Mary Harrington On Feminism | The Good Fight with Yascha Mounk

Mary Harrington is a writer and a contributing editor at UnHerd. She is the author of Feminism Against Progress.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Mary Harrington discuss second-wave feminism and the downstream consequences of the sexual revolution; the unintended effects of industrialization and contraceptive use; and whether the contraceptive revolution has, as Harrington argues, brought about a greater commodification of female sexuality.
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Twitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @joinpersuasion
LinkedIn: Persuasion Community

[@advocate1563]

Mary's a gem and a master of the english language. Masterful essay in Unherd this week.

[@Gay_Detransitioner]

Feminism is propaganda.

[@SeanRyanJ]

Maybe it's just what was discussed in the podcast, but I found it strange that she never mentioned the other parent's role (usually being the father) in parenting. This seems to me to be a major omission by both Harrington and Mounk during the interview. For example, the mother could have attended the "radical feminist" meeting and voted on childcare if her partner had stayed home and looked after the child(ren).

[@Baeraad]

Mary Harrington's work contain a few very important insights that deserve to be widely recognised. Firstly, that there is no such thing as progress towards equality, only a continual renegotiation of rights and responsibilities for different groups in relation to each other as the conditions change and old arrangements cease to be reasonable. Secondly, that new arrangements will necessarily have pros and cons rather than being absolutely better or worse than the ones that preceded them. Unfortunately, I feel, she tends to start at that promising beginning and then head off in quite wrong-headed directions. For instance, one point she keeps coming back to is that greater control over their bodies and lives are bad for women, actually, because it means they can't plead out of doing things they don't want to on the basis that it would have catastrophic consequences for them. E.g., that convenient forms of contraception is bad because women can no longer get out of having sex by claiming to be afraid of getting pregnant. And I'm sorry if this is rather cynical of me, but I'd really like to know where she came upon the idea that men ever considered that a valid reason not to give it up. Or at least, that there was a significant overlap between the sort of man who DID care about the girl being afraid of getting pregnant but DIDN'T care that the girl just wasn't willing and never mind why. Because I'll grant you there may have been SOME, but it seems like an incredibly specific amount of caring. As for women "being forced to make war on their bodies," it is true that they must do that, and I have absolutely zero sympathy for it, because I've spent my life making war on my body too. My body wants to do nothing but sit on its ass and shove donuts into its face, but if I let it do that too much I'll die, so I keep having to torture myself with exercise and diets. So no, our bodies are not our friends. They want things that aren't actually good for us. Deal with it.

[@liberality]

Feminism is built on the premise that men are incapable of responsibility because of their brutish natures. Some men have embraced that idea in order to absolve themselves.

[@ricardocima]

It's amazing how feminists tend to think that men don't make and don't need to make any effort to look better.

[@Gay_Detransitioner]

Self identified academic Feminists are almost always nutcases. No matter how 'reasonable' they try to present as.

[@vivienneb6199]

I agree with your points in the second paragraph, i.e the possibility of pregnancy as sufficient to provoking a man caring about her desires etc. I would add: what about condoms? Isn't that a technology? Mary ignores the 1980's (after second wave feminism already made its gains) when AIDS was a big concern.

[@timmilder8313]

Aging feminist realizes she ruined her children's future. Lay in the bed you made