TRIGGERnometry - "I Don't Believe In Progress" - Mary Harrington

Episode Date: July 14, 2021

Mary Harrington is a writer for UnHerd. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/  OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.PayPal.me/triggerpod https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's this sort of eternal tension, you know, between one, between desiring equality between the sexes and acknowledging the difference, the physiological differences between the sexes. And I think that, you know, I mean, that tension is not one that you can abolish, even though, you know, recent activists are definitely trying. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin.

And this is a show for you. If you want honest conversations, with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a writer for unheard. Mary Harrington, welcome to Trignometry. Thank you for having me. Oh, it's great to have you on. Francis and I have both reading many of your articles recently

and really enjoying your work from a kind of independent thinking person's perspective, which is really, really cool. For anyone who doesn't know who you are, tell everybody a little bit about your background. What has been your journey through life? How do you find yourself sitting here talking to us? Well, I fell into writing completely by accident.

Well, not completely by accident. but mostly by accident about 18 months ago. I read English literature at university and like most English undergrads, wanted to become a writer when I grew up, spent my 20s writing completely unreadable garbage. Eventually came to the conclusion that actually no, I was going to park that because I didn't really have anything to say

that anybody wanted to hear. And I should probably go off and do some stuff because I didn't really know enough to have anything very useful to say. So I did a lot of stuff, about 20 years' worth of stuff, in fact, when it started with. founding a web startup, or nearly founding a web startup in my 20s, which kind of came to an end in 2008 with the Great Crash. Then I went off and retrained as a psychotherapist.

I left London, got married, had a child, spent a stint as a stay-at-home mum, and fell into writing kind of by mistake through that because when she got to about two, I just started, I mean, you spend the first couple of years with a child being very preoccupied and just kind of in love with your child. and then after about two years you start to get some of your own sort of brain functions back I thought you were going to say and you start hating them

no no no no I mean the love never goes away of course nor does the mum Bluetooth really but the Bluetooth gets less intense when they get a bit older so I started to get some of my own brain functions back and I mean I don't you know not to put too fine a point on that I started to get a little bit bored so I started blogging my daughter's artwork in the style of a contemporary temporary art gallery. It was kind of a running joke really with a friend who is actually, he's a writer on art and a digital artist, and who had a baby at the same time as me, and just an old friend from university. And we started sending each other kind of, you know,

two toddler, toddler scrolls, but with very, very serious chinstroke in commentary and the style of an art gallery. And I started blogging them just because it was, it was just something to do. And it kind of accidentally went viral. And a friend of mine, you know, an old friend from my start-up days I ran into, said, oh, Mary, you should write more because I really enjoyed it. It's really funny. I mean, she's a mum, and also she was, she's a gallery owner. And she just found the whole thing hilarious. She said, oh, you should write more. So I did. I started, I thought, well, I've got a bit of time. You know, my daughter's seeing going to a childminder for a few hours a week. I'm going to spend a bit of that time writing because I can. And I've always, I've always enjoyed

it. So why not? So I pitched a couple of things to a couple of places. And then I'd literally written two or three things for no money and unheard got in touch and said, would you like to pitch to us? And I said, okay. As it happens, I had a pitch half written which I hadn't dared to send to them. So I said, well, would you like, would you be interested in this? And they said, maybe. And so I wrote that for them and I think I've written for them pretty much every week since. That was September 2019. And I mean, it's not really, it's not really a story which is ever supposed to happen, I think, but that's basically... Well, I'm glad it has happened, Mary, because as I say, I think you're writing, and it's

very clear to me that you're someone who's lived a life outside of the commentaria. That comes very strongly through your work. I think a lot of people sort of, you know, go to Oxford, go to Cambridge, do this degree, do that degree, and then by the time the 25, they're writing for the whatever. And look, there's nothing wrong with that, but I think your commentary is informed by that. So let me ask a question that we always try to ask if we can of people as broadly as possible. What is happening in the world, in your opinion, at the moment, and why? Well, I think we've several things. We've gone out the other end of never-ending growth. We have left the era of never-ending growth. And a lot of what's happening at the macroeconomic level

is people kicking the can down the road with their hands over their ears and saying, la-la-la, la, as loudly as possible. So that's one thing I think which has happened. We've also come out the other end of, we're already into the era of ecological exhaustion and slow motion ecological collapse. We are well and truly into the Anthropocene. I mean, these are all sort of very macro things. We've left the era of liberal democracy and are now living in something else, and I'm not completely sure what to call it yet. And we've left the industrial age and are now in the digital age. and all of these things are interacting in ways which are complicated,

infinitely complicated. And I guess my writing is about trying to make sense of all of the different ways, everything we believed and everything we thought was good in the previous age is now bad in the new age. I mean, that's my sort of overarching thesis for where we are. Everything that was good is now bad. And working through how that affects people. So just to finish on that, well, not to finish on that, I don't think we're going to finish on that any time soon.

No, no, no, we've literally just started on that. Just before Francis jumps in, because I know he has a lot of questions for you as well, everything was good is now bad. So what used to be good? Family, tradition, like, give us a little flesh on the bones there. Well, I mean, I would actually turn that round, and I would say, you know, everything, all the liberating ourselves from family used to be good. It's now bad.

Because we've got about as liberated from family as it's possible to get with that. I mean, on the conservative think tank onward published a report just today, reporting on the epidemic of loneliness among young people, you know, many of whom report just literally having no friends. I mean, at best, they just have a set of parasycial relationships, but they have no friends. I mean, I don't think people need to be any more liberated from emotional commitments than they already are. And yet we still have this sort of legacy narrative about how we should just be free to be, free to be who we want, man. And I don't think that's interacting in a healthy way with actually where we are. That would be just one example. There are lots.

