In my first post (here) on Mary Harrington’s (2023) Feminism Against Progress, I focused on her views on the family and suggested that not unlike Yoram Hazony (in his (2022) book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery), she rejects the patriarchic ‘nuclear family’ embraced by American, Christian-ethno-nationalists. Instead they both defend what they call the ‘traditional family,’ which in Harrington’s argument involves commitment to joint projects centered on home-based work and family. As she puts it, “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.” (p. 21)
There is also an important contrast between Harrington and Hazony. As Hazony recounts in Chapter IX, “Some Notes on Living a Conservative Life” of Conservatism, rejection of the morality of abortion as a student was a major pathway into a more conservative political orientation for him. This does not seem to be the case for Harrington (who notes that abortion plays out differently in the US and the UK). Harrington’s transformative conversion moment (rejecting ‘progress theology’) seems to have been much later in life during her sense of isolation in a commuter town after a near death experience in giving birth (pp. 3-4; 24; 27-28).
Harrington treats abortions as a necessary, albeit regrettable by-product of the sexual revolution. On her view legalized abortion is to some degree inevitable once relatively secure contraception like the Pill is available. For, on her view, this makes casual sex massively more likely. And because contraception is not full proof, it makes many more unwanted pregnancies likely.
She is quite pragmatic about abortion, and its politics:
The downstream effect of making birth control widely available has been de-stigmatising extra-marital sex; abortion serves as the material backstop for that change in social norms. Banning the backstop would not put the broader changes back in the box. (p. 170)
As this passage hints at, Harrington is against the Pill (and Big Pharma). This is not a mere idiosyncrasy, for it ties many of her arguments together. She thinks the Pill is a victory for a social world-view that sets women against their own bodies — the “radical project of tech-enabled emancipation,” (p. 149) — that promotes for-profit practices where there should be none, and that reinforces fluidity about our bodies (“meat Lego”) more generally. This worldview favors autonomy and rootless freedom and devalues care and embeddedness.
She views the Pill as poisonous for women’s bodies, for natural ecology, and social ecology.
The Pill is an ecological catastrophe on an immense scale, thanks to the literal poisons it leaks into the water table. And after 50 years of its reign, the figures are in: its effect on the delicate social ecology of sexual relations has been every bit as bad. The Pill plays a central role in opening the door for a host of figurative poisons, which have percolated into every facet of our intimate relations. And on both ecological and social fronts, bio-libertarian feminism simply chooses to look past these side effects, because progress means individual autonomy at any price. (p. 208)
In her telling the sexual revolution failed on its own epicurean terms. Rather than unleashing sexual pleasure, it generated massive amounts of mostly bad sex that is, more often than not, unwanted. (Here Harrington echoes some of Audre Lorde’s views on the sexual revolution.) The way Harrington explains it, this is due to the fact that (i) in virtue of the Pill it became socially unacceptable to decline sex for single women (p. 211); (ii) drawing on Louise Perry and Harry Fisch, she claims porno has ruined “the capacity for mutual pleasure.” (p. 210)
As my insertion of Lorde implies, Harrington is not alone in having qualms about the sexual revolution among feminists. But the more standard feminist hesitation about it is shaped by the observation that the sexual revolution preceded economic and other forms of material equality, and so ended up simultaneously glorying (and mutually reinforcing) women’s subordination and pleasure. (This is an argument I have ascribed, for example, to Manon Garcia’s interpretation of De Beauvoir in We Are Not Born Submissive.)
By contrast, Harrington briefly hints at the argument that pornography is a form of sexual violence (but primarily to note that Andrea Dworkin lost the ‘sex wars’ (p. 65)), but does not connect it with women’s subordination nor patriarchy more generally. (While repeatedly emphasizing “material conditions,” she never engages MacKinnon.)
Crucially, this is because while Harrington repeatedly emphasizes differences in physical strength between the sexes, she rejects the idea that sexed economic, legal, or political inequality is a fundamental cause of these phenomena. Harrington (who presents her own backgrounds as “an average middle class girl” (p. 4)) allows that women’s material interests lag at the very top, “highest-status” professions and very bottom social rungs (“where mothers are compelled by economic necessity or the pressures of career to return to work two weeks post-partum” (p. 131)). As I have noted before, she sometimes pays lip-service to more global inequality and subaltern criticisms of ‘white’ feminism.
But her main arguments are structured around the claim that in “knowledge-based” areas of the economy and material equality, women have achieved de facto equality. This shows up in claims like, “female knowledge workers are unlikely to be confronted, in the course of working life, with any stark contrasts between their ability to perform professionally and that of their male peers.” (p. 150) But also in her larger, more sociological tinted arguments:
The elite of the United States today is increasingly female dominated…the institutions that set and manage social and cultural norms – such as education, media, law and HR – are all increasingly female dominated. Female law students outnumber male ones two to one. Women outnumber men in journalism. Seventy-five percent of nonprofit workers in the United States are female, and the UK proportion is nearly as high, at 68 percent.
