Mary Harrington thinks feminism needs to go backwards, not forward

[Music] all right Mary uh thank you so much for joining me on the same drugs I'm looking forward to talking with you thank you for having me um I have way too many questions [Laughter] they're not bad questions it's because I mean I just I've been reading your your book and uh just yeah there's so much good stuff in there and so many things that came up for me I think in some ways our histories are fairly similar in other ways not so much but um I think we were born were you born in 79 yeah so we were born in the same year and one of the major differences that I noticed was that you got into the internet right away and I absolutely did not um you know I sort of I don't think I started really using the internet until I don't know like Myspace but you were involved long before then um and I thought that was pretty interesting because it seems that where you started is in a lot of ways where We've Ended up as a culture and where the younger Generations are um which you know in in various different ways but in in your book you describe like sort of being able to be someone else um you described a feeling of like finding your tribe and then yeah you could sort of you could almost live like a little bit of a fantasy yeah it was well I didn't really like being a teenager um I think that's true of a lot of people but I mean I was I was a nerd most of my classmates were not I you know that's that's that's enough really you know it's the 1990s everybody's into clothes and just being normal and I I was I was reading Nietzsche in the bath and kind of having complicated thoughts and just generally not being happy with life or myself or having a body or just anything really and yeah I I was a nerd um I've been extreme nerd and it was just yeah like the moment I met the internet for the first time I got what it was for and it wasn't just you know the Boomers all think it's they still just think it's like a big library that sits somewhere invisible and that's all you need you can just go and borrow books from the library and they'll or send each other letters and this is great and they don't get that it's a it's it's something it's something else altogether it's a way of moving more of yourself um away from physicality and you know where previously I if I wanted to get away from being in embodied I had to go and read a book and that's just us by definition a solitary thing to do um the internet just does something different altogether it means you're not just you're not just doing the reading in the in the world of ideas you're doing you're doing a lot of the discussion as well and the whole what else besides and yeah I think since I mean I've been I guess I've been extremely online for 20 years yeah For Better or For Worse you know I guess I'm that's given me plenty of time to think about the downsides of that as well as the upsides but in the in that time I've I've seen I've seen a lot of a lot of people follow a similar path towards um finding ways to create selves for themselves which just aren't are only tenuously connected to the Physical Realm and I guess you know for me the sort of big the big moment of Revelation with that came a little bit after my first encounter with the with the internet in the late 1990s um at this sort of early early to mid-naughties where by which time still still a relative minority but enough people had got what it was for the message boards were a thing um and I was I was very involved in a now defunct lesbian Message Board um which was it was mostly centered around London so it still had a fairly strong connection to place I mean it wasn't exclusively there were members from all over the world but it was mostly it was more London based than not um and and there was a little there was a kind of subculture within a subculture on the message board which was very genderqueer in a way which is as far as I can make out pretty much eaten kind of gay and lesbian culture since but it was it was very much a French thing at the time um and and it was it was so interesting because it was a like in in that space people people had selves that were as much virtual as they were real you know we had a regular night that we'd meet up at in this Pub and and people would people would kind of bring their virtual fantasy selves with them but they everyone and politely ignore the difference between who they who they were in an embodied sense and who they were on the internet um and that was that was just kind of part of the game and it felt very playful and very very liberating genuinely liberating you know a lot of these were it was they were all women they're all female I should say most of them most all most almost almost everyone I know from that scene now um who who identified as a who created a masculine virtual self for them has subsequently transitioned um you know most almost almost my entire um everybody I know from that time is is no longer no longer identifies as a woman that is so interesting for you know yeah after for a while after it happened Megan I was like pretty much every woman I've ever dated now calls themselves a man you know was it something I said but I don't I've come to think that it actually it wasn't me I mean it wasn't me at all it was just a thing which was happening and to be honest to be honest you know I don't I don't blame Butch women who do that I honestly don't it's a very difficult social space to inhabit being a very masculine woman and just you know that being the way you're comfortable being in the world and I honestly don't blame them for just wanting to kind of tip the scales a little bit more and just not get the side eyes in the toilets anymore I really don't um even though it's that's a you know I think I think Butch women are beautiful and always have done I think it's a terrible shame um but actually the first time anyone ever called me a Turf and this was long before I've ever thought of myself in that light it was the the then editor of a very well-known British uh lesbian magazine um who with whom I was doing a therapy a psych therapy course and at the time we were talking about gay lesbian identities and I expressed my ambivalence this was some years after I'd left the London lesbian scene and I expressed my real ambivalence about the fact that pretty much every woman I'd ever dated had subsequently I'd you know gone through this gone through gender transition and she called me a Turf and I was like I don't I don't blame these people for doing what they've done but I just feel sad because they're useful and I don't I don't even know if I have a right to say that or Express that but that's that's how I feel she called me a Turf and that yeah a lot of a lot of thought is Downstream of that little exchange I've often wondered what I should have said but anyway well yeah I think I think so much of that my in my observation um it wasn't you know there are social and cultural pressures there as well but but the internet was a real accelerant being being able to create yourself for yourself virtually was it was just of this insane accelerant on for people for whom like being embodied was difficult anyway yeah and I'm I mean I I thought this was interesting when I read it in your book and now even more so since you've you've told me this about all these these people these women who had masculine personas online or whatever you want to call it having transitioned because I think that it seems as though there's a huge part of Internet culture now that's connected to this I can have a whole different it can be a whole different person on the internet which which of course means I can be a whole different sex on the internet and I think for a lot of young people that does mean trans identity and and potentially transitioning yeah well it's I guess one of the thought processes I've gone through and trying to make sense of how we've ended up where we where we are is thinking well I mean you and I got a similar age and we remember the before times like before what James paulos calls the digital catastrophe like the which I some at some point in the book I call it the real Singularity you know the transhumanists are fond of saying oh at some point in around 20 30 humans will meld with machines and will just become one sort of giant super intelligence and I'm like that already happened that happened in 2007 when the smart when iPhones went endemic you know the the human the merger of human culture and and and digital culture is that's a done deal that's like 15 years in the rearview mirror now the singularity already happened but you know what one of the things I've tried to make sense of is what would it be like if if you didn't remember the before times because that's pretty much everyone younger than us now isn't it oh I mean you know to a to a to an ever increasing