The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | Mary Harrington on Transgenderism and Feminism

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

Mary Harrington, author of the new book "Feminism Against Progress," discusses how our digital world--where people can pretend to be whoever they want--helped contribute to the rise of transgenderism. She also discusses "meat lego gnosticism," how the Pill changed how we think of the human body, and how she became comfortable with her own body. Plus, we talk about "Big Romance" and the change throughout history in how marriage is viewed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You and Santa? Best wrappers out there. But Reeses wants to know, what about the best unwrapping moment? Reese's peanut butter cups put your unwrapping skills to the test. And with three cups of creamy peanut butter and smooth chocolate per pack, you get your practice in. Experiencing that sweet and salty satisfaction again and again and again. Santa gets cookies. You get Rees.

Nothing else is Rees. This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, April 27th. I'm Kate Trinco. Today, I speak to Mary Harrington. She is the author of the new book, Feminism Against Progress. We talk about feminism, of course, the transgender movement, the war on embodiment, and much more. Stay tuned for our conversation after this. Looking for quick conservative policy solutions to current issues from America's outpost here in Washington, sign up for Heritage's weekly newsletter, The Agenda. You'll get top conservative research, a rundown of important events happening here at Heritage that you can watch online and hot takes from our experts.

Sign up at heritage.org slash agenda or at the link in the show notes. Joining me today is Mary Harrington, the author of the new book, Feminism Against Progress. Mary, thanks for joining the Daily Signal podcast. Thank you so much for having me. All right. So I just want to say that I really enjoyed your book. It's very thought-provoking, had me underlining a lot of things. And when it came to this podcast, I really wasn't sure where to begin, but you have to begin somewhere.

So I wanted to ask you, you write a bit about your online life as a young woman, including, I don't know if posing is the right word, but acting as a man named Sebastian. Tell me about that and how it affects your views on sex and transgenderism. Well, for the avoidance of doubt, I don't know that I ever exactly identified as a man. My apologies. No, no, no, it's fine. I mean, it was kind of ambiguous in the book. But I did change my name to Sebastian for a while. I went by Sebastian and then mostly to see what it felt like.

And I think it's in a way that's kind of hard to convey now. It was part of a whole vibe that I felt very strongly in the noughties where social media was just happening. Web 2.0 was just happening. I was right there. I founded a web startup and I was very involved in the kind of the London end of that tech explosion and was just really excited by it because it felt like something very new and very thrilling was happening.

And it really felt for a little while that we could just create our own realities. And that was something that just really spoke to me and it felt really appealing to me. And so much of my 20-something life was about just experimenting with how far you can take that. So, you know, if I... I mean, actually the quote that springs to mind,

I don't know if you remember that, the famous quote from the White House aide after 9-11, where he said, we're an empire now, we create our own reality. Do you remember that? I do not remember that. Somebody was saying, well, you know, this is, yeah, we create our own reality and you just

respond, as you will, and then we'll act again and you'll create your own reality again. And there was this real sense that what was actually there and what was real had come adrift and could just be remade at will through sheer, sheer willpower or sheer energy somehow. At least that was what I kind of wanted to be true. and I just wanted to see how far I could take it. Not all the way into changing my sex as it turned out, as it also turned out, and this is something I've reflected on a lot since, I didn't actually enjoy changing my name

because it felt strange to ask people who had known me with my actual, with my name name for so long to perceive me otherwise than the way they already did. That felt like I was asking something of them which wasn't really, it wasn't really mine to ask because their perceptions of them belong to them. and not to me. But again, I mean, this is all kind of,

where some way off the usual kind of culture war territory, I guess, for transgenderism. But to me, I mean, this was the heart of it for me, just how far can you take creating your own reality and how far, how much can you ask of other people to change of their own perceptions and their own experiences of you? How far can you ask people to perceive you differently to the way they already perceive you?

