TRIGGERnometry - Why 'Progress' is Bad for Women - Mary Harrington

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

Mary Harrington is a writer who sometimes goes by the moniker of ‘Reactionary Feminist’. She is a Contributing Editor at Unherd and the author of ‘Feminism Against Progress’ available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1684514878/ Our first interview with Mary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgptSG3V2B4 Mary’s Substack: Reactionaryfeminist.substack.com Mary’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/moveincirclesv Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   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. 00:00 Intro 01:44 The Central Case of Mary’s New Book 12:53 What Does Feminism Mean Today? 17:30 The Unspoken Costs of the Sexual Revolution 26:00 Are Women Waking Up to These Issues? 31:56 The ‘Cyborg Revolution’ 46:15 The Argument Against the Contraceptive Pill 53:32 How the Left React to Mary’s Case 1:08:05 What’s the One Thing We’re Not Talking About? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The contraceptive pill is the first transhumanist technology. It's the first major widespread social, you know, biomedical intervention, which aims not at fixing something which has gone wrong with normal health, but upgrading normal, you know, in line with what people want. It's impossible to separate liberation from commodification. And the same goes as well for the fertility industry, which is to say the moment in theory I can control my fertility, it becomes theoretically possible to commodify my fertility.

I've argued that the technologies which enable us to flatten the differences between the sexes, fundamentally, beginning with the pill and abortion, are in logical continuity with the technologies now being employed by transgender-identified people to become, as they see it, their true selves. And the fundamental difficulty we have at the moment is that these, lot of these policies are being driven by elite women who simply don't see the downsides because they just never they're they're less likely to encounter them. There's a lot of women who would actually disagree with you who say, look, I live in a

society which is freer than ever. I have more choice than ever before. I can pick a wide range of careers. I can choose when I want to have a child. Surely these are all positive things, ma'am. Yes, but they're not without cost. Hello and welcome to trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisham. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our terrific and returning guest today is a writer and the author of the upcoming book. In fact, it's out already here in the UK. It's called Feminism Against Progress, which is exactly the kind of feminism we like on this show.

Mary Harrington, welcome back to Trignometry. Thank you for having me again. It's a real pleasure to have you on. How have you been there? You've been writing this book for a while. Yeah, I've been, well, it's been a very strange sort of. of hiatus for me because the book, obviously, I've finished writing writing late last year. And then there's this period where you go through it and you check to make sure, you know,

people tell you off your sloppy footnoting and it goes through the whole post-production process. And then you just have to wait. And that's where I've been for a little while. And it's a bit like the point where I ran out of things to revise at university. And then it was just waiting for finals. So that's about where I am at the moment. It's just waiting, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Well, having read the book, we can say you've passed.

But more interestingly, of course, to our audience, tell us what is the central case? Because last time we had you on the show, we talked about this idea. You said you don't believe in progress. Well, I still don't believe in progress. But now you also don't believe, you want feminism that's against it. Well, the central thesis of the book is that much of what we understand as feminism is less an effect. of endless moral improvement towards some kind of imagined future heaven on earth as a side effect of technology and specifically of women's responses to changes in how we live together as a

consequence of technological advancements. And you can, and so the book traces the development, traces women's responses to first the Industrial Revolution and then more importantly from the point of view of my case against progress of the what I think, what I call the Cyborg Revolution, which is much more recent and is really everything which has come since the contraceptive and the digital revolutions in the mid-20th century. And I argue that at that point, a progress which previously seemed to be delivering never-ending dividends of more freedom and more good things for everybody and particularly for women has now increasingly turned against women and is delivering not just diminishing returns,

but actively making life worse for everyone, all women except an increasingly a shrinking elite. Well, before we get into the way that that is making things worse, you mentioned the response to Industrial Revolution and so on. Give us a quick run through of some of the changes of the technology, because I think in the modern consciousness, people don't think about it at all. They think that women's rights were achieved in the way that we currently conceive of them purely through campaigning, protesting, you know, throwing yourself in front of horses, that sort of thing, right?

So what's actually happened throughout history? Give us a brief overview. What I, this was, this part of the story was the result of me doing a deep dive into first wave feminism, which doesn't really get much of a look in in terms of sort of school history lessons, if you like. You know, apart from the suffragettes, you know, everyone knows that, you know, there was the one who threw herself under a horse and, you know, they jumped up and down and said votes for women.

But people don't really talk about the century or so of women's, women's activism and arguments over the relations between men and women, and really of feminism prior to that. And there was an awful, there was a lot of it. And really people, people were intensely preoccupied from the Industrial Revolution onward with the changing roles of men and women and how families should be formed and how men and women should relate to one another, because the Industrial Revolution changed that radically. It had a profound effects, you know, really for the fundamental reason that work no longer happened for, and a growing number of people in the way that it had done for a very long period of time. In the Middle Ages, most work happened in the home,

you know, and both sexes worked. You know, it's a mistake to imagine that women only, women only entered the workplace, or women only worked from the mid-20th century onward. In fact, so that pretty much has it backwards. Almost all women, apart from very, very, very aristocratic ones worked in pre-modern England because most work happened in farmhouses and in artisan in what historians call a productive household. So that might have been a couple and possibly extended family members as well, producing subsistence goods for the family, possibly producing artisan goods for sale, possibly, you know, producing goods for use within the family. So in a farm, in a farmstead situation, and that might be the men producing raw materials

and the women processing those into fabric or food or other goods for the family. And a huge amount of that just happened in the home and women who were mothers would have done that with kids underfoot and the kids would have chipped in as well the moment they were old enough to do it. So that's the sort of pre-modern template for a productive household.