Such workers are chiefly graduates, notably from the arts and social sciences – subjects where women outnumber men two to one in the UK and which lean strongly towards a progressive worldview. And if the disproportionately female graduates of disproportionately progressive elite liberal arts courses, who then disproportionately make up the nonprofit seor, have seized enthusiastically on a set of moral principles and institutional changes that downplay the role of biological sex in a way that benefits elite women overall, so a second key terrain for the contest over the political salience of sex dimorphism is corporate HR. This is the division of the business world tasked with managing the acceptable social (and, by extension, moral) parameters of everyday working life. Sixty-three percent of UK HR workers and over 70 percent of those in the United States are women. (pp. 151-152)
On Harrington’s account, then, credentialed women’s material success is both shaped by and, more importantly, fosters a conception or ideology (a term she uses) of the functionality of the Pill that emphasizes women’s self-control and autonomy and embraces fluidity of identity (including gender and sexual identity [as before, I am skipping over my strong disagreement with her on trans issues]), but that in reality alienates women from their own bodies and structurally devalues motherhood and care (especially maternal care). As she puts it: “Side effects of this generalised desertion of interdependence in favour of freedom include widespread loneliness; abuse of the elderly and disabled in care homes; substandard childcare; family breakdown; and the well-documented disadvantage experienced by children in one-parent families, such as greater risk of poverty, reduced life chances, and adolescent mental health issues.” (p. 50)
As I hinted in my earlier post (and as the readers at CrookedTimber noted), when Harrington turns to her own positive vision it is not entirely clear who will care for the elderly and disabled in her account, because her conception of the home-based family seems to focus on joint projects centered on parenting and (managing a portfolio of) work. And while taking some material inequality in the household for granted and as unproblematic, her vision does involve a change in social norms on the Pill, divorce, and motherhood. (Presumably porno, too, but I don’t recall any explicit suggestions.)
It’s not explicit she would be willing to ban the Pill, although it follows naturally from her account which is very critical of the intersection of markets and technology in re-shaping human nature. (She ignores potential medical benefits from use of the Pill.) She studiously avoids suggesting, which otherwise would follow naturally from her analysis, more welfare programs and infrastructure policies centered on supporting motherhood and its care-work. (In mainland Europe such policies used to be associated with Christian democracy; but they became unpopular when they entailed supporting Muslim families.) Rather, when it comes to explicit public policy (as distinct from voluntary changes in social mores) she seems to advocate more restrictive divorce laws, while denying that she is “arguing that anyone should remain in a violent or otherwise abusive relationship ‘for the sake of the children’. The case against easy separation isn’t a case against every separation.” (p. 185) But the details are left unclear.
Interestingly enough, while she implies that abandoning the Pill will improve the sex lives of couples, her vision of marriage is not centered on mutual pleasure. Rather, “it’s absolute, unshakeable loyalty.” (p. 186) This idea of loyalty. also frames her otherwise puzzling distinction between a contract and covenant: “if you want to pass through the looking glass into a world beyond the marketisation of everything, you have to treat your miniature commons as indissoluble: not a contract but a covenant.” (p. 185) Marriage should be a “post-romantic covenant.” (p. 188)
The rejection of pleasure, Big romance, Big Pharma, and even “emotional fulfillment” (p. 188) is surely counter-cultural in our age. She does so in order to promote “companionship, belonging, solidarity, and children.” (p. 188) She believes such a program will make motherhood “less grueling” and lonesome (p. 188). With the rejection of the fluidity associated with markets, there is, also lurking in her program an argument for a certain kind of assortative mating; to be continued.
- An earlier version of this post was published at digressionsimpressions.
{ 59 comments }
Tm 08.14.23 at 8:29 pm
You said this in the first part already but it’s not clear from your account how Harrington‘s family concept „rejects“ the nuclear family. You stated that her family is not multigenerational, so how is it not a nuclear family?
Doctor Science 08.14.23 at 8:45 pm
I am deeply confused by Harrington’s terminology & thought, at least as you’re reporting it. Waving aside the cisheteronormativity, doesn’t she realize that married women need access to reliable contraception (I assume that’s what she means by “the Pill”) and abortion?
Harrington treats abortions as a necessary, albeit regrettable by-product of the sexual revolution
Harrington needs to listen to more people talk about late-term abortions, about rape, about abuse. The kind of abortions she seems to be thinking about are birth control failures, and the solution is NOT to restrict birth control. ffs.
I’ve recently been reading a range of studies of pre-20th c family structures in a variety of places/times/cultures, and almost everyone deliberately limited family size … one way or another. How does she imagine this should, ideally, be done?
A “traditional family” which combines family & work functions would be economically less efficient than current structures, which let each individual do work that suits them, and to switch jobs with some independence of the other adult(s). What Traditional Families give, of course, is much more scope for controlling personalities & abusers, because their victims have fewer avenues of escape.
Tm 08.14.23 at 8:55 pm
My other question is this: Harrington‘s claims, as presented here, are so divorced from reality (female HR workers represent the „elite of the United States“, single women never refuse sex, contraception leads to more unwanted pregnancies etc.), her moral and political judgments so bizarre and incoherent (and thankfully unpopular): why should we take any of this seriously or even pay attention to it?
bekabot 08.14.23 at 9:44 pm
“why should we take any of this seriously or even pay attention to it?”
I used to ask myself the same question, but that was before the same set of moral and political judgements, or something close to them, denuded classroom shelves and shut down school libraries all over Florida.
superdestroyer 08.14.23 at 10:05 pm
Harrington focus 100% on hormonal pills without no mention of IUDs or any other form of birth control. Of course, Harrington describes using birth control pills is turning oneself into a cyborg. Of course, he does not mention whether implanted pace makers, defibulators, insulin pumps, or implanted sleep apnea device.
Is part III going to be about Harrington’s red hot hatred of surrogacy?
steven t johnson 08.14.23 at 10:24 pm
Harrington is yet again represented as someone who doesn’t understand that owning family property holds families together, which emphatically includes traditional families most of all. Wealth is an incentive for loyalty. Companionship in traditional marriage seems to be very much like romance in courtship, requiring many expenditures. Of course traditional families also gave children away, fosterage being a way of fostering an alliance of families. (Perhaps those children should be thought of as hostages?)
In addition, most people don’t have careers, they have jobs. A politics that only addresses careerists is of doubtful relevance to a genuine analysis of politics and society. Nor does it even concern itself with the majority of people, male or female. Success in any event also includes the acquisition of income-generating forms of property which both heightens male/female disparities and divides the female population against itself.
