Feminism Against Progress E-Book

Mary Harrington

• Herausgeber: Forum
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 348

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

'An exhilarating read' New Statesman In Feminism Against Progress, Mary Harrington argues that the industrial-era faith in progress is turning against all but a tiny elite of women. Women's liberation was less the result of human moral progress than an effect of the material consequences of the Industrial Revolution. We've now left the industrial era for the age of AI, biotech and all-pervasive computing. As a result, technology is liberating us from natural limits and embodied sex differences. Although this shift benefits a small class of successful professional women, it also makes it easier to commodify women's bodies, human intimacy and female reproductive abilities. This is a stark warning against a dystopian future whereby poor women become little more than convenient sources of body parts to be harvested and wombs to be rented by the rich. Progress has now stopped benefiting the majority of women, and only a feminism that is sceptical of it can truly defend female interests in the 21st century.

Leseprobe

‘Brilliant, bold and beautifully written, Feminism Against Progress is sure to infuriate – and inspire. Mary Harrington courageously articulates a new feminist vision for living together as the human beings we actually are.’

Erika Bachiochi, author of The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision

‘Mary Harrington has written a learned, witty, sometimes terrifying, but always hope-giving book. Recognising that modernity’s “progress theology” has blinded us to the undeniable costs of an individualistic feminism and its relentless marriage to a dehumanising market, she calls for a new birth of care – between women and men, mothers and children, and humans to their humanity.’

Patrick J. Deneen, author of Why Liberalism Failed

‘What a dazzling, radical, hope-filled book! With Feminism Against Progress, Mary Harrington launches herself to the front rank of public intellectuals of her generation. She takes us a great leap beyond the tired categories of liberal-vs-conservative, and gives us a powerful vision of social relations based on her lived experience, the gift of motherhood, and the truth that no man – and no woman – is an island. Part Julie Bindel, part Wendell Berry, the brave Mary Harrington is a true original, and the realistic, compassionate voice we have been waiting for.’

Rod Dreher, author of Live Not by Lies and The Benedict Option

‘Mary Harrington is one of the most courageous and compelling voices of our times. Never afraid to challenge orthodoxy; she is always thoughtful and thought-provoking. Those reading her had better be prepared to be shifted from their ideological comfort zone.’

Paul Embery, author of Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class

‘Mary Harrington understands that human life is embodied and relational. She analyses the alliance between big tech, capitalism and progressive politics that is now dominant. It is essential reading for the left in particular, who are often unwittingly complicit in this cartel.’

Lord Maurice Glasman, author of Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good

‘Mary Harrington is a brilliantly original thinker and a wonderfully engaging writer. Her handling of some of the most hotly contested debates of our time will, inevitably, spark controversy. But no one engaged with these questions can afford to ignore her penetrating insights and intellectual courage.’

Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities

‘Original, fearless and profound, this beautifully written book will change the way you think about feminism, progress and, ultimately, what it means to be human: embodied, sexed and endowed by evolution with needs and desires that are an ever worse fit in an increasingly marketised world.’

Helen Joyce, author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

‘Mary Harrington takes a flamethrower to our most cherished contemporary myths and it just might save our lives.’

Alex Kaschuta, host of the Subversive podcast

‘A brilliant and necessary book by one of Britain’s most important writers and thinkers. Every page offers a new way of seeing an old problem, or an introduction to a new one you might only have been dimly aware of. Any woman – or man – who is trying to negotiate the business of being human in the rising cyborg era needs to read it, and think hard about how to act on its arguments.’

Paul Kingsnorth, writer

‘Sharp, funny, and occasionally shocking, reading Feminism Against Progress is like downing a packet of Tangfastics after a lifetime of gruel. Mary Harrington is a truly visionary thinker.’

Louise Perry, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution

‘This is a bracingly provocative read from one of progressive feminism’s most ingenious critics. You’ll read nothing else quite like it.’

Kathleen Stock, author of Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

Contents

Part One: Memes + Material Conditions1. Against Progress 2. Feminism, Aborted 3. Sex and the Market Part Two: Cyborg Theocracy4. War on Relationships 5. The Devouring Mother 6. Meat Lego Gnosticism Interlude: DetransitionPart Three: Reactionary Feminism7. Abolish Big Romance 8. Let Men Be 9. Rewilding Sex Afterword: Ghost BooksNotes

Part One

Memes + Material Conditions

1

Against Progress

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

Martin Luther King

Losing my faith

What started me down the path towards writing this book was feeling like I wasn’t a separate person from my baby.