And you said there are lots of examples. When you were started to talk to us about where we are, I just felt myself sinking into a deep depression, Mary, I'm going to be honest. It's a natural state for him to guys. You know, I'm a comedian. That is a natural state. Is it as depressing as it sounds? Well, I mean, when I say, I give you all of these pretty kind of miserable headliners,

But, I mean, all of these are very long-term slow-motion things. So, you know, ecological collapse. Collapse isn't something which is likely to happen tomorrow. It will happen in slow motion over the course of decades. And it might just look like radical climate change and a completely different geopolitical setup. I mean, it's not going to look like complete obliteration of the human species, I don't think, or like, you know, sort of the matrix, like rise of the machine's scenario.

That all seems a bit far-fetched. But, you know, I mean, weather patterns becoming unpredictable. is something which has been remarked on a lot this year. It's not the first year that weather patterns have seemed strange. You know, weather has pretty enormous downstream effects. Again, in slow motion, you know, migrations of whole peoples. You know, there are arguments that the little ice age had colossal geopolitical effects over the course of, well, the beginning of the Enlightenment

and the whole sort of late medieval period. You know, we might just be in for that, but, you know, this is all, you know, this could be a narrative arc of 100 years, you know, most of which you and I won't be alive for. So, you know, there's plenty of room for beauty and endeavor and heroism and, you know, all of the kind of, you know, granular human stuff in all of that, right? And plus soon you'll be dead, mate. Yeah, and we're all going to die anyway, so whatever, you know,

there's plenty of room to have birthday parties and kids and, you know, live heroic lives. Good times. Thank you. Completely pear-shaped, right? And it might not go pear-shaped. I mean, you know, we could be on the cusp of something amazing as well. But I think it's definitely a mixed bag. But you say we're moving from the industrial age to the digital age. To me, I very much see COVID as a catalyst for that. Yes. Would you delve into that a little bit more for us, how COVID has essentially speeded up everything?

It has. I mean, I think there was, a lot of those trends were pretty well established already. I mean, I think the headliners there are virtualization and centralization. Centralization and dematerialization. There's a bit of a mouthful. But, you know, the ideas there being that, for example, where local newspapers were once the sort of, you know, mediators of news, you know, the functions that used to be taken by local newspapers have just got eaten up by Facebook, which is this centralised platform that talks about disintermediating and, you know, just freeing everybody up to just do their amateur thing. And to an extent that's true. I mean, you know, independent media is a marvellous thing. I'm here enjoying it and participating in it.

But there's also, but the smashing, the knocking away of all of those intermediate institutions, for example, in journalism, has created a space where, you know, suddenly a very few players have an enormous amount of power. As, for example, we see when big tech can decide en masse to de-platform the President of the United States, which happened not so long ago. So dematerialization, so you know, all of those local newspapers are physically no longer there. you know, a lot of them have just gone. And centralisation. Big tech now controls an enormous amount of what's, of the available bandwidth for what is or is not sayable. And I mean, that's one instance,

but the trends are observable in all kinds of places. I mean, you can even see it in the Church of England, which is kind of a bonkers example to give, you'd think. But, you know, there was a, there's been a hoo-ha this week about the Church of England releasing a report where they're saying, well, actually, actually we don't need churches, or even priests.

We can just have lay people, can, you know, evangelising and growing the Church of England, they can all just meet up in people's houses, and it'll be great. And that will free up unnecessary resources from, I don't know, quite what they're planning to, maybe they just want to free up,

free up more bishop time to produce powerpoints or lobby the government on foreign aid spending. I don't know quite what it is that they propose to replace ministry with. But you see what I mean. It's the same pattern. There's a sort of, there's a measure of central, among a smaller group of sort of managerial elite types coupled with, coupled with things

dematerialising, you know, this idea that, you know, in fact, we can do without church buildings. And it's the same, it's roughly the same template as the dematerialization and centralization of news media. And what do you think, what do you think this is having on society? Well, I think one, one impact it's having is that it's annihilating all the people in the middle. in a sense, you know, it's just, it's obliterating the middle class. And by obliterating, do you genuinely mean obliterating, as in there will be no middle class? And that is the inevitable consequences of what we're seeing. I don't think it's inevitable, but it has already hollowed out an enormous stretch of the middle class.

I mean, if you consider all of those jobs that used to be there, for example, in journalism or in manufacturing or in, you know, any of these sort of physically based occupations and industries, which are now theory, which have been either been physically outsourced to other countries, or they've been, or they've been virtualised and rendered more efficient. I mean, I suppose we could take the law, for example, you know, which is a classical middle class profession, you know, with clerical jobs increasingly going to AIs, you know, such as, you know, once upon a time there was a guy whose job it was just to go and find things in the archive. You know, at the moment you can replace that with a search engine, you know, the law firm, can save themselves a lot of money, right?

And the consequence of that is that, you know, an awful lot of people who once had reasonably well-paid clerical jobs now don't anymore. So I don't know, I mean, completely obliterating is probably putting it rather strongly. You know, there's still plenty of middle class people left. But, you know, if you look at that, I mean, one of the things I wrote about not long ago

was what I call Aella's law, which is to say the internet power law is now being rolled out in real life. And the power law of how things work on the internet has been observable since the early days of social media. The 1-990 law, which is to say in any given social internet space, 1% of the users will generate most of the content.