Are women really denied inheritances by wealthy parents?
Traditional families in any case very much included marriage as family alliance. That is embedding all right, but it’s not clear why anyone would defend that. It is especially macabre to complain about bad sex because of the Pill/porn and similar excuses.
Retroactive birth control by infanticide, purportedly accidental mortality, giving away excess children (aka foundlings) are similar methods used in traditional families. Putting excess women into nunneries, pressure on widows to remain celibate, ditto. Perhaps the most common form of birth control in traditional families was the celibate wife delegating sexual services for the husband to prostitutes. Of course to a certain extent high infant mortality “solved” the problem of excess children. But it seems to me a perverse misreading to assume the increase in child survival wasn’t the driver for birth control. Having children for social security or an unpaid agricultural labor force is very much a traditional families thing.
Anti-sex is so common it is hardly worth commenting upon. It seems it should be assumed. Women competing with men is perhaps no more conducive to romantic or matrimonial love than sibling rivalry? The occasional perfunctory claim of respect for sex work appears to be much more about endorsing the great moral principle, freedom is the right to buy anything you can pay for it, then do what you want with it.
Ray Vinmad 08.14.23 at 11:15 pm
TM–I am with you.
It’s just a fantasy. It’s a fantasy about the past–that humans were more fulfilled in certain traditions. Perhaps they struggled for survival more, women had fewer thought to their own needs because they had to keep many children alive. So less discontent! Let us re-discover the glorious past.
We don’t know if the past was better. There aren’t many reports from women, because cultures disabled this possibility for women. Certainly, men and women lived under threat of informal and formal sanctions, so their sexual choice wasn’t free. We certainly cannot execute these options that SOUND better to this writer without extreme coercion given the options exist now.
We also can’t go back to the past. There’s a reason things changed, and it wasn’t because some nefarious ideologues lured us into their house of candy. Fundamentals of how we live change. We don’t need most people to work farming the land, and producing many children as a labor force. Maybe climate change will break down supply chains and we will again, and they can try this utopia.
It’s notable that under any more traditional system women were kept unfree by the threat of rape. Their choice to submit to some men is self preservation. So how do you create a system where women aren’t required to submit to men? How can it be feminist if you don’t have such an option? But if you have such an option, women will exercise sexual freedom unless we truly go medieval and give women convents to escape to.
Does she have an account of how we shut down the freedom we now have that doesn’t involve violent coercion for women’s own good?
Most of what the sexual revolution really is, is a lessening of certain penalties for having sex. Yes, it’s disruptive to expectations that were created when these penalties were present. Coercive measures can promote a regularity of behavior that some people prefer. The question always is–why should their preference dominate others? Is there some moral justification?
Her answer seems to be –people don’t know what is truly good for them. But I know. This is a common strategy. The problem is –how do you get people to see that?
This part is never very nice. ‘Maybe if we reinstate the penalties people will see it.’ This, I doubt because you can’t erase people’s knowledge that the penalties are arbitrary.
Merely referencing feminism doesn’t make it feminist.
The backlash isn’t a reason to take seriously these kinds of views. You can’t meet extremists in the middle. They don’t want half the pie. And there are facts at issue.
MisterMr 08.15.23 at 12:20 am
“in virtue of the Pill it became socially unacceptable to decline sex for single women”
I’ll try this line in my future dates.
Jokes apart, this might make some sense if she means that a woman in a relationship, but not yet married, cannot tell to her partner “wait for the honeymoon”. Is this what she means or she literally means girls can never say “no”?
Also the idea that porn is a modern invention is quite weird.
bekabot 08.15.23 at 7:24 am
“Perhaps the most common form of birth control in traditional families was the celibate wife delegating sexual services for the husband to prostitutes.”
That’s interesting. I never thought of that. So if, at a certain level of society, housework is accomplished by handing it off to other people and if at a somewhat higher level of society childcare is accomplished in the same way, it’s also true that within a certain sector of society, birth control is managed through the same kind of swap, except that the designated pinch-hitter is a hooker instead of a maid or au pair or nanny. I suppose that once you fasten on a useful expedient you don’t let it go. Interesting, like I said.
MisterMr 08.15.23 at 8:34 am
@steven t johnson 6
Perhaps the most common form of birth control in traditional families was the celibate wife delegating sexual services for the husband to prostitutes.
Maybe this is true, but the wording you used is problematic IMHO.
Celibate wife isn’t really a good term, nor is virgin wife, so perhaps sexually restrained wife?
Plus, women also want sex, whereas “sexual services” makes it sound like it isa chore. Was really the wife’s choice to send the husband to prostitutes?
It seems to me that we are importing excessive cynicism about marital relationships if we just assume that there is never love, sexual desire, and often emotional need of a partner.
If people didn’t have emotions and desires, everything would be flat and there would be no point of speaking of oppression or similar ethical concepts.
Girls do actually dream of finding a prince charming, and actually bang him to boot. If we skip this point the whole argument becomes a bit too abstract IMHO.
J-D 08.15.23 at 8:48 am
When you are dealing with somebody who is acting as a shill for a three-card-monte mob, it may be important to pay attention, but it is certainly important not to direct your attention in the way that the shill is trying to get you to direct it. In this context, there is a serious threat and serious attention should be paid to it, but the overt content of Mary Harrington’s utterances is not serious and should not be treated as if it is, since that will only result in your being distracted from the threat.