Before I had a child, I had no idea how I’d feel once she was there, though I had a dim sense that pregnancy and birth usually does something far-reaching to the emotional landscapes of women who experience it. Even so, the starkness of the contrast between how I’d experienced the world previously, and how I experienced it once my daughter was in my life, still took me by surprise.

It first shocked me physically. Her birth was not straightforward, we both nearly died, and I was bed-bound for a while afterwards. It shocked me emotionally as well. The hormonal aftermath of birth is well known for being an emotional time, but hearing that from someone else is different to riding the rollercoaster yourself. My midsection was held together with staples, while a tiny human I’d carried in my guts for months was now on the outside but still dependent on me for every need. It was, as they say, a lot.

But the story really begins at a point about ten years prior to becoming a mother: the moment I lost my faith.

I was raised to believe in Progress Theology – the more-or-less religious framework that governs much of modern culture in the West. This theology says there’s a ‘right side of history’, and things can go on getting better forever. But one day, about 15 years ago, I realised I no longer believed.

What happened?

I was born the year Margaret Thatcher came to power, and politics turned against the postwar social-democratic consensus. My first political memory is the fall of the Berlin Wall. The reverberations of this event, which was fairly swiftly followed by glasnost and perestroika, marked the decade of my teens profoundly.

For an average middle-class girl, in 1990s Home Counties Britain, all the big battles seemed to have been won, and all the great disagreements of history settled. Progress Theology makes most sense seen against this backdrop, or one very like it, where relative material comfort and safety can be taken absolutely for granted. That then frees up time and mental energy for more rarefied topics such as identity and sexuality. My route into such reflections was via Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which I read in my early teens. Around the same point, I started to notice certain asymmetries in family life. Every day, for example, my mum would cook dinner and set the table, and after we’d all eaten my dad would get up and leave. It seemed to me a clear statement of status: ‘I’m exempt from these petty chores.’

After a while, my two brothers began to follow his example, leaving my mum to clear the table again. This seemed unfair, to say the least. But it also left me with a dilemma. I felt a clear solidarity with my mum, the household’s other female. But I also believed myself and my brothers to have equal status in the family. Should I then assert this equal status by declaring myself exempt from these petty chores, like they did? And if I did, what did that say about how we all saw my mum? In turn, as another female, what did this imply for me when I reached adulthood? That dilemma founded my lifelong interest in feminism.

I had reasons for optimism, though, as well as anger. For if feminism is a body of political theory dedicated to wrestling with just such thorny-yet-intimate questions of power, social order and the proper relations between the sexes, it was also widely treated as a central plank of the progressive story. How could I not believe its capacity to bring about positive change? After all, over the period between my grandmother’s birth in 1914, and my own in 1979, women’s lives changed immeasurably. And it was easy enough to connect that to the larger story of human progress and the fall of the Soviet Union: a fresh reminder that freedom and progress were marching ever on.

The evidence for progress was all around me, for all that my own home life suggested the balance was still not equal between men and women. But, as the D:Ream song declared in New Labour’s 1997 party political broadcast, ‘Things Can Only Get Better’.1Surely things could change – not just out there in the political world, but also in the intimate one of sexed roles in families. Ever greater freedom and equality was our destiny, if only we put our minds to it.

Meeting critical and queer theory as an English Literature undergraduate both confirmed and also radically scrambled my End of History faith in progress. I left school having received a fairly classical education, with a sense that societies and cultures evolve over time, but in a clear forward direction that we can grasp objectively. But at university, I met the postmodern insight that language itself helps to shape meaning – and, worse, that every ‘sign’ can only be defined in relation to other signs.

In other words, we have no way of experiencing truth directly or objectively. School told me I was learning about a stable realm of canonical human culture, built up over the ages. Now this new body of thought used language itself to attack the very foundations of that worldview. What had appeared, at school, to be a reliable framework for making sense of the world, was re-imagined by critical theory as an infrastructure of contingent memes, which is to say ideas aggregated over time. These, I was now told, serve to entrench covert hierarchies of class, sex, race and so on. How all this was meant to relate to the material world, the pressures of survival or the demands of physical life, was less clear. But these were generally treated as also shaped (if not wholly constructed) by the operations of power through memes.