But when you think about what happens when so much of that work industrialises, it changed things radically and particularly for women, I've taken the example of textile making because for tens of thousands of years prior to the Industrial Revolution, that was always women's work. And there are historians who've looked at textile making throughout the millennia and argued that it's historically been women's work because it can be, you know, you can raise a loom off the ground so it doesn't get, your baby doesn't eat it. You know, it's semi-interruptible work. You know, if you're, you're blinging a shuttle back and forth. You know, you can stop because the baby's about to climb into the fire or whatever. if you, and it's social as well. So, you know, you're not just stuck at home on your own with a baby. So it works, you know, it makes sense for, it makes sense for you, if you've got kids underfoot,

for women to be doing that. But now if you think about what happens with industrialization, suddenly textile making, you know, the spinning and the weaving are both done via heavy, expensive industrial machinery, which has to be centralized in a factory. So instead of making textiles in the home, Suddenly, even if you're a woman and you want to go on textile making,

you know, you've got this decision to face. You know, you have a breastfed baby at home, and suddenly you have to go, you have to travel some distance away and work a 12-hour shift in a factory. What do you do? You know, it's a problem that you never had to face before. So this is just one way of illustrating the fact that work and the home separated in a way which actually reduced women's agency

at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. And it's sort of common kind of pop feminist idea is that women were radically disempowered until feminism came along and saved us all at the beginning and in some distance into the modern era. But I've argued that actually relative to, in some respects, the medieval era,

women actually lost agency with industrialisation. And everything that followed in terms of feminist activism has been in response to that radical disempowerment that happened with industrial modernity. And looking at the 19th century, that took two distinctive forms. On the one hand, you know, there were women whose activities at home were now just confined to spending money and looking after kids who argued that, no, no, no, actually, the work of the

home is good, actually, and we need to make sure it's still valued and it's not treated as second class. And this was the so-called cult of domesticity. So you have a proliferation of women's magazines, essentially, most of which are focused on bigging up the domestic work that women do at home. And feminist historians have often framed this as a kind of false consciousness, parroting the tropes of patriarchy in order to accustom women to their subjugation. But another way of looking at it might be that these are women who recognize that actually

caring for children and the work of the home and, you know, defending a space outside the marketplace is important. And the stuff that can't be done within the market, which still matters. and we're trying to make the case for actually that being important and valuable. So in a sense, it was a kind of proto-maternal feminism that's going on in the quote-unquote culture of domesticity. And then against that, you've got women who say, no, actually, you know, we don't want this domestic life. We want to enter the market on the same terms as men. We want to be able to go out into the workplaces where some of the work is now stuff we can do.

You know, I want a shot at being a barrister or a doctor. And these tended to be more sort of upper bourgeois women. And so you have this sort of bifurcation of, you know, there are women who push for greater valorization of care. And then there are women who push for women to have personhood in, you know, understood as being an atomized market participant on the same terms as men. And these are the two poles of pre-cyborg feminism, which I think of as feminism proper, which is the feminism of freedom and the feminism of care. And there's a huge range of views within those two poles, you know, and the back and forth between them and the negotiation and trying to find a healthy balance between freedom and the needs of dependence is, I think probably the best characterization you can give of what feminism looked like up until the cyborg revolution. Before we get to the cyborg, though, there's also, that's a whole one. I'm sure we will. There's also the sexual revolution to consider, which we kind of skipped over.

It is the cyborg revolution. You did. Oh, that is the cyborg revolution. Oh, because I thought the cyborg revolution was going to be slightly more recent. But anyway, tell us about the cyborgs. Well, I mean, this isn't actually, this is a, I've made the case more starkly since I finished writing feminism against progress, but I realized actually the pithiest way I can, I can say this is to make the claim that the contraceptive pill is the first transhumanist technology.

And by that, I mean, it's the first technique, it's the first technique. first major widespread social, biomedical intervention, which aims not at fixing something which has gone wrong with normal health, but upgrading normal, you know, in line with what people want. I mean, if you think about what contraceptive pill does, I mean, it actually interrupts normal healthy fertility in the interests of essentially personal freedom. And in that sense, it's a radically different paradigm for what biomedical technologies can and should do. And that,

that obviously, as we know, was legalised and spread like wildfire in the 1960s. And downstream of that came a whole load of other technological transformer. We're a good way further down the path that that started.

But my argument is that we became cyborgs and women became cyborgs arguably ahead of men at the point where we accepted transhumanist medicine as a basic enabling condition for women's participation in society, which really began in the 1960s.

Wow. I mean, that's a really, really good way of putting it. My question to you is this, what does feminism now mean, Mary? Because we've got first, second, third. I mean, we've got more waves than the Mediterranean Sea. So what does it actually mean when we use this word? Because I think that's important when we have this discussion.

Well, it really depends who you ask. I mean, there are, I would, if you want to take the sort of consensus view of what I think of as magazine feminism, if, you know, the kind of pop version that comes out in articles about who you should or shouldn't date and why, you know, that kind of the sort of Jezebel feminism. I would say the broad consensus is probably that feminism is, actually, I'm just going to quote the onion. that you hear. Feminism is anything a woman does. To put it very crudely, you know, and really this also is downstream of the cyborg revolution

because I've argued that the arrival of the pill, and particularly the inevitable consequence of the arrival of the pill, which was the legalization of abortion, the feminism of freedom decisively defeated the feminism of care. I'm so sorry to interrupt, and also I don't want to interview. fear with Francis Lina question. But I'm curious, I think I know why you say the legalization

of abortion is a consequence of the pill. Is it just like a more advanced version of the same thing, essentially? Is that what you're saying? Why is legalization of abortion a consequence of the pill? Yeah. People hope, when they campaign first for the pill, the hope was that there would be, as a result of the pill, there would be fewer accidental pregnancies. And therefore, you know, it would make women's reproductive choices much more within women's control. But what happened in practice was, well, the absolute number of accidental pregnancies went up, not down. And that was because there was just so much more casual sex happening.

Because it radically moved the goalposts for what you could or couldn't do. And it's only mostly effective. It's not 100% effective. So there were still enough oops pregnancies. More, in fact. You know, the rate of accidental pregnancy went down, but there was so much more sex happening that the absolute number went up. And at that point, it created an inevitable ratchet towards saying, well, what are we going to do

about all these accidental pregnancies? Because then it was very difficult to put back in the box. I mean, it was pretty much impossible to put it back in the box. People were saying, well, they have the pill now. And everybody's got the pill. And so they're all at it like rabbits. And, you know, we can't stop this now. So, you know, we have to do something about, you know, this is obviously not a tenable situation.