To apply this more specifically to one example, it isn’t important how people feel, individually, about the Pill, but it is important how people feel about the idea of its being banned, or access to it being restricted. That Mary Harrington doesn’t explicitly commit herself on this point, or others like it, is confirmation that, so far as the surface content of her statements goes, she isn’t serious. Somebody who talks negatively about the Pill but who neither commits themself to supporting a ban nor explicitly disavows any such idea is being either duplicitous or dense and should only be responded to accordingly.
bekabot 08.15.23 at 9:38 am
“so far as the surface content of her statements goes, she isn’t serious”
With respect, I disagree. A person who isn’t serious can do as much damage as a person who is — maybe more.
Duplicitous people can cause as much harm as honest people can — once again, maybe more.
Let’s say Mary Harrington doesn’t want to ban the pill, or won’t acknowledge that she wants to ban the pill, or whatever. Fine. But my question would be: what prevents her from acting as a cheerleader-cum-attitude-coach for the people who do want to ban the pill? (Or whatever?) When did dishonesty ever preclude influence? For myself, I can’t remember a time when it did.
TM 08.15.23 at 11:42 am
J-D: “it is certainly important not to direct your attention in the way that the shill is trying to get you to direct it.”
True. That’s why an actual analysis of Harrington’s positions and goals might still be interesting.
Jake Gibson 08.15.23 at 1:52 pm
The only reason to take Harrington seriously is that some others apparently do. It almost seems that she is thinking backward from Feminist as a mistake. And trying to design a way to repair what she sees as a “mistake”. Like most reactionary authoritarians she is looking for a way to convince/coerce people to live in a social organization that has been widely rejected.
J, not that one 08.15.23 at 5:40 pm
I might hold my nose and read her if she was going to tell me anything new about her side. But her citations seem facile and her personal anecdotes are withholding and abstracted. She’s an extraordinarily ungenerous writer or else an extremely arrogant one. And it isn’t clear she has anything to say about either the US or the UK, because she’s obviously unfamiliar with the one and rarely draws on present-day circumstances in the other. This is a book by someone who wants to be taken as an Authority (on both the world and her own younger self) but there are a sea of similar writers who are better at what she does and therefore more reliable.
If she’d decided to write a memoir or a novel she might have something to say. But her apparently newfound conservatism according to her includes a principle that “loyalty” precludes personal self-exposure.
Every time I ask myself the questions from the OP about what her policy preferences would be, I wonder if she believes it’s not a woman’s place to have any.
A Person Who Remembers "Safe, Legal and Rare" 08.15.23 at 6:02 pm
I guess it’s good to know that the Slut Who Lives In The City And Just Fucks Whoever She Wants For Fun And Gets An Abortion If She Gets Pregnant is not just an American cryptid, but haunts even the minds of English people. This mysterious figure has never been recorded on camera or spotted in the wild by even the most assiduous searchers, but crawls through the shadows of the minds of millions. Grown men and women, on the left and right, of all political backgrounds and persuasions, even those who don’t believe in Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster or Santa Claus will suddenly, without warning, belch forth some kind of deranged statement about feminism, the Pill or abortion that betrays their deep seated fear of this awful beast. You can show them carefully collected statistics that despite easy access to contraception, teens and young adults have less sex now than in the 1950s, you can show them facts and figures demonstrating that states with better access to contraception have happier families that stay together longer. They may even agree with you for a moment. But in the dark recesses of their soul, where the real work of belief and faith goes on, they know, they know, they know to a certainty she’s out there. Somewhere.
DCA 08.15.23 at 6:10 pm
What’s quoted here suggests that most of what she writes consists of Proof by Blatant Assertion.
steven t johnson 08.15.23 at 9:32 pm
tl;dr
bekabot@9 The estimates for the number of prostitutes working in societies dominated by traditional families, is quite high. The example of “Victorian London,” according to Google ranges from 8 000 to 80 000. So far as I know, no one has even wondered how many married women contracted syphilis or gonorrhea from their husbands, which suggests that such relations were no longer an issue for the marital couple. Of course, much of the activity was conducted by men who couldn’t afford a wife. But then I believe that what people tell themselves about how things are and what things are, aren’t the same thing.
The real point was not how many wives were consciously reconciled, something I couldn’t know. I do know that the endless variety in people means some wives preferred to delegate the dirty work. The relevant point re Harrington was that the tradtional family was a social arrangement characterized by significant large scale prostitution. Regardless of how few consciously acknowledged and accepted this social arrangement, husbands and unmarried males resorting to prostitution was part of the traditional family as it was, not as Harrington pretends it was.
MisterMr@10 I admit to being behind the times, but the notion that marriage is oppression is like double predestination: Maybe unfashionable , but never disavowed and usually a permissible reading of the subtext. It’s not clear to me that “Penetration is degradation” is not a very widely held feminist principle. It is after all the defining characteristic of rape, no? In popular culture, the male gaze is the sexual gaze but the female gaze is not.
No one, no one ever objects that polygyny is intrinsically unequal because the wives cannot ever receive equal “service,” meaning polygynous marriage contracts are therefore unenforceable (absent assuming equity in the women sharing the burden, but that contradicts the premise of wives wanting sexual services.) And by the same token, no one, no one ever argues that polyandry is equitable for the wife, precisely because sexual services are pretty universally regarded as being, from women to men and never the other way around.
If anyone wants to object that the shocking variability of human personalities means that, however inexplicable it is, some women will be so perverse as to “want” sex for the act itself, I can only say, that is likely to cause cognitive dissidence in such unfortunates. Sometimes I think some mildly “conservative” women are reluctant to avow themselves feminists despite being avidly in favor of equal pay, equal opportunities, social services for families, for the choice of contraception (which necessarily includes abortion) and a whole host of other feminist goals, is a discomfort with those parts of feminism that seem to require a repudiation of heterosexuality. Avowed feminists who use the term “patriarchy” to refer to men, regardless of the fact that not all men are fathers nor are all fathers “patriarchs,” are apprently using it as a covert synonym for penis. (It’s something like “lizard people” or “adrenochrome pedophiles” being used as covert synonyms for Jews.)