How much of that is actually under my control? These were all questions I was really preoccupied with. And gender, I suppose, or sex. Sex and gender was only one of the fields that I found that I was exploring that in. You know, most of my interests were in digital art and experimental community building and political protest. And, you know, all manner of fields where people were held bent on, you know, pushing reality in one direction or another. And that was just a terrain that felt very interesting to me. Right.

And I do think it's interesting because it seems like technology has allowed us to play with this for perhaps the first time in human history. And I think, you know, I was online a lot as a teenager and I mean, I'm still online a lot. But, you know, there is a sense of like these people don't know my family. They don't know me. They generally, I don't think I ever had photos online as a teenager. You know, and there was a sense of like I can maybe not quite be anyone I want to, but I can sort of define myself in a way. Exactly, exactly. It felt incredibly liberating. Yeah, just genuinely very freeing.

You know, there's the joke about, you know, on the internet, nobody knows you're a doc. Or actually a young moon-faced woman as I was then, rather than, you know, some of this sort of glamorous Oscar, you know, Oscar Wilde figure that I fancied myself as and kind of play acted at being. But there was, yeah, there was something so liberating about just being able to create a self or a persona that was detached from all the, all of the baggage that you bring with you just inevitably as you accumulate real life connections and real world real world friends and a reputation and a track record in life in everyday offline life. It's just interesting to think about whether some of this transgender stuff is just as I think you put it or I want to put words in your mouth, but if it's sort of the logical conclusion of that in some ways. Well, I feel it's I feel it's very connected. I mean there were,

there have been people who sought to to present as the opposite sex prior to the existence. of the internet. So it's obviously not the only factor. But I do think it's acted as an accelerant. And if you look at the prevalence of cross-sex identification in young people and the arrival of mass and the mass adoption of smartphones, it's pretty much, pretty much, it's not a coincidence that they both haven't at the same time. I think they are, they, the internet has acted as an accelerant. It's a point I've made in one or two places. But if you, if you, I mean, if you are, if you're under 20 now, or certainly, or even under 25, chances are you spent a fair amount of your youth interacting with others in this

disembodied world and creating cells for yourself that were radically detached from your physiological self and your embodied self and all the relationships and the constraints that come with that. And I can see why there's this intergenerational tension in how people perceive the question of gender ideology and older men and women say, well, no, of course you can't change your sex. Because we remember the before times where it was just taken for granted that this was just a given. And embodiment and selfhood were broadly the same thing. Even if you didn't like that, it was just, you know, suck it up.

But I think if you've grown up with an experience of selfhood and perhaps your primary experience of sociality is this disembodied one, if you spent a lot of time in Minecraft or whatever, rather than in playgrounds or rounded other people's houses. And this again is, this again tracks the statistics. Kids are kids and young people interact a great deal more. in digital domains now rather than in real life, and outdoor play and outdoor rough housing and just being able free range nests for children

has deteriorated over the last 20 years, concurrently as internet, sociality has accelerated. And so perhaps it's no wonder that they see it as a question of natural justice, that you should be able to apply the same rubric of disembodied selfhood first in what the kids would call meat space, some of them anyway.

Well, so along those lines, you write about D-Transitioners, detransitioners, of course, are people who have had some form of gender transition and then ended up deciding that they didn't want to transition. And you write that detransitioners highlight the great lie of, I think you call it, Meat, Lego, Gnosticism, is that? That's right. That's right. Very fun. Namely, the great lie is that we can be freed from dependence on our bodies and implicitly one another. So can you unpack this a little bit? Okay, I'll start with Meat Lego. I mean, it's kind of self-explanatory.