You know, women are, you know, bleeding out. in alleyways with coat hangers up them and, you know, this is horrendous. We've got to do something because, you know, they'd open Pandora's box. And so many of the very strict social controls, which had previously obtained around premarital sex, were beginning to fall away. And, you know, the case became very compelling to legalize abortion. But of course, once you do that, you're saying that women's autonomy is, you know, Women's autonomy is that much more important than the needs of a dependent.

And it doesn't really get much more dependent than an unborn baby that can't survive outside its mother's body. That you can end the potential life of the dependent in order to safeguard the freedom. So at that point, the feminism of freedom and the feminism of care collided. And history tells us which one won. And that's the world we've been living ever since. And so I think that's the long answer, Francis, to your question of what is feminism? It's the feminism, as we understand it today, in its mainstream sense, is a doctrine which argues that we can and should use technology in every, you know, to the fullest extent possible to flatten the differences between the sexes. And what's wrong with that?

Even at the, even at the expense of unborn lives. And what's wrong with that? That's what wrong with it, I think. But, like, there's a lot of women who would actually disagree with you, who would. So, look, I live in a society which is freer than ever. I have more choice than ever before. I can pick a wide range of careers. I can choose when I want to have a child.

Surely these are all positive things, Mary. Yes, but they're not without cost. I entirely agree with you that these are all positives, but they're not cost-free, I think. And that's really what, so that gets us to the end of part one. And part two really is about some of the undercounted costs of the victory of freedom over care when it comes, or rather, tech-enabled freedom over care in the domain of feminism. And so I've looked at the war it's been waging on our relationship, on the relations between men and women.

On the war it's been waging on the relations between mothers and babies. And finally, the war it wages on our relationship with our own bodies. Bless those out for us, please. Okay, so the wrong turn of phrase. War on relationships. Yes, thing, how do I characterize this? The point at which you can use technology to flatten the difference between the sexes is the point at which sex leaves the domain of management by social norms and becomes something which is theoretically free. It becomes private.

So, I mean, let me back up a little bit. So if you imagine, it's 1910, you know, I'm female. I'm a young woman, I get horny, like all humans do, whereas in adolescence, there are very, very, you know, my mum tells me never be, never be seen alone with a guy, you know, they can get ideas, you know, and you're warned at all, you know, and you're supervised carefully by your aunties and your mum, and this is all with a very pragmatic intent,

and it might seem unfair because guys don't get this level of supervision and constraint, but there's a very practical intent behind it, which is that, you know, if I get knocked up by mistake, with somebody who then disappears on me, it's a problem. It's not just a problem for me. It's a problem for everybody in my immediate family, and it's a problem for wider society.

So whether or not it's unfair, the basic asymmetry between the reproductive roles of men and women just forces a pragmatic response to that at scale, you know, in order to manage the challenge posed to everybody in general by babies, by unplanned babies. So there's this intense social pressure from all directions, which is aimed at funneling couples into something like functional, functional

diads, which can raise children together, because it's just, it's just, the result is just less messy when you do it like that. Then you, then you, then you, then you add the pill into the mix. All of a sudden, all of those rules are theoretically weightless. You don't need them anymore, because I can just, I can, I can, I can just take this medicine, which means that I can have as much sex as I want. But the the thesis I've I've advanced for what happens at that point is that when in theory, you know, my sexuality is now my private domain. But what happens at that point isn't just a dividend of freedom. But the market also moves into that space. Because once once something belongs just to me, in theory, I can buy or sell it as I see fit. And really the governing,

the common thread to the, the war, these various wars on relationships, is the way that technologies, the intervention of technologies into our bodies, you know, seems to privatise the different facets of our bodies, whether that's our fertility, our sexuality, or even really our embodiment itself. But in practice, what happens then is that that becomes commodified. So in the context of sex, the empire of, you know, the porn industry and the sex industry began to mushroom the moment those constraints on sex went away. I mean, you know, the prostitution isn't called the world's oldest industry for nothing.

You know, it's always been there, but it absolutely moved from the 60s onwards. I mean, Hugh Hefner's Playboy and Playboy clubs appeared the same year as the pill was legalised. And by the 1970s, you know, radical feminists were protesting against the endemic and increasingly violent and degrading nature of pornography, which was now just being marketed pretty much openly. Because sexuality was privatised, you know, suddenly there was this libertarian argument for letting women do whatever they wanted with their bodies. Now, in practice, if you speak to a survivor of the sex or the porn industries,

they'll tell you that, in fact, there's a great deal more coercion that goes into that than the libertarian arguments might like to believe. But fundamentally, you know, this is the pattern that I wanted to sketch out, is that it's impossible to separate, liberation from commodification. And the same goes as well for the fertility industry, which is to say the moment in theory I can control my fertility, it becomes theoretically possible to commodify my fertility. So if you fast forward a number of decades on from the arrival of the pill, we're a long way down that path. I mean, we have young women who have been rendered infertile by selling their

eggs in order to pay for college tuition. You know, we have entire, I'm sure you saw the headlines during when the war in Ukraine began of these Ukrainian surrogates. It's a big industry over there, impoverished young women in the Ukraine who essentially rent their wounds to wealthy Westerners who either don't want to gestate themselves

or don't have a uterus between them or for whatever reason. And all these babies is... Or who, by the way, have postponed having children to the point where they're physically and precisely because of society we now have. Precisely because of that. Yeah. Precisely because of that.

And all these babies, lined up in rows in bomb shelters without your motherless babies essentially. And their gestational surrogates have left. And then they're just sort of being cared for under this kind of semi-factory conditions by a couple of nurses with the bombs falling overhead. You know, just astonishingly dystopian images, which is again what you begin to see once you privatise something which was previously governed by social norms.

And finally, you know, in the same context, I've argued that the technologies which enable us to flash the differences between the sexes, fundamentally, you know, beginning with the pill and abortion, are in logical continuity with the technologies now being employed by transgender-identified people to become, as they see it, their true selves, you know, in ways which use technology to flatten the differences between the sexes or to remodel, remodel secondary sex characteristics in line with their preferred felt sense of self. So, so really, I mean, I'm very straightforward forwardly, I'm arguing that you couldn't have trans people without the pill and abortion,

and that any coherent critique of trans identity has to begin with a coherent critique of what the pill does. Because fundamentally, if you're going to say women are allowed to emancipate ourselves by getting rid of what makes us, by by using technology to flatten what makes us distinctively female, why shouldn't other people become more fully themselves using technologies to flatten what make them distinctively themselves. You know, why shouldn't we just take that a little bit further and just remodel ourselves as we see fit? You know, if you're, if you're brought into the cyborg feminist paradigm, you know,

trans activism is just, is absolutely in logical continuity with it. And I would go as far as to say that the cyborg feminist argument is more coherent, so, you know, quite a lot more coherent than those radical, those gender-critical ones, which say we should have the pill on abortion, but we can't have trans activism, because we're going to flatten, we're going to flatten reproductive characteristics of women, but wait, no, not like that.

