Progressivism Gone Mad - A Radical Feminist Turned Koferes

Someone was kind enough to send me this article from the Atlantic that I referenced recently. This is only part of it.  

Was the sexual revolution a mistake? From the 1960s through today, the majority of feminists would instantly answer “no.” Easier access to contraception, the relaxation of divorce laws, the legalization of abortion, less emphasis on virginity, reduced stigma around unmarried sex—all of these have been hailed as liberating for women.

But in the past few years, an emergent strand of feminism has questioned these assumptions. “Reactionary feminism”—the name was popularized by the British writer Mary Harrington—rests on a premise that sounds far more radical today than it once did: Men and women are different. In her 2022 book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Louise Perry argues that individual physical variation “is built upon a biological substrate. Liberal feminists and trans activists may do their best to deny this, but it is still true that only one half of the human race is capable of getting pregnant, and—failing the invention of artificial wombs—this will remain true indefinitely.” Perry also argues for “psychological differences between the sexes.” Men are innately more eager for sexual variety, and much less likely to catch feelings from a one-night stand, she believes. Modern hookup culture serves men very well but forces women to deny their natural urges toward seeking commitment, affection, and protection.

These are heretical thoughts. For more than a decade, the dominant form of American feminism has maintained that differences between the sexes—whether in libido, crime rates, or even athletic performance—largely result from female socialization. Anything else is biological essentialism. The feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon recently declared that she did not want to be part of “a movement for female body parts … Women are not, in fact, subordinated or oppressed by our bodies. We do not need to be liberated from our chromosomes or our ovaries.” This view extends to the assertion that male and female bodies do not differ enough to justify strict sex segregation in sporting competitions or prisons, domestic-violence shelters, and public changing rooms. Recently, a reporter asked the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, for a response to parents who worry about the safety of daughters competing in sports against genetically male athletes. Jean-Pierre responded with a terse smackdown. The reporter’s question, Jean-Pierre said, implied that “transgender kids are dangerous” and was therefore itself “dangerous.”

The reactionary feminists have no patience for this line of argument. In her new book, Feminism Against Progress, Harrington writes that the internet has encouraged us to think of ourselves as a “Meat Lego,” hunks of flesh that can be molded however we want. For women, that involves suppressing the messy biological reality of the female body—taking birth control, having consequence-free casual sex, even outsourcing pregnancies—to achieve something that might look like equality but is really just pretending to be a man. “Realizing my body isn’t something I’m in but something I am is the heart of the case for reactionary feminism,” she writes.

Reactionary feminism is having a moment. Harrington recently toured the United States, where Feminism Against Progress was plugged in The Free Press, the heterodox equivalent of a glowing New York Times review. At the recent National Conservative conference in London, she shared the stage with Perry, whose book covers similar themes. Another NatCon speaker was Nina Power, a former leftist who is now a senior editor at Compact, an online magazine whose editors declare that they “oppose liberalism in part because we seek a society more tolerant of human difference and human frailty.”

That said, Harrington was radicalized by Mumsnet, which she started reading more than a decade ago. “At the time, I was still a fully paid up Butlerite,” she told me in clipped English tones. She was referring to Judith Butler, the high priest of queer theory, which argues for the subversion of categories and norms. In her 20s, Harrington hung out in bohemian communities online and offline, and sometimes went by the name Sebastian. “My first glimmers of ambivalence” about queer theory, Harrington said, “were when I realized that pretty much every butch woman I’d ever dated had subsequently transitioned, and now thought of themselves as a man.” As a married mother of one, living in a small town, she went on Mumsnet and met other women who shared her ambivalence about the new ideology around gender.

Both Power and Perry had similar experiences that peeled them away from the progressive consensus. Perry’s was in the early days of motherhood, realizing her deep connection with her baby—and her economic dependence on her husband. Power, a scholar of Marxist and continental philosophy, told me that her apostasy was driven by a “general frustration with the progressive movement. It’s just gone mad.”