You know, this idea that we can, our bodies are not integrated holes and exist as a gestalt, that they're somehow an assemblage of parts that can be disassembled and reassembled and remodeled at will, like bits of Lego. It's kind of a gross idea when you put it like that. But that idea that we can be disassembled and reassembled at will is implicitly present in a great deal of the positive cases for transgenderism. Where people are saying, you know, I should. and indeed the language used by the surgeons who do this. I remember there's Joanna Olson Kennedy, I believe her name is. She's a well-known slash notorious, depending on who you ask,

pediatric gender clinician, who gave a talk some time ago where she said, she's talking about radical double mastectomies for adolescent girls who identify as male. And she's saying, well, you know, and if you decide later on you want breasts, well, you can just go get some. And, you know, those of us who've had children and who've breastfed are like, hang on a minute. That's not really how it works. You know, like breasts, like plastic implant, yeah, silicon implants and the kind of breasts that I use to feed my daughter are not the same.

You know, and this woman who say, oh, you can just go get some, you know, as if you can just place, I'm just gesturing at my body in this ridiculous way. So you can just, you know, click bits in and click bits out. It's just not true. It's just not true. And because of this falsehood, which has now been so widely embraced, there are great many young people with irreversible scars. I mean, Abigail Shrya has written very powerfully their book about this. Irreversible damage.

So you think it carries into when we start viewing our bodies this way and not depending on them, we also have trouble with dependence in our personal relationships? Or maybe I'm putting words in your mouth again? So I guess I probably come at this from a slightly different direction. I mean, I've characterized the aggregate effect of setting out to master and also, you know, along with it, commodify the human body and human emotional and social spaces as a kind of war on relationships, which is to say to the extent that we can remodel or control or master aspects of our human nature or our human nature or our human. human physiology, we're also not existing interdependently with others, you know, in, in those realities. You know, if I say, if I say I can be a man, let's say I say I can be Sebastian. Actually, this is, that's probably a good illustration of what I, what I experienced as the limits

to that and where, where really the, we're really interdependence as I, that I, the interdependence that I advocate for comes into radical tension with this, this sort of meat Lego vision of who we are and what we can do. So if I let's let's say I want to go by Sebastian. And let's say I want people to perceive me or you know respond to me as if I were the opposite sex. I have to ask everybody who's known me since I was a baby to to completely remodel their their internal aggregate understanding of who I am and and then to address me and engage with me in the terms that I choose and not the terms that they choose. bluntly I just think that's too big of an ask

I don't think it's possible to there's something fundamentally there's something deeply disturbed about imagine this fantasy that you can reach into somebody else's perceptions and reorder them in line with how you want to be perceived

there's something there's something just profoundly it's a basic mistake you can't do that it's not possible because you can't control what other people think what it recalls to me actually is my experience with very young children where they haven't quite figured out yet

that the world isn't an extension of their own ego. And so they'll expect other people to know what they want before they want it. Or they'll get really angry because you're not just doing, you're not doing the thing. Whatever the thing is, and they won't tell you what the thing is. But that sense that the world is just an extension of myselfhood is developmentally inappropriate for an adult, I think we should say.

And there's something very strange going on when that seems to have become normalized as not just an appropriate way to expect other people to interact with me, but also a matter of social justice that you should perceive me in the way that I wish to be perceived. And fundamentally, yeah, and in order to ask that of you, in asking you to do that, I'm refusing to grant you any space to form your own relationship to me. So in a sense, it does really, it wages war on any possibility of us having a relationship. And as such, it wages war on the possibility of existing in interdependence and in, in relationship. Because I refuse to accept the possibility that you might see me differently to the way I wish to be, I want to be seen myself.

I mean, this all seems very metaphysical, but I see what I see in the rage, the rage and the distress that's expressed by people when they're, for example, when they're misgendered. There's the famous video clip of the very tall male yelling, it's ma'am, it's ma'am. I'm sure you're not the one I'm talking about. But there's something going on there where this individual is just furious. He's furious because he's not being perceived in a way. that he wishes to be perceived. And it's just not possible. But despite that, it's not possible for me to look at that individual and think this is a woman.

It's just not possible. And there's this sort of narcissistic rage that erupts. And I don't know. I don't think it's right just to say you're being a narcissist and you should do better. I think there's something fundamentally broken in how people are growing up. And I don't understand. I'm not sure I fully understand what it is. I have some speculations about what might be contributing to it.