The next 9% will generate quite a lot and 90% will mostly just hang out a bit. But that also goes for earnings on the internet. So if you look at any given internet platform, say eBay or Amazon or YouTube, indeed, 1% of the contributors will reap most of the gains. 9% will do pretty well and 90% will just get the long tail. AELA has posted a graph. AELA for anybody who isn't aware is an extremely high earning performer on the pornography website OnlyFans.

she's in the top 0.6%, I believe, of earners. And in a good month can make several hundred thousand dollars. So she's right up at the top of the curve, but the majority of performers on only fans, or indeed the majority of sellers on eBay, will make a few quit here and there. And that law I see in the digital age, I think is being rolled out in real life as well.

And I mean, one of the things you talk about COVID and lockdown, one of the things that's definitely been happening is the further accumulation of wealth right at the top. Yep, yep. And the imiseration of everybody else, pretty much. COVID has rolled out AILA's law comprehensively throughout all kinds of areas of society, which were still resisting it,

because it effectively banned real-life alternatives to the kind of virtualization and centralization that I'm talking about. And what about Francis? Did you have another question about this? Yes, so the question that I want to ask, And again, it's touching on the real world impacts. What effect does that have on the real world? Now, we've talked about the middle class.

But doesn't that just exacerbate the atomization, the feeling of loneliness? Because we're destroying our communities, aren't we? Great. Happy? You've got the answer you were looking for. Everything is fucked. Congratulations, May you can relax now. Let me ask something else.

Mary, we joke, of course. But seriously, in terms of the culture coming back, back perhaps to where we started, you were talking about how everything they used to be good is now bad. Can we get more into that? Because I guess this is one of the things we've been wrestling with on the show. There seems to be a radical cultural transformation. And, you know, if you talk to Jordan Peterson, he'll say that it's primarily driven by technology. Other people have different points of view about it. But there's a sort of feeling like the pace of cultural change is accelerating and the world is very rapidly becoming unrecognizable. So I'll give you an example.

I was just in Ukraine a few weeks ago visiting my grandmother who's 95 and she said to me, A, what do you do for a living and be what's your book about? And I found myself unable to speak because how do you explain these things to a 95-year-old in Ukraine who lived through Stalinism and the German Nazi occupation? Like she does not, She's very clued up for a 95-year-old, but she has absolutely no reference for all this nonsense that the three of us are involved with. So what is happening in the culture and why do you feel? I think that's a difficult thing to answer comprehensively because it completely depends where you're standing. I mean, as your grandmother illustrates.

I mean, what's happening where we are in East London is very different to what's happening where I am in Bedfordshire, where I live in Bedfordshire. I mean, they're related, obviously, but they're not quite the same thing at all. So, I mean, where I live in Bedfordshire has been, up until now, at least, relatively immune to a lot of this radical stuff. You can still say pretty much what you like to people. There are still strong local community bonds. You know, it's, it contrasts quite sharply with what life is like, say, in a very high turnover, part of the country's capital. Most people where I live have jobs locally.

That doesn't really, you know, it's not so much a Zoom class's place. But it's also right at the sharp end of a lot of the sort of economic transformation of the country, you know, where I live right on the Oxford, the Oxford Cambridge Arc, which is where they're planning to build the 10 million or whatever it is, houses that the country is currently missing. So all of the green spaces that I currently run through and enjoy just as footpaths and countryside will probably be gone in the next 10 years and turned into, you know, never-ending urban sprawl. I have very mixed feelings about that because on the one hand, people have got to live somewhere. And on the other hand, I like the countryside where I live

and enjoy it and would prefer to live in the countryside. So what is happening in the culture overall in terms of, you know, what everything that we thought was good is bad and everything. It just, it's not something I find easy to answer because it's so contextual. It really is. I mean. But look, I would argue that, of course, for the moment, you can feel somewhat isolated from what's happening in East London in Bedfordshire. You can. For the moment, right?

But you are isolated from it in the same way that a manufacturing worker in the 90s was isolated from people who believed in globalization in London, right? You're isolated from it until it takes your job. Yes. Right. And you're isolated from the culture war and wherever else until the public education system starts teaching your three-year-old whatever it is gender ideology or whatever else you want. So I feel that anyone who thinks that way, and I'm not saying that you do, but anyone who has that illusion is going to get disabused of it very, very quickly. I think that's absolutely true. I mean, I occupy a funny sort of position living where I do in that most of my working life

is spent in the discourse, you know, with a capital T and a capital D. I mean, the discourse is kind of what I do for a living, and I've been very online for 20 years. So I enjoy living in the countryside and I run a lot because that's the only way I can stay sane and stop myself from just drifting away altogether into the discourse. So on the one hand, I enjoy being grounded in a local community where I have local mum friends, etc. On the other, I have this sort of parallel existence, which is in this strange kind of disembodied world

where people worry about this stuff. And it really does give me double vision sometimes. So I wander around my local area, and sometimes it just feels insubstantial, as though it could just sort of blow away, like a sandcastle drying out. and just become, I don't know, what will be left behind. You say, and it's a very powerful image that you've just used.

Do you think that's what's going to happen inevitably? Or do you think there will be a pushback against what we're seeing? I mean, probably neither. I mean, England's market towns have been around for a long time. Where I live has existed for the last thousand years. You know, I don't think that's, I don't think it's likely to disappear overnight. But although I don't really believe in progress in any sort of absolute sense, I don't think it's a thing. I do, you know, cultures do evolve and, you know, places and communities change their meaning and their inflection over time.

And there's sort of, there's nothing you can really do about that. So I'm kind of, I'm sort of fairly resigned Duma in that sense. You know, I don't see my, I don't see Bedfordshire and its community is just kind of blowing away like a sandcastle in the wind. but I do think, as you say, things are changing very rapidly. And a lot of the things that we thought were just dead certs forever are really not. When you say you don't believe in progress, what do you mean by that? Because, I mean, objectively speaking, if we compare ourselves to humanity 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 500 years ago, 500 years ago, 100 years ago, 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago, I think you'd be very easy to argue humanity has made a lot of progress.