This is all wildly over-simplified, but it’s a fair summary of my takeaway from a whistle-stop introduction to critical theory as a young adult. And the mental shift from seeing the world in terms of stable meanings, to seeing it in terms of power, sent me (to say the least) a bit loopy. Overnight, the hallowed buildings of Oxford University stopped looking like an expression of ancient traditions within which I could find my place. Suddenly they were hostile incursions into my consciousness by something phallic, domineering and authoritarian. I remember describing to a friend how I experienced the ‘dreaming spires’ as ‘barbed penises straining to fuck the sky’.

I wish I could say this paranoid state passed swiftly, but it didn’t. After I graduated, I took this plus the feminism and the belief in progress into my adult life, in the form of a visceral aversion to hierarchies, a fierce defensiveness against anything that felt like someone trying to wield power over me, and an equally fierce determination to make the world a better place. Needless to say, all this made me a less than ideal employee. It also made me willing to experiment widely in how – and with whom – I wanted to live. So I drifted through low-paying jobs, wrote unreadable novels, tried my hand at intentional communities and anti-capitalism and the pursuit of a life freed from power, hierarchy and all limits.

Naturally, this extended to my views on women, which came out the other end of the encounter with critical theory heavily flavoured by it, and more focused than ever on ideology and representation. Perhaps the text along these lines that marked me most deeply was another End of History-era work, Judith Butler’s immensely influential 1990 work Gender Trouble. Here, Butler argued that neither sex (our embodied, dimorphic, reproductive biology) nor ‘gender’ (our social roles, putatively rooted in sex dimorphism) exist pre-politically, but are instead both to an equal extent social constructs. It’s not that biological processes don’t exist, but how we make sense of them is inescapably social, meaning the supposedly clear distinction between ‘natural’ sex and ‘cultural’ gender is in truth muddier than we believe.

For Butler, we ‘perform’ both sex and gender, in a system that’s imposed on us and that we re-impose on ourselves and others by participating in it. As such, while we’re unable to escape it, we can embrace a revolutionary queer and feminist praxis of ‘disrupting’ the diktats of gender from the margins. The aim is to open up greater space for a wider range of gender expressions and roles, unmoored from the stifling impositions of the patriarchal heteronorm.2

From the point of view of a girl who’d spent her adolescence unhappily identifying both with my mother (who looked like me) and with my father (whose status I wanted), Butler’s suggestion that we just set about subverting the whole ugly mess of sex roles, hierarchies and power relations was very appealing, to say the least. This goal also seemed possible, perhaps for the first time, thanks to something else that arrived in mainstream life during the End of History decade: the internet.

I fell instantly in love with the internet the moment we got dial-up, in the late 1990s, and was straight online looking for My People. That instant, deep attraction to the digital world has stayed with me, however ambivalent I’ve since become about the widespread impact of the internet on our culture and society. Online, the intoxicating escape Butler imagined from a ‘gender binary’ freighted with millennia of oppressive hierarchy felt, for the first time, tantalisingly within reach.

After university, in the heady early years of social media, I mutinied against every form of ‘normal’. Thanks to the internet, it was suddenly relatively easy to find others with similar interests; I experimented with drugs, with kink, with non-monogamous relationships. And I experimented with selfhood. Online, I could be anyone. Whiling away the days at the slacker jobs I took to make rent, I hung out among the ‘genderqueer’ cliques in early-2000s messageboards, meeting up with those groups offline too.

Drenched in queer theory and adrift in the endless possibilities of digital culture, it suddenly felt possible to re-imagine our genders in bespoke terms, and to create supportive enough communities to somehow realise our inner lives in the world. We found others of our ‘tribe’ via suddenly proliferating social networking sites, where we crafted elaborate imaginary identities for ourselves while congregating offline at regular meets. Everyone politely ignored the slippage between the two. Online, someone who in reality was a pudgy, moon-faced woman with a buzz cut could be a sleek, suave, debonair Oscar Wilde figure, and everyone joyfully played along. I changed my name to Sebastian for a while. I pondered whether I really was female. It all felt thrilling, liberating, revolutionary and unambiguously like the ‘progress’ I’d always dreamed of.