This last reminds me that since authority is rooted in personal experience and I don’t have Marry Harrington’s experience, everyone really should take Mary Harrington seriously.
nastywoman 08.16.23 at 4:19 am
@
‘I guess it’s good to know that the Slut Who Lives In The City And Just Fucks Whoever She Wants For Fun And Gets An Abortion If She Gets Pregnant is not just an American cryptid, but haunts even the minds of English people’.
Yeah!
and that’s why I LOVE and always LOVE to visit my besty friend LONDON!
J-D 08.16.23 at 6:19 am
I expect you’re disagreeing with somebody, but it isn’t me you’re disagreeing with.
I don’t think I suggested otherwise. Three-card-monte mobs do a lot of damage. That doesn’t make three-card-monte a serious game, though, and it doesn’t make the patter serious either.
Exactly so. You’re agreeing with me, whoever it is you may be disagreeing with.
It might be worth finding out what her actual positions and goals are, but I dob’t think you’re going to achieve that by taking what she says at face value.
bekabot 08.16.23 at 3:03 pm
“Three-card-monte mobs do a lot of damage. That doesn’t make three-card-monte a serious game”
I’m not suggesting that three-card monte is a serious game; all I’m saying is that the damage contingent on a non-serious game can be serious in its own right. When the damage is serious (even if the game isn’t) the damage deserves to be taken seriously.
“it doesn’t make the patter serious either”
Ditto non-serious patter. When and if it’s meant to incite a mob it can lead to serious trouble despite its own lack of gravity or coherence.
“You’re agreeing with me, whoever it is you may be disagreeing with.”
Okay, but in that case you seem to insist on drawing a strong distinction which doesn’t have much bearing on your real argument. (I might be wrong.) So I’m puzzled.
J, not that one 08.16.23 at 5:19 pm
“It’s not clear to me that “Penetration is degradation” is not a very widely held feminist principle. It is after all the defining characteristic of rape, no? ”
No.
bekabot 08.16.23 at 7:38 pm
“It’s not clear to me that ‘Penetration is degradation’ is not a very widely held feminist principle.”
It’s not very widely held feminist principle. Even Andrea Dworkin held it more in the breach than the observance. If you think about it for a minute you’ll see why: since practically every biological woman alive is going to be penetrated in some way during her lifetime, if only by a doctor or a tampon, saying penetration equals degradation comes perilously close to saying there’s something innately disgraceful about womanhood as such, which is exactly the sentiment feminism hopes to counteract.
Lynne 08.16.23 at 8:09 pm
Bekabot @23 A feminist writer (Australian, I think, but the name escapes me for the moment) suggested using the word “enclosure” for sexual congress, rather than “penetration.” Recognizes that the woman’s role can be as active as the man’s.
Could the writer have been Dale Spender? Decades since I read her.
John Quiggin 08.16.23 at 8:39 pm
I looked briefly into the idea of the “nuclear family” as a modern innovation, and it seems as if multigenerational families have never been the norm for Western European societies and their offshoots. It used to be more common to look after aged parents, and well-off households once included live-in servants, but that’s just adding a few electrons to the metaphor.
As for “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.”, this was true of farm households for a long time and remains so to some extent. But the Industrial Revolution destroyed cottage industry.
Knowledge-based work has always been done primarily outside the home. WFH is changing that, so it’s quite feasible now for two knowledge workers to share a home workplace. But they will almost certainly be working on different projects in different organizational settings.
steven t johnson 08.16.23 at 9:08 pm
J, not that one@22 ““The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/blog/updated-definition-rape#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20penetration%2C%20no%20matter%20how,the%20consent%20of%20the%20victim.%E2%80%9D
But yes, I was only thinking of penetration by male parts, but didn’t think to actually write that part. Pardon the unclarity, please. The additional point about consent is problematic, as women are always afraid for their lives ( “…. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” Margaret Atwood, who is not an extreme feminist ideologue, a position mostly monopolized by Andrea Dworkin and Valerie Solanas.) It is entirely unclear how there can be meaningful consent when threatened.
bekabot@23 The legal definition doesn’t imply the male sexual organs are defiled by the penetration of the woman. (The gender neutral phrasing is a legalism, this means penetration of women by men.) If anything it means the opposite, that the dirty thing is the man’s. Obviously it is incontestable that some people willfully misread. But in popular language, to be penetrated is to be f…. Men who are penetrated are widely despised as victims—or even worse perverts who enjoy being degraded—because they are degraded and that has nothing to do with saying there’s something disgraceful about womanhood. The equation of homosexuality with toxic masculinity seems to be a rising thing, see The Power of the Dog which made a very big splash for its ideas.
At this point I should observe I’m doing my best to guess widespread popular attitudes. I do not have the access to the feminist literature, the time to absorb it or possibly the nous even if I did try to guess the au courant positions in the advanced feminist movement. I’m working from a baseline where feminism is not a leftwing movement and any woman favoring suffrage for women, abolition of couverture, the right to divorce, the right to wear pants without being accused of being in drag, careers open to talent, maybe even equal pay, count in my mind as some kind of feminist. I’m trying to estimate attitudes and implicit principles in ordinary people more similar to me. (I’m afraid yes, I do think there are non-feminist women, even a few anti-feminist women though they are for some reason pretty rare, in my eyes at least.)
So I defer to the advanced feminists on what they say is the prevailing opinion in advanced feminism.
J-D 08.16.23 at 11:23 pm
Sorry. Is there anything you would like me to do that might help to reduce your puzzlement?