But I think there's something fundamentally broken about the way we're teaching people to expect the world to respond to them if this is now becoming widespread. Yeah, and I think, I mean, yes, I'm not the biggest fan of metaphysics, but I don't think you can avoid them in some of these conversations. But putting aside transgenderism, you talk a lot about embodiment in the book. And of course, I think for women in feminism, embodiment is such a huge, I don't know, source of conflict, I would say. Women's magazines are endlessly about, you know, dieting or fat positivity, which seem to be opposite extremes that are both problematic. You see Instagram where even, you know, people like the Kardashians are using filters galore. And also speaking of the Kardashians, you have this whole culture of cosmetic surgery and procedures and even, you know, I feel like I'm

hearing more and more like, well, you can't be a professional woman even in your 20s and 30s and not use a little bit of Botox. So how, I mean, that's a lot of things to throw at you. But, yeah, feminism, embodiment, all these different things going on. How do women deal with it? If I'm completely honest, I think if we're going to be consistent and we're going to say transgenderism is that that's a misapplication, a misuse of medical technology, then I would say to be coherent, we have to extend that to cosmetic procedures.

I mean, way invasive, I mean, I think you can't. I don't think you can reasonably stop people wearing makeup. But, you know, once it comes to invasive medical procedures, I mean, it seems, it makes no sense to me that we should, we should be cool with mums giving their daughter's breast augmentation for their 16th birthday and not be cool with mums giving their daughters breast removal for their 16th birthday. I mean, you know, at the end of the day, like, what really is the difference? You know, and I suppose you could make the case that at least breast augmentation, you know,

bears some kind of a relationship to a sort of normative understanding of what a young woman looks like. And as such, it's not quite so aggressively, aggressively anti-normativity. And, you know, I don't know, the conservative case for breast implants is not one I particularly want to make. But to me, to me, they're all, they all fall under the order of meat Lego. So how do women respond to this culture? How do they deal with these pressures? It's incredibly hard. I mean, I didn't want to be embodied

and I didn't want to be a woman for so long. I mean, I don't think I'd have changed my name to Sebastian if I didn't, if I wasn't deeply ambivalent about being female. And it really wasn't until I became a mother that I saw any of the upsides of being female at all. And up until that point, I had just, you know, it had just seemed to be all downside. You know, people perceive you as being,

people are more likely to perceive you as being dumb or frivolous. You know, you're less physically strong. you're potentially at greater risk of sexual harassment or other forms of violence. Yad, yad, yad, yad, you know, there's a thousand and one ways that there's, there are some, there are obvious downsides to being female. And particularly, you know, by the time I was, I was a young woman in the late 1990s, there wasn't a whole lot of chivalry left. And such chivalry as there was, I was fairly kind of, again, uncomfortable and defensive

about because it felt as condescending as it did, welcoming. And so, I mean, given all of this, yeah, the idea that actually I might, I might go the other way and lean into being female and lean into being embodied as a woman would have felt incredibly counterintuitive to me as an early 20-something. I'd have recurring nightmares about accidental pregnancy. There seemed to be nothing really great about it at all. And I can't really say what changed except that it became very, very slowly apparent to me over the course of my 20s and beyond, that I was just less nuts the more, the harder I worked at being at peace of my body. And that didn't really start with, I didn't really start with my reproductive physiology.

That just started with going to yoga classes and, you know, and doing couch 5K and going running a lot. And, you know, trying to live a healthy normal life, it was just, it just became slowly apparent to me that being at peace with, with the body which I couldn't, at the end of the day, couldn't really escape. You know, no matter how much time I spent in the internet, you know, eventually I'd still get hungry or need to sleep. And, you know, there you are again, wherever you are, there you are. And it's still inextricable from your body, no matter how hard you have tried to escape it. And eventually I was like, okay, fine, okay, we've just got to, we've got to do this, you know. Well, what's the movie where the two convicts are shackled together? I don't know.