In my working life, I also found a way of bringing together my conflicting desires for achievement and optionality, ambition and egalitarianism, money and ideals. With friends, I founded a ‘social enterprise’ web start-up that aimed to ‘disrupt’ education the way eBay had disrupted auctions. All of us were Thatcher’s babies: progressive in outlook, but drenched from our earliest memories in the world she created, where ingenuity, entrepreneurship and markets were to deliver the solution to all the world’s ills. We hoped to extend those markets to education, and somehow in the process both make the world a better place and make ourselves a whole lot richer.

Our team was heavy on ideas and ideals, and relatively light on commercial experience, but we still made it to first-round funding. We were even briefly celebrated, in the age of ‘Third Way’ social enterprises, noughties Web 2.0 tech-optimism and boundless progressive conviction, as a Next Big Thing in East London’s febrile ‘Silicon Roundabout’ community.

Like many kinds of revolution, losing my faith happened slowly, then all at once. Every egalitarian commune I drifted through turned out to be full of interpersonal power-games. With hindsight, one likely common factor was me; maybe real egalitarian utopia might have been possible, just without me and my issues. But I don’t think it was just me. Historically, egalitarian utopias have a tendency to disintegrate after a while because they turn out, inevitably, to be not very egalitarian. The postmodern worldview I’d learned at university encodes a deep pessimism about how inseparable power is from human relations at both the large and small scale. My experiences seemed to underline this hypothesis. I found myself wondering: if this really is inescapable, whether as our cultural legacy or a fact of the human condition, does it really make sense to treat power relations as bad? Why not just accept that they’re a fact of life?

Increasingly, too, I found loose, shifting, postmodern constellations of romantic entanglements unsatisfying, and began to long for a more enduring partnership. I’d been sceptical up to that point of the prospect of sustaining such relations over the long term – and indeed of the political ramifications of doing so with a man. Would that not just represent selling out to The Man? And yet, as I inched towards the end of my twenties, a settled home life started to seem more and more appealing.

Then two things happened simultaneously. The start-up imploded (much as in the communes, I was a major contributing factor in said implosion), and at the same moment, so did the global economy, in the Great Crash of 2008. The latter wasn’t my fault, but it punctured my fantasies about reconciling political idealism with an economic ‘Third Way’, in which (as Gordon Brown famously put it) there’d be ‘not stop go and boom bust but economic stability’,3 and about how social challenges could be solved through the creativity and dynamism of markets.

In the course of that simultaneous macro- and micro-crash, I lost my social circle, my career, most of my convictions and the majority of my identity. I’ll spare you the recovery story, except to say it took years to reassemble something like a workable worldview from the smoking ruins of my queer-theory-inflected, double-liberal, anti-hierarchical idealism. By the time I emerged at the other end, I was married, not living in London, had qualified as a psychotherapist and had comprehensively questioned more or less everything I had thought up to that point. And I no longer believed in progress.

People sometimes look a bit shocked when I say this. But why? It’s not self-evident that humans have progressed, in some absolute sense. That doesn’t mean everything was perfect once and we’re all going to hell in a handbasket. But pick a subject, and you’ll find some things are better, while other things have become worse.

If you’re going to believe in progress, you have to define what you mean by ‘progress’. More stuff? More freedom? Less disease?

Pick any subject, and you’ll find that what looks from one vantage point like ‘progress’ mostly seems that way because you’re ignoring the costs. We’ve grown immeasurably richer and more comfortable in the last 300 years, for example. But we did so on the backs of plundered, colonised and enslaved peoples, and at the cost of incalculable environmental degradation. Meanwhile, torture in warfare hasn’t gone away. Warfare hasn’t gone away. Nor has hunger, misery, want or human degradation.

Is this progress in some absolute sense? It’s beyond the scope of this book to try to answer this question; I’ll only point out here that, in order to settle it, you have to define your terms and exclude some costs as irrelevant to progress. And as soon as you do that, you have (as the lawyers say) begged the question. That is, you’ve rigged the game by assuming the truth of what you set out to prove.