extent yeah I mean I think like when everyone younger than 25 just has no recollection of a time before um you know doing at least some of your interaction online and I'm thinking in that under those circumstances you would just assume you would just take it for granted that being able to be your digital self um or be to be able to approximate your embodied self to your digital self would be a matter of basic simple Justice you know it's not a this is this isn't some some absurd limit which you're you're an idiot for trying to pursue this is a matter of simple Justice because you've been interacting in this form for since you're a child so you know I'm not surprised I'm not surprised that they look at older people and just particularly older women um you know in whom the the person of the mother you know the the forbidding mother or is just you know they get you know so you know the the figure of the older Turf has sort of become kind of everybody's mum who says no you're not allowed to do that you have to you have to put the have to put the phone down and go to bed and imposes limits and that's just that's just outrageous and so you get this this very complicated very very forgive me infantile rage that gets directed at anybody who says no actually you can't do this and it's not my fault you can't do this this is just I don't make the rules on this this is just how things are yeah I mean there's people become very defensive and you know irate in a lot of ways when I criticize first uh dating apps but also pornography um and you know to me dating apps and it's not just because of my age because a lot of people who are the same age as me get angry at me when I make these criticisms you know I think it has become the norm for almost everybody of course especially the younger Generations but everyone my age too this is just how you date this is how you you meet people and to me there's so many you know really gross things about dating apps um first of all I don't you know I'm in a relationship now but when I have been single like I don't enjoy swiping through people's faces this is not how I'm interested in meeting somebody that's not how I connect with people you know I connect with people in real life I think that's a healthier way to connect with people because you you know often the people that you're meeting in real life are connected to other people that you know um you can read their body language you can make eye contact with them you can have a real conversation with them you can see what they actually look like there's a real it's completely normal and accepted for of course women specifically young women in particular to put filters on everything they post online you know like most of these photos of these young women don't look like well they look in real life and yeah people are just aghast and I think it's just it's become so much a part of people's lives and so accepted it's like this is this is where you meet people this is where you um yeah this is where you start relationships this is where you work this is it this is just it's so intricate inter-integrated thank you I could say it's too late for me but I'm nocturnal so I don't have that excuse um in people's lives and I'm curious to know what you think about the whole dating app aspect of of relationships I mean do you think that they're as toxic as I do well to be honest they slightly passed me by I mean I've been I've been on the shelf for 10 years I mean well longer than that but I've been married for 10 years so yeah I mean the the whole the whole Tinder grinder phenomenon was wasn't it wasn't even really a thing when I when I met my husband um but oh I'm gonna but I'm I'm possibly about to say something radioactive but this is a thesis that I've been speculating on um about the sub the metoo phenomenon which describes you know uh I think of as a fairly unavoidable dynamic between men and women you know like sex happens power is sexy and like those situations where attractive young women are around powerful men are always and forever going to be dangerous because they always have been right so that's my basic that's my sort of Baseline premise and my my theory is that a lot of a lot of the the metoo anxiety and anger and also a lot of the kind of related anger about some about so-called Street harassment is Downstream of dating apps because there are no long people are no longer habituated to encountering sexual tension in the wild it's just not not normal anymore like yeah I mean I can remember the before times and I can remember sometimes being approached by a by a horny stranger on the street you know I don't I didn't didn't love it then and I I'm I'm middle-aged now so it doesn't happen now anyway um but but that's just something you know For Better or For Worse that you learn to navigate um and if dating apps are a thing it just doesn't it sort of it takes that entire you know in a sense your own you only ever encounter sexual tension or you've become accustomed to the idea that you only ever have to encounter sexual tension in a situation where which has pre which has been sort of pre-tagged with the possibility of sexual tension [Music] um you know you're only ever you're only ever flirting with people with whom you've already kind of pre-agreed by virtue of having you know arranged a date with them that flirting might be a possibility and there's never ever ever that moment of finding yourself talking to a complete stranger on a bus or some random location where suddenly you realize they're looking at you in that particular way and you get you get that feeling and I think I think there's a huge amount of anxiety particularly for women because they're the you know every every woman you know from puberty onwards knows what it's like to be the object of male sexual attention like in that way and it's and it's I think if you're just not accustomed to that um it's frightening and you know and when you when you meet men who have no boundaries it's frightening in any in any case um but but I think it's I think I think dating apps have actually made that worse because they've sort of colonized it and returned it into an industry in a sense yeah one I mean dating apps are very much connected to pornography not just in the way that women have to self-objectify and it's just a very superficial means of interacting well you're sort of turning yourself into an Amazon a product listing on Amazon aren't you I mean I've done digital marketing you know I did various kind pretty much every sort of marketing there is and you know I've I've spent time uploading products on Amazon whatever um you know you're packaging yourself in exactly you use exactly that mindset when you create a dating profile um because as you say you have to sort of you have to self-objectify everybody you know not just not just women but um inevitably particularly women and you you think of you you have to think of yourself as a product in order to in order to stand out from the crowd so I sort of feel like the difference between that and only fans is a different there's a difference of degree rather than kind you know the the the hinge moment is the arrival of dating apps as such not the arrival of only fans that just introduced a checkout stage um yeah that's a great way of putting it um I do you still do you identify as a feminist yeah definitely I mean I still I still care about women's interests and I still think they're often sidelined um I've just found I've just had a lot of questions since since my late 20s about what that what constitutes women's interests yeah I think that yes I think we've had sort of a similar trajectory in terms of our feminism and and criticisms of feminism I mean one of the things that I found interesting that you wrote about was the the appeal of you know the appeal of getting rid of gender sort of from I never was super into Judith Butler when I was in college last University um partly because I think she's a really bad writer and I could never really understand what she was talking about only only the academy could could yeah I don't think anybody could understand yeah the the the ultimate superpower now is to be able to do theory in plain English and almost nobody can when you meet somebody who can it's absolutely absolutely just radioactively powerful but Judith Butler is not one of them no but but I mean I did I did spend a long time as a young adult and probably into you know part of my 30s my early 30s um thinking that gender was entirely a social construct and the idea of getting rid of gender entirely or like gender fluidity kind of thing was interesting and liberating and it wasn't until relatively recently that I realized that that was um not really realistic and maybe not so desirable yeah yeah I think it's it's a it's an appealing fantasy um the idea well the the idea that gender as a social