Alex SL 08.17.23 at 3:57 am
This all very confusing and partly incoherent. It reads more like somebody rationalising backwards from their conservative emotional preferences than somebody reasoning towards a positive vision. What Tm wrote summarises it well.
In mainland Europe such policies used to be associated with Christian democracy; but they became unpopular when they entailed supporting Muslim families.
I am originally from mainland Europe, and I have no idea what this is about. There is xenophobia and racism, of course, but to the best of my knowledge welfare and infrastructure policies, be they to support motherhood or not, fell victim to the same neoliberal ideology in mainland Europe as their equivalents did in English speaking countries.
TM 08.17.23 at 8:28 am
OP: ” She studiously avoids suggesting, which otherwise would follow naturally from her analysis, more welfare programs and infrastructure policies centered on supporting motherhood and its care-work. (In mainland Europe such policies used to be associated with Christian democracy; but they became unpopular when they entailed supporting Muslim families.”
Alex 28: “I have no idea what this is about. There is xenophobia and racism, of course, but to the best of my knowledge welfare and infrastructure policies, be they to support motherhood or not, fell victim to the same neoliberal ideology in mainland Europe as their equivalents did in English speaking countries.”
Not clear what the OP is referring to but welfare policies supporting parenthood and care work are still and increasinlgy popular in mainland Europe. Paid parental leave is available in most of Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave#Europe_and_Central_Asia). Originally it was only for mothers. The extension to fathers has been more recent. To my knowledge, neither neoliberalism nor racism have called these policies into question.
Child benefits are also popular. In Germany, parents receive 250 Euro per child per month from the state. Originally this was a pronatalist policy introduced not by Christian democrats but by the Nazis (it doesn’t work that way; nobody decides to have children in order to get paid 250 bucks). Racists certainly resent foreigners, even Muslims, benefiting from such generosity but the policy has never to my knowledge been called into question.
Infrastructure policies probably refers to state subsidized child care facilities. Neoliberals are in principle in favor of those because they increase female labor participation, whereas the Christian democrats used to be opposed. Harrington is probably opposed as well.
engels 08.17.23 at 11:14 am
My impression is the right in Europe is generally pro-natalist; only in Britain does it have the genius combo of:
-hating immigration
-hating working class people having children
-hating high wages
engels 08.17.23 at 3:14 pm
Stephen Johnson’s critique appears to be directed at boomer feminism, which saw heterosexual sex as bad because it was inherently similar to BDSM, prostitution and pornography, which has been superseded by millennial feminism, which sees heterosexual sex as good because it is inherently similar to BDSM, prostitution and pornography.
Scott P. 08.18.23 at 2:58 am
And by the same token, no one, no one ever argues that polyandry is equitable for the wife, precisely because sexual services are pretty universally regarded as being, from women to men and never the other way around.
To the extent this exists, it is culturally determined. In both Greek and Roman society, for example, it was taken for granted that women were the more promiscuous sex, and the wife who needs constant sexual gratification at the expense of the worn-out husband who reluctantly complies is ubiquitous. Marriage was considered necessary to keep women from straying, although it was widely felt that, among elite women, the presence of so many non-elite males within the household made this something observed more in the breach than in realithy.
Tm 08.18.23 at 11:25 am
Stj, Engels: Always fascinating, the bizarre views some people (usually men) ascribe to feminism.
steven t johnson 08.18.23 at 3:02 pm
Scott P.@32 so far as I know is correct that ancient Greeks and Romans did tend to claim, mingling prurient fantasies and distaste I suppose, that women are voracious. At this moment in history they are arguing nothing, though.
But I’m not sure how representative Ovid was, it seems likely to me that Augustusm who banished Ovid, was politically astute enough to correctly assess the majority opinion in respectable Roman society. So far as I know, one of the most despised sexual practices in ancient Roman society was cunnilingus. That seems to me to genuinely express the belief that women’s parts are intrinsically filthy. Conventional wisdom of any sort is always certain it is universal and dissent is unthinkable, even trolling. But it seems to me that the variety in personalities is matched by a variety in opinions….and finding a truly self-consistent thinker is like Diogenes with his lantern?
Judging from Augustus’ actual legislation, it appears to me the exhausted husbands were exhausted from recreation with younger and thus more desirable slaves. And the “elite” wives were not exhausted with child bearing, which for so long was a common side effect of sexual congress. I’m not quite sure who “non-elite” males were in wealthy Roman households, but I think if wives were in the habit of sex, they would by and large have been in the habit of having children. But the lack of such children was Augustus’ issue. If “non-elite males” means slaves or close relatives? The salacious horror stories about Caligula’s sisters or Messalina makes me suspect otherwise. But then I’ve thought that any US women who liked their husbands’ male slave better than their husband fairly quickly died in childbirth or an unfortunate accident.
engels@31 I’m rather in favor of woman suffrage, equal pay, the right to divorce, the right to contraception and so forth. But I am rather against political cross-class unity of women (in the sense of property, not SES alone) against the patriarchy/men. And I am highly doubtful as to the liberating value of sexual puritanism. Thus in addition to having the wrong standpoint, I am by most standards hopelessly retrograde. I wasn’t aware there was a distinct millennial feminism. But the, I have trouble distinguishing the moral character of the generations.
I will note that repeated surveys purportedly show that the newest players are non-playing, that is, they are having less and less sex. So I’m not sure that millennial feminists—I suppose nowadays all women are feminists, because they all have the same enemy?—are so favorable to heterosexuality at all, much less why.
bekabot 08.18.23 at 8:49 pm
@ engels
Boomer women differed from their mothers in the sense that Greatest Gen and Gray Apron women disapproved of prostitution/porn/BSDM because they’d never tried them out for themselves. Boomer women, OTOH, disapproved of them because they had.
Andrea Dworkin explained all this (at length).