Regardless, the world is full of people who really, fervently believe in progress. Martin Luther King famously claimed ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice’, a statement that captures the religious origins of the belief in progress: the sense that we can and must go on getting better, forever. Barack Obama loved the quote so much he had it woven into a White House rug.

In 2018, Steven Pinker wrote a 576-page book that piled up statistics to support his version of progress, which is to say in the terms set out by Enlightenment rationalism.4(He dismisses economic inequality as irrelevant to progress.) More recently, queer activist Jeffrey Marsh expressed the same sense of an ineluctable onward march. ‘Let me tell you about LGBTQ rights,’ Marsh declares in a 2021 TikTok video. ‘This is only going in one direction. You will respect us.’ Like Pinker, Marsh sees some costs as irrelevant, declaring: ‘You can be upset. You can be angry. You can feel like we’re stealing something from you, but it’s still only going in one direction.’

For our purposes here, the key is to notice the underlying structure of belief: that there exists a kind of axis along which progress can be measured, and that we’re inexorably moving along that axis, from ‘more bad’ to ‘less bad’. Confusingly, this is often accompanied by the sense that even though the movement from ‘more bad’ to ‘less bad’ is supposedly unstoppable, it also demands constant life-or-death defence against the forces of reaction. My starting premise for this book is that this structure is a belief, not a fact.

This isn’t an original point. Back in 1991, social critic Christopher Lasch was already asking how progressivism continued to assert such a grip, when infinite economic and moral progress was certain to hit social and environmental buffers in the end.5More recently, legal scholar Adrian Vermeule has dissected what he calls ‘sacramental liberalism’, a ‘lived and very concrete type of political-theological order’ representing ‘an imperfectly secularized offshoot of Christianity’. This quasi-theological regime, he argues, takes as its central sacrament the disruption of existing norms, in the pursuit of an ever-receding goal of greater freedom, transformation and progress towards some undefined future goal of absolute human perfection – that we somehow never attain, and whose externalities are never counted, save as further evidence of how far progress still has to go.6 This is the core of Progress Theology.

I am not a believer in Progress Theology.

Feminism without progress?

If you’ve been wondering why this book has, so far, taken the form of a slightly odd Bildungsroman, it’s because I want to invert the claim made by the feminists of the second wave that ‘the personal is political’, and share something of how, for me, the political is also personal.

For while I’ve lost my faith in progress, I haven’t discarded everything. I still love the internet. And I’m still a feminist, in the sense that I care about women’s interests and think these are often sidelined. Also, crucially, though I have some questions about the direction critical theory has taken since my university days, I’m deeply shaped by some of its insights.

It’s clear enough to me that language does shape meaning, and more broadly, that memes really do help to structure reality. That is, those ideas and meanings that succeed in replicating themselves within culture, over time, really do serve as vectors for power. And we’re all implicated in that system. When earnest academics recite a litany of their ‘privileges’, what’s being gestured at, however clumsily, is a related truth: that we’re all shaped by our particular place in the world. I’m a bourgeois, white, Anglophone woman, living in the developed world, and this structures what I see, and what I consider important – as well as my blind spots. Given all this, it’s not really possible to avoid being roped into the push and pull of power, privilege and violence. Nor is it possible to be wholly objective.

The argument that follows is the intimate result of that personal story. On the face of it, if feminism is inseparable from the progressive story, it would seem impossible to lose faith in progress without also losing faith in feminism. The solution to this thorny problem, as I’ll explain, is that it depends what you mean by ‘feminism’. And my path to this conclusion started some years after my world fell apart in the year of the Great Crash, when I became a mother.

Up to the point where I got pregnant, I’d taken for granted the notion that men and women are substantially the same apart from our dangly bits, and ‘progress’ meant broadly the same thing for both sexes: the equal right to self-realisation, shorn of culturally imposed obligations, expectations, stereotypes or constraints. The experience of being pregnant, and then a new mother, blew this out of the water. I’d bought uncritically into the idea that individual freedom is the highest good, that bonds or obligations are only acceptable inasmuch as they’re optional, and that men and women can and should pursue this equally. Then I went through the wonderful and disorienting experience of finding my sense of self partly merged with a dependent infant.

