Review by Paula Weiss
Image by Freepik
We are not meat Legos
I have been out-dystopianed. I was prepared to read a conventional screed against the impact of second-wave feminism (women should have brilliant careers! No men needed!) I did not expect Ms. Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress to methodically connect feminism to the sale of body parts, especially in the Third World, or the rental of uteruses for the production of children or to the online porn explosion that saps our interest in sex. But she is right, painfully so. Good analysis identifies credible connections among random happenings and phenomena that wouldn’t have occurred to you otherwise.
It was Harrington’s late-in-life birth of her child, and an ensuing medical crisis, that generated a great insight: she wanted to be with her daughter, not in an office as she was supposed to want to be. She was drawn to her daughter in a way that some pro-abortion activists—calling babies ‘parasites’—do not acknowledge is fundamental to motherhood. She says she was fortunate to be able to stay home with her daughter (thanks to a loving husband and a sufficient income) but what about poorer women who cannot do so? What about those women whose jobs are taking care of richer women’s children? Harrington points out that second wave feminism made contemptible the “culture of care” that was a hallmark of women’s contribution to the home and to society.
The most significant achievements of the era of second wave feminism were the invention of the Pill and legalized abortion. “Progress” became defined as liberating women from the biological realities of reproduction and femaleness, or what Harrington calls “bio-libertarianism.” The norms governing sexual relations between men and women were obliterated. Feminists celebrated “sex work” instead of asking what had happened to marriage or to the women who had relied on it for personal satisfaction and economic security. By separating intercourse from its traditional risks, women were expected to enjoy the sexual freedom norms more typical for men, and discouraged from refusing sex. But all too often, the sex was joyless and transactional. Women were told to hold off for Big Romance, a man who could fulfill all of her emotional as well as material needs. The bar was raised. Men also decided not to “settle,” when sex was so freely available and commitment portrayed as a drag. But inevitably a few years later, those men could choose from younger, more nubile women who had not yet sacrificed all for glamorous careers. Or they became embittered “incels” who saw women as greedy and predatory. Dating apps only reinforced the logic of the market on what had been a social and economic partnership between a man and a woman.
Sex was detached from reproduction, and motherhood detached from care. One of Harrington’s insights is that the current obsession with safety tracks with the increasing professionalization of “impersonal, tech-mediated care,” for children, going all the way up to college campuses. In my childhood, we roamed around the neighborhood on bikes for hours, but our mothers were nearby, at home, not trailing us in a car.
The separation of men and women from the reality of “embodiment,” the integration of the mind and a sexed body, led to what Harrington calls “Meat Lego Gnosticism.” The infiltration of the market into this atomized environment legitimized porn for both the women who sell videos of themselves online and the men who buy it. It legitimized the renting of uteruses by wealthy childless couples. It defied biological realities by encouraging boys to pretend to be girls, girls to be boys, and demanding that the rest of us to pretend this was perfectly normal, chromosomes be damned.
“Meat Lego Gnosticism,” with the de-sexualization of men and women, creates a world of rentable and buyable body parts. All humans must be interchangeable. The “gender transition” movement is the logical outcome of the notion that “embodiment” is the enemy and can be surmounted by will, technology, and money. It generates a new religion, prioritizing gender over sex, “cyborg theology,” whose priestesses are the upper middle-class women who predominate in the knowledge and communication fields and impose norms. Ironically, “Gnostic Madonna,” the mother who fights for the mutilation of her child and pretends all is well, is “afford(ed) a means to recoup some parental authority” denied to her under bio-libertarianism. Notes Harrington, “Facilitating a ‘trans’ child a partial means of reclaiming the maternal work of care and nurture…not least in the sheer effort required to ‘protect’ a child from the implications of his or her own biophysical reality.”
These priestesses fight for the rights of biological males to box and swim against weaker women, against all logic. They see nothing wrong with forcing women to share prison cells with these men, even if pregnancy or assault occurs. After all, the affluent priestesses will most likely not find themselves in a prison cell with such a “trans” woman. As Harrington says, these elite progressive women will “reap the benefits of their vision, (but) its costs are borne elsewhere.”
This is one of the rare theoretical books that has given me insight into my own personal life, decades later. I came of age in the early 1980’s, at the height of careerist women who were luxuriating in new opportunities and not inclined to compromise them by marrying early. I went to a Seven Sisters women’s college, which are now the citadels of cyborg priestesses (now I realize why I re-named my alma mater “College of the Earthloving Priestesses” in Deplorable Underground). I did not find sexual liberation fulfilling, to put it mildly. The saddest day of my life was a Thanksgiving spent with my then very casual partner and inexplicable (to both of us) crying jag. Relationships never got started, because like other women of my time and place, I did not understand how to date traditionally or what to look for. And this is after coming from an intact, kind, and comfortable family, with all the advantages that affords. Like Harrington, I finally married, happily, and had a daughter. We both wonder whether we had known better, we would have started earlier and had more children.
Feminism Against Progress is rich with insight, particularly about how the market seized upon sexual atomization to further Meat Lego Gnosticism. As recently as 2020, Forbes Magazine estimated a market in gender medicine worth over $200 billion a year, arguing that more investments should be made in “trans tech.” Harrington says, “This marketisation of human bodies is well under way.” With her way with words, she refers to it as “meat avatar customization,” which she points out will “not free us from our bodies,” but allow the demolition of cultural and legal norms and then the market to move into those spaces.
As befits a theoretical book, Harrington’s ability to come up with concepts for these malign trends swirling around us makes an important contribution to the debate. To name something accurately is to make it real and usable in political discourse, the inverse of 1984’s removal by the government of words from the English language so no citizen could even articulate criticism.
“Cyborg priestesses” capture devastatingly the white woke Karens who have hectored us into tolerating the intolerable. One can only hope they are on the defensive with the proclaimed return to common sense. But so many casualties! Many if not most of my college classmates never married, or like myself, just have one child. Men and boys lost their gathering places, whether McSorley’s Pub, the social club, or the Boy Scouts, which Harrington says especially harmed working-class men. These associations were said to stand in the way of women’s career advancement. And the professional elite women who devoted themselves to their careers are often struggling economically in late middle age as the nest eggs they could have built with a husband, or the children to care for them, turn out to be insufficient. No wonder they disproportionately look to government and other taxpayers to meet their needs.
Recognizing that she needs to present some alternative vision, Harrington—calling herself a “reactionary feminist,”—seizes on the modern development of technology-enabled work from home. She suggests that couples might start working together under one roof in a way last popular in the 15th century, and not take industrialization, with its march to factories, and entrusting of childcare to strangers, as a relevant model. “Reactionary feminism” does not seek to return us to some patriarchal past, she assures us. Instead, it accepts the civic rights early feminism secured, and urges us to embrace the “context” of family and marriage in which most women find meaning, and to protect that context. Stability, not freedom, is the ultimate goal.
Her examples of such partnerships, which are characterized by a practical view of marriage rather than by Big Romance, are designed to appeal to the leftists she needs to win over. “Ashley, 36, and her husband live in Uruguay, where both do part-time remote language teaching while managing a homestead where they teach courses on low-carbon living and caring for their three young children.” I hope that Harrington’s scenario will open feminist eyes to a more fulfilling and humane future for all of us. We are ready to be happy.
Paula Weiss is the author of The Antifan Girlfriend and The Deplorable Underground.