Nature's Progress
The following review is part of RealClear Books & Culture's symposium on Mary Harrington's 'Feminism Against Progress.'
Human beings have a pesky tendency to evade, avoid, and escape. We seek freedom at any cost but often have no idea what this holy grail will give us. We have an uneasy relationship with nature, especially our own. “In the beginning was nature,” writes Camille Paglia in her brilliant work, Sexual Personae (1990). “The background from which and against which our ideas of God were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature…Feminists, seeking to drive power relations out of sex, have set themselves against nature.”
If we assume that we didn’t know much about nature in the past, then we can certainly conclude (given chaotic events of the last few years), as a society, we have moved further into darkness. We are not only lacking clarification about nature and gender, but also entering into the realm of absurdity by denying basic biology and differences between male and female.
In her book, Feminism Against Progress, Mary Harrington seeks to elucidate the question of nature as related to feminism’s current state in our society. Things have changed since the first and second wave of feminism. We have entered into the sphere of technology that was unimaginable before, and because of this, the relationships between men and women have changed as well.
Almost everything we experience online and in the media is ideologically and politically driven, and this has seeped into human relationships. Everything, including and especially sex, is for sale. Although technology has disembodied us, the body is paradoxically commodified, and finds itself as yet another product to be exchanged and manipulated. Essentially, what is missing is human dignity, without which human beings are reduced and subject to economically commodified whims.
Both men and women are under an attack, and Harrington offers a different way of remaining a feminist, while not asserting superiority over men. Although she doesn’t go into memoiristic details, Harrington refers to her own experiences as a young woman in her 20s and early 30s, and the fluidity with which she moved through the society. “Drenched in queer theory and adrift in the endless possibilities of digital culture,” she did her best to navigate through the strange world of relationships as she reveled in a newfound freedom. Harrington accepted all the usual liberal and utopian existential markers. She even changed her name to “Sebastian for a while” and “pondered whether [she] really was female.”
All of this seemed exciting as it would be to a young, intellectual woman in her 20s. But every utopia ends badly, and as time went on, Harrington realized that there is something skewed about this vision of the world. In the end, it wasn’t more endless intellectualizing that fully changed her but something far more profound: giving birth to her daughter. It was a shocking experience, as any woman who has given birth to a child will attest. Harrington realized that this particular relation changed how she views the world.
Can a woman be a feminist and a mother and a wife? This may sound like a simplistic or naive question but it is indeed implied in Harrington’s book. Although she has rejected certain aspects of feminism she calls “Progress Theology,” she still is a feminist herself, “in the sense that [she] care[s] about women’s interests and think[s] these are often sidelined.”
What is sidelining women today? Technology, for one. As Harrington writes, “The ‘marketplace of everything’ invites us to be together, at scale, but to do so without obligation: always in perfect individual freedom. And this includes – or perhaps especially concerns – sex and relationships.” Naturally, sex and relationships have always been about one exchange or another. (Harrington gives an excellent summary of feminist thinkers and general views of marriage throughout history.) But at what point does this accepted implication become so economically charged that love and eros have been entirely erased from existence?
For some, technology has been entirely embraced. Men and women base their relationships on apps or online dating, and empty hook ups. People think that they can transcend nature and deeply human emotions, such as anger and jealousy. Unfettered and independent women think that having casual sexual encounters will not have any effect on their psyches. As Harrington writes, “...if we have more technological control, we don’t need moral codes any more. Except what this produces is, in practice, a new moral code: a cyborg theology.”
We have always thought that we can get rid of morality because we are more enlightened than tradition, or the previous generation. Recall Hugh Hefner defending his “Playboy Philosophy” to William F. Buckley, Jr. during one of the episodes of Firing Line. Hefner wanted to get rid of the Christian ethics, or put more succinctly, moral “bugaboos” that are impeding the progress of sexuality.
Is the feminist movement progressing? Does such a movement even exist anymore? Harrington doesn’t entirely answer this question but whatever feminism has turned into at this point, it is against real progress. It is the elite women (perhaps aligning with elites in general) that are controlling certain aspects of feminism which, paradoxically, deny women’s lives and realities.
Harrington travels a difficult path as a self-described “reactionary feminist.” On one hand, feminism appears to have been annihilated by the transgender movement. On the other hand, women all over the world are denied an ontological status as women through various forms of transgenderism, which includes drag queens–something that used to be only in the performative (aesthetical) sphere and that has strangely and awkwardly entered into the moral (ethical) sphere.
But Harrington tells us to not forget the young women within the trans movement that are being exploited. She has done a great service at delving more into the mechanical and biological impacts of gender reassignment surgeries. Tying in with the notion of disembodiment, Harrington points out the horror show of what actually happens when hormones are disrupted, body parts are removed, and new artificial parts are added.
Women and men who opt for such extreme reactions to a possible gender dysphoria are often collateral damage for an ideology aimed at destroying life itself. One such case involves “Helena,” a woman after the transition, who “dropped out of college, found a dead-end job and, in the grip of escalating psychiatric difficulties, resorted to hitting herself and self-harming with blades to cope.” This is indeed a sad state of affairs, to put it mildly.
Harrington doesn’t devote a lot of attention to writing about men, although men’s important roles are implied in her discussion of women’s relationship to men. The disembodiment that technology has imposed on us has changed the way women view themselves. This has also given rise (no pun intended) to strange forms of Nietzschean and homoerotic masculinity we see in figures such as the Bronze Age Pervert. Harrington rightfully argues against this misogyny, saying that such “extreme masculinists” have “reduced [women] to a subordination far more total than any which has ever historically obtained in the West.”
None of these paths – homoerotic masculinity, transgenderism, or even certain forms of feminism – are adequate in our understanding of what it means to be human. Harrington is wrestling with important questions of what feminism even is today, especially given her own personal experience. She eschews ideologically categorical thinking, and this is one of the things that makes the book a highly valuable contribution to the debate.
But given all the changes in our society, can any type of feminism (including the type Harrington is espousing) have an impact on understanding who we are as men and women? “Only connect!” wrote E. M. Forster in his 1910 novel, Howards End, recognizing the alienation of his own epoch. “Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.” Perhaps, in the end, it is love that will provide the most fulfilling answer. At the very least, it will be the beginning of a true encounter in which men and women see each other as human beings.
Emina Melonic's work has appeared in National Review, The New Criterion, The Imaginative Conservative, American Greatness, Splice Today, VoegelinView, and New English Review, among others.
Rachel Lu's contribution to the symposium: Feminism's Alienation of the Body
Elizabeth Grace Matthew's contribution to the symposium: Feminism Needs Religion