The kind of absolute freedom I’d accepted as an unalloyed good, pre-baby, was suddenly a great deal less appealing to me than it had been, because I actively enjoyed belonging to my daughter. It was also, obviously, not in her interests to go on insisting that my obligations to her were always optional. Where, pre-baby, I could do more or less what I liked, as a mother I couldn’t very well refuse to get up and feed my crying newborn at 3:30 a.m. just because I didn’t feel like it.

Her interests mattered more to me than anything else in the world, including my once-treasured autonomy. Chewing this mental shift over led me, in time, to read more deeply into the often-conflicted relationship between motherhood and women’s liberation: a debate I discovered goes all the way back to the dawn of the women’s movement in the 18th century. In turn, this led me to wonder: why did we start having these arguments at all? From the progressive point of view, it’s because human society is moving from ‘more bad’ to ‘less bad’, as evidenced by our transition from women occupying subordinate social roles to enjoying relatively equal opportunity in the workplace and in public life. If you take off the Progress Theology goggles, though, does the picture change?

I concluded that what’s usually narrated as a story of progress towards feminist freedom and equality can be better understood as a story of economic transitions: in particular, of the transition into industrial society, and the transformative effect that shift had on every aspect of how men and women live – whether apart or together – including how we organise family life.

I should note that when I talk about this story, I’m talking mainly about the story of bourgeois white women in the developed world. And talking about how men and women meet and form families by definition means my discussion focuses on those bourgeois white developed-world women who are heterosexual. Many feminists from outside this demographic have rightly pointed out that the political and class interests of this group were often (and still are) framed as a universal women’s struggle, when they were nothing of the sort and in fact sometimes outright inimical to the interests of women in other demographics. If I’m choosing this focus, it’s because it’s still routinely framed as the story of feminism, and because (in terms of what feminism achieved in concrete political terms) those class interests still dominate. Those class interests are still being advanced under the banner of ‘feminism’ – to the growing detriment of a number of other groups. None of this, however, should be taken to imply that there are no other available, useful or important lenses on this story.

The inception of feminism is the story of men and women adjusting to market society, and particularly of women’s response to the asymmetrical impact of that society on areas of our life in common that have historically been women’s domain: that of care and the household. From the earliest days of feminist debate, a clear tension is visible between efforts to escape the domain of care, for an equal share of individual autonomy – Team Freedom, if you will – and efforts to defend and valorise that domain of care – Team Interdependence.

Women’s response to industrial modernity negotiated a tension between individual freedom from the ways we’re shaped by our biology, and woman-centred accommodation by both sexes of our embodiment. But the more recent history of the women’s movement is also the story of coming out the other end of industrial modernity. The hinge moment for this transition was the emergence from the industrial era of still newer material shifts, with equally transformative effects: reliable birth control and digital technology. And this debate ended in the 1960s with a conclusive victory for Team Freedom, thanks to the mastery granted to women over our bodies via reproductive technology.

Since then, mainstream feminism has morphed from a movement with both communitarian and libertarian strands, to one focused almost entirely on individual freedom, imagined as the property of functionally interchangeable ‘humans’. The pursuit of ever more complete freedom from the constraints of biology has extended to viewing as feminist an individual’s right to adopt the stereotypical ‘gender presentation’ of either sex, according to personal preference, and for all purposes to be treated as his or her chosen sex – or as neither sex. That is, an effort to extend ‘equality’ and ‘freedom’ to the fundamental fact of sex dimorphism itself.

For Team Freedom, this is a logically consistent feminist stance. You’ve probably guessed by now, though, that I’m not on Team Freedom, or at least I have questions about how indisputably pro-women the effort to transcend our sexed bodies in favour of a genderless ‘human’ state really is. (Reflecting my position, in what follows I will wherever possible use ‘men and women’ rather than ‘people’ for the simple reason that, as Norma Swenson pointed out,7 no one has ever seen such a thing as a ‘human’ body. Just male and female bodies.)