It doesn't make sense. So is that the reason, Mary, these cyborg feminists are, in the words you use, a pro-porn, sex workers' workers' workers' a mantra that they like to say, they're pro-surrogacy, and they're pro-trans. And it stems right the way back to this idea. It's all entirely coherent. It would make no sense at all to be for some of those things and against some of the others.

It all goes back to the definitive defeat of the feminism of care by the feminism of freedom. If we're allowed to use technology to remodel our bodies as we see fit, then that just goes all. And when we invite the market into ourselves as a side effect of the emancipation that produces, then you just have to follow that all the way down the rabbit hole. But Mary, then why is it with these feminists when they see the negative effects of their arguments? For instance, we know that sex work is not good for women.

We just know it isn't. I mean, people will try and dress this up and they'll try and give you arguments, but if we... No one would want their daughter to participate in the sex industry. That is pretty much obvious. If we look at abortion, again, no one would want. want their child, or very few people want their child to have an abortion. And thirdly, as we've seen

with the case of Ila Bryson, the endgame for the transgender ideology is profoundly negative to women, rapists and female prisons. At what point does this break and do people start to wake up? And are we actually seeing that at the moment. Well, I think people are breaking and people are waking up. But one of the difficulties is, or one of the, one of the tensions is, is social class fundamentally. And by that I mean all women are not the same. I mean, you can talk about, you can talk about something being universally in women's interests, but I'm fundamentally, my feminism is anti-universalist. And by that I mean, I think you can talk, you can talk concretely about women's interests and you can care about women's interests,

but the same policy could be pro-women and anti-women, depending on the context. And the fundamental difficulty we have at the moment is that a lot of these policies are being driven by elite women who simply don't see the downsides because they're less likely to encounter them. So, I mean, if you think about, I forget the names of the Scottish members of Parliament

who've been cheerleading for, for gender self-decloration recently, but there are lots of them. Penny Mordaunt has been a big flag waiver for that in the United Kingdom. And these are women who likely grew up in fairly comfortable bourgeois homes because those are the people who become politicians. You know, they've been to university, surrounded by men who are mostly reasonably well behaved,

relative to the way some can behave. You know, they mostly socialise in situations where men are not routinely violent or unpredictable or just outright dangerous. And I think it's possible if you've just been sheltered in that way, simply not to be able to imagine just how depraved some people can be. It's just that they're just not able to picture it. And therefore, it's a fundamental blind spot. It simply refuses, for whatever reason, to grasp the fact that bad act,

really, really, really bad actors exist. And the problem is that pushing for effectively the abolition of sex in law is in the interests of this of the upper crust women. You know, if you're a knowledge class worker, which is to say you're a barrister or you're a solicitor or an accountant or something, it is not in your class interests for there to be a serious conversation going on which says men and women are different. You know, it's not, it's, you know, because professionally at work, you can see how that could very easily become, you know, are you going to perform less well in your spreadsheet jockeying job? You're going to end up making the coffees again and stuff. Right, exactly, exactly, you know, red flag, you know, alarm bells start going off in your head when people start talking about how men and women are different. And frankly, if you're a barrister or an accountant, you probably don't see it. I mean, there's no earthly reason why I shouldn't be a better or worse barrister than some guy, apart from the fact that I'd be terrible, but that's my first.

That's my personality. It's not a sex. It's not, that's just I'm, yeah, I'm basically unemployable in that way. But that's nothing to do with my sex. That's my bad attitude. Yes. I find that. I mean, you understand the point I'm making.

And also there's another way these women benefit because if we are in a situation, as you described, where there are certain things that have become commodified, well, if you want to be a barrister and you want to have a child at 45 and have a Ukrainian. Again, it's in your interest. And you've got money to pay for. a Ukrainian surrogate, that's fine. I mean, going down a slightly darker path, if you want to, you know, if your husband's using prostitutes, that's fine, you know. What's the problem, right? And in fact, it may be better for your marriage. It's not in your class interests, if you're,

if you're a barrister or an accountant, to go very far down the rabbit hole of how different men and women are. And it's not a coincidence that the highest rates of support for trans rights are among the most educated women. It's very obviously in those women's interests to believe that the sexes are fundamentally the same apart from some trivial differences of genital topography, because that works for you from a professional point of view. But if you're a bin man or you're married to a bin man,

you know, the sex differences are obvious. You know, nobody's campaigning for 50-50 representation of the sexes in waste collection or, you know, working on an oil rig. I mean, for very obvious reasons. You know, men and women are different, you know, You know, in terms of muscle mass and physiological, you know. And discuss threshold, which matters for women. Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Working in the sewers or, you know, waist-collar. I mean, you watch those guys go. They move, they move, and it's physically arduous work. I don't think most women wouldn't last 10 minutes because we're just not physically as strong. You know, which is fine. We have other talents. But the point is that once you start taking apart how much sex matters, you can see very quickly

that it's a question of class. Yes. It's fundamentally infected by social class. So elite women have a particular worldview that is shaped by their circumstances. For which they could perfectly be forgiven, by the way, because people act in their own interests as I understand them. So we are in a situation where, as in many other things, I think we'd agree, there is a certain elite view of how things ought to be that is not in the interest of the majority.

Is that fair to say? Yes, I would say that's accurate. So you are not a tech determinist. We discussed this on the way here. So I said to you, well, if technology is driving all of this, what's the point of writing a book about the feminism against progress? But your point is you're not a determinist and you think culture matters. I think culture matters.

