really what ignited my interest in feminism and my sense of Injustice that that these these sex divisions should be there implicitly somehow baked into the everyday the tiny minute interactions of our everyday lives um but but you know I came to it from Simone through Simone DEA you know who who tacitly accepted a lot of my dad's premises that all the that the menial stuff really was menial and that did make us some that did make anybody who accepted that as their a lot in life somehow a secondary a second class person um and with that I accept I absorbed I suppose a lot of the sort of end of History liberal feminist principles which which which declared that you know women women should women could and should be the equals of men in every possible sense and implicitly that that meant all of all the menial stuff should be below our P pay grade too and never really looked very closely at the question of who in fact was going to be doing it then um so this is you know not in a particularly examined way you know via the that that's the material I took to University with me whereupon I met um queer Theory and um postmodernism and a whole whole lot of other things which sent me completely around the twist I mean it's genuinely making to encounter that stuff for the first time right um and left University fully fully committed to that sort of deconstructionist worldview um I guess as a sort of early adopter of wokeism and the idea that we should be deconstructing all hierarchies and abolishing the ideological you know all the the ideologies that inscribe us within within systems you know irrespective of where where we would choose to be and and instead to kind of try and fashion ourselves from first principles according to our desire which that that which is I suppose the sort of that that's the positive aspiration of that that worldview if you like that we should be able to shake off all of these these impositions that come to us from our identities and ideologies and existing super structures and you know the the matrices of power and and and oppression which which supposedly bear down on us and force us into this or that place um that we should be able to somehow somehow demolish all of that stuff and just free freely self- fashion according according to however we want to be and so that was that that that was my aspiration by the time I left University and did my sincere best to put that into practice in real life which as it turns out is easier said than done right and was just not a very not very emotionally satisfying or financially rewarding as it turns out I mean this is this is the nauy so I mean the all all the architectures of identitarian grifting didn't really exist yet so like it was it wasn't very easy to be profitably um profitably obsessed with ident identity politics in the way it is now I mean you know the whole whole new whole new huge corporate Dei sector at that point right right it was all it was all very Avant guard at that point so if you were if you were obsessed with identities and obsessed with ideologies and so on you were you were pretty much on your own and everyone just thought you were a bit unhinged which was arguably true anyway long long story short you know I got to about I guess I got to my late 20s and um I mean I sort of did various different jobs and sucked at most of them because I was functionally unemployable because I was a bit nuts um but and the I mean that all sort of came to a head when a a startup which I co-founded with friends um fell apart um in the year of the year of the great crash um partly through my own fault because I was I was too just pathologically hostile to hierarchies or really kind of working in any stable way at all with anyone and you I mean I I take a I take a major share of the blame for for what went wrong um but it was a really painful experience because in the Pro I I sort of lost everything in the process I lost everything I thought I had which was which is to say my Social Circle and my my friends and my my purpose in life and and with that went a lot of the things I thought I'd believed and with that also went any sense of any sense of alignment with what was then the prevailing kind of political Orthodoxy which was the third way I mean I don't know I I guess that the the American equivalent would probably be clintonism this idea that you could you could reorder the forces of commer um to social good which was again something that people genuinely believed in the 9s even though it seems insane now I mean now now we have work capital and again haha LOL but back then people genuinely thought it was it this could work you know nothing else seems to be working and you know espec especially since Thatcher and Reagan kind of demolished the the previous social settlement you know all we really have now is capitalism so let's try and make it good you know that that seemed like a plausible Avenue to try at the time even if it's seems insane now and so and so we were genuinely trying to do that you know we were trying to disrupt education and make the world a better place and also make lots of money at the same time and for a moment it seemed like we might actually succeed in doing it and then it all went hideously wrong and I by the time I like losing losing a business from underneath you that is I mean I I've never been God forbid I've never been divorced or but it was it was like losing everything um it was a completely devastating experience and by the time I recovered from that it was I mean it took seven years I think to to recover from the the complete like total detonation of my of my my my entire world by which time and by the time I came out the other end I mean the rebuilding took a long time I read a lot and I thought a lot and I left London you know I I formed new friendships I retrained as a psychotherapist I met my husband we got married I left I left London I I did various just kind of dull money money jobs which I was you know not particularly good at but functional um did My Level best to be be more normal um by the by like by the time I came out the other end of that you know having just set aside all of the all of the different ways I'd sort of been a kind of unhinged Avant guard political hipster um in my 20s I was yeah I was living in the countryside I had a kid um and I just didn't believe in any of the things which I believed in before and I didn't I didn't well I mean I still believe some of them but I didn't believe in progress um and I didn't and I found myself questioning a lot of the anti-h hierarchical postmodernist stuff at least questioning how how conducive all of that worldview was to Leading any kind of a flourishing Sayan or sustainable life so so that's the long answer there's so much there's so so many different directions we could go in there uh one I notice is that you you're able to reflect on your past and hold yourself responsible to a degree that is unusual most people that are for instance terrible employees because they've you know been indoctrinated into a kind of anti-h hierarchy worldview where any kind of direction is strikes them as unjust and uh most of them are not able to say actually you know that that was my fault but you you have a remarkable ability to to view your past with some kind of remove and reflection which is I think atypical and and you know something in that seven-year crumbling of of the business and out of the ashes you you you were really able to reformulate your past in a way that is that most people are unable to I think it it was probably actually although I don't practice as a psychotherapist now it was probably that um one of the things you do a lot as a training psychotherapist is you you practice on each other and you get a lot of feedback in the process I got a lot of feedback I learned a lot about all the ways I was abrasive all the ways I was just not very easy to work with I mean it's it's kind of painful to think about it now but yeah I I guess I grew a lot in the process and I'm grateful to I'm grateful to my peers