construct is an appealing idea um because it suggests that we could just somehow magically do away with a lot of things which are genuinely often frustrating and annoying um you know to be to be perceived differently based on physical attributes that you can't really do anything about is genuinely in some situations frustrating and annoying and that goes both ways but I think it probably women are probably more at the sharp end of it than men for all manner of complicated reasons um so so yeah I mean it's I can see why people wish that it could be done away with particularly when you get into the the violent or degrading ways that women are perceived differently to men just by virtue of physical features that they didn't choose however um it's it's an appealing it's an appealing fantasy that in my view only holds because of how technologically advanced we are generally um it's a it's an illusion based on based on living in a high-tech Society you know the fact that you could even imagine it possible to do away with that gender could be a social construct is itself a social is itself Downstream of Technologies which make it possible to live as though there are no differences between men and women I mean if you you take away you take away all the labor-saving devices and you you stick everybody back into agrarian work and you'll see men's work and women's work um emerging pretty much instantaneously I mean you still you can you even even within a high-tech Society it's only really possible to imagine that gender is a social construct if you do the kind of work which involves you know driving a spreadsheet or you know pushing paper you know there are no there are no campaigns for trash collection to have greater female representation there's a reason for that you know you you watch those guys working and it's hard and you have not a lot of women trying to get under the oil rings right there's not a lot of women trying to get onto the oil rigs there's not a lot of women trying to get into trash collection and and because that work is physically arduous um you know I see the guys coming down the street with the behind the behind the bin Lorry and they're they're ripped because they're running behind a lorry that's moving at sort of you know four four miles an hour constantly and they're dragging these heavy objects around and like you know there might be a few women who could do that but would they want to um probably not if we could avoid it I imagine um so so there's this there's this real kind of unspoken sort of class element to the idea that we could just do away with gender that completely ignores just how many physically arduous and often dangerous jobs are done by the sex which is almost always stronger and you know there are plenty of there are plenty of aspects of sex male sexed difference which the the gender critical feminists are funder of talking of but I I think the you know the fact that men are also more more likely to be violent and then you know all manner of other all manner of other things um but but yeah I think physical strength is is a factor in manual work um which means that you know imagining that you could do away with the differences between the Sexes is is a luxury belief as Rob's Rob Henderson would say yeah it's a it's a it signals your your up your upper class status imagine that you could do all over that yeah yeah I've read I've read some of his stuff um and I think that it's quite good and in you know what you were just saying in in this idea of sort of doing away with the idea of gender scenes like an elitist belief which sort of flies in the face of you know I always rejected that accusation that feminism was this Bourgeois politic um but in a lot of ways modern feminism is I mean it's sort of not rooted in reality all the time anymore absolutely um one of the an interesting vignette in in a book by a great friend of mine Erica bakayoki who's a legal scholar um I think really serves to underline this I wish I could remember the the specifics of it but it's a it was a court case in the early 20th century um it was a legal battle in one of the states over whether or not there should be sex specific workplace regulations and there were feminists on both sides of the argument and this is this is what I find so interesting you know there were on the one side there were on one side there were feminists who were looking at the situation of um working-class women in factories and saying well of course we need you know we need different regulations in the workplace for men and women because women are women of less physically strong they need they need more breaks you know sometimes they get their periods or they get pregnant and you know if you're talking about working on an assembly line for 12 hours a day you know you have to protect women differently because on average they just are different and on the other side you had feminists who were who are who are looking at the situation of Bourgeois and perhaps more like themselves in in an office context and saying no we we absolutely cannot have different regulations for men and women because that will that will structurally disadvantage women in knowledge work um they'll structurally different that will the disadvantaged women in the workplace because they'll be discriminated against because everyone will assume they're less able to do a desk job which self-evident well which ought to be where they properly to be treated the same and it was the it was the Bourgeois side it was it was that side that won which I think is is a is a story that's been repeated in slightly different context again and again and again since you know there are women who are feminists who are looking at the embodied situation of people in context men and women in context where material reality can't be avoided um lose out again and again and again to people men and women to feminists in situ who who exist in contexts where material reality can be avoided and so then well one of the subtexts to you know sort of internal struggles within feminism is really about a much bigger much bigger picture phenomenon which I think has played out all over the world in political contexts which will you know well beyond feminism which is about is kind of like a victory of the the virtual of the of the of idea over physicality and of people who work with materiality um the defeat of people who have to work with the material world by people who just work with ideas if you like the sort of financialization of everything but and when you when you apply the same sort of dematerialization dynamic to feminism you get this idea that actually biological biological sex is a social construct and we can just dissolve it by saying so and material reality doesn't work and which is which is fine perhaps if you work in a museum or you're in a University Administration because the guys you're around are probably fairly well behaved and you know relatively unlikely to be sex offenders but it's a whole other ball game in prisons which is you know it's a context that you know you and I will be very familiar with you know having having tracked this issue for a number of years yeah and I mean there's obviously another way where women and men are quite different and I think that you you write about this in your book also you know the way that having a baby really changed yeah your feminist politics it did I think that in my my belief that gender is a social construct um just hit the wall at that point and a lot else besides yeah my my whole liberal Paradigm pretty much hit hit the buffers at that point um because that that's this is a this is a paradigm that we've taken more or less for granted increasingly since the beginning of the modern era which which asserts that you separateness is the default condition of people and that what a person is um you know as a sort of basic premise for everything that we do and everything that we seek and desire as the good is everything that we are is radically separate to begin with I mean this goes all the way back to Hobbs and lock and Russo um but it's it's just less possible to be that if you're a woman well certainly it's less possible to be that if you're a mother than it is if you're a if you're a man you know and Russo kind of said the quiet part out loud all that time ago you know he explicitly excluded women from his his vision of liberal personhood you know he thought we should just be kind of charming Supply charming and compliant support humans um you know we should be there to kind of look pretty and raise the babies and and let let the real people get on with personing um yeah obviously you know women have had plenty to say about this since and a lot of a lot of the trajectory of feminism since has been about saying no hang on we we get to be women are people too you know that's a that's a common it's a common