Well, I mean, I would actually disagree. I mean, because I think the moment, if you say, well, you know, we've progressed over the last thousand years, you've got to define what you mean by progress. Longer, longer life expectancy. Right, but at that point, you've already begged the question. I've already. You've been begging the question as in you've, you know, in the way you phrased the question, you've already predetermined your answer. Okay. So, but would you argue that it's unfair to say that?

people living longer, healthier lives. I mean, I see what you're saying in a way. My point is that there are always trade-offs. Yeah, yeah, I see what you're saying. So, for example, you might argue that the fact that we live longer is a product of a society that also means we live in atomized groups and therefore we're not connected with family. We have fewer children and blah, blah, blah, blah. And we end up dying care homes as supposed to be looked after by immediate family.

Just so. Yeah. Just so. You know, what I'm saying is not that, you know, that nothing ever gets better or that we're getting worse. My point is, you know, the reason I don't believe in progress in some sort of an absolute sense is that I think all the things that we measure as progress are just measured as such by bracketing all of the ways that they constitute trade-offs. So, you know, the moment you frame such and such as your metric for progress,

you've already answered your own question. Okay, what about penicillin? Well, I mean, penicillin is great. But what about superbugs? Tush. Tusha. I mean, you know, my point is simply that, you know, it's not obvious to me that humanity, you know,

taken in its total, is, you know, is in some way morally improved from over a thousand or two thousand years ago. Let me keep trying. What about a lack of Stalinism and purges and gulags and... Well, sure, but we didn't have Stalinism before Stalin either. Yeah, I mean, we kind of did, though, didn't we? Like, you know, we had the inquisitions and the... What about Xinjiang then?

Yeah. You know, we don't not have Stalinism anymore. It's true. That is true. I don't believe in progress. All right, well, I'm going to get depressed as well. Fucking out. It's great to have you on, Mary.

We thought, you know, we'd get someone interested in. But no, you know, just, you know... This is the ultimate black pill episode. Yeah, absolutely. The thing is, like, it's not... It's not that I'm... You're not depressed about it. No, I'm not. I'm really not depressed about any of this.

Yeah, because it's so bad, why bother? Yeah. Do you take a certain nihilistic glee in it? Absolutely not. No, I think there's immense scope in human life for beautiful, heroic, wonderful, transcendental experiences. I just don't think things are necessarily never-endingly getting better. You know, humanity evolves and cultures and ideas and people and places and everything evolves. And just tracing that is itself astonishingly beautiful.

It's just not constantly getting better. It's just changing. I think there's a lot of truth. I mean, if you look at the last decade to suggest that things are getting better, I'm not sure I'd buy that argument. Yeah, I mean, it depends where you're standing. You know, I mean, if you're an upper-middle-class white person who inherited wealth sometime in the late 1990s,

and got on the London housing ladder before the colossal boom, then you'd be forgiven for thinking that things have been continuously getting better. But, you know, for somebody not very far down the road from that person, it really might not feel like that at all, or for, you know, not that many years younger than that person. It might not feel like that at all. You know, if you're... No, it's an excellent point.

I mean, let's touch on a subject that has never upset or offended anybody who gets anybody angry, feminism. You write a lot about feminism. I particularly enjoy your articles. Would you describe yourself as a feminist, Mary? And if you do, what does that mean to you? Well, my Twitter bio says reactionary feminist. Okay, what does that mean?

Let's start with that. It started as some banter. It was literally just a running joke between me and one of my friends. I had a long-standing argument with a friend about the term post-liberal, which people attach to me. I don't attach it to myself, but people attach the term post-liberal to me. And I had a long-standing argument about with a friend, who's of the opinion that I was not a post-liberal, I was a reactionary.

And I said, no, I am not a reactionary. Reactionaries are bad people. And he's finally sort of, you know, his take was essentially that post-liberals are just reactionaries who don't inhale. And it was a very long-running, very sort of, it was a long-standing banter back and forth about post-liberals and reactionaries. In the course of which I changed my Twitter bio just to see how long it would take him to notice.

But I sort of, I came to think that actually it's, it's, it's a fun placeholder. I like reactionary because people are going to call me that anyway. They're bound to because I acknowledge, for example, that humans can't change sex, which is already a serious enough heresy to have you dumped among the bad people. And also because I don't believe in progress. And one of the questions that has preoccupied me for a long time is how is it even possible to argue for women's interests if you don't believe in progress? progress. Because feminism, as we understand it, is pretty inseparable from the whole sort of liberal

progress narrative, this idea that, you know, we're going from a bad place where everything, everything was terrible and benighted to a good place where everybody is enlightened and it's all good and we have rights and so on. And why is that not true? I mean, you can vote now, you know, your husband can't beat you with a stick. Which is all great. You know, I'm very much in favor of all of these things. What are the tradeoffs that you are concerned about? Well, in that situation. I mean, what is worth being beaten with a stick for?

I guess is what I'm getting at. I mean, that's a bold question, mate. I'm going to be honest with it. I'm just following the logical line here. And give him Mary the opportunity to elucidate. Give me a nice long length of rope that I can hang myself with.

Let me be perfectly clear. I am fully, fully, fully in favor of, very grateful to my foremothers for securing for me. the right to exist as a person, you know, in contemporary post-industrial, contemporary sort of liberal era terms. There's a very, very, very long answer to your question, which we probably don't have time for today to do with the...