Cranky Observer 08.18.23 at 9:57 pm
Andrea Dworkin in one of those original, very extreme thinkers that is is worthwhile reading to gain new perspectives and challenge one’s own perceptions and biases. Dworkin did not ever speak for any significant number of their own or any other generation however and assuming that any ‘wave’ of feminism follows Dworkin’s principles is a fast road to fundamental error. Makes good fodder for right-wing NYT columnists when they are short of other material though.
engels 08.18.23 at 9:59 pm
Bekabot: that’s interesting but I’m not sure how it explains millennials?
engels 08.18.23 at 10:17 pm
Meet The Dominatrix Who Requires The Men Who Hire Her To Read Black Feminist Theory
Alex SL 08.19.23 at 12:16 am
TM,
Point taken; I was thinking more of access to child care and other support that makes the subsequent years easier and thus might slightly reduce the economic disincentive to have children* than paternity leave. * Agreed that no economic help will really make up for the investment of ca. eighteen years of child-rearing, purely in terms of what one could have done with one’s time instead, but there will be some people who think about potentially having children and take whether it will disrupt their career into consideration when making that decision.
steven t johnson,
I have absolutely no horse in the race about who was more interested in promiscuity in the Roman empire and would like it to stay that way, but people tend to underestimate the degree to which the ancients practiced birth control. In Rome, fish bladders were used as condoms, and there are a number of plants that can be ingested to induce abortion, or “produce menstrual flow”, as that is often diplomatically described. Pennyroyal comes to mind, if only because that is from a plant family that used to be one of my research foci? focuses? whatever.
engels 08.19.23 at 9:14 am
Andrea Dworkin in one of those original, very extreme thinkers that is is worthwhile reading to gain new perspectives and challenge one’s own perceptions and biases.
See also: Valerie Solanas
engels 08.19.23 at 10:34 am
no economic help will really make up for the investment of ca. eighteen years of child-rearing, purely in terms of what one could have done with one’s time instead
I’m all for child benefits but you appear to have no idea what life is like for the majority of women or men in America or the world.
Tm 08.19.23 at 1:36 pm
Scott: „In both Greek and Roman society, for example, it was taken for granted that women were the more promiscuous sex“
Not just in antiquity. The trope of the woman unable (as opposed to men LOL) to control her overbearing sex drive defines Christian attitudes to women throughout history and is quite alive today. The male response however wasn’t exactly „let‘s do our best to keep the women satisfied“.
This thread is on track to be one of the most embarrassing ever on CT. Note to Alex, don’t feed etc.
bekabot 08.19.23 at 2:37 pm
@ Cranky Observer
True. Dworkin was a provocateuse and owned it. She knew she was the kind of woman whose life story gets recycled as a cautionary tale for other women (‘swerve out of your lane and not only will your life be over but you’ll look awful in your coffin and they’ll crack nasty jokes about you at your funeral’) so she made a point of telling her own side of the story first, often and loudly. She was a go-getter, basically, and she was as American as apple pie.
@ engels
Valerie Solanas, though, was one of those curiosities who appeared onstage around the end of the 60s. She differed from Charlie Manson in three respects: 1) she was willing to commit symbolic murder (as opposed to the merely instrumental kind) with her own hands instead of through proxies, and 2) she wrote her own scripture instead of imparting her gospel to followers, because 3) as a woman and as a woman of her era, she wasn’t entitled to groupies.
@ engels “Meet the dominatrix”
She understands her market. Literary theory is like the last three novels of Henry James: if you want to enjoy it you kind of have to like to hurt.
steven t johnson 08.19.23 at 4:54 pm
Alex SL@39 I’m afraid I really don’t think I’ve underestimated how much ancient people tried to practice birth control. But I’m quite skeptical about how effective the herbs and simples were. In fact, rightly or wrongly I don’t even think breast feeding is a highly effective mode of birth control (well, except for the body of the child presenting an obstacle.) I tend to think the Hippocratic oath barred abortions precisely because it was both so urgently desired yet so dangerous as to be barred by the famous prohibition “First, do no harm.) In fantasies and alleged period pieces, when wise women have convenient natural, organic and effective methods of birth control, my reaction is to note it as bad writing. So, regardless of who is deemed to be the victim and who the victimizer, it seems to me that if people were having sex back then, they were having children.
marcel proust 08.20.23 at 2:51 pm
steven johnson @18 wrote: And by the same token, no one, no one ever argues that polyandry is equitable for the wife, precisely because sexual services are pretty universally regarded as being, from women to men and never the other way around.
In Chapter LXVII of Roughing It (part of the section on his trip to the Sandwich Islands), Mark Twain stated that
This certainly suggests an exception to your rule of the burden never being from men to women: “not never, but hardly ever” if I may refer to G&S.
ETA: I wrote the above before seeing the response of Scott P. @32 on attitudes among the ancient Greeks and Romans on “women’s voracious sexual appetites” and the conversation that that kicked off: @34, @39 & @42. (Hope I have the links correct, since there is no edit function here)
marcel proust 08.20.23 at 2:53 pm
One link that I thought I included in my comment above was to the chapter in Roughing It that contained the passage quoted therefrom.
Oopsie.
steven t johnson 08.20.23 at 3:41 pm
marcel proust@45 The next part of the passage from Twain reads: “Although this meant the noble women were up to six times as unhappy, her father was quite pleased to have so many sons-in-law to applaud him at the luau.”
Nevertheless, obviously I am refuted and polyandry is the next frontier in marriage equality.
marcel proust 08.20.23 at 4:58 pm
Steven t johnson @47: Interesting. I do/did not find that part of the passage in the gutenberg.org version (and as feared, I did muck up the link previously: should a been chapter 67 not 62).
steven t johnson 08.20.23 at 8:04 pm
marcel proust@48 I’m very sorry, I forgot yet again there are no pixels for irony. The alleged continuation of the Twain is of course my personal joke.