phrase um that you that you hear amongst amongst women in the women's movement is so no this is you know obviously where people too you know and how how dare you suggest otherwise or imply otherwise but the trouble is if if you're so if you're asserting that women are people and your basic Paradigm for what a person is is radically separate then you're you're what you're what in effect you end up doing is is making mothers invisible you know at the level of your metaphysics at the level of your philosophy um because the moment you become a mother you're just not a person in that way um because you're just not separate from your baby in that way and pretty every mother I've ever spoken to will tell you this you know it's yeah but I got a beautiful email yesterday from from a mum who I'm trying to think how she put it she's the way she described it um she said it's like if if one of your ex one of your internal organs is now is suddenly separate from you and but it's it's completely you can't you can't not take care of your internal organs you know it's an existential necessity so when your baby is hung it's not it's not like oh yeah I want to look after my baby or oh I love my baby it's not as it's more basic than that it's like this is this is a part of my body and I will die if I don't look after it because it's a part of my body um um and and that's I mean the only time I've ever crashed a vehicle in many in two decades of driving was when my baby was screaming in the back because she was hungry and I just couldn't think um you know um yeah it's it's a and and that and going through that experience you know having pretty much bought into the whole you know to be a person is to be atomized to be a person is to be autonomous you know that's what being a person means um you know then to find myself just not quite a separate person from from this little dependent infant who had completely scrambled everything that I thought was true and I thought well if this is if this is what it's like being a mother and that means and being if being and if being a mother means not being a person in that sense then how if if feminism has taught me that to be a person is to be autonomous but now I find I'm a mother um I no longer seem to be a person in that way what does that imply about what feminism is telling us about motherhood and that kind of sent me down you know from from there I ended up down a whole whole series of rabbit holes about the the blind spots within the women's movement and you know having having gone having having kind of scouted around you know the sort of Pop feminism magazine feminism and fun nothing really to nothing really to counter you know what I was what I was seeing I ended up going going further back and thinking has this always been true and and actually it's not if you go back to the 19th century which is very underrated period in in the women's movement um I I started I started looking at I started looking at what what women were saying there about about what it meant to be well you know about what being a woman was you know and even pre the suffragettes you know there's this incredibly Rich history of women trying to engage with um with with what it means and and to add to advocate for women's interests and from there I came to the conclusion that um we're looking we're looking at the whole history as as things stand from where we are now we're looking at the history of feminism on the other side of our of us of a victories an ideological Victory that's so total that it's almost impossible to conceive of what happened before then in terms other than those those that have been set by The Victors it's like if you imagine if you imagine the other side had won World War II and we'd look at all the events prior to that completely differently because the winners would have written a different history book um so and I came to think that that's what I was looking at in the history of feminism was you know an entire historiography that had been written by one set of victors and from there I came to the conclusion that up until about the 1960s there had been this real back and forth between the feminism of care and the feminism of freedom and these were two polls in women's experience and what women were trying to advocate for in our in our in what what constitutes women's interests um which had emerged out of material changes that came with the Industrial Revolution which just completely transformed family life so that work and home no longer happened in the same place anymore you know it posed very specific problems for women like you know if you're if what you're doing is producing food and tending to animals and maybe weaving you know processing raw materials into Goods for the family in a medieval productive household you know work and family are pretty much the same thing um you know you're economically active but you can be a mum at the same time because it's all just it's all just one it's all just the work right but um you know when work leaves the home and it becomes something that happens in a factory or an office that's just not possible anymore and there were so many and women had to you know family life had to adjust and that threw up problem political problems for women you know because on the one you know they were they were actually they had less economic agency in you know as housewives in a context where they couldn't own property and they couldn't divorce and they and and they no longer had an economic leverage because they weren't directly productive so in situations where they where their husbands didn't treat them well they it was a problem so you know that set off the whole you know the demand for for property ownership and the demand for the franchise and you know all of which was totally justified at the time um because they found themselves with a set of Legacy cultural and legal structures which just no longer no longer fit um where where Bourgeois in particular found themselves and there was and so of course they responded by with political mobilization you know and rightly so but then on the other side there were also Bourgeois women who who who thought actually what what ought to happen was um a defense of the defense of the domestic realm so maybe maybe like economic productivity had drained from Domesticity but care was still important you know children still needed looking after and and so that you get this whole Cult of Domesticity as it's contemptuously called by the side that won in this argument the the historiography that you read more recently of of 19th century women but I see I see The Cult of Domesticity um you know the cult of the Bourgeois housewife is straightforwardly a type of feminism it's just a subtype of feminism which doesn't read as such now because we we don't think of the home as something that could be a site of um feminist of what value for women it's that that's almost Unthinkable now it's not viewed as a place where you can gain power or status um you know quite quite the opposite and I completely internalized that when when I was young you know it was it was unimaginable to to think of yourself as um you know to say oh I want to be a mum when I grow up is just you know to say I'm a feminist and I want to grow up to be a mum people be like what what that makes no sense yeah and I'd say that's probably still true yeah I mean I certainly internalized that I did grow up thinking that uh being a mother was oppressive that being a wife was oppressive um that you know I never wanted to have kids and I still don't want to have kids um and I'm very happy and I've I've noticed that there is a sort of Chad wife slash conservative slash anti-feminist backlash right now that is that says that women who claim that they don't want kids are happy without kids are lying and they actually are empty inside and that's not true for me but I also realize that of course the reality is that most women do want kids like the best fast vast majority of women do want kids and I think I think the tread wife well the one thing I would say I'd say about tread wives is that they're nowhere near tread enough they're not trying the problem with tread lives is they're not tried enough what they want to do is go back to Bourgeois 19th century Domesticity and we don't live in the industrial era anymore so that's just not going to happen so it's just it's just kind of and I think they should be going considerably further back not to like the 1950s or the 1850s but something more like the 1450s where women where we were women and men work together in productive households and actually you know for all that I'm quite down on technology in a lot of ways remote working actually makes that possible now to for some people at least um and and I think for those people who can do that it's a worthy goal to try and bring family life and and economic