I mean, it's essentially my thesis that what we understand as feminism is one iteration in the context of industrial modernity of much of just an eternal debate, which is to say how men and women can reconcile their not always perfectly aligned interests, which are fundamentally rooted in our different reproductive roles. You know, what men want and need out of the opposite sex and out of society doesn't completely overlap with what women need. And, you know, a lot of, you know,

and it's an eternal source of kind of cultural negotiation, let's say, how we go about squaring these two sets of interests. And in different material contexts and different, you know, sociocultural context, that plays out very differently. And it is my view that, in the context of industrial modernity. Well, when society is industrialized,

that left women quite disadvantaged in some ways which are specific to the material conditions of industrial modernity, particularly to do with how work was reorganised. You know, suddenly there's very stark split between work and home, which left women very on the back foot. And, you know, so to an extent still subject

to an older set of patriarchal social code, but without any of the social and cultural power that they had previously wielded, you know, in a medieval setup. In other words, you're expected to go to work and you don't have the sort of the protections that are afforded to women in a more patriarchal traditional society, well, you're getting ahead of, I'm thinking really of the 19th century here,

where all of a sudden women were expected to be the angel by the half. And but they, and completely economically, inactive. But they had no personhood independent from their husbands as a legacy of an older patriarchal way of doing things in the medieval era, which was semi, I mean, you know, not without problems and not without abuses. And there are plenty of, you can cite plenty of abuses of women from the, from the Middle Ages. I mean, obviously, you know, which burnings to name but one. However, you know, there were, it was a, it was a setup that was more or less functional in a context where both adults in a household worked, you know, within a household.

I mean, if you think about, you know, sort of typical kind of artisan or, you know, reasonably well-off kind of yeoman household in the middle ages, you know, women worked as well as men because everybody was engaged in some sort of subsistence activity. But that changed in the industrial era because all of a sudden work happened, you know, out there in a factory or whatever. And, I mean, I'm talking here about the middle classes again, you know, it's very difficult to pin this stuff down because it's. it's so contextual. But for the bourgeoisie, suddenly women were supposed to be this kind of,

this very sort of very constrained kind of, still no independent person had still no right to own property. And suddenly you don't really have any role outside just raising children. And so that prompted, you know, women who are obviously people, just like men, to say, well, hang on a minute, this is a bit boring. And nobody really, this is just a bit shit. So we would like, we would like to be deemed persons, you know, under the new, we exist in a, we live in a democracy just like you. Can we vote, please? Can we own property? Can we work? And, you know, the, but it was, it was the, it was the economic shift that drove the, that drove the political shift. And then again, you know, with the advancement of technology, you know, all of a sudden, you know, all of the sort of housewife

drudgery started to fade away because you just, you don't have to do your washing by hand anymore. And so all of a sudden that frees up a whole lot of time. And suddenly women are looking out and thinking, they seem to be having a more interesting time of it. You know, why can't we go and, you know, we'd quite like to work as well. You know, we're just sitting around twilling our thumbs. And this is, I mean, this is immensely complicated territory

and I'm really not doing it justice here. No, I actually hear a lot of what you're saying. I mean, it's even more dangerous for me to articulate some of these things than it is for you. But I suppose if you look at women's mental well-being over the last, I don't know, a few decades, let's say, or more than that, maybe the last six, seven, eight decades. You don't necessarily see much progress.

In fact, you see a decline, seemingly at least, right? So I see your point about trade-off. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, what we've ended up in is a situation. I mean, there's this sort of eternal tension, you know, between one, between desiring equality between the sexes and acknowledging, and acknowledging the physical differences between the sexes. And I think that, you know, I mean, that tension is not one that you can abolish,

even though, you know, recent activists are definitely trying. But, you know, it's irreducible. It's how we make new humans, right? You know, unless we're going to stop doing that, you know, there are certain irreducible facts about how you make new humans, which are very difficult to get away from completely. And that's, you know, the fact that, you know, only one sex just dates and only one sex can breastfeed.

We're getting into very controversial territory. Indeed, we are, and I'm skirting around some really quite radioactive territory here. You don't need to skirt around it. No, no, indeed, but I'm very careful about what I say on this subject. No, no, no, I mean, I'm going to get cancelled probably sooner or later, but, you know, perhaps it won't be today. Mary, I'm going to, why? Why are we so worried about skirting around this territory? when I think, you know, as human beings, as intelligent adults, we all know what the troops are. Why are we skirting around these territories?

Well, there's a, I'm not afraid of being cancelled for saying that humans can't change sex. I have no concern about that. I mean, I'm out and proud and have been for some time about my views on that. So, you know, that's, I'm not concerned about being cancelled for that, because were that to take place, it would already have happened. However, I tread cautiously when it comes to how people feel about their identities because I came to the subject of trans politics via personal involvement in the trans scene as it was, you know, very nascently in the noughties. You know, I know a lot of people who began, I mean, all the women I dated in the

the noughties have since become men. This is something I... So it's your fault. Well, I did wonder for a bit. I did wonder for a bit, but I'm not actually... I mean, you joke, but I did think, is it me? But no, no, no, I really don't think it is. I think it's just straightforwardly that I was, you know, in as much as I'm attracted to women,

I was always attracted to butch women, and not unreasonably, a lot of butch women have opted for life as a transgender man, because why wouldn't you? considering trans men get stunning and brave and which women get not very kind or understanding treatment. I mean, why would you not? You know, especially if you've been always felt uncomfortable with, you know, the expectations placed on women and prefer to adopt more masculine style and presentation and dress and so on. I completely understand why a lot of female body, why a lot of female body people would opt for that pathway and just sort of go all the way there

and find it genuinely more comfortable. And so, you know, I say this just to explain why, you know, I'm very, I'm careful in what I say on the subject, not because I want to skirt around the fact that humans can't literally change sex, but because I think it's really important not to dehumanize the individuals involved

who often genuinely struggle and, you know, really suffer and really struggle with, you know, just a sort of existential state of discomfort, you know, and the dissonance between their physiology and identity. And I think it's really important not to be dehumanizing and how we talk about this because it's very painful for a lot of people. I quite agree with you. And actually, I found that comment that you made really remarkable

that there's a lot of butch women, particularly butch lesbians, who would prefer to transition and live their life permanently medicalized as a inverted commas as a man, than they would do as a woman living a perfectly normal natural life. That to me seems awful. Yeah. Is it really that bad for them? Yeah, I think being gender non-conforming is extremely difficult.