on that course for helping me to do it yeah I'm always excited to talk about a longtime sponsor of this show ground news navigating today's complex news landscape requires a tool that transcends single Source biases and where ground news comes in ground news Aggregates articles from across the globe in the 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the news personally my favorite feature in ground news is the blind spot feature where you can see which stories are being ignored by the left and the right respectively which gives you an insight into what what each side wants to ignore in other words the ideological bias of each side ground news is not just an app or a website it's an essential tool for anyone seeking to engage critically with world events and form a well-rounded perspective so try ground news today and experience experence news in a way that challenges and enlightens you right now ground news is having its biggest sale of the year you can get 40% off their Vantage subscription which is what I used to do my news analysis if you go to the link ground. newscan or you subscribe to the Pro Plan for as little as $1 a month I really appreciate what ground news is doing and I hope you check them out one of the big themes that your story and your book highlights is this notion of freedom the the attractiveness of living a life completely free of blueprints of categories of um of archetypes completely Unshackled from every expectation just purely following your deepest truest self uh self-invention completely this is a very attractive thing especially for young people I find and it's I think it was more attractive to me when I was younger as well but there probably something very American about it particularly I mean the idea of the idea of being able to go west in a in a sort of metaphorical sense you know you you leave everything behind and start start a fresh in Uncharted Territory right I mean it it inspires a lot of people but there's I mean it it feels like it's pretty close to the heart of the American dream very much I remember as a as a teenager I was blessed to be able to go to Japan a few times uh as a jazz musician and one thing I noticed is that all of us American kids we were looking to make friends and go out drinking with some like Japanese Rebel kids right just like I'd heard of when American kids go to Spain or France they they make all these friendships and no one was willing to do it and it struck me as a very deep cultural difference in many Western societies that to to to rebel against any Norm to to be an individual to find yourself to follow your heart right uh that's not a universal thing of course and and the promise of that freedom is you're going to find happiness and self-realization but I think what many people find is that it can be an endless search for like that self-realization is just right around the corner and never quite comes and that freedom also can be a a burden taken to an extreme because uh because you you you have nothing to hold on to right um I wonder how how do you think of this notion of freedom and and Liberation in the context of feminism and happiness one of the things I always chafed against you know at the most basic level was being female bodied um you know to be to be born with a female body is if you if if you drink the Kool-Aid if you accept the the the the the general premises of liberal feminism implicitly to be to be born female is to be at a disadvantage in a in a thousand one different ways because the default the cultural default across the board is male you know in terms of physical strength in terms of your expectations for what professional life looks like in terms of a thousand one different things and that's baked into the culture Caroline crado Perez recently wrote a book about just how far the default male standard is it's baked into you know the shape of surgical instruments um you know the the tolerances of Crash Test Dummies you know the dosages in medical trials which are which are which just take male standard which just take male subjects and generally don't don't test um separately on women even though our physiologies are very different there's there's a thousand and one different ways in which the the distinct physiological uh differences between between male and female human beings are just not calibrated for in the culture um which which you would think would render us more equal but it doesn't um because in practice what it does is it makes the male the male stand a just the default and and and therefore frames women as sort of defective humans in every possible way and even if nobody's ever actually spelled that out to you explicitly you you can end up if you're if you're born woman um just internalizing that from the word go um and certainly I experienced I mean I guess my my family situation growing up took a lot of this for granted you know my my dad set the tone of the family culture my brothers were and you know and the it it was it was a very it was a very sort of male Centric culture and in a sense you know to be feminine to be female was It was kind of something which embar which happened in a slightly embarrassed way behind closed doors or when my brothers weren't watching because otherwise they tease me you know being girly was just kind of an affront to the family culture um so I I I grew up with this incredible ambivalence about about being female um and when I mean when I encountered Judith Butler for the first time who who's who proposed this whole theory of how we could construct our own genders um from you know from from first principles as it were you know to say that gender is a performance you know it's not contingent on our bodies because in a sense sex is constructed as well and she makes this argument that you know that the fact that we talk or think about sex in culture means that in a sense somehow we're making that up as well and it all just comes into being in relation to each other and therefore we can just kind of create ourselves from first principles and free ourselves from from our from our embodiment um I it was it was an incredibly iing Prospect but what I what I came to realize is that it's just not true it's just it's a lie um that actually our our bodies shape how we experience the world at such a fundamental level that it's it's much it's actually as I've as I've come to think more liberating to accept our Givens and to accept that there are some things which will be more or less accessible to us you know based on the particularities of where we find ourselves in our embodied State and in our kind of cultural context that it it makes you it's actually more liberating to just accept accept those giv and to work with it than it is to try and to try and Escape them because you all you all you ever find yourself doing when you try and escape the Givens of your own physiology is just running running to stay ahead of something which is which you can never really Escape because all all you're ever really doing is running from your own shadow and I mean you know I I joke sometimes that um like decart would never have come up with the with the idea of the Mind Body split if he got PMS on a month you know this is this is this is how fundamental um the the embodiment affects how we perceive the world um you know and I would I wouldn't want to generalize about all of women but I would I would suggest that women probably see a different relationship between between object and subject simply because we're used to we're used to a hormonal cycle which is much more much more palpably affects your mood and your and your perception of things over the course of the month um but I mean but but but this stuff this stuff goes all the way down and honestly it's just it's just much more freeing if you accept it and I suppose the just to concretize this a little bit um the the point where really I I've found myself framing this for the first time and and really coming to some sense of peace and reconciliation with my own body having been at war with