I mean, it's obvious that culture matters because otherwise everywhere in the world would have the same level of economic development and technological advancement. And they don't. And the only obvious explanation for that is, I mean, geography matters obviously. geography, I was going to say. Geography, but also culture. Geography shapes culture. I mean, this is what people don't know about Russia.

Just so. The reason Russians are the way they are is because it's pretty hard to survive in that kind of environment. Have you seen Russia? Yeah, quite. Exactly. And so the question inevitably is, what do we do about this? What do we do about this? Well, the argument, my argument is that it doesn't follow that just because many knowledge,

class women unthinkingly adopt these positions which are having a number of heavily negative downstream effects that we should necessarily, that we just have to. You know, this is precisely my point is I belong to that class. You know, I'm laptop class. I work remotely. I write for a living. You know, I belong to, you know, I'm a class traitor in even making these arguments. But that, that in itself is, that in itself is testimony to the fact that it's, you don't, you know, people are not robots, you know, we're not, we're not determined, we're not overdetermined by our, by our economic circumstances, and it's possible to take different views. And there are, there are other, in growing numbers of other knowledge class women like me who look around and think,

no, actually, this isn't, this isn't good. This is, this is making things worse for everybody. This is profoundly wrong for a, for a number of, a whole host of reasons. And the, the backlash is coming, coming back up the food chain. And it's, and it's heading for me, and it's, and it's, it's heading for my daughters and really it's heading for all of us. And so what are we going to do about it, which is your question? Because I don't hear you or Louise Perry, who I imagine is one of the people you referred to as these very bright women who are looking at these issues with a focus on this side of it. I don't hear you talking about banning abortion.

I don't hear you talking about reinstating gender roles. Like, what do we do? Well, I've made a three-part case for some. things which I think would help and all of which I think can and should be led by women. The first of these is the case for marriage. And this is really, this is the Duma case for marriage, I suppose. You know, if essentially we're facing a sort of all-out war on relationships, one of the things I think, you know, one of the first moves that men and women really need to make is towards rethinking what marriage means

in the context of the 21st century. And I've argued that we need to step away from this very individualized, very consumerist, very picky, sort of high romantic vision of marriage, which is what it's sort of degraded into in the context where everybody is an individual economic agent, including women, and try and move towards something closer

to the pre-modern understanding of marriage as a covenant rather than a contract and marriage as the enabling condition for life together on the basis that if the world carries on getting worse, as I anticipate it will, we're well past peak progress in my view, as we discussed last time I was here. And I think for, again, for all but the wealthiest,

life, the future is looking like, is looking scarcer, potentially more volatile, potentially more unstable for a lot of people. And if men and women are going to thrive together, and fundamentally for women who are mothers, it's an urgent feminist project to try and rebuild a slightly more stable society. And the smallest possible functioning unit

of social stability is marriage. We just need to rethink a little bit what it means. And I think we need to start with what I coined, abolishing big romance, which is to say the idea that marriage should always be about personal gratification. Sometimes it has to be about, it has to be about forming a household together and just keeping things going. And, and actually, well, really, I mean, if you're going to be very reductive, what I'm saying is staying together for the kids is good, actually.

And in most cases, you know, I mean, I'd make an exception for cases where a relationship is violent or outright abusive. But in most cases, the numbers suggest that, you know, where couples, where couples separate in marriages which weren't terrible, they were just not ecstatic, those are the most disastrous outcomes for children, because actually it was good enough for them. And my argument is that particularly now we're at the other side of peak progress, you're making a big gamble,

assuming that the world is going to remain stable enough for it to be wise to continue going it on your own. And actually, if we're going to have even the remotest shot of rebuilding some kind of functional social stability at the other side of total atomisation, it has to begin with being willing to take the rough with the smooth in your partnership and just seeing that as an indissoluble long-term thing,

you know, for all but the most extreme cases of challenge. So that's part one, but part two is, you know, that's all very well. But, you know, there's no point in telling women to embrace a slightly more pragmatic approach to marriage if there's no one to marry. And so part two really has to be men, thinking seriously about,

The feminist case for letting men, leaving men alone, or rather letting men be, is how I put it. Leting men be men, is that what you're saying? Let men be? Well, to dig down into that a little bit. I'm arguing that there is in fact a precedent for the incursion which is currently afoot into women's single-sex spaces by transgender-identified men, males. You've just been demonetized, thank you, Mary. We were demonetized a long time ago.

The moment we said marriage is good, that was too far. I'll say that again, just in case you do want to cut it. There's a precedent for the current contest, which is going on over transgender-identified males in women's prisons, and it was led by feminists, which is to say the all-out assault on boys' clubs, which has been well underway all the way through the 20th century. And I think that one paradigmatic instance,

And it was asymmetric as well. You know, the paradigmatic example of that is Boy Scouts, where scouting went co-aired a long time ago, while Girl Guides remained single-sex. Or rather, it remains single-sex until the point where trans-activists insisted that males could join the Girl Guides as long as they said they were women.

I was all female. But, I mean, from that point of view, you know, what's happened more recently in Girl Guides just mirrors something which happened a long time ago in Scouts. And I've made the case that in fact, there are aspects of single-sex male sociality which have been lost. And the biggest loss has been to working class men for whom there haven't been any corresponding benefits to outweigh the loss. And I think it's painful and striking when you look at the rates of mental psychiatric distress and elevated rates of suicide and other indicators of. of distress, they're absolutely the highest amongst working class men, and particularly amongst

men who are divorced. Because without any, with very limited access to any kind of male sociality, which has become routinely the case in the modern world, you know, men are getting lonelier and the statistics bear this out consistently. Pretty much the only social contact a lot of men have is via their wives, and if they lose that, there's really nothing left, and these are utterly alienated men and the consequences of that are there in the statistics and it's pretty great.

So, so that's one facet of it, which is, you know, if we're, but I've sort of taken that a little bit further. Bring back the gentleman's close. Yeah, exactly. Bring back the Bullington. But I mean, you know, I don't really care about the Bullington to be on,

you know, that's a very small subset of men. What I do, what I care a great deal more about is those other clubs for ordinary guys which have just fallen by the wayside with the result that a lot of regular guys are just lonely but more importantly, younger guys don't receive the same level of mentorship that they might otherwise have done from older guys

and it's very obvious to me, I'm not going to try and make the case of you, but it's very obvious to me that women don't form men, men form each other and they do that in ways that are opaque to me because I'm not one, but they do it in some kind of hierarchical facts in all-male groups and older men tell younger men how to behave and that's just how it works.