We’re increasingly uncertain about what it means to be dimorphic in this way. But when we socialise in disembodied ways online, even as biotech promises total mastery of the bodies we’re trying to leave behind, these efforts to abolish sex dimorphism in the name of the ‘human’ will end up abolishing what makes us human men and women, leaving something profoundly post-human in its place. In this vision, our bodies cease to be interdependent, sexed and sentient, and are instead re-imagined as a kind of Meat Lego, built of parts that can be reassembled at will. And this vision in turn legitimises a view of men and women alike as raw resource for commodification, by a market that wears women’s political interests as a skin suit but is ever more inimical to those interests in practice.

What we call ‘feminism’ today is for the most part this worldview, the Team Freedom one, which should more accurately be called ‘bio-libertarianism’: the doctrine that legitimises the vision of men and woman as Meat Lego, and which is taking on increasingly pseudo-religious overtones. This doctrine focuses on extending individual freedom and self-fashioning as far as possible, into the realm of the body, stripped alike of physical, cultural or reproductive dimorphism in favour of a self-created ‘human’ autonomy. This protean condition is pursued ostensibly in the name of progress. But its realisation is radically at odds with the political interests of all but the wealthiest women – and especially those women who are mothers.

In turn, this pursuit of technologically enabled liberation, underwritten by a medical guarantee of freedom from motherhood, has formed the centrepiece of a war on relationships of all kinds that has accelerated radically since the digital revolution. This has, since the 1960s, compounded an advancing process of social atomisation under liberalism whose endgame will have far-reaching consequences – particularly for women, but more broadly for our ability to survive as functioning polities. And the replacement of relationships by individual desires has everywhere been mediated, encouraged and glorified by digital media that have moved swiftly to colonise and monetise our every individual longing – even (or perhaps especially) at the expense of interpersonal connection.

This whittling-away of every relational understanding of identity has, in conjunction with new biomedical technologies, reopened the question of what it means to be a person. Are we, as Hollywood has long told us, whatever we dream ourselves to be? Online, you can be; today, new branches of elective surgery are springing up filled with the promise that you can re-skin not just your digital avatar but also your meat avatar.

Some feminists have embraced this as a positive opportunity. But if liberation for everyone means the radical separation of selfhood from embodiment, what does that mean for those who have to stay embodied? Who cleans the toilets? Who births the babies? Recalling the dilemma of my adolescence, who does the dishes? Team Freedom is galloping us at full speed towards a putatively liberatory cyborg future; but while trying to mitigate our natural limits seemed to be – and perhaps was – in women’s interests during the industrial era, as we enter the cyborg era it is increasingly obvious that this is no longer the case.

The endpoint of a three-century struggle for ‘progress’, understood as individual separateness, has culminated in a political effort to eliminate all meaningful sex differences through technology. Though conceived of as an idealistic project, in practice this largely serves corporate interests. And it dresses in feminist garb a commercially driven effort to deregulate all of human nature, which will enslave our minds in digital fantasies even as it monetises our bodies via biotech. And notwithstanding the hopes of ‘radical’ progressives and cyborg feminism, a howlingly dystopian scenario can’t in fact be transformed into a dream future just by looking at it differently.

Another way

So what might it look like to pursue women’s political interests in practice, when we stop squinting desperately at dystopia through Progress Theology goggles, and ask instead what those interests might be in terms of where we actually are now? We’ve inherited a set of memes from the long 20th century that connect feminism firmly with freedom. And we’re taking those memes into a set of material conditions in which technology is rapidly expanding the scope of what we have the ‘freedom’ to attempt. The product of that is a fusion of once-emancipatory ideas with new technologies and commercial interests that calls on us to pursue the fantasy of an abstract ‘human’ body all the way into a post-human social order.

Resisting this means pursuing not untrammelled freedom, mindless hedonism or the final victory of one sex over the other, but a broader project of staying human together, as men and women in the cyborg era. To this end, we’ll need to reckon with some of feminism’s unpaid debts, and to take more of a realist stance on where the limits to individual freedom really are. We are all, perhaps, liberated enough. It’s not just women who need a freedom haircut; it’s everyone. And it’s my hope that we may be able to mitigate some of the negative side effects that may otherwise accrue from our effort to scrape the barrel of freedom long after its best fruits have been exhausted. We can do this by taking the initiative on where and how we set about constraining ourselves, in ways that are overall in the common interests of both sexes.