myself you know through eating disorders and you know extreme physical practices and you name it um you know I've tried everything at one one point or another to to try and wage war and gain control over my physical body I have very ambivalent relationship with my own embodiment um but the point where I managed to find some sense of peace with my own body was in having a child um because that was the point at which I realized just how much of it I wasn't in control of and that in fact there was something freeing about that I mean you know feeling feeling a another human being in your literal viscera um is a very sort of De decentering experience I think is probably the best way I can you know being kicked in the ribs from the inside um and realiz you know this is this isn't something terrifying um you know this isn't sort of HR Giga body horror it's the most wonderful thing in the world which you know from from the perspective of somebody who's been raised to think think of their own embodiment as inviable or as or as an imposition um just just reads a straight up body horror um but but it's not like that you know if it's a wanted pregnancy and and you know you're in a you're in a happy relationship and you and you want a kid it's not it's it's not body horror it's fantastic it's incredible um but what what really blew my mind was real was discovering that um the sense of being more more than one person but less than two people goes on for a long time after your baby's born like my daughter was born and for a long time afterwards it felt as though she was still part of my own body it was it felt very much like I'd grown an extra limb um which was somehow weirdly not attached to me anymore but was just over there in a crib but I but like the the the the desire to to careful you know to secure the well-being of my this other part of my body was just every bit as strong as it would be you know if it was my own hand you know if I saw if I saw sort of immediate approximate danger approaching that extra part of me over there you know i' I'd be i' take evasive action just as urgently as as if I you know as as if there was a car rolling towards my fingers it's that visceral MH um and yeah it's it's it's incredibly hard to describe unless you've been there it's like going through the Looking Glass right you know the only time I've ever crashed a car in you know 20 odd years of driving was well damage to car was was trying to get it around get get the car around a tight corner with my hungry baby screaming in the back and I literally couldn't think um and you know I'm not I'm not a bad driver you know I'm not a I'm not a par scratcher of wing mirrors but on that occasion um on that occasion I grazed the car going around the corner because I just couldn't think um because she needed me and and the her her physical need for food was was so overwhelming that just pretty much you the all my all my capacity for special reasoning or contextual thought or you know really adulting functioning at all as an adult except tend to her needs pretty much completely shut down and like operating heavy machinery under those conditions was just really difficult um and and you try and then you know the more time I spent doing this the more I I tried and I tried to map that experience back onto everything I'd internalized about what Freedom meant as a as a condition of separateness and a sort of and of freedom from obligation and of Detachment from um expectations or obligations or assumptions or stereotypes or any of things which might be imposed on me from the outside which structure what I should or shouldn't do or you know set expectations or demands or strictures on me and that was always my understanding of Freedom my understanding of feminism was that it was the pursuit of that kind of freedom for women you know from a position of Greater disadvantage than men um I'd always just taken it for granted that that's what that's what feminism meant and then I was like hang on a minute none of this maps onto what actually matters more to me than anything else in the world right now which is tending to the needs of my newborn baby and so if if this is my experience as a mother of a newborn child and the majority of women have children um the majority of feminism ought to be speaking to the interests of women and if if if a majority of those women are mothers how have we ended up with an ideology which is promising a type of Freedom which is radically incompatible with the experience of being a mother how did we end up with a mother- shaped blind spot this just doesn't make sense um and that I guess that started me you that that was the kind of head scratcher moment pushing my baby in a buggy around this around small town England which kind of started me on on uh asking the questions which led to book I have to imagine that that has to resonate with a lot of women I I can give you I think why why it resonates with me is uh I'm 27 now and still among my male friends I'm one of I'm in the minority in knowing that I want to have multiple kids and in not viewing that as something to be delayed as long as possible basically that the attitude I find certainly among men and to some extent am among women is you know do everything in life before you have kids because once you have kids if you have kids your life is over right that's the that's certainly been the ethos growing up in a liberal city in America I've I haven't felt that way in a long time and I think something in me changed when my mother died when I was 19 the experience of being her her child and comforting her through that something just permanently switched in me where I was like yes I'm definitely having kids and I've had no doubts or qualms about it um and and even given that having a family probably may have some negative trade-off with my career or something like that that that doesn't bother me at all if it's going to be the case because I don't think anything really could be more important in life um um so when I would talk to when I would talk to women uh like in college uh I went to Columbia and Barnard was across the street was really a hot bed of the kind of Freedom feminism freedom from family freedom from motherhood um the the male ideal as the as the sort of goal to be aspired to I I had a I I had a girlfriend at the time who said I I feel there's something denigrating towards motherhood in in all of this like it would to be a a quote unquote stay-at-home mom is viewed as low status in this in this culture and I thought that can't be right that there has to be something wrong about that if the version of feminism denigrates motherhood right there there has to be some kind of way to fight for women's unique and separate interest us without teaching women that they ought not be mothers that they're not enough if if if they if they do that because certainly as a man I feel to be a great father would be number one on my list as as of of proud accomplishments right right right well what I realized as I mean being being a nerd I can't ever just leave a head scratcher on its own you know even if I'm you hoovering the house and you know changing nappies in the meantime so I I sort of went down the hole a bit was trying answering this trying to answer this question does it you know how did we get to this point how did we how how do we get to a point where there's a mother shaped blind spot in the in the feminism which I just inter internalized as a as a teenager sort of magazine feminism if you like mainstream feminism and I realized that like it's not that nobody's ever thought of it far from it I mean there have been countless feminists you know who've spoken up for mothers whove made the case for motherhood who've who've spoken to the embodied difference between between men and women and the fact and women's reproductive role and and the the importance of of the the fact that being a mom matters to to the vast majority of women there are so many feminists who've written and spoken about that going all the way back to the