life back together and I know but I know of families where we're both both Partners work and they have kids and they and they balance um spending time with kids around you know a portfolio career that's partially home based and and that seems to me a to be a totally workable and really potentially thriving um way to do family which is just isn't Trad wife as such at all yeah that's a good point and I mean the reality is of course that women do want to be around babies and there was this part of feminism that said women actually don't want to be like straddled with babies like they want to have the baby and then they want to get right back to work and I don't think that most women want that I mean and my dad for the baby is bad for the mom like in my observation that's almost almost never true I mean there have always been some women who don't want kids right you know that's that's that's observably true even even before the industrial era you know if you look at the convents in if you look at the conference in the Middle Ages I find I wish I could remember the source but I found a statistic which suggested that actually a significant proportion of these women came from the upper classes um and my hunch is that these were bookish women who just preferred the life of the mind and they figured they realized that they had a straight choice between the life of the mind and it being being able to read books and be left alone and being a mum and they were like you know if I if that means I have to give up sex then whatever I'm just gonna go to you send me you know pack me up and I'll go and be a woman of God and you know it's it's another you know it's maybe not an ideal solution from the from a modern perspective but if if actually all you want to do is like do botany then you know in the in the 1450s it's probably you know it's probably your best option so so yeah I mean I have and I certainly don't think it's the case that the only archetypes available to women are like maiden mother and Crone you know you mean you've got you've got Priestess and witch for but you know the the Priestess archetype is not a is not a maternal one there are and there are other there are countless others too and I think we have to make space for that and we have to honor that but you know the the demographics which I'm interested in is yeah the slippage between the number of the number of children women say they want to have in the number of children women are actually having is a very sad slippage because consistently women say they want two plus kids and consistently women are not having two plus kids and some of some some of them get all the way out the other side of the of their fertile years having never planned not to have kids I think you know well while we we absolutely need to honor those those women who just who are just not up for it um there's a there's also a subset who end up not not having not becoming mothers who for whom that's very painful I mean just just anecdotally in my in my immediate Social Circles you know it becomes pretty obvious from your mid-30s onwards that if you know if you know a mother who has only one kid who's like school age um you don't you don't ask them nosy questions about when they're having another one because usually that's a that's a sore point yeah yeah I I have the same experience um I think that's partly because I came from a sort of urban I came from an urban area where people are not religious and I think those kinds of communities are places where women tend to wait a lot longer to get married and have babies and the sad truth is that women have been told that they can wait and it's not true not true that's not true I wish I got started sooner um you know I'm I feel I feel blessed to have reached escape velocity at all you know given her completely just not in that place I was in my twenties and how totally sketchy just everything everything about me was in my 20s I feel very fortunate to have ended up in a in a in a stable happy home with with one child but I I often wish I'd started sooner she's six she's six and I'm curious to know how your views of relationships in marriage has changed I mean did you start off I when I was younger for most of my adult life like honestly until maybe two or three years ago I was very anti-marriage and I thought that marriage was inherently a patriarchal institution I'm not particularly interested in Marin so it didn't really matter to me that much personally but I was judgmental of women who got married and you know now I could kind of go either way again it doesn't really matter to me but I don't see it as like an inherently impressive space no I don't I don't think marriage is inherently impressive I mean it's it's some it's an institution whose meaning has changed a number of times over the Millennia that we've had it um I mean I'm I I will I'll say explicitly that I'm I won't talk about my own marriage because it doesn't just belong to me um it belongs to my husband as well and and his privacy is is a big part of you know respecting his privacy and his boundaries is is an important part of um you know playing playing my part in that relationship so I'm I'm very sparing about um about details from my own relationship but but I but for me personally um I found it life-changing and just I'll paraphrase my cousin actually who wrote to me just after we got married my husband and I not not me and my cousin obviously Amber uh my husband well shortly after my husband and I got married my cousin who's a few years older than me wrote to me and said congratulations and it's it's so I'm so happy to hear that you're married and and she described how for her it was such a nice relief it was like a weight had been taken off her shoulders and now you know now they'd agreed that that was just it um she was like no I can plan you know you don't have to think about oh if we're going to be together and you know can we can we you know are we gonna are we gonna are we gonna do X Y and Z you just know that's it in perpetuity so you can make long-term plans and you and thinking of yourselves as a as a collective as a household and I've come to think from personal experience and you know sort of in in the light of those very wise words um that that the way to think of it is not as a as something which is either trapping men into being beta bucks providers like the manosphere imagines or you know trapping women into domestic drudgery as the as the very anti-marriage feminists think but if you're if you're doing it right then you you go all in and because you've agreed that it's a covenant and that's just it in perpetuity your team from there on in um you it becomes an enabling condition for for a completely different way of living it's a kind of like it's a sort of radical human scale communism like the only the only form of human scale communism that I think actually works you know where you really can't just share everything um and the moment you start treating it as a trade and there's this again from you know every couple goes through this when you have kids and suddenly you have you have a third party that depends on you or you need to work together um if you think of oh you know I did last night and you're going to do this night oh it's your turn and you're not pulling your weight doing this and you're not you know that's a that's a common feature of adjusting to being parents is you know going through that kind of Tit for Tat and that's there is nothing more corrosive to being to that long term um that that long-term communism then then trying to treat it as a as a set of transactions where you have you have to be you have to be optimized you have to be maximizing your maximizing your yield from from your part of the bargain the moment you start treating it as a contract in that sense then the the value which is there and it begins to drain away um but if you're if you can if you can get back to just treating it as a as a genuinely as a genuine kind of all-in micro communism there's there's yeah it's it's like going through a magic mirror into a completely different world um where where you're just not you're you're not you're in a very fundamental sense you're not alone anymore um and the precondition for that is a kind of eradicism very radical loyalty which is quite difficult to attain I think in the in the 21st century when everybody's been taught you know for for hundreds of years that were that were separate by default and it's very difficult to sustain as well but but if you can it's it's life-changing yeah and I'm glad that you brought up the the importance of I I mean I don't it's the waves are sort of an imperfect way to describe feminism but for lack of a better word first way of feminism because it's not really taught anymore you know like I didn't learn it's being canceled entirety modern like young feminists