More show than tell. Right. I mean, there's a certain amount of chest beating and kind of monkey stuff that I don't really understand, but it happens. It's necessary. Right. You can see it happening and the upshot of that is broadly in women's interests. You know, being around it while it's going on isn't fun, you know, and you just want to kind of not be there when it's going on. But the net effect is generally beneficial to women because you end up with men who sort of more or less know how to behave.

know how to behave. Well, this is what women often don't understand is women can never civilise men. You first need other men to do it, and then a woman can tinker at the edges. Right. So I think an underpriced downside of abolishing male single-sex spaces has been the attrition of that kind of socialization of young men. And I don't think it's a coincidence that we now have this sort of proliferating class of basement dwelling needs who are these miserable, alienated, disaffected guys who spend their time computer gaming and interacting with one another on the internet, while lamenting the impossibility of getting a girlfriend and fermenting their general bitterness and hatred towards women, whom they blame, you know, not totally unreasonably for

some of their ills. I mean, I don't think, and here I'm on very dangerous ground, because I, I'd like to make it very clear that I don't endorse, you know, I don't endorse that entire world view. But I do think that if you listen to it, how do I say this without just having a blow up completely in my face, it's not exactly that, I mean, these things get expressed as the most horrendous, virulent, just deeply unpleasant misogyny, and which in turn feeds the kind of hostility from women, which, you know, and that's a vicious cycle which goes round and round. It's really unpleasant. And, you know, I read every so often I dip into these forums and I come out feeling like I need to take a shower.

You know, it's not nice. But I think, you know, there's just at the most minute grain of, I have some sympathy with these guys because something has been lost. And, you know, they're not being taught how to behave by older guys. And some of that genuinely is downstream of, you know, the coedification of social life. It really is. And some of that is downstream of feminist activism. And I'm not saying it's all the fault of feminists that in cells are such deranged, just psychos. That's really not what I'm saying, but there's a set of complex systems which shifted in a way which has been very harmful for everybody as a consequence of making slightly too much stuff co-ed.

I think that's what I'm trying to say. And so the upshot of all of that is, I think we should, I honestly think, I honestly think, think is the reactionary feminist stance on all of this is we have to just care a little bit less if men want to do their thing on their own without us. You know, they just have to not mind as much. And an important, positive consequence of this, I think, would be that we'd have more of a leg to stand on asking for men's help in defending women's single-sex spaces in sports and prisons. Because I think as it stands, you know, basically we're saying, you can't have your, you can't have your boys clubs, but can you help us protect our girls' clubs? And that, you know,

and I think not unreasonably, there's a lot of guys who are like, you made your bed ladies, you know, you can lie in it now. And we're just going to be over here laughing. And I'm like, you know, that's a really stupid and short-sighted kind of, kind of, you know, Shadenfreude to be enjoying. Because at the end of the day, you know, the cyborgs are coming for all of us and they want to upgrade your as well. But I think actually here, it's incumbent on, it's incumbent on feminists to give a little bit of ground. And so really, I'm making the reactionary feminist case for a bit more, a bit more constructive sexism, you know, and actually for that to be a two-way street. And then there was a third part, was there not? Oh, yes. Sorry, Francis. She's hiding all the super dangerous ideas behind that sweet

smile. So I'm waiting for the third part. The will gear you can. You've been very, you've been dancing around on this very thin ice and what is the final piece. So part, part three, well, I'm, I've, I've argued, so I've argued that we need, we, we need to, to grant more serious central, central position to marriage, that we need to, we, we need to be realistic about what it, what it take, what it will take to create the kind of men that, you know, we want to marry and spend, our lives with. And the final piece of that is that we need to give, we need to give sex back the seriousness that it, that it has. And this, this for me, means the feminist case against the pill. Now, I'm, to be clear, I'm not making the argument for, for taking legal measures

against the contraceptive pill, because that's just nowhere near the Overton window. But, but I, but, but, but, but, but, those are your words, Francis, not mine. Well, what I do think we can do at this point is just lean a little bit harder into something which is already happening, which is a female, particularly young, Gen Z female backlash against the pill. And that's a phenomenon which I've been tracking for some years. I mean, I was genuinely shocked to hear how the, how usage and prescription of these really quite mind-altering medicines has changed since I was in adolescence.

I mean, when I was a teenager, if you went to your GP and said, can you put me on the pill, you'd get the third degree about, you know, are you in a study relationship and, you know, X, Y and Z and, you know, is it an appropriate relationship and do we need to talk to your parents and so on. And now, as far as I can make out, you know, it's pretty routine, you know, for GP is just to stick a girl on the pill at about the age of 15 and that's just it. And there's a book that came out last year, I think. Is it called Your Brain on the Pill or something? Anyway, it goes into just how radically mind-altering the effects are of this drug. It changes who you find attractive.

It changes your entire hormonal cycle. It changes your attitude. It can have major mental health implications for young women. Whose brains, let's not forget, are still developing? You know, the downstream, you know, the mental, the psychoactive impacts of this drug are immense. I mean, I was on it briefly. and I stopped in my early 20s because I just realized it was making me fat and sexless

and it's low-key insane and it's just not worth it. What's the point of taking this thing so I can have sex if I no longer enjoy having sex? What am I doing? Now I think I'd rather just not have sex with men, which is the solution which I adopted for a number of years.

So now we're seeing a growing body, of young women who are just saying, I don't want this, and who are embracing less invasive, less psychoactive, non-hormonal contraception or just cycle tracking. And my argument is that this is just where we have to start here. Don't take the pill, don't encourage your friends to take the pill. You know, reject this idea that you can't be a person

unless you make radically psychoactive cyborg interventions in your own body. And there are a number of things that follow from that in terms of how you relate to men and to your own sexuality. And one of them is that, you know, of necessity, you become choosier about who you sleep with, which from women's point of view, when you think about the amount, when you think about hookup culture,

is obviously beneficial. Because one of the things that women complain about is ending up, basically consenting to loveless or degrading sex because there's no obvious reason to say no. And, you know, if you sort of neutered yourself sexually by taking this medicine, You know, there sort of is no reason to say no.