I'm terrible with pop culture. It's an old movie. It's a comedy. There are two unlikely characters who escape, who escape from prison, but they're handcuffed together. And, you know, and hijinks into you. Anyway, that was a bit how it felt at the time. You know, it was not a very happy relationship, but I was like, okay, fine. Okay, we've got to do this, we're going to do this.

But it's interesting to me that yoga and running and being with your body and noticing the hunger is what led to, again, just sort of to your theme of being out of the digital world and into the physical. That's where the healing, it sounds like occurred. Yeah, absolutely. And I found it very striking that in Abigail's book, A Irreversible Damage, she describes one detransitioner or a young woman who identified as the, you know, a young woman who identified as, as the, you know, the opposite sex and who recovered. You know, she desisted. And she desisted because her parents, they basically unplugged her from the internet

and they took her to live on a horse farm for six months. And so she spent, instead of spending all of this time doom scrolling with, you know, young, you know, trans influencers, you know, showing off their chest scars and whatever. Instead of, you know, she was out in the fields and she was cleaning the horses and she was, she was embodied and active and doing something offline in the real world.

And by the end of that, she was like, she was fine. She was fine with her, she was fine being as she was again. And I think there's, I mean, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the digital world exerts on all of us to, to, in, inciting us and inviting us away from, away from presence in, in the place where we are, is so phenomenally strong. I mean, if you think, you know, you can be, you can be, you can be sat at dinner and your phone will go ping and there's always the temptation to reach for it. We have a blanket ban on phones at meal times in the house. We have various, the constraints pretty much escalate, escalate on a six-month

basis because as more time goes on, we realise that it's directly inimical to family life. It's directly inimical to just being present and being together. And really, I mean, you know, the most wonderful times I have with my family at home are when we're all digging the garden together. And I seek that out very intentionally. That sounds very idyllic. Yeah. Just that and just to round the thought off in the other direction, those people I know who are extremely online, and I can't my I'm one of them.

I mean, I say all of this about the internet with a kind of ambivalent love, because I love the internet, and I've been extremely online for 20 years. And everybody I know who is anywhere near as online as me also has an extreme physical practice of some kind. You know, a lot of the men lift, some of the women lift too. I run, like a lot. And I have a very strict rule for myself that if I'm out running, I am not allowed to stop and photograph the landscape and then tweet about it. Absolutely, absolutely verboten. So you really have to live in the moment when you're running. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's not possible to scroll and run. It's just not physically possible. And everybody I know

who is extremely online and not barking mad does something. like that. And what it is varies from person to person. And I think, you know, in as much as we're going to be able to resist that siren song of disembodiment, which leads to the, I mean, this is, this is really the, to come to a very long way around to having unpack meat Lego to unpack the Gnosticism bit. I mean, I've borrowed that from, it's not strictly Gnosticism, but like, you know, the risk of going down a theology rabbit hole. The Gnostics were a bunch of early Christian sects who thought that the material world was bad and evil. And I don't, I don't view the contemporary revulsion with the physical world and the longing to escape into digital realms as, as strictly

nocissism in the ancient sense. But it's, it, it has in common with that ancient nosticism, a distaste for the real world. And so I've borrowed the term nosticism, along with this idea of meat Lego to characterize this, this sort of coming a part of, coming up, coming a part of the human person into radically re-reassemblable bits of meat and a disembodied selfhood, which I see is just now being largely normalized through the culture. And the most visible and controversial aspect of that is transgenderism, but it's by no means confined to that. It's, once you start seeing it, you see it everywhere.