beginning of the movement in the in the late 18th century in England um but but somehow again and again they get memory hold somehow again and again those are not the those are not the women who are who are held up what I realized um the more I kind of went down the rabbit hole is that actually the memory H holding of etal of of mother motherhood M maternal if you like in feminism is actually quite recent and it dates from the second wave um and it dates particularly to two technological Transformations which both impelled the second wave um well one one Tech transformation which is the arrival of reproductive like reproductive Healthcare quote unquote which is to say birth control and abortion um which which rapidly became um the the central foundations of a a kind a feminism committed to flattening all of the reproductive differences between men and women um which then became it has has since been the dominant mode of feminism and because we have those Technologies which give us the illusions that we can flatten those differences um we can we can therefore pursue this this this project of of total sameness between the Sexes um even if actually in practice it still turns out not to be true you know because there are still a billion and one ways that we're different and there are still billion one ways in which more often than not we want to be different um yet the Technologies exist that seem to give us seem to give us that possibility and because of that all of those because we have the tech that seems to fix the problem um all all those all those feminists who pre who prior to birth control and abortion were saying no actually we have to defend women's interests as as the the ones who give birth and the ones who breastfeed and the ones who the ones who arm others um seemed somehow less important because we we've got a tech fix for that we don't need a social fix for that anymore um and so and so all of those all of those feminist voices have been relatively marginalized ever since and and and the winners kind of wrote the history books so the so the feminism of care and of maternal and of embodiment has been kind of sidelined and we have this we have the kind of we have a feminism of Freedom which very importantly is underwritten by biotech um and this is I mean and so and so what I what most people call the beginning of the sexual Revolution which is to say the arrival of reliable birth control and all the social Transformations which have followed from that I think we we should understand much more accurately as the beginning of the transhumanist Revolution which is the point where we started to apply Technologies to ourselves in pursuit of IND individual Freedom so in a sense and it began with women and it began with liberal feminism in a sense we industrialized ourselves in pursuit of individual Freedom um and we've been we've been we've been going further and further down that track ever since you know and I mean there's a thousand one different fertility Technologies which have spun out of that all of which kind of extend the reach of technology and of Commerce further and further into the human body in particularly into the female body such that we now have commercial surrogacy in some jurisdictions we have we have the whole IVF and fertility industry we have people buying and selling gametes on the internet um and we have increasingly people the the idea the the idea of cosmetic self remodeling um in the in the name of identity and freedom and you can draw a straight line from from from the arrival of birth control which is to say you know meddling with your in endocrine system in the name of uh personal freedom you can draw a straight line from that through to transgender medicine and really it's just a difference of degree it's just a sort of extension of the same field interesting u i i i remember when I was in college we would often talk about what we called hookup culture at the time and hookup culture was just the expectation that you know you could have casual hookups with people and it's fun and no commitment is really expected and I found immediately it fit quite well with the factory settings of men we didn't we we needed very little convincing right um but I would talk to young woman after young woman that that would really be burned by women absolutely hate it and women don't feel able to speak about I mean my friend Lis Perry writes very persuasively about and ironically though it wasn't the men that were publicly advocating for this way of being largely it was the hardcore feminists yes that were pushing this as a norm yes it happened to benefit men but we weren't the ones out there saying because if you if you suggest for a moment that women women's Orient mate selection approach or orientation or preferences differ in any meaningful way from those of men what you're doing is inen re-enchanting to to to reinscribe the differences between the Sexes which that form of sameness feminism Freedom feminism has worked so hard to overcome and you know given that we have the Technologies which flatten the reproductive differences or at least you know most of them um you know the the moral or emotional ones should in theory if you're a blank latest just disappear they should just come out in the wash over time and the fact that this hasn't happened um I mean we've got we've got 50 years of receipts now haven't we since the since the sexual Revolution you know if if the sexual double standard quote socalled um if the if the differences in mate selection preferences between the Sexes um was was really just a a matter of socialization and a matter of stereotypes and a matter of you know different different upbringings you would have thought that with 50 years of 50 years to come out in the wash it would have done so by now but all that's happened actually is that th those differences have those differences have persisted and they but but they've they've ended up being some somehow reordered to the market so so they they've become part of this this hostile competitive transactional order where men and women women weaponize the the normative matate seeking behaviors of the opposite sex against them so women's women's longing women's normatively greater longing for emotional connection gets exploited by pickup quote unquote pickup artists you know who who NE them and make them feel insecure and then or or or try and overwhelm them with with status displays and then use that as a way of manipulating women into granting sexual access and then discarding them or or or women women who who will exploit men's desire to look at young pretty women to to make a ton of money on on only fans or any yeah yeah or pay pay their college pay their college tuition by going on one of those sugar daddy websites I mean there's a thousand and one you know squalid ways that you the the the normative matate seeking behaviors of both both sexes continue to exist and they continue to be there and they continue to be real and because we have these Technologies which flatten the the The Brute material material reproductive difference and we can just have sex in what's supposedly a consequence-free vacuum um we can we can pretend those differences no longer apply and and and all that's done is to turn them into turn them into Commodities and weapons and it's created this incredibly toxic culture where honestly I speak to people in their early 20s who who are who are longing for companionship and solidarity and mutual affection they say it's just it's a it's a Wilderness out there I mean my heart goes out to you guys I've noticed a lot more dissatisfaction with the pill from women I'm close enough to talk about that kind of thing with this has been one of come on this is actually one of the things that really surprised me so the last chapter in in my book is a feminist case against the pill um and I had I've had some push back on it but the push back has all come from Boomers um it's older older men and women who are like you cannot possibly be making a feminist case against the