like the third wave they're like oh yeah just just screenshot it yeah white ladies it's nothing and in fact it was the best of all the feminists but they don't teach it in school they don't teach it in University I did women's studies I did a ba in women's studies in a master's degree in women's studies and they did not teach women's if that would have been called women's history right right but it's it's a terrible shame because and I think part of the reason they don't teach it is just because it's illegible from the other side of the from from the other side of the the um the victory of the feminism of Freedom you know which which took place in the 1960s with the transhuman turn if you like the the arrival of the birth control pill yeah um which which just changed everything the birth control pill and then the ratchet towards legal abortion which is about the strongest statement it's possible to make that freedom is more important than anything yeah certainly freedom is more important than care and the obligations you might have especially unchosen obligations to somebody who depends on you you know if it's if it's so important if it's that important that it's that you can that sustaining it even justifies um destroying the life of the potential life of an unborn baby then you know how wherever else you stand on personhood and yada yada it's a very very very strong statement in favor of Freedom over care and and at that point the feminism of care just became something kind of marginal and out the other side of that magic mirror you know the pretty much the entire 19th century argument over what women's interests actually are just becomes completely illegible because you can only see the bits which are about the feminism of Freedom which is sort of Mary Wollstonecraft and definitely Harriet Taylor Mill and definitely Charlotte Charlotte Perkins Gilman um but certain yeah those are for jets but you know the entire so-called Cult of Domesticity is becomes illegible as feminism because that's the feminism of care and it just looks like patriarchal false false consciousness and just propaganda and it's not it's feminism engender stereotypes and gender stereotypes but it's not it's feminism it's just it's just a form which has become illegible I'm glad that you brought up abortion because I wanted to ask you about that I mean I've been told for by pretty much every almost every radical feminist and you know I've been engaged in feminism and the more radical end of feminism for a long time I don't actually like identifying as a feminist anymore because I don't like what that word has become and I don't like attaching myself to labels in general because people try to hold you to certain beliefs as a result but I've been told by you know pretty much all radical feminists that you can't be a feminist unless you support abortion or I should say abortion rights perhaps um and I do support abortion rights I honestly think women should have the right to have abortions whenever they like but I also know many women who either would call themselves feminists or who I view as feminists certainly not you know misogynist certainly Pro women's rights certainly strong women um certainly women who are not trying to oppress other women who are pro-life um who do oppose abortion and I think that's a totally legitimate view um and I'm curious to know what your views are where do I stand um this is something I've really really wrestled with because I came very reluctantly to the conclusion in the course of writing feminism against progress that abortion was the metaphysical Cornerstone of the kind of radical Freedom Obsession which is which has produced amongst other things the transgender movement which is which has now become a very very obviously anti-woman thing at least to my eye I know I believe you share my view you've been canceled repeatedly for sharing that view for many years um and and I've I came very reluctantly to the conclusion that the the legal the hinge moment where where that became where that that Paradigm came to dominate was was the legalization of abortion across the West um and and I I wasn't happy at having come to that that conclusion because I've always you know reflexively as a as a legacy liberal was took the view that safe legal and rails the appropriate way to look at it but I think what my sense increasingly as I as I look around and I look at the arguments now I think what it what abortion means has has begun to change um so how do I how do I put this how do I put this um I really struggled with whether whether to take us take a stance and say no actually we should it ought to be banned um because it's bad metaphysics and it's very and in practice over time it's becoming increasingly clear that it's extremely it's if it's effect it's very anti-anti women metaphysics does it what it does is it entrenches it's the Cornerstone of women's personhood that kind of um the central importance of freedom from unchosen obligations which structurally disadvantages mothers which is to say actually more women than not um so what you're saying is that this the central the central you can't be a feminist unless unless you accept a metaphysics which structurally which renders mothers invisible and I'm like that doesn't that makes no sense um I also think it makes no sense to to say well we ought to be able to flatten the unchosen obligations of our of our embodied selves in this way in the in the pursuit of personal freedom um even at the expense of um radical medical interventions such as ending ending a pregnancy but we shouldn't allow other people who identify as the opposite sex to flatten their sex embodied self differences um in the pursuit of personal freedom in that way you know we can do it like this because feminism we can't do it like that because um reasons to me to me there's a there's a basic incoherence in in being for for abortion and against transgender surgeries because they're they're they're from you know the one the one leads directly to the other in my view so that you know I've really struggled with this as well but um life is messy and I think where it comes to where it comes to pregnancy this is one of those situations where there are really no good Solutions and you just have to pick which set of trade-offs you want um and what I would like to what I what I've the the position I came to in the book was to say I I don't stand with those radical pro-lifers who say we should just bring down the ban Hammer because they tried that in Romania under chosisco and we we've all seen the photos we've all seen footage from the orphanages and just the the horrors that came Downstream of of just bringing down the band hammer I think yeah the the the pill and and sexual Mori is more broadly have changed so fundamentally that even if you bound abortion now um everything without changing anything else all you would do is just make life hell for for women and I I can't I can't stand behind that as a feminist policy but um what I would Advocate and where I think both ambivalently pro-choice and ambivalently pro-life women can possibly come together is to say instead of instead of taking radical autonomy even at the expense of an unborn life as our Paradigm for what women should be aiming for perhaps we could say what would it take to create a world where every baby is welcome in conjunction with his or her mother without without that coming at the expense of her her personhood you know what would it take to create that world and perhaps we could work together towards that um you know that might that might look like better maternity care that might look like um that might look like Crisis more Crisis Pregnancy support that that might look like you know a whole raft of social changes that valorize family life as alongside economic economic agency as an individual is it you know it's and all of which are laudable feminist goals wherever you stand on abortion so that that's really where I'd like to start and and I think there's so much work to be done I'm just working towards that world that we could we can perhaps part the question of you know a final yes or a final no on the medical procedure until they're considerably further towards that goal yeah I mean I think that criminalizing or somehow otherwise just need far too cruel to too many women and girls and actually if you talk to if you talk to any serious pro-life feminists they'll agree with you wholeheartedly on that I mean Erica bakayoki who I mentioned before is a is an active campaigner for life um she's also a feminist who comes originally out of the liberal tradition and also a staunch from Catholic um and and she's she's she's very and if you talk to anyone within within that Community the Roman Catholic pro-life feminists they are they're absolutely not on the same page as the as the guys who just want you