So you write a lot about the pill and how it affected history and feminism and women and men's relationships. And I'm curious as to what are your overall thoughts? about it and you know if you could wave a wand and either have the pill created or not created what would you do I mean those those sort of counterfactuals I don't know I mean we are where we are at the end of the day as they say in the foreign office the pill I've argued a few times is the first transhumanist moment you know and when you say transhumanism most people imagine you know humans with cyborg eyes or you know the terminator or you know you

you know, people grafting, grafting robot arms onto themselves or giving themselves tentacles or whatever, like very sci-fi stuff. But actually, the reality of the reality of transhumanism is very much more banal. It's any medical technology that we use to upgrade ourselves rather than fix something that's gone wrong with normal.

And I mean, everybody has a pretty good gestalt sense of what normal looks like for a human being. I mean, kids have that by the time they're two or three. And if you have, you know, most parents will know the embarrassing moment where your kid points out somebody who's deviated from that normal on the street. You know what I'm talking about. Mommy, look at that man.

Exactly. You know, it's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a normal people put together very early on. And it's, and the transhumanist vision is that that, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's the ceiling is, isn't really there. And we can and should use any technologies at our disposal. as we see fit to improve on, on the gestalt that a toddler would be able to recognise on the street. And the contraceptive pill does that. It doesn't fix something that's broken, like a medication to treat a kidney which isn't working properly. It breaks something that's working in line with the desires of the individual who wants to turn off their ability to conceive.

And I've argued in feminism against progress that this is a radical paradigm shift in what we understand medicine to be. And really a great many of the biological technologies which are so controversial, particularly among conservatives, are downstream of that moment. Because once you've accepted in principle that we can upgrade normal when it comes to women's reproductive physiology, why should we not extend that? for example, into people remodeling their bodies in line with their inner identity. I mean, it's hard really to see why should we stop there? Why should we not continue? Why should we not grant, why should we not treat normal sex dimorphism as a medical problem in need of solutions? And create, you know, in vitro gametogenesis so that two people of the same sex can have a child that they're both genetically related to.

Why not? At the end of the day, if the human normal is a problem to be solved, then in theory, in theory, there's nowhere you can't go with it. And I think it's very easy to get stuck on the trans issue. But to my eye, the biotech innovators who fund a lot of gender ideology and the people who are propagating the legal changes which support gender ideology and gender identity over sex dimorphism don't really. massively care about the people who suffer immense distress because they feel that their gender identity is not aligned with their physiology. They don't actually care about those people. If they cared about those people, they would also, they'd be throwing as much money at helping

detransitioners, as well as transitioners. This is not, it's like the, it's the, your expressive, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, only works in one direction. If actually what you want is medical help returning to normal, then you're on your own. Good luck with that. And I think, and what I see going on there, the bigger picture, again, it's very much more banal than the kind of sci-fi vision of transhumanism. It's more about deregulate or de-delegitimizing the idea of human normal as a precursor to deregulating the human body and opening it up to Comos. A lot of food for thought there. To pivot a little bit. I did want to ask.

you about the concept that you call big romance in your book. I found it very interesting as someone in my 30s who's dated online for many years, had a lot of friends who have issues. I have a great boyfriend right now, but, you know, this is the calm and miss the storm. So what are your thoughts on how we're pursuing, yeah, romantic relationships these days? Well, I should qualify everything I say by saying I've been on the shelf for well over a decade. I've been happily married for a decade. Congratulations. Yeah, it's the most, the most life-changing, wonderful thing that ever happened to me. I very deliberately don't talk about the knots and bolts of my, the inner workings of my family life, because it doesn't just belong to me. It's not really mine to share with the public. But,

but I will say that. It was the most life-changing, wonderful, transformative thing for me, and I highly recommend marriage to anybody. Okay, great. So happy endings can happen. So happy endings do exist and really I was there I was dating really only at the beginning of online dating it was it was not really back when I was still single it was kind of embarrassing to have met your partner online it was it was that was very much an outlier situation and now it's like meeting someone in real life is the weird thing why would someone approach you at a bar that's so creepy so much so in fact that I gather I gather from friends with teenage kids that it's it's considered a radically radical no-no to to date among your friendship pool it's it's completely

