Feminism's Alienation of the Body
The following review is part of RealClear Books & Culture's symposium on Mary Harrington's 'Feminism Against Progress.'
Modern people are very confused about bodies. The public conversation about sex and the human body has become increasingly detached from reality in recent years, and in Feminism Against Progress, Mary Harrington charges into the subject with courage and panache, coining some memorable phrases, and raising a number of provocative questions. It’s a very worthwhile read, though there is still much work to be done in answering questions she raises.
Harrington is an ex-progressive promoting a “reactionary feminism” that recognizes the many ways in which post-liberal modernity has undercut the interests of women (along with men, and children). The book gives an overview of shifting marital and romantic norms, from the pre-industrial era through the present, and makes recommendations for improving our debased modern culture. Harrington thinks modern people should re-conceptualize marriage as a kind of domestic partnership, focusing on family and the good of a shared life. Romantic bliss is nice for those who can find it, but mileage inevitably varies; our homes and families need to be built on something stronger and more durable than feelings of intimacy.
Marriage has been in limbo for some time now, and the problem has much to do with bodies. Modern people are in our present quandary in no small part because we have become alienated from our physical selves. Once, husbands and wives were bound together by the fact that normal marital behavior tended to lead to babies. As technology advanced, that became an option more than an expected reality, and various ideologues (first feminists, then a proliferating crowd of gender theorists) began arguing that it was unnecessary and even tyrannical to attach any social or moral significance to the kind of body a person has.
The Information Age hit full stride, and young people discovered that they could immerse themselves completely in a world where bodies had no relevance, and they could, in Harrington’s words, “prise the ‘me’ I felt I really was free of the lumbering flesh that carried it so awkwardly through the material world.” Initially, pouring energy and attention into this online world created a joyous sense of liberation. “Our inner worlds seemed posed to manifest in the real world through sheer force of imagination.” But over the medium-term, she realized that this existence was unsatisfying. She eventually married, had a child, and began building a richer and more meaningful life. But some never make it that far, and recently growing numbers have been declaring that they are so alienated from their physical bodies that it is unbearable even to live in them.
Bodies matter. We live in an age that is perpetually struggling to understand how and why. Harrington exposes some of the relevant errors with great clarity, focusing in particular on the moral significance of the reproductive asymmetry between men and women. Women bear children, while men only father them; from a biological standpoint the mothers have the harder task by far. This reality comes with all sorts of ramifications, and we do our children no favors by refusing to tell them the truth about their bodies. They may make imprudent choices of course, but even beyond that they may fall into a mindset that is deeply reductionist, especially with respect to the physical body itself. Harrington writes about the modern tendency to treat human beings as mere “meat legos”: having been assured that their physical nature is mostly incidental to their “true selves” (which live online in invented personae), the young come to see their bodies as mere bits of miscellaneous matter that can be linked or pulled away from one another at will, just like the building toy. But in fact, our bodies are us, in a very meaningful sense, and life as a meat lego turns out to be unsatisfying and, often, quite painful.
Harrington surely has her finger on one major source of loneliness, depression, and anxiety among young adults in the West. Body alienation does help to explain why so many want to change sexes, but also why they find it exceedingly difficult to build stable relationships, healthy communities, or happy families. What is to be done, though? In fact, people at many points on the political spectrum have recognized the importance of “climbing back into our bodies,” though priorities in this regard may differ: for some people organic food and exercise are the key, while others fixate more on the threat of smartphones and social media, and still others root the problem in the abandonment of Judeo-Christian Sexual morals. These are not mutually exclusive concerns, of course, and a given person might share any or all of them. But all are potentially fraught, because bodies don’t actually tell us everything we might want to know about a human being, only some things. Sometimes it is good for people to try to transcend severe-seeming physical limitations. Sometimes it’s wrong to make substantive judgments about people based on how they look. Bodies matter, but putting them in their proper place is genuinely hard and only continues to get harder as scientists give us ever more reproductive technologies, transhumanist “improvements,” and trinkets that enable us to plug ourselves into the virtual universe at any moment and from any location.
No simple or straightforward solution is available, and Harrington, to her credit, never claims to have one. Social conservatives have long wished to believe that the moral universe would put itself back together again, if society at large would simply re-embrace traditional sexual norms. I myself would support this (though I can’t speak for Harrington), and I do embrace those norms in my own life, and uphold them in my Catholic community. But they won’t be re-introduced wholesale in society at large, and even if they were they would not solve the problem of bodies.
As Harrington and I discussed on a recent podcast, she and I have in many ways reverse-engineered somewhat similar lives, as writers and mothers, working from home and balancing a range of commitments and goals. She came to that life from a very progressive direction, but I was raised in a religiously conservative community where I was essentially taught that as a woman, I would be happiest and most fulfilled in a domestic life, without professional ambitions or pursuits. I established myself in a settled domestic situation, and it turned out that really I wasn’t happy at all. So I had to go about re-evaluating the views that had led me there, and though it all worked out in the end, I think my case illustrates another sort of mistake one can make with respect to bodies: exaggerating what one can properly assume about a person based on the sort of body that they have. That error can still be made, even in these benighted modern times.
In the end there is no substitute for a continued effort to uncover the truth, about babies and bodies and souls and sex, as honestly as we can, using all available sources of truth. That should include tradition, which is a trove of accumulated wisdom, but it should also include observation and contemporary experiences, because circumstances change, and our ancestors made mistakes too. Anti-progress feminism is a clever concept, with potential to advance the conversation, but we should be careful not to let it become too “reactionary.” The goal is not to vanquish “progress,” like some terrible foe, but rather to help people live better and more fulfilled lives, in their bodies and with their families, as the rational and loving beings that they properly are.
Rachel Lu is an Associate Editor at Law & Liberty and a Contributing Writer at America Magazine. After studying moral philosophy at Cornell, she taught for several years before retiring to focus on the moral formation of her own five sons. She writes on politics, culture, religion, and parenting.
Emina Melonic's contribution to the symposium: Nature's Progress
Elizabeth Grace Matthew's contribution to the symposium: Feminism Needs Religion