And if anything, it's more difficult now than it was 20 years ago. I mean, I think about, my husband's a little bit older than me. He's sort of proper gen X. whereas I'm kind of borderline, borderline, gen X, millennial. And, you know, his musical and sort of aesthetic era is the New Romantics. I mean, if you think about some of the, some of the sort of celebrity figures from that era, the late 80s and up to the early 1990s, they were all gender bending merrily, left, right and center.

And you think about Marilyn and, well, I mean, you name it any of the New Romantics. Right, exactly. I mean, the whole of pop culture there was filled with people who were just really playing. very creatively with the boundaries of gender presentation. And that all just seems to have gone. I mean, if you watch Top of the Pops from that era, you know, from the 70s through to, I suppose, perhaps the late 1980s, and you think, you watch that

and you see the women form, you think, my God, they're wearing a lot of clothes. Yeah, but it's really striking. And it's not just a decency thing, you know, Patty Smith would get up on stage wearing a pair of sort of brown corduroy flares. And nobody tried to put her in a little fucking Britney Spears sort of warrior battle bikini. Like they do with... Battle bikini. I mean, you know exactly the sort of outfit I'm talking about.

Rhinestone's spangled battle bikinis seems to be kind of the order of the day if you want to be a female performer. The only way you can be at all, you know, anything kind of curvyer than anorexic, is if you're, if you started life as a stripper. You know, those are those are the options available. You know, the, the pornification of women in, in, the culture now and the, you know, the sort of extremeness and the, I mean, think about the contestants on Love Island, you know, all the girls are kind of, you know, with their boobs hitched up to

here and their botox and their fillers and the highlights and what have you. And all the guys are, it's a sort of pumped up, pumped up kind of kendals covered in, with their arms covered in Biro. You know, it's this sort of incredibly kind of cartoonish, you know, hypermasculine and hyperfeminine, stereotypical aesthetic, which, yeah, it doesn't leave very much scope for gender creative expression. So I can really understand how people who just don't comfortably fit those sorts of extreme stereotypes could find themselves thinking, well, actually, maybe I should just join the other team and just literally become the other team, because that's just going to be less of a miserable paradox to try and occupy.

I get that. And I can see why people would think, no, actually the trade-offs in terms of, you know, osteoporosis and, you know, 25 years off my life or whatever it is, you know, that seems like a reasonable trade. I can see how people get there. That is so sad when you consider what the narrative

that is being fed to us that, you know, we're more free, liberal than ever before, were more accepting than ever before. But actually, you know, the narrative that the media is showing us, the images, and also, let's be fair, social media as well, is there very much the opposite of that, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, one of the, I did a, I wrote something about, I wanted to, I wanted to explore, you know, the, what's understood about, you know, how much, you know, what basis is there for thinking about, you know,

there are actually psychological normative differences between the sexes. I looked into it and I found a really interesting study which showed that the people are more likely to think of themselves as very masculine or very feminine in societies where materially people are more egalitarian. So people cling more strongly to masculine and feminine sex roles, the more egalitarian life is in reality. You know, women are less likely to go off and study science and engineering and maths in where the culture is. Women are more likely to study egalitarian subjects or to take an interest in science,

where the culture itself is more sexist and more sex role differentiated, which seems really odd until you think about it. And you think, well, you know, people intuitively sense that there is, you know, there is something different between men and women. We're not quite sure what it is. But if everyone's saying, oh, you know, men and women can both do everything and, you know, men can be stay-at-home parents and women can be, you know, ball-busting CEOs and yad-di-dadi. And there are, in fact, no material differences between us at all. But people still feel instinctively that there is something.

There is something different. And so instead they kind of construct this sort of exaggerated masculinity or femininity as a way of making up for the sense that we're all just kind of disintegrating into a sort of grey goo. I mean, that's my reading of what's going on there, whether it's, whether it's true or not, I don't know. But, but my sense is that people, people want there to be a difference of some kind between men and women. People kind of, people feel it matters. Do you think it's that they want or do you think that they're tired of being told there isn't,

even though all their objective life experience is telling them that there is? And they're just tired of living a lie, like with so many other issues. It could just be, it could be that. It could be that. I mean, I don't know. I mean, certainly what has felt very true to me is that it's very, you can pretend that there are no differences between men and women

until you have children. And the fact that more people are putting off children until later and later, or just not having children at all, is increasing the constituency of people who pretend that there are no differences between the sexes. But the rubber really hits the road when you have children, because at the end of the day, you know, it's, it's only me. It's most, it was only me who was able to nurse a baby. You know, it was me, it was me who grew her in my

literal entrails. And actually, you know, physiologically, that came with a whole load of changes. I'm reading this amazing book at the moment that's just about, it's coming out shortly called Mum Genes, which is all about the physiological changes that come with changing from being a woman to being a mother, because it literally, it literally rewires your brain. I mean, I'm still kind of hopefully, mostly sort of functional. Cognitively, I think I do okay, but it completely rewires your brain. And actually, you know, even every child that you carry as a woman, as a mother, leaves traces of their DNA inside your body permanently.