MisterMr 08.21.23 at 11:25 pm
As an important contribution to the thread about roman and greek ideas about female sexuality, I’ll quote the epicurean poet Lucretius:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/785/785-h/785-h.htm#link2H_4_0023
Nor sighs the woman always with feigned love,
Who links her body round man’s body locked
And holds him fast, making his kisses wet
With lips sucked into lips; for oft she acts
Even from desire, and, seeking mutual joys,
Incites him there to run love’s race-course through.
Nor otherwise can cattle, birds, wild beasts,
And sheep and mares submit unto the males,
Except that their own nature is in heat,
And burns abounding and with gladness takes
Once more the Venus of the mounting males.
Alex SL 08.22.23 at 12:12 am
steven t johnson,
Just to clarify, when historical sources say that people didn’t have enough children for the writer’s taste, and in a time when famine wasn’t the issue, you assume it can only have been abstinence? Because that comes so easily to most humans?
This paper may be of interest, although it mostly deals with attempts to increase fertility: DOI 10.1080/09612025.2020.1833491
engels 08.22.23 at 2:35 am
While Bekabot may be right that Solanas didn’t have much of a fan club at the time, she does now:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/obituaries/valerie-solanas-overlooked.html
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/1901-scum-manifesto
From the NYT’s glowing obituary:
steven t johnson 08.22.23 at 1:44 pm
Alex SL@51 “Judging from Augustus’ actual legislation, it appears to me the exhausted husbands were exhausted from recreation with younger and thus more desirable slaves. And the “elite” wives were not exhausted with child bearing, which for so long was a common side effect of sexual congress.” I do not believe the low birth rate in the nobility, the target of Augustus’ moral legislation—which by the way still suggests to me that Ovidian notions of women’s sexuality are not likely to be representative—was due to the abstinence of male nobles.
And my disagreement with your notion the noblewomen were not abstaining hinges on my belief ancient methods of birth control were not reliable. Hence, noblewomen who were habitually engaged were habitually getting pregnant, in my view. Also hence, the widespread tendency to infanticide in various forms/disguises. Unlike ancietn contraception, infanticide was effective. Going back to Marry Harrington, infanticide was distinctly a part of the traditional family. And everything cited of her in the OP suggests she is either a fool or a liar or an unsavory combination of both, as to be expected of a political conservative. Being cautious, prudent, conventional or even stodgy are not political ideas, they are traits of temperament
A note on Lucretius: I suspect Lucretius had as much influence on popular morals and moralizing as Spinoza did in our times, which is to say, at best, indirect and occasional. I also suspect many people did think women or at least some women actually enjoyed sex with men. But see, When Harry Met Sally. How this is to be squared with fighting the patriarchy I dare not say, because I don’t know.
MisterMr 08.22.23 at 5:16 pm
As an addition to Lucretius, I’ll point out that Juvenal’s famous sentence “who watches the watchmen” is also about infidel wives:
… I am aware
of whatever councils you old friends warn,
i.e. “throw the bolt and lock her in.” But who is going to guard the
guards themselves, who now keep silent the lapses of the loose
girl – paid off in the same coin? The common crime keeps its silence.
A prudent wife looks ahead and starts (her infidelities) with them
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire_VI
Also about infidel wives, it was common in some ancient periods (more so in times of economic stagnation when it was difficult for a young man to feed a family) to have men marry when they were much older, to young women.
Also probably there were many young poor males without a wife, and many servant girls who had affairs with their masters; this presumably influenced the paths of infidelity.
MisterMr 08.22.23 at 5:30 pm
Reading the whole synopsis of Satire VI by Juvenal, it is all just badmouthing women, and it is surprising how many of these stereotypes, changing a few references, are still used today.
Juvenal was already fantasizing about the older, more moral times in 200ce, so clearly 1450ce is not nearly reactionary enough (this is sarcasm).
J-D 08.23.23 at 1:18 am
The English word ‘infidel’ seems as if it should be synonymous with ‘unfaithful’, but it has a different, more specific, meaning.
The pattern is certainly more ancient than Juvenal: see Ecclesiastes 7:10:
https://biblehub.com/ecclesiastes/7-10.htm
engels 08.23.23 at 9:47 pm
Less provocative version: I see little evidence contemporary US liberalism (the official ideology of US global empire) relies on classic misogynist tropes. On the contrary it seems to idealise women/female authority in an arguably rather creepy and unfeminist way.
MisterMr 08.24.23 at 6:01 pm
My two cents: there are some aspects of gender stereotypes that arguably are innate and present in our baboon mind (e.g. jealousy about women, male aggressivity etc.).
The fact that these are innate does not mean that they cannot be controlled, however they will often pop out in cultural depictions: they are “archetypes” in the strict sense of the word.
The anti-woman arguments in Juvenal’s style pick from one side of these arhetypical fears, some (not all obviously) feminist arguments pick from the other. Naturally if a feminist makes an argument that, say, on average women have lowe incomes than men this has nothing to do with “archetypes”, but then other expectations (like that if women reach places of power they will act better than men) IMHO are the same kind of fallacy.
There is a problem because while it is true that gender expectations are a cultural construct, this doesn’t mean that there are 0 nihil instinctive tendencies and/or “archetypes”, but it is difficult to discuss these things because it is difficult to know where the line passes and there is a risk of falling into gender essentialism; but then also ignoring these things can lead to gender essentialism when this kind of archetypal expectations pop out unconsciously into theories that supposedly negate their existence.
MisterMr 08.24.23 at 6:02 pm
PS: thanks for the correction J-D
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