socially unacceptable. You just not allowed. It's complicated. Right. And I was like, what? What? This is the, but but what? Yeah, I don't even know what to start with that. But yeah, big romance as I've as I've characterized it. Well, I think we probably need to dive a little bit into the history. The first part of the book, I spent, I spent quite a while looking at the broad social and cultural impacts of the industrial revolution on on family life and on family formation. I wrote a whole chapter about, well, about how we ended up with this idea that sex could be a marketplace. And I took that all the way back to the 18th century, which was the first time. And this actually started just to give some context. I became very, very preoccupied with

this question. You know, is sex a marketplace? Is that, is that a, does it? Because it seemed to me intuitively that this is a category error. This is, sex, sex is not a marketplace. And so I looked at, you know, Google Ngram. It's a Google tool that you can use to scan Google's entire digitized archive and look at the prevalence of a term over time. And I saw it, I was like, when did people start talking about sexual marketplaces?

And I looked it up and I thought, and it turns out that the term didn't really, it wasn't a thing before the 1960s. And I thought, huh, interesting. Okay, so we can date that to approximately the arrival of the birth control pill, the idea that sex is a marketplace, which tracks? I'll come back to that.

And then I was like, what are there other terms, are the syncognate terms, sort of in the same kind of, in the same sort of conceptual ballpark that I should look up as well? And then I looked up marriage marketplace and it turned out that that goes a whole way, a whole way further back.

I thought, how, this is interesting. And of course, then you start thinking about Jane Austen and you think about, you think about the immense discourse in the 18th and 19th centuries about I'm finding a suitable husband. And it struck me that something changed. And then I, something changed in the, around the arrival of the industrial era,

in terms of how men and women formed relationships. Christopher Lash writes, writes superbly about this in his book, Women and the Common Life. He has a chapter on how marriage formation changed from the, from the pre-modern to the industrial era. And probably the most salient point is that women, women become, became functionally much less useful. I mean, there's not, you know, they didn't become less people, but they lost economic agency in the household with the arrival of the industrial era. And whereas previously a wife would have probably have been a farmer's wife or some kind

of a peasant's wife. And she would have worked, you know, she'd have been, you know, processing raw materials, making clothes, she'd have been doing, you know, she'd have been doing what was necessary stuff. Necessary, necessary stuff for the survival of the household. And then then all of a sudden, you, you. you arrive in the industrial, a lot of that work bleeds out of the home. And you're left with the private home, which is reframed as a space of respite from the world of work,

which is presided over by the bourgeois housewife, and is no longer a sphere of productivity. It's a sphere of safety, and it's a sphere for the moral education of children. And this is all very well. But under those circumstances, women actually have a whole lot less leverage. And they're still living under the, broadly speaking, the political order that governed, the pre-modern era, you know, including the rules governing who has formal political power, which was almost always men. Because the basic unit of economic life was the household in the pre-modern era.

And so you could only really have one head of a household. And because men have typically wielded formal political power, in practice, what that meant was that with the arrival of the industrial era, women lost the forms of agency that they'd used to counterbalance that formal political power and it hadn't really gained any any anything to counterbalance that does that make sense it does so so under those circumstances provided provided you have a husband who who loves and respects you you're okay probably um but you know should should you have a husband who tyrannizes you or beats you or drinks all the money away or something like you know you you have very little redress you have very little recourse um it's problem and so under those circumstances

is you see the emergence of a companionate marriage. And this is really, I mean, pride and prejudice, I'm sure you're familiar with the story. Of course. Mr. Darcy is the quintessential, ideal husband for a companionate marriage. He's rich, he's intelligent, he respects Elizabeth's intelligence,

he's morally upstanding, he values her moral fabric. You know, he loves her as a person. And really what Austin is depicting there, I mean, as well as being brilliantly written in the superb drama, You know, she's setting out the ideal template for a relationship under the new political order, under this where women in practice have very little political leverage, you know, the optimum set up for not having a terrible time as a wife and mother. So this is the companionate marriage.