There's absolutely wild. I didn't know this. You know, my sense, this sense I had of being kind of symbiotically connected to my baby actually has a material basis in the sense that, you know, every child you carry, you leaves traces of DNA that just sloshes around inside you and will actually, will actually repair injuries that you have. So if you, if you cut yourself, you know, the, I think that they call it microchimerism, which is to say, you know, sort of genetic, you become sort of chimerically interconnected with your child, literally at a

cellular level. And, you know, the, the trace cells, the trace DNA, which is left behind by your child will repair injuries to your body. You know, I have a C-section scar. That was probably repaired by my daughter's DNA, even though she was physically gone from my body by then. It's just nuts when you think about it. And within this sort of atomized paradigm we have of what humans are and how humans relate to one another, it makes no sense. It just doesn't compute this idea that we're interconnected and can be interconnected, you know, even at a cellular level. And that's particularly true for women in a way which is just, it can't true for men. You know, that's sort of in violation of a number of pretty kind of fundamental

beliefs that we have about, well, for one thing, about the sameness between men and women, and also about the fact that we're all separate and atomized and sort of propelling ourselves around like billiables around a table. And in fact, the reality is much messier and stickier and more sort of interconnected than that. And that's more pronounced. for women than it is for men. It's a really great point and it's fascinating. And one of the things that you touched on that I particularly wanted to talk to you about

because it was something that concerned me when I was a teacher is what you talked about, which was the pornification of women. What impact do you think pornography is having on our society and particularly on its impact on women? Well, I mean, I'm not really at the cold face of this because I've been married for nearly 10 years. So I'm not really at the sharp end of dating

and relationships so much. But from younger friends, of both sexes actually, my sense is that it's having a very radical impact. Women, there have been numerous studies done of this that indicate that women in particular are experiencing much higher levels of sexual violence, violence during sex. I think there was a study done last year that showed that over something like three quarters of men have slapped or choked or spat on.

a woman, their partner during sex, men under 40, three quarters of them. Now, it may well be that some of those women were really into it, but all of them, I doubt it. I very much doubt it. And this is coming directly from pornography. And the difficulty there is that, I think of pornography, you know, it's not a, it's not a, it's a, it's a, it has direction as well as force, right? But by which I mean, you know, you watch something that you, you, you watch two people, people just having a shag, right? And that's, that's really exciting. And maybe you, but then you watched a couple of times and it's just not so exciting anymore. So you go looking for something a bit more

intense. And that, and that, that takes you, that takes any regular, prolific consumer of pornography inexorably towards the really dark, the really violent, the really exploitative, and then all the way out there beyond the pale into, I don't know, children, on animals and what have you. You know, pornography has, it has force and it also has direction. And, and it also has, and it also replaces intimacy. And I think this is a problem that a lot of, as I understand it, a lot of young men are struggling with, some of them increasingly consciously. I think there are hundreds of thousands of members now of the NOFAP boards, you know, where, you know, usually, usually adolescent, but, you know, men from all walks of life are really struggling with pornography addiction,

you know, compulsive masturbation. And I think, you know, people laugh at it. and go, ah, losers, you know, you can't keep it in your pants. But I don't think, I don't think it's, I really don't think it's something to laugh at. I think what they're doing is genuinely heroic. Because the porn industry, the online porn industry is the most, the most kind of nakedly, nakedly venal and just completely out there in the open version of the whole, of the internet dopamine machine, you know, full stop. You know, this whole, you know, that wants to commodify people's desires.

and turn them into profit centres. I mean, most of the internet is about that, right. You know, whether it's wanting to, you know, hack the desire for, you know, social applause by encouraging us to get really addicted to social media platforms and the likes and the retweets and what have you. And I fully confess, I have a fairly serious and chronic Twitter addiction. So, you know, I'm speaking from experience there. We've got no idea what you're talking about. Absolutely not.

of course. I mean, you know, I mean, we're all, we're all, we'll, we'll, we'll perhaps be in recovery together one day. Right. I mean, this is, this is the water we all swim in, right? But the, but the pornography industry takes that absolutely to its, it's, it's most squalid and venal conclusion, you know, because it's every, every, every hit you get there, it's not just a little dopamine hit like you get from a, from a, from a, from a, from a, from a, from a, from a, from a, from a retweet. It's an orgasm. So, you know, the rewiring is more, is, is, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, is more direct and it's more comprehensive. And I think for a lot of people, it's very, very, very addictive.

And the whole pornography industry is just set up directly to hack, to hack people's, you know, absolutely basic sort of lizard brain mechanisms for reproduction. And the fact that there are, there's this growing subculture of young men out there who are saying, no, actually, I'm going to disentangle the vampire squid from my brain. I think that's genuinely heroic. And there's something really, really quite sort of, you know, radical.

And, yeah, it's genuinely heroic. And I don't spend a huge amount of time on the no fat boards, but I've scooted through them once or twice, not sort of voyeuristically, but just out of curiosity to see what the discourse there is like. And it's, you know, a lot of people are really suffering. you know and they talk about falling off the wagon and they support each other trying to get back on it and yeah i mean there are there are corners of that discourse which are a bit weird you know the whole

kind of semen retention thing is kind of a bit mad but and there are there are bits of it get quite misogynistic perhaps as well um but but these are people who are trying to unplug themselves from the dopamine machine and that's that's almost impossible to do you know as as witnessed by my own twitter addiction when i think about trying to quit twitter i just think how am i going to do that you know it's every bit as addictive as the smoking as which i which i finally quit 10 years ago and in some ways i think it's a direct replacement for it but you know these this this is the this is where this is where we are as a culture it's interesting we're rapidly running out of time because i think we're trying to scratch the surface of so much that we could talk about

but before we get to the end uh we we brought up feminism never really got into it but this is an interesting, perhaps, point on which to wrap that conversation up for now until we get you back and talk for seven hours instead of one, which is, what do you make then of strands of feminism who seem to be totally okay with this? Totally okay with sex work, totally okay with pornography, totally okay with erosion of women's spaces in some cases. How does that work? I don't think it does. Well, I don't either, but I'm guessing what I'm trying to say is how has that happened? How has it happened? Well, this is, this is, I suppose central to my reactionary feminist thesis

is that we've come to the end of the gains that we can be made for women by centering freedom. And those strands of feminism, which are now all about applauding prostitution and transgenderism and yada yada, the whole sort of meat Lego matrix, this idea that we can just sort of monetise and commodify our bodies and that constitutes empowerment.