pill is the the pill was the foundation of feminism as as I understand it as I grew up what what this isn't a thing you what are you talking about and then I I I make the same argument to women who are like 21 or 22 and they're like ah oh yeah of course they're like I stopped taking the pill a year yeah yeah and and who just see is completely obvious and you know I was put on this thing at the age of 14 and it made me fat and crazy and depressed and then I came off it 10 years later and I had a total personality transplant things I was happier and that thing I thought was my permanent my my chronic mental health issue turned out to just be this disrupted you've been giving me for 10 years what did you do to me right and and what was what what was any of it for you know all I all I had was bad sex with people who didn't love me and who wanted to choke me like this this was a terrible idea yeah and yeah I I guess I guess it's like with with any of these cultural interventions um I mean the the original Advocates of the pill um the original Advocates but people like Margaret sang I mean whatever else you want to say about her she's a kind of crazy eugenicist in general not Jobing parthood right I mean kind kind of scary kind of scary person but but that that generation genuinely believed that the that birth control like the only effect it would have would be to reduce unwanted pregnancies and what they had they they completely hadn't reckon on how radically it would change sexual behavior nobody has no it never crossed anybody's mind to think that once you have once you have quote unquote safe sex people are going to have a lot more of it like nobody every everyone just assumed everything else would stay the same apart from there would just be there would just be fewer accidental pregnancies and other otherwise sexual Norms would stay more or less stable and that's just really wasn't what happened instead there was such an explosion in casual sex essentially because people could you know the the what as it turned out what had been keeping a lid on everybody's rampant horniness was the fact that there was a real material risk of pregnancy and you know yes there were some unwanted pregnancies but on the whole the fact that the fact that it was a real material risk and there were really stringent social controls on it had more or less kept that kept a lid on it um and once that once that risk once that seemed largely drisk everybody was like fine let's let's let's go for it and know we have 50 years worth of the consequences and you know I I agree with Louise who argues very cogently on this in the case against the sexual Revolution that the the the net the net benefit hasn't you know it has not been a net benefit to women and I would argue also it's not been a net benefit to most men you know there's a small subset of Highly sociosexual men who who who probably enjoy it but the vast majority I think of both sexes who who you generally in over the long term I think are both longing for companionship and you know longterm long-term relationship and most people still want families and kids um and and instead have found themselves in this blasted Wasteland of hookup culture and um you know increasingly unhinged sort of explicit um sexual content everywhere um are ask are asking themselves is this is this really actually is was this did this benefit anybody I'm not so sure I think the the Paradox of choice underlies all of this I mean I think almost anyone could think of examples from their life where just being given more and more choices doesn't necessarily make you happier right just like having one great toy that you loved as a kid and then going to the toy store maybe initially it's amazing but you know at the end of the day you can just be paralyzed by the fact that you don't actually know exactly what you want I'm a big fan of a short menu yeah oh yeah I have this experience at restaurants all the time like I now when I go to a resta I don't know do you don't really have diners in the UK that like we have in in New York and newers we have greasy spoons which are kind of similar I think well the the at a diner an American Diner they're famous for just having everything on the menu they just a 10-page menu with with you know 70 things on each page so what I've now had to do as an adult is remind myself don't look at the menu because if you look at the menu you will not only will you just spend 20 minutes trying to choose whatever you choose will be wrong because you'll have this thought in the back of your head that maybe I didn't choose right just think about something that would pretty much satisfy you that's in the ballark of what you want and just order that because they'll have it and this is in some way a metaphor for certain aspects of happiness is like it it doesn't actually behoove you if you're in a relationship say to constantly have the illusion that someone else around the corner might be better which is what's given to you by dating apps and by hookup culture in general that may not be the the the path to happiness but certainly I think it is the incentive of capitalism to maximize Choice y right yeah where and that and it's the in the incentive of dating apps to to not pay you off that's right that's right of course there's an obvious OB they lose money if you if you find the one right so the the point is to keep you on the app um keep you scrolling keep you swiping that's right that's right um I'm curious what is your perspective on abortion do you consider this similar to the pill or do you have more of a a reverence for the fact that that's this this is something I've really grappled with I mean I I came unhappily you know as a I mean I was I came to this topic and I came to writing feminism against progress you know broadly in the safe legal and rare camp mhm um and over the course of writing the book I came uncomfortably to the conclusion that actually the the the decisive moment of victory for the feminism of Freedom over the feminism of care was the legalization of abortion um because I it's difficult to think of something which expresses more clearly and more viscerally literally um the the Primacy of Freedom over the needs of of a vulnerable dependent than to say my my bodily autonomy is so important that it's I I can claim it even at the expense of a potential life it's difficult to think of a of a more of of a of a more direct statement of of your moral your moral hierarchy from that to say you know I I I can kill a potential baby in in in in defense of my own Freedom um so and down Downstream of that uh you know a great many a great many things follow um again I mean we could we could we could go into the whole gender surgery thing and the whole you know proliferation of biotechnologies which I think really come down Downstream I mean both like the pill and abortion really come as a package like that that's the important thing to understand you know once the pill was there um abortion was in the mail because it changed sexual behavior so radically that actually the what what happened was not as Margaret Sanger expected a reduction in the number of unwanted pregnancies but a but a rapid increase um because sexual Norms changed so so much and so quickly that even though the number of even though the the the number of accidental pregnancies per hookup went down the total number of hookups went up up so much that the total number of unplanned pregnancies just went through the roof and so that created a ratchet towards the really the it created a moral case for abortion because sudden all these women were were having sex and then some of them were some of them weren't using the pill so some of them were getting pregnant and then some and then women you can get pregnant on the pill you can and so women were dying in back street Backstreet abortions and there was a and it made for a powerful and you know very moving feminist case for for for the legalization of of a techn a technology which which would save women from having to Dill actually led