And sometimes it might just seem politer to put up, which is a pretty kind of grim position to be in, if you're a woman. And I think privately, I think a lot of what flew under the Me Too banner was basically this, this. There's young women who assented to things sort of out of politeness or found themselves railroaded into sexual encounters, more or less out of politeness, that they couldn't say no to. or didn't have a robust enough reason to say no to,

because they were already contracept it. And if you're in a situation where there's a meaningful risk of pregnancy, you know, that's a pretty solid motivation for saying, no, actually, no, actually, I'm not coming home with you, or no, you know, now I'm here, you know, we're not doing this. And it's also, you know, for all, for all but the most, you know, straight out tow rag, it's a fairly robust reason there's a guy to not go there as well. I feel like I'm not on birth control and I'm not going to use birth control.

You know, you're not, you're, yeah, it would take a fairly serious, a fairly serious scumbag. Anyway, so it reduces, it reduces the opportunity for bad sex, which I think is obviously in women's interests. It also makes sex better. You know, if you're, as speaking as a woman, you know, I'm not going to give you grisly details, and I'm too old and ugly to be talking about this stuff anyway. But if you're in tune with your own cycles, you just, it's just nicer. You, you know, you know where you are. And, you know, there are certain kind of moods go up and down over the course of the month in ways which are interrupted if you're on the pill. And I think one of the, and taking that a little bit further, it's my view that you can't have, you can't have the intensity and the mystery and the beauty of a sexual encounter without the danger.

fundamentally we take sex seriously or have historically taken sex seriously because there's the potential of creating another human and once you take that out of the picture something strange happens to the entire field of sexuality

and again I can't prove this because it's just a hunch but I'm willing to bet that if we didn't have if contraception was no longer part of the picture most of the cultural interest in BDSM would go away you know most of the choking most of the role-playing most of the other ways that people look to put the danger and the intensity in to a sexual encounter which has been sort of neutralised it's kind of vegan bacon equivalent of the sexual encounter you know it's almost it's almost the same but not quite and so you have to add more hot sauce and that's where you get all of these you know escalating escalating levels of degrading disgusting kind of kink and and extremities people are trying to add the hot sauce back into something which is fundamentally vegan bacon And the obvious solution, if you're starting to get inured to the hot sauce, is, you know, have the bacon.

But that means you put the danger back in. And I call this, so I don't think of this as a purity-based argument against contraception. I think of it more as rewilding sex. And in an ecological context, when you talk about rewilding, that means sometimes introducing apex predators back into an environment. I don't know if you've seen that amazing viral video about what happened when they introduced wolves back into Yellowstone. And it had all of these incredibly complex effects on the ecosystem, which ended up with a river-changing course,

because the deer followed different patterns, and then other things happened in a different pattern. And eventually, you know, things righted themselves in a whole ecosystem, which had been going slightly wrong before. And it couldn't have happened without the apex predator back in. So I've used that as an analogy for thinking about how we can correct some of the things which have gone wrong in our sexual ecology by reintroducing the danger and the intensity.

I mean, this is a risky argument to be making. I feel like I'm on genuinely heretical territory here. But essentially, I'm making the pro-sex case against contraception. Mary, there's one aspect of this discussion that people at home will be watching, particularly the left-wingers, particularly the people who, dare we say it, would identify a socialist, going, come on, Mary. Isn't this just what happens at what they would call it? late-stage capitalism where jobs don't make the money that they used to.

Inflation. Therefore, people need to go out to work. Therefore, people need to go out to work for longer. We're doing longer and longer hours. There's no longer a choice for women anymore, as it was for women 30 years ago to be able to stay at home, to have children, where a man can then go out to work and be able to provide for a family. Are we not ignoring that element of this as well? Well, here, it's going back to what you were saying about tech determinism and my critique of technology and technologies. I say I'm not a tech determinist and I'm also not rabidly anti-all technologies. I mean, as a case in point, I wouldn't be able to do what I'd do, were it not for the fact that it's possible to work remotely. You know, I couldn't have juggled writing around having a small child, you know, if I wasn't able to work from home.

And I think, you know, there are a lot of pitfalls that come with particularly internet technologies. But there are also, for more families, for quite a lot of families, there's an opportunity to bring work back into the home, which I think has a huge amount of potential and still for many unrealised potential to make, to create something a bit more like the productive households that, existed prior to modernity. And in the book, I've given the examples of two families I know who are already doing this, who have some kind of trade-based home activity combined with a bit of homesteading, combined with a bit of remote digital work, who have, if you like, a sort of home-based portfolio economy, which is intentionally ordered around raising people.

kit. And, you know, I might be, of course, it's wildly optimistic to imagine this, this can never be the case for everybody. But I think it offers a template for how we might be able to rethink for more people than is currently the case, you know, the way we're ordering family life. Because a large part of this is also the way we identify ourselves. When you ask someone, the first question you ask someone, really, in our society is what is your name and what do you do? And it's not really socially acceptable. It's seen almost as a bit weird for a woman to go, I'm just a mother. Actually, that's the most important job in society. Yeah, I've been that soldier. And I can tell you that when you go to a party and you're a stay-at-home mom, you know, every stay-at-home mom I've ever

spoken to knows what it's like when somebody says, what do you do, and you tell them, and they're immediately looking over your shoulder for someone more interesting to talk to. Without fail. And it gets to you, it gets you down. It makes me really angry on behalf of every stay-at-home mum I know, who throws herself into really important work and just gets treated as though they're just unimportant and probably a bit thick. It's grossly unjust.