But after the 1960s, when women started began entering the workplace en masse, I mean something akin to that companionate marriage held pretty much up to the sexual revolution because it was still broadly presumed that women would, would focus their energies on the private domestic sphere, broadly speaking. And men would broadly... So this is what conservatives call traditional gender roles, which I characterize as actually being distinctively modern because they only really emerge with the industrial era. But I'll call them industrial gender roles. And companionate marriage is a critical part,

is a crucial part for women of hedging against the ways that your situation can go wrong under industrial gender roles slash traditional, whatever you want to call them. But the point when women begin to enter the market on the same terms as men, which really begins with women's suffrage, but then proceeds with this sort of gradual and then mass entry into the workplace with the arrival of contraception, just for very practical reasons, because women at that point can plan.

And those women who are ambitious and intellectually curious and so on, are not unreasonably going to seize these new opportunities. I mean, I'm obviously a net beneficiary of that. So these are not things that I would want to roll back. But companionate marriage at that point goes out of the window because it doesn't really hold anymore. You know, when women can in theory earn their own money. And, you know, we have the vote and we have all the forms of political agency

whose absence companionate marriage was meant to hedge against. So we don't really like, and companionate marriage is really what I'm calling the origin of big romance. And under those circumstances where it's not, it doesn't really have a practical purpose anymore, this sort of big romance. It evolves again into something, something very much more, I think I want to say consumerist. A sociologist I've quoted in the book characterizes it as the self-expressive marriage, which is to say a relationship whose principal purpose is not solid, it's not economic solidarity as in the middle ages. It's not even really forming,

forming a family and raising children. It's self-actualization. And should it fail on that front, you can end it at any time for any reason. And this is really what I've been characterising as big romance. When I call for us to abolish big romance, I'm not saying we should get rid of the companionate marriage where this is still appropriate. And I'm not saying that you should marry somebody that you don't really care for. But what I am saying is that the self-expressive marriage is catastrophic. It's a catastrophically poor model for any kind of family formation. And fundamentally, it's a very poor one for surviving in the world that I think we find ourselves in now in the 21st century because it's predicated on the assumption that all of us will be able to get by just fine on our own economically and physically and materially.

And when I look at the sort of rolling poly crisis that we've been in since 2008, and I listen particularly to early to Zumers talking about their who are universally, pretty much universally in a state of despair about their. economic prospects. And I think you've inherited a model for relationship formation, which treats it purely as a form of self-expression and self-actualization. What you guys need is solidarity, because otherwise you're stuffed. There's absolutely no way any of you are going to be able to form families, unless you're treating it as something radically more, much more foundational than self-actualizing. And if you're coming into an obviously pretty economically scarce and potentially radically unstable life with a model of relationship formation that actually makes that worse rather than better, then you're stuffed.

So when I say abolish big romance, really I'm speaking to the early 20-somethings and saying, you know, I strongly recommend marriage because it's life-changing and I strongly recommend doing it sooner rather than later and treating it as the start of life and not the capstone of a life as an autonomous individual within the market. Well, definitely a radical message today. Well, Mary Harrington, thank you so much for being. on her book, which is incredible if you want more of these insights. It's called Feminism Against Progress. Thank you so much for having me. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thank you for

listening to The Daily Signal podcast. If you haven't gotten a chance, please be sure to check out our evening show right here in this podcast feed where we bring you the top news of the day. Also, please make sure you subscribe to the Daily Signal wherever you get your podcast and help us reach more listeners by leaving a five-star rating and review. We read all of you. your feedback. Thanks again for listening. Have a good day and we'll be back with you all at 5 o'clock for our top news edition. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. Executive producers are Rob Luey and Kate Trinko. Producers are Virginia Allen and Samantha Asheras. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John

Pop. To learn more, please visit DailySignal.com.