to the demand to legal abortion legalize abortion in some way yeah the the two come as a package once once you have the pill you will have legal abortion it's it's pretty much you know it's pretty much impossible to to to have the contraceptive to to have mostly reliable contraceptives unless you also have abortion as a back stop MH um and the two the two together really represent our entry into the transhumanist era where where we we accepted in principle the idea that medicine isn't just there to fix things which have gone wrong but sometimes it's there to break things which are working as they should in the in the name of personal freedom and and it's from from that from that sort of inversion of our medical Paradigm from a restorative to a me meist one that every other transhumanist initiative that's followed since you know in terms of you know upgrading ourselves or remodeling ourselves or editing ourselves everything else follows from that moment that was it was the the first transhumanist moment so I mean this so thus far my my of abortion my sense of where abortion sits in our cultural history I mean it's a it's an immensely consequential moment and I think we we really underpriced just how powerful that was um it's difficult to talk about and I think particularly in America it's very difficult to talk about because your dis your your dialectic there about abortion is so polarized it's become so so bitterly a partisan issue in a way I mean in a sense it's much easier for me to sit here and talk about it in London because it's not partisan in the same way I mean there's a I think you have a specific cultural history of how how feminism emerged became fused with the Democrats and how the how the religious right kind of coalesced and formed oppositional Camp you the the the history of abortion campaigning America kind of is the history of the cultureal war right yeah absolutely totally yeah and every Everything Everything sort of emerges out of that but I mean as a Brit I can sit here in this a sort of relatively relatively not deranged um cultural consensus around it and say um and and and and kind of and reflect on these things and where where do I think we should go with that um again I went I went back and forth with with with where I should cuz CU in a sense I sort of felt like I I couldn't just dodge the question altogether you know I can't raise it and then make it a sort of Central Central conceptual moment and say you know we've massively underpriced the significance of this and then say well oh you know I don't know what we should do about that maybe we should just all try and be nicer to one another or just have less bad sex or um I mean I've where where I ended up coming down has just annoyed every it frustrated everybody because it was it's kind of a a it it's kind of a Centrist position in the sense that if I if I were a if I were a rabid Catholic which I'm not um I would I I'd be obliged to say I think I think it should be I think it should be legal um you know following following through the logic of my own argument I probably should make that argument however as a feminist um and as a a pragmatist you know up to a point I can't in good conscience say I think we should just bring bring down the banhammer tomorrow I can't say that because sexual norms and sexual practices and the culture um has evolved around the availability of those Technologies to such a degree that if we were to do that tomorrow the results would be so brutalizing for women um that in I I couldn't I couldn't make that case in instantly snap back to the culture and there would be there would be a lot of there would be there would be an absolutely catastrophic internum in which in which a lot of women would probably die um as a femin I I can't I can't just hand I can't just say yeah yeah we just have to we just have the only way out is through and so I I can't be gung-ho about that um but but what I what I have like the question I find myself asking and whether the question I think we should all be asking ourselves is you know if abortion is a bad metaph it's a bad B foundation for thinking about what women are and for think thinking and for pursuing women's interests and I do really think that I mean I think a a technology which which grants us personhood to the extent that we can we can reduce our we we can escape the thing which makes us constitutively women um you know is that that that's such a form of personhood you know sets us fundamentally at odds with our own biology now to me that you know I don't think it could be anything could be more clearly anti-women than to say you you can be free to the extent that you can evade being a mother like being a mother is part of who and what I am right and you know sure that yes right okay there are some women who don't want that at some points um but you know to like the capacity to be a mother is so in inextricable from from being female from being a woman I don't see how that how how that should diminish me or diminish my person or diminish my dignity or you know my potential to to contribute to the flourishing of mankind so you I want what I what I would love to see is a world where women where all all babies are welcome um without without that coming at the expense of their mother's personhood mhm um and I and I and the question I want to ask and really the question where I think ambivalently Pro and ambivalently anti feminists could possibly come together or at least you know brainstorm creatively even just for a start might be saying you know what would it take to create that world you know surely there's some stuff that we could do to make it better which would be welcome on both sides even whether you're pro-choice or whether you're um pro-life you know to to make it to to make life easier for the born you know we could we could we could do there's so much more we could do for crisis pregnancy centers there's so much more we could do to support new mothers there's so much more we could do to th than social ties there's so much more we could do to make children welcome in the fabric of society you know we need to start there um and and can we can we start there rather than starting with um making making life difficult for women who find themselves in a in a in a in a pregnancy emergency yeah this episode is sponsored by better help life is tough and it can be very helpful to work through your problems with a therapist I've certainly benefited from therapy in the past but it can be tough to travel back and forth to a therapist given all of our busy life schedules that's why you should try betterhelp betterhelp is entirely online incredibly convenient and built around your schedule fill out a quick questionnaire and you'll be paired with a licensed therapist and here's a perk if you ever feel the need you can switch therapists at no extra charge so you're always in control visit better help.com manoday to get 10% off your first month remember that's better help hp.com colan I've uh one thing many people have said I I think is true somewhere like Italy has a culture that's far more friendly to to having and raising a child like if you just take your child to to a dinner outing with your adult friends your adult friends are not going to think it's weird that you brought your seven-year-old right they they're going to help you and it's it's going to be a congenial environment whereas in America you're you're like supposed to get a babysitter so that you don't bring your freaking kid right and there's just like a much less of a culture of communal um communal parenting in America almost no one very few people live with their grandparents compared to somewhere say like Israel where everyone lives with with with their parents which gives you a natural babysitter um and so it and I guess this ties into one of the biggest problems I think facing almost every secular society uh which is the declining birth rate um we're not at replacement rate in almost any country um and I'm curious how you think of this this birth rate