know if if you like reaganism with a side order of reproductive sadism like You're a murderer and you have to go to jail you know this idea oh yeah all we need is you know everything everything should stay the same except what women do and and that means just you're you're on your own um you know personal responsibility and apart from that we're just going to have my capitalism and it's all going to be fine you know that that obviously doesn't work and it's and is profoundly anti-women yes itself is obviously obviously the the impact of that you know just placing the entire responsibility for you know what happens when it what for making sure it goes right and then also the the suffering endured when it goes wrong um because there will always be situations where it goes wrong or you know Horrors um um and there's extreme health risks for the mother and baby extreme health risks or you know abusive situations you know these are all well rehearsed um and placing the entire responsibility for that on the shoulders of often very frail and very young shoulders of women who found themselves in extreme or horrendous situations I just just it is that's that's self-evidently just not a not a pro-women position to take and it's and it's very difficult difficult in the extreme for me to reconcile that with the fact that legal abortion is a bad metaphysics which in which at scale in the way it's kind of now being pursued is is producing anti-feminist effects um throughout the culture and my it's it's my it's my sin my heartfelt desire that we can find a way of working towards um a less reaganite less reaganite with reproductive sadism world where where every baby could be welcome um without it having to come at the cost of a woman's personhood I will say that I mean despite the fact that I I do think that women should have the right to have an abortion when they want to have an abortion I also think that the pill has been one of the worst inventions ever for women um Alex Jones is not entirely wrong I mean it's it's it's horrible health-wise like physically it's really bad for women but socially I mean there's a reason why Hugh Hefner loved the pill right is that right I mean it's the it's the original it's the foundation for all the commodification of women's bodies which is common sense you know because it's it it's the Keystone of privatizing sexuality yeah because of you know you can you can realistically make the case underwritten by a technology such as the pill that interrupts normal fertility that sex is nobody's business apart from your own you know whereas previously that just wasn't the case you know everybody around you really did have skin in the game about what you were doing and with who yes if you were female because you know there was a real material pregnancy risk and then the pill comes along and suddenly it's possible for it for for women to have fit for sex to be treated as a kind of leisure activity because that because that that normal condition of fertility has been interrupted and once once it's privatized it can become commercialized you know the the two follow hand in hand absolutely without fail wherever at the moment something is private property it can be leveraged as a as a resource for profit um so so in in the moment the moment sex becomes nobody's business but your own you have a Libertarian defense of the sex industry you have a Libertarian defense of the porn industry and you know all the all the horrors that all the horrors that radical feminists um will will you know rightly rightly denounce you know the the exploitation and the brutalization the degradation that follows from that yeah the the the the the flip side of freedom is always trade you know you can't have one without the other yeah and it's also I mean it's it sells a lie about women because women don't enjoy casual sex as much as men do women don't want to be like men no matter what some women will say it's simply not true and I'm not saying women never enjoy casual sex I mean I've had casual sex I know that it can be fun but I also know that there are way different implications for women in terms of having casual sex and I think for the most part women do get more emotionally attached than men do and there's evolutionary reasons for that right all right I mean my good friend Louise Perry is excellent on this and on the the ways in which it scale the sexual revolution has been a disaster for women you know and she points out that you know the studies of studies suggest that you know for for women in you know for men casual sexual encounter you know they're most likely to have an orgasm for women the child the the likelihood is 10 percent um compared to you know considerably higher something like 60 in a in a in a robust relationship um in a committed relationship and you just think you know so this is a technology which which facilitates the commodification of women's bodies in pornography and prostitution um and and furthermore it it opens up it makes it very much more difficult to say no to sexual encounters with a 10 chance of orgasm and it's psychoactive and it makes you fat and mad and sexist I mean I speak from personal experience here right yeah um yeah I took I took the pill for a for a little while in my late teens and early 20s and I've and after I came off it I was like I never want to do that again yeah that's just that yeah that made me nuts oh that made me crazy because yeah and I went off of it you know when I was like way young in my early 20s and then at some point my doctor pressured me to go back under the pill um because I'd had a miscarriage and he essentially was like well clearly you're too irresponsible and there's no other option and I was I said I was like no I don't like it I don't like how it makes me feel he's like well I'll try this one it'll be different it wasn't any different it was terrible but it made me I was able to tell the difference you know it makes you bloated it makes you put on weight it makes you crazy it makes you have no libido it's completely irrational it's horrendous it's horrendous and I think there are but one of the most encouraging interesting phenomena recently has been is the the growing number of young women who are pushing back against the pill you know having been put on it sort of yeah I gather from women much younger than me that it's pretty routine now they just stick girls on the pill at about the age of 15 just as a matter of course and then some of the some of these young women will get to their 20s and they'll come off the pill and just be like what did you do to me you bastards what did you do to me um because they they've just had a complete personality transplant and and just discovered actually who they are you know having been having been on this incredibly psychoactive substance you know just just so so that nobody would have to so so they could so they could be sexually exploited for throughout throughout their their cutest years without without any negative consequences and they're like buses and not learn anything about their sexualities in the meantime first of all because they're young and they don't really know but because their libidos have been messed up right and they're having casual sex which is not like yeah give them sexual pleasure anyway so they've they've come out they they've come out in their mid-20s you know having you know with having had sex with however many people most of which was probably not very enjoyable and which they probably weren't feeling very horny for anyway um you know with a wagon load of sexual trauma in that in their early twenties you know realizing that somebody was just messing with their brain and like who who actually benefited from this you know for you know que bono here it's not it's not the girls and you know who are pushing back and saying No this is this is just outrageous um yeah I think I I think a feminism a feminism against progress yeah a feminism fit for the 21st century the transhuman century is it starts with a feminism against the pill yeah you know and that's the only way to bring intimacy back into sex is is to bring back the danger um and that I mean this is not a course I advocate for anyone who has poor impulse control for obvious reasons but but yeah I think I I want I make the pro sex case against the pill and I mean the pro sex and pro-intimacy case against the pill for sure I mean it's not it's actually empowering at all um again first of all the physical impact but also again because you know women especially young women should know that casual sex isn't enjoyable this isn't how you're going to learn about your sexuality but most people know absolutely not you know sure there are very loud outliers who have a platform yeah out there that you know there are like just because we don't have your sexual Hang-Ups that's what people say to me all the time