The first of these must be reinstating single-sex spaces. And this isn’t just to protect women from predatory men; men, too, need social spaces where they can do whatever it is men do when women aren’t around. More broadly, we need more realism than is even found among ‘gender-critical’ feminists, concerning how and why we place limits on making social settings ‘gender neutral’.

Women can further shape how we live together in the rubble of absolute freedom by challenging the centrality of abortion and birth control to our sexual culture. This isn’t so we can make some absurd pretence that women are all high-minded virgins who never get horny, but because there are well-documented asymmetries in how men and women view sexual desire, and sexual access, along with the obvious asymmetries in the male and female reproductive roles. Medical technologies which eliminate those asymmetries physically haven’t also done so emotionally, and many women suffer at present less due to constraints on their ability to say ‘yes’ to sex, than for lack of a reason to say ‘no’.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. Our assent to this regime, and these medical interventions, is voluntary. The most powerful weapon at women’s disposal for defending ourselves against the undercounted cost of supposedly ‘empowering’ hook-up culture is making sex properly consequential again. And I suspect many men would prefer a robust ‘no’ from a self-possessed young woman un-neutered by progesterone and in command of her own reproductive cycle, to being resentfully #MeToo’d or hectored on TikTok about toxic masculinity. By thus reclaiming human sexuality as something that men and women govern together as part of our common life, we can begin to claw the power of sexuality back from its current jaded, affectless role as low-consequence leisure activity or mere marketing tool. And we can reclaim it instead as one of the most profound and beautiful mysteries of our common humanity.

The third plank in a reactionary feminist programme is the post-romantic case for marriage, as against the industrial-era vision of that institution as a vector for self-fulfilment. The cyborg era calls on us to re-imagine marriage as the enabling condition for radical solidarity between the sexes, and as the smallest possible unit of resistance to overwhelming economic, cultural and political pressure to be lone atoms in a market. Households formed on this model can work together both economically and socially on the common business of living, whether that’s agricultural, artisanal, knowledge-based or a mix of all these. And this is an infinitely better setting in which to be a mother than trying to ‘have it all’ on the 20th-century model, even as the 21st is busy dismantling your family for parts. In other words: it’s an essential precondition for the sustainable survival of human societies – and will become more so if the world continues on its present trajectory away from the kind of 1990s-style End of History stability towards something more volatile.

Our biggest obstacle is an obsolete mindset that deprecates all duties beyond personal fulfilment, and views intimate relationships in instrumental terms, as means for self-development or ego gratification, rather than enabling conditions for solidarity. This radical reordering of women’s politics, women’s priorities and even our bodies to the interests of the market, in the name of ‘freedom’, has racked up a growing mountain of uncounted costs and unpaid debts. As the mother of a young daughter, I look at that growing mountain of deferred repayment, and the growing chorus of resentment from groups that gather outside feminist filter bubbles, and I worry about her future should we face the ideological equivalent of a subprime crisis.

My aim in writing this book isn’t to stuff feminism back into its box, as if such a thing were even possible. I’ve no wish to be banned from voting or working, any more than I want my political agency to be subsumed into that of my husband. In any case, those policies make no sense today. But sex continues to be politically salient, even if you take off the Progress Theology goggles. We’re shaped in part by memes: our culture and habits concerning how to live. And we’re also shaped by material conditions: our economic circumstances, the wider political world, and also our sexed nature as evolved animals. But contra the Prophets of Progress, neither memes nor material conditions necessarily evolve, as Jeffrey Marsh claims, ‘only in one direction’.

Even if, as I suspect, we’re past Peak Progress, men and women will continue to exist, and certain basic facts about us will remain true. Most of us want children; most want a life lived in common, usually with a member of the opposite sex; same-sex-attracted men and women exist, of course, but heterosexuality is still the default. Humans can’t change sex. The shape of our bodies still matters, despite everything the modern world has done to minimise those disparities. And even as the industrial era recedes in the rear-view mirror, we’re not powerless. We don’t have to stumble blindly into an age of technological upheaval with a worldview shaped by a set of industrial-era memes that are now making everything worse. Other futures are possible, as well as the cyborg one. But just as we have in the past, we can and must once again re-evaluate how men and women can be human together.

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Feminism, Aborted

The endeavour to keep alive any hoary establishment beyond its natural date is often pernicious and always useless.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Interdependence Day

After I had a baby