I think that's a set of people who are still committed to the idea that it's possible to square feminism with liberation in the digital age and I just disagree with that. I think they're looking at it wrong. And we need a root and branch re-examination of the material conditions we're in now rather than just fighting yesterday's battles. I mean, if you look at the digital age, you know, within, if you're stuck in the industrial paradigm

and you still think more liberation is self-evidently better, then I can see how you could end up in that, you know, arguing for sex work or arguing for, you know, uploading our consciousness is to the cloud or, you know, abolishing, liberating women even from the constraints of biological sex via, I don't know, extra uterine gestation or just being men or whatever. You know, I can see how if you're still chasing the high of liberation, you could still imagine those things might be feminist, but I'm not chasing the high of liberation.

I think we're all of us, men and women alike, liberated enough. what we need is more and better obligations. Like what? Well, I think we need, that depends on who you are and who you're committed to and who your obligations are to. I mean, in my case, it's straightforwardly my obligations to my family, particularly to my daughter, but also to my extended family and to the people who I'm actually connected to and whom I love in real life.

And beyond that to my working relationships and my friends, I mean, grounded commitments in actual relationships. You know, parasocial relationships are great and fun and interesting and exciting, but they're insubstantial when it comes down to it. You know, internet friends come and go. Some of them turn into real-life friends. You know, I've been online long enough to have to have in-real-life friends who started out just as, you know, a DM chat.

But that's, but, but it's, I think it's important to develop an ability to discern the difference and to be to be able to think very pragmatically about what actually matters. So, you know, there isn't a universal answer to what more and better obligations means, but it's grounded in real relationships and not in, not in ideology. Mary, I absolutely love this interview. It's been challenging. We've discussed a variety of topics. Depressing?

Slightly. Which for him is a dopamine, to be honest. Yeah, that is my pornography, so thank you. But before we do our questions for our local supporters, we always say, have one final question, which is what is the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be? In my opinion, it's the very obvious conflict between liberal feminism and climate change, ecological collapse. I agree with Phyllis Schlafly, and this may well be the point where I get cancelled for quoting Phyllis Schlafly, who's an American conservative, who died about three

months before Donald Trump was elected. But it was her opinion that women's liberation was not a result of moral progress, but of modern technology. And although there are plenty that I disagree with Felish Laughley on, I do agree with her about that. I think a great deal of what we think of as liberation through progress is in fact liberation from drudgery through machines that just do the jobs for us. And I hope it doesn't happen in our lifetimes, but I can envisage a future in which most of those technological gifts are no longer with us or no longer widely available. Whether we're talking about washing machines or whether we're talking about contraception, I think without, there is a huge amount of, a huge amount of the ways in which women are

liberated now are effects of an advanced technological civilization. And should that civilization collapse, which we should all, which we must all hope it doesn't, we might find ourselves in a situation where actually the underlying, underlying conditions that enabled feminism are just gone. And I think the environmental movement in particular is yet to get its head around that. With possible exception of Roger Hallam at Extinction Rebellion, who's considerably more switched on about this stuff than most of his supporters, really. Former guest on the show?

Roger, good, good. Yeah, he gets a lot more, I think, than he lets on. But, I mean, just to take one specific example, hormonal contraception is ecologically catastrophic and this is just something, this is an elephant in the room as far as, you know, I mean, most environmentalists would also consider themselves to be feminists. So all of them are keen that, you know, women should have reproductive autonomy, as am I, I should say,

but when that comes to the mass rollout of the contraceptive pill worldwide, we should probably bear in mind the fact that it's having disastrous effects on aquatic life. it's turning literally to it's having disastrous effects on a Were you about to say it's turning the frogs gay? Well I mean that it's true

it's turning the frogs gay You know I have no kind of I have no moral view on that But you know it's obviously a problem as far as Frogs have frogs making You're not homophobic against frogs No no I'm not I'm not frog homophobic But you know it's obviously a problem

When it comes to frogs making more frogs So I mean these are these are probably things that we should engage with. But this is a conflict, which I think is just people are just not willing to engage with at the moment. They're like, well, hopefully it's all going to be fine, so let's just not talk about that. Well, what a note to end the interview on.

Thank you very much for coming on the show, Mary. If people want to find you online, ironically, where is the best place to do that? My substack is reactionary feminist, and I tweet at Moving Circles. Fabulous. Fantastic. And make sure also to check out Mary's

on Unheard, which is absolutely brilliant, Mary. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for having me. It's been a real pleasure. And thank you for watching at home or listening. Thank you for being here. We will see you very soon with another brilliant interview like this one or a raw show. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. Or 2pm Eastern Standard Time. Which is the same time. It is the same time, but for our American guests. Guys, thank you so much and we'll see you soon. We hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview. Remember to subscribe. and hit the bell button so that you never miss another fantastic episode. And if you believe that the work we do here at Trigonometry is important,

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