issue because it seems to me to tie into everything we've been talking about I'm everything go states have done to try to increase the birth rate pretty much hasn't worked and I think that is because it's such a fundamental the root cause is so fundamental which is that you know economic growth and uh perhaps progress theology has made being a single person you know more and more attractive but the experience of having a child and H having a family hasn't necessarily become much more attractive it's sort of not so different than it was 40 years ago and so in relative terms people want to prolong their adolescence as long as possible or they think they do and and so what you get is a declining birth rate how do you roll that back I don't know I mean a lot of people are trying a lot of different things I hope someone figures it out yeah I mean my it's it's it's clear to a lot of people at this point that the culture and the economy and the politics that we have is structurally anti-natalist M and what and what's so striking to me um and probably Bears repeating is that this this is not just a western phenomenon um this is this it's it's present in China it's present in Japan it's present pretty much everywhere in the world where we have um where where techn Capital you I mean the highly technological you know atomizing um knowledge-based um urbanizing um technology heavy economy where wherever that exists um the the same problems the same problems become apparent well actually this as a slight slight detour one of the things a fact that that I stumbled on which I find interesting and provocative I mean it's common to hear conservatives particularly in America blame feminism for the breakdown of the family um but what what's very what what's what I I discovered a little while ago and I was looking into it that the there there's a link between feminism and the and the atomization of the family but it's not it's it's not clear which way the causality runs because if you look at the story of China um it was the breakdown in the family which caused feminism in the sense in the sense that um there was a very there was a deliberate Push by the Chinese government over some Decades of of the last century to get to urbanize the Chinese population um to to break down these traditional extended large um productive household type families which was typical of Chinese agrarian life and to to move people into smaller households within the cities and doing doing more kind of developed world um industrial type jobs um which which fragmented the size of families and it it and with that came the one child policy which which reduced obviously the size of families um and and the this deliberate um dis atomization of the family in turn produced feminism because a whole a lot of the women who would previously have accepted their their gendered role within a more traditional family setup found themselves obliged for example to take on filial piety which would previously have been their brother's obligation which meant a duty to look after their to their parents in old age um which in turn meant that they would have to pursue ambitious careers which in turn meant that if they got married they they they couldn't just go home go and be a stay-at-home mom as their which their husbands then expected them to do so so these Chinese men were coming into marriages with very traditional expectations and you you're going to do all the housework and and these women are like no I can't do that because I'm the only child in the family and I have to go and ear a ton of money because I have to support my parents in old age and and and of that then gives rise to a particular a partic a distinctive brand of Chinese feminism which is saying no actually these patriarchal these patriarchal expectations can't stand you the these we this won't hold this doesn't work so where whereas in the west it looks as though feminism caused the breakdown of the family in China it was actually the way around the breakdown of the family caused feminism and so there's obviously a relationship between women pushing back against gender expectations and asking questions about women's caring role within the family and the pressures imposed by this atomizing um shrinking families which is typical of developed World modern post-industrial capitalism there's a relationship but it's it's not at all clear which which way the cause a relationship goes I mean all I can like the only inference I can make from looking at that bigger picture is to say I'm clearly like clearly that social and economic order imposes brutal um and asymmetrical uh expectations and obligations on women who are mothers um clearly some women are responding to that by just having fewer children because the burden is intolerable and we should probably think about the wider social and economic order which is imposing those pressures if we want if we want mothers to be willing to have kids again so you you tie in the the pill and the abortion and the Technologies of the sexual Revolution or as you call it the transhumanist revolution with this wider story about how we're told we can transcend the body transcend nature you tie this in with uh the the trend towards cross sex hormones and uh cross seex surgeries that has exploded in the past seven years especially if you look at data at least I've looked at data from America this is an interesting area where the UK and America are in different places in the conversation I've heard PE people from Great Britain complain that whatever happens in America they experience it a couple years later I think there's something of the reverse in this case where when I talk to people from the UK people will say the push back against trans ideology has sort of won in the UK I don't know if you agree with that I'm not willing to be triumphalist to be honest I mean I think the gender critical feminists have been more successful in the UK than they have in America and I think that again that that's actually connected to the the specific Contours of the culture war and how that how that emerged around especially the issue of birth control and abortion in America and the way that became so sharply politically polarized in America and one of the downstream consequences of that has been that any any feminist and any objections to that kind of biopolitics um is immediately right coded like you're immediately immediately instantly coded as being as coming from the religious right which makes it very difficult as a otherwise broadly left leaning feminist to to to mount any kind of critique of gender ideology just you cuz the schmittian logic of it is just so so brutal and so all-encompassing yeah and that's just not the case in Britain for because our our cultural context is a little bit different yeah we also I mean there are there are some other quirks of the British context which have made it easier for gender critical feminists to mobilize I mean there's an on a M's messaging board funly enough which has been a major Vector for for political organization of particularly of mothers and and I in that sense you could probably argue that the internet itself has been has been a a an enabling factor in giving mothers a voice in feminism in a way which just wasn't really the case prior to the internet I mean there's a there's a funny story I read in a in an anthology of feminist writings from the 1990s about a women's center where they took a vote on whether or not they should have a crash and they voted a crash at this women like a daycare um at the at this Women's Center and and it was voted down because none of the mothers who would have voted for it were there because they were looking after their kids and so so there's a structural problem like if you can only if you can only participate by showing up physically like as a mother of young children like you have a you have a problem like you you have a your your voice is your voice disappears but now that now that so much political activism takes place on the internet like moms all have