right you know on on average no what Megan is saying is true and I'm thinking you know how many how many dodgy sexual encounters would just go ahead and not happen if women had a real material reason to say no you know that that time when it's the end of the evening and this guy's like oh come on just come back for one last you know you'd be like no I can see where this is going and actually you know I'm I'm not and I'm not going to and I don't want to do that either and now I'm just gonna go home and then you know really and then wake up hungover but considerably less regretful than you would otherwise have been yeah I think and and yeah I think the I think the the route the route back out of some of the really unpleasant um degrading places that we found ourselves in collectively as a sexual culture begins with women women projecting the pill and rejecting the idea that we're sterile by default it's interesting I'll let you go soon I know that it's been about an hour now um it seems to me the Third Way of feminism has mostly offered women a lie um you you wrote about polyamory and you know everything from teaching girls that prostitution and pornography is empowering for them you know like it's cool it's cool to be a sex worker it's cool to say I'm a sex worker now I mean whether who knows what that means anymore it could mean all sorts of things from actual prostitution to like I don't know selling a nude photo once yeah I get the impression that most of the people who are you know the loud outliers on this tend to be tend to be kind of college girls who who did Cam work once or twice um that you know it's not it's not the trafficked girls from villages in Romania who end up in the mega brothels in Germany those are not the ones who are advocating for um sex workers work you know they're they're the ones who end up who end up on the other side you know telling painful stories as survivors and saying no actually this this needs to be this needs to be stopped if we can for sure um but that's yeah that's not what third wave feminism is that's not what Third Way feminism has taught young women I mean like the most charitable impression the most charitable read I can give to you know the entirety of that that sort of social justice mindset is that it's what being idealistic looks like if you've drunk the the sort of post like drunk the neoliberal Kool-Aid so deeply that you can't see any way out of that kind of radical individualism and you know actually being idealistic looks like focusum from that perspective you know if you've if you've been if you've been mainlining factorism and reaganism since before since you were a baby and you know which obviously you know anybody in their 20s has you know thatch came to Parlier I was born God and so so that that whole the near Liberal mindset is is just you know it's in the air now and you know these kids have never known anything else um so and you know if you're if you're a genuine the idealistic person and you when you want the world to be a better place that sort of utopian view of you know what what trade could actually be kind of it makes a messy kind of sense as long as you don't try and map it ever onto actual reality or use your eyes or um really think about think about the feedback you're getting when you try these things in practice you know as long as you don't do any of those things it kind of makes sense um but if you if you do try any if you do actually have eyes and um a capacity to to think from observation as well as from principle um it's it's obviously not true you know humans still talks humans still can't change sex we still can't do anything about the fact about the fact that we have that we are our bodies we still can't do anything about the fact that when we get older you know the the filter still isn't my actual face I just I just wrote the column that comes out today about about this this phenomenon last week of all these these these mostly women looking at the looking at themselves on the tick tock teenage filter and crying which I just thought was an is an extraordinary moment you know whether they're sort of encountering their their younger selves and thinking where did the time go but it came immediately after a very sad story about a uh only fans Creator Diana Dietz who's also known as coconut Kitty um who was Notorious for for altering her online images to appear very much younger and if you look at the images themselves they're they're really eerie because I mean she's the the body is is obviously a mature woman you know very beautiful very trim you know very large fake breasts um very heavily tattooed I mean in my experience people who have a lot of Inca saying without saying it that actually they find life difficult that's usually what having a lot of ink means um and so this is you know this is the body of somebody who's been around the block still beautiful but definitely been around the block and then you've got this like 15 year old face on it and the effect is weird but yeah there was a it came out in the news about a week ago that she'd taken her own life um and you know I don't I don't want to speculate you know on something that's obviously just a source of you know she's obviously suffered greatly and you know she'll be mourned by the people she left behind including her kids she was a mother um but yeah there's just something there's something so tragic about the whole story um and the you know these images and what she was what she was doing to get by and the gap between that and obviously who she was in real life and yeah it's just just a just such a yeah really awful and the idea that this kind of thing is empowering it's like well I think that if it were actually empowering free you wouldn't be pretending to be someone entirely different who you weren't which is what all women in the sex trade are doing I mean it's what they have to do yeah so you have you have to keep smiling no matter what it is people are asking for you've got to keep smiling and you've got to keep making happy noises yeah yeah you can't be yourself and the and the idea that there's anything empowering about that and that it's just the same as like being a hairdresser or um I don't know putting packets through a till in the supermarket is the most pernicious lie you know because it's one thing like going to a workplace and it's a whole other it's a whole other ball game when you are the workplace and you're the product or you're the oil or indeed you know you're you're the raw materials for somebody else that has in the surrogacy industry you know you're the product in the workplace and I think you know what was it they talk about uterus transplants now perhaps we could even be the raw materials you know they'll just complete the commodification in women's bodies yeah and turn us just into you know something something like coal which can be a strip mined welcome to Liberation also known as um also known as total commodification yes yeah I'm I'm not a fan um so your book of course is is feminism against progress um when will it be available in North America is it out in the UK it's out in the UK today actually wow congratulations it's publication day for me here it will be available in in North America publication date is 25th of April the publisher is regularly I'm I'll be over in in the US on the most on on the East Coast for uh for about a week in New York and DC um just around around the book coming out yeah I'm excited also very nervous as you can imagine but yeah I mean it was it's super interesting like it's a I I mean it's it's an original perspective for sure I think it's really um important to think about everything that you're you're bringing up I mean some of these things like radical feminists have been talking about for some time and other things I don't know that anyone's been talking about yeah the the cyborg theocracy everybody asks me what I mean by that I'm just like please just read the book because it's difficult to sum up but yeah they we've all we've all been cyborg since we started taking the pill and came to believe that actually our freedom was contingent on um making these Technologies part of our bodies you know I have I have questions about how feminist it is to be a cyborg so like donahara way Donna haraway's observations are correct but I disagree with her conclusions well thank you so much for talking with me it's been super interesting I really enjoyed this time yeah and and congratulations again on the book thank you okay oh my goodness it's been great have a great day and you take care

Channel: Meghan Murphy

Views: 7,400

Keywords: mary harrington, feminism, feminism against progress, female empowerment, reproductive rights, birth control, women's rights, meghan murphy

Id: ipn57IYQIzs

Length: 71min 48sec (4308 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 18 2023