smartphones you know we can do a lot of scrolling and a lot of we can do a lot of activism you know while simultaneously pushing a buggy and I think that's that's been a major driver actually in in helping to helping to bring back in the voices of women who just know because they've grown humans in their literal ENT entrails that men can't be women they're like no obviously this is bollocks because you know clear clearly men can't be women yeah um because just du um and that's that's brought some it's brought a whole a whole previously very Mar like structurally marginalized perspective back into it and mumsnet was a major driver of that in the UK and just because it was mostly UK focused um that's that's helped to impel it and there's also I mean the the the The Contours of political organizing uh are just different in the UK um so all of all of those factors plus that we don't have quite the same culture War um right terrain as you as you do in America that's all that's all contributed to the to Turf Island being what it is did you see the Barbie movie I did they ex pregnant Barbie was expelled from the Barbie verse I thought that was that that that was a fascinating way that it's you know if even if it was meant intentionally as a liberal feminists greed it told on itself in some very eloquent way yeah I'm I'm curious what you thought of that movie I thought it to me it missed the mark in in several ways besides being too lecture heavy as a film I think that's a separate critique it was interesting to me that you know equality was not really the point of the film I thought what it was going to say at the end was that okay let's give the Ken half of the seats on the Supreme Court and make turn them from an oppressed class into an actual equal class akin to this what the civil rights movement did with blacks and whites in America but that actually isn't where the movie went they gave them like a symbolic amount of power but still kind of kept the Ken Ken as second class citizens and I thought that was a that was a unexpected way from to end the movie I sort of feel like I'm talking talking metaphorically here but it kind of applies in real life as well um until until there's actual generativity in the Barbie and Ken Universe we're all we're all just going round and round in circles you know because like fundamentally like all the the contests between like the the struggles between men and women the negotiation between men and women about how we live together all really boils down to how we make the Next Generation like that's that's what it's all fundamentally about you know how do we reproduce ourselves as a species um you know that's that that's what's at stake when when we when we argue about when how men and women can or should or shouldn't live together um and and for as long as that's excluded from the Barbie and Ken Universe all we're really arguing about is is roles and stereotypes and all all the all of it is a lar you know for as long as pregnant Barbie is expelled from the Barbie verse right um it's all it's all just it's all just academic it's all empty empty theorizing right yeah it's a very good point I mean at some level reproduction is the the root cause of all the trade-offs and interesting uh this is obviously not to say that people who don't have kids have make no meaningful contribution of course that's not true you know there have always been there have always been people who don't who don't want children or who can't have children and you know there's and any number of whom make you know fine honorable contributions to human civilization you know it's not as though our the meaning of life can be reduced to having kids but you know but but life life won't go on unless we do have kids yeah so you know it's it may not be sufficient but it's it's indisputably necessary right before I let you go I want to ask um you know obviously most of the conversation has been and most of your writing is about women broadly but I'm curious do you have do you have any thoughts about the status of men in masculinity right now in the culture and what your perspective on that is absolutely I mean I I could go on about this for a whole a whole another hour which unfortunately we don't have I mean one of the I I I think one of the under another of the undercounted costs of flattening the differences between the Sexes and in the process um imagining that we could make all social spaces co-ed um has been the loss of male Single Sex sociality and I think people people wildly underestimate how how great a loss that has been for how for how many men um and I it's perhaps less palpable like at the top of the Soom socio economic chain because you men men with more Social Capital will be more resourceful and more able to find one another and socialize and do do whatever men do when when I'm not around um but but but I think it's been particularly sharply felt further down like the the the war on men's Single Sex space was really pursued by High by high status women in the name of Smashing the glass ceiling right you know it was all about breaking down the boys clubs and you know allowing women access to equal professional opportunities you know in you high achieving careers such as the law um but one of the unintended consequences of claiming that in fact all social spaces ought to become unisex has been to has been to to whittle away at um at Social spaces for men who were for for the for the classes of men who were never gatekeeping power and they were never gatekeeping you know social goods particularly they were just I I don't know shooting pool whatever it was I have no idea what men do when I'm not like it's it's I I don't really have a stake in play Call of Duty whatever whatever um but but a lot of those a lot of those spaces like the the the more structured ones you know the the hobby groups and the and the and and the pubs and the clubs and and all of th those kinds of social spaces where men might once have gathered to do whatever it is that men do and to form one another to an extent and those those networks of formation where younger men would learn how to how to man from older men um have have withered away in the process and I don't think it's I don't think that's just Downstream of of the great feminist leveling but I think I think feminism has made a contribution to that um and if if we're ever going to ask for men's support in pushing back for example again against the incursion of trans trans identified males in women's sports or women's prisons um we should also we should also be willing to to turn the heat down a little bit on making all all social spaces unisex and I think you know just be maybe a little bit more chill when when the guys want to get together without us okay I could talk to you for another two hours but I got to let you go uh your book is feminism against progress there's a lot in there we didn't get to I really recommend people get it aside from that is there anything my audience should go towards on the internet to find you I WR regularly at unheard UK UK online publication my subst reactionary feminist you can find me on Twitter at moving circles beautiful thank you Mary thank you that's it for this episode of conversations with Coleman guys as always thanks for watching and feel free to tell me what you think by reviewing the podcast commenting on social media or sending me an email to check out my other social media platforms click the cards you see on screen and don't forget to like share and subscribe see you next [Music] time

Channel: Coleman Hughes

Views: 57,270

Keywords: politics, news, politicalupdates, policies, currentaffairs, political, society, highsociety, modernsociety, contemporary, intellectualproperty, debate, intellect thoughts, opinion, public intellectual, intellect, dialogue, discourse, interview, motivational, speech, answers, Coleman Hughes, talkshow, talks, ethics, intelligence, discrimination, music

Id: dGTx75yKxso

Length: 68min 28sec (4108 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 23 2023