But what I would also say about that is that very few stay-at-home moms, I know, just mum. But what they do often do is a whole range of other things which are not immediately legible in market terms. and I think part of the reason why everything feels so kind of empty and atomized even in a relatively lively small town like the one where I live

is that a lot of the mums who used to run if they basically run the fabric of civic life are no longer doing that because they're out at work and I think if it were possible as it becomes possible for us to bring a bit more of work back into the home there's just a possibility that we might see some some more of that liveliness and that texture come back to in a distributed way to small towns and local communities, you know, as people re claw back a bit more of an opportunity to work, you know,

to do voluntaries, to balance for doing voluntary stuff and professional stuff in a more flexible way, you know, from, from their own homes. I think there also to be a cultural shift as well, because, you know, as you know, my wife and I just had a baby, my wife is looking after our son at the moment. I mean, I always respected my wife anyway, but I respect her way more now because I can see how challenging but also amazing she isn't doing it, right? And I think part of it is there's got to be a cultural shift around that thing like, you know, the idea that you would just stay home. I mean, what does that even mean? It's like saying, well, I'm just a YouTube, you know, presenter. Why? Do you know what I mean?

Do you think that's likely? Do you think it's possible? I think probably what's more likely is, that will find ways of making a more textured kind of work-home mixture more legible in social terms, such that women who are mostly mothers but who do a little bit of remote something and a certain amount of civic organizing, find ways of telling their stories, which isn't quite this stark split between being a mum and being something else. Does that make sense? That makes a lot of sense. And I very deeply hope that I think that will be a very, very, very good outcome.

There's really, you know, this idea that trad wives, that there's anything trad about trad wives, you know, the woman who just keeps house, the woman who keeps house and raises kids and so on, the idea that there's anything trad about them is actually, has it all backwards. The thing about trad wives is that they're actually very distinctively modern. You know, they weren't a thing at all until work disappeared out of the home into factories and offices. And now that it's theoretically possible for at least some work to come back into the home, you know, I think I prefer to call not for trad wives, but trade wives, which is to say women who do stuff as well as mummy.

And actually for the opportunity that that opens up for fathers to be professionally active and also present in their children's lives. I mean, my husband works from home and, I mean, he's out some of the time and he's traveling some of the time, but he's had an opportunity to be there for our daughter's infancy in a way which, yeah, he was working, he was doing the commuter thing when she was a baby and then basically chucked it in to be, to work from home running his own business. Because he said, he said it's just like, I don't see her from one week to the next and it made him so miserable.

And I don't think he's alone. I think there's a lot of fathers who take it for the team, essentially, and who just feel pretty much alienated from their wives and children because they don't see them. from one end of the week to the next. No, I think that's really important as well. And I've certainly found that I've rearranged how I do this to a large extent in order to be around a lot more. Right, right.

And so I think there's a compassionate, you know, case to be made for, you know, not kind of radically domesticated fatherhood where, you know, dads have to be pretending to breastfeed, but just a slightly more flexible template of work and home coming back together in a slightly more textured way, which offers opportunities for women to do some work, whilst also being able to be present for their babies,

but also offers opportunities for dads to be present more, in a way which I think is just healthier and more constructive for everybody. Back to the happy pre-industrial age we go, Mary. Yes, yes, but with internet. Mary, there's one thing that I want to finish by exploring that kind of, because there's a lot of time where I hear a left-wing economic argument, and I don't give it much credence. But in this case, do they not have a point that surely the end goal of capitalism is commoditization of everything and everyone?

And what we're seeing is a commoditization of women's bodies, a la only fans, etc., etc. Isn't this the logical endgame? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Yes, I mean, I tend to get published. I read as a conservative these days because I... question some sacred cows of what has become the kind of leftist orthodoxy.

But fundamentally, the arguments in my book are, but they're all left arguments. My case against the marketization of women's bodies, my case against cyborg theocracy, as I've called it, as an anti-capitalist one. I'm pushing back against the marketization of everything. I'm arguing for, you know, a reactionary feminism as a way of clawing back some space from the market. rebuilding forms of solidarity, hopefully out the other side of the marketization of everything. It's fundamentally an anti-capitalist argument.

Fantastic. Women of the world unite. Well, right. Well, actually, it's quite... Men and women. Well, it's actually the opposite of that, though, isn't it a merry? Because you're not arguing against capitalism. What you're arguing for is for people to voluntarily make decisions that they opt out of

certain things that capitalism can create. I'm arguing for reclaiming our agency from the kind of machineification of everybody. and I'm arguing against the idea that we should just inexorably submit to the commodification of ourselves, even down to commodifying our bodies. Well, exactly. And saying that we have some agency and we don't have to treat this as deterministic and we can. Even if we're just doing that at the level of family life, you know, family life is as important as what you do at scale in terms of political activism. And I think, you know, all of my work is really about emphasizing that.

You know, the micro and the macro are both equally important. And I think you can treat, you can treat, see, looking for ways to just withdraw, withdraw your labor essentially from the marketization, withdraw your body from commodification. I think that's a, that it's, yeah. The reason I bring this point up about capitalism, which is quite often critiques of capitalism end up with people going, you know, we must overthrow capitalism and women of the world unite or whatever it is. But that isn't, I just don't see that as the path forward on any of these things because it seems to me on a lot of these issues, the path forward is not going to be legislation. The path forward is not going to be some top down instruction to people. It's going to be changing the culture, which is what we talked about earlier, which is a culture of people voluntarily deciding to do things in a different way, voluntarily saying, you know what, being a barrister actually isn't making me as happy as I wanted. I want to have children and do something.

else as you were talking about, or I want to not do this and do that, and I voluntarily choose to do this. The same will probably happen with technology. I mean, there will be communities of people who don't give their children mobile phones until they're 18 years old and whatever. That, I think, is probably much more the path forward, whereas this sort of like, we must end the capitalism type of argument. I just, I don't see that happening.

Yeah, I mean, I think there are a number of different facets to it. And I've focused in the book much more on the question of what you can do at the small scale than really what. I've made a few points in the afterword for what I think some sketches for what ought to happen at scale. But fundamentally, yes, I've argued that memes, which is to say culture matters as much as material conditions. And while material conditions obviously shape what a culture is, but correspondingly the culture, the culture has a reciprocal effect on material conditions. And from where we are right now, if we just throw up our hands and say, well, the technology has us and there's nothing we can do, then we might as well throw in the towel and not, you know, I can pulp the book. Well, this is what bugs me about all of this stuff.

It's like people forget about their own role in their own lives. Like I was talking to somebody on Twitter today about this and they were like, well, it's impossible for a woman now to stay at home and be a mother. Well, it's not impossible. You just don't like the trade-offs. There's a difference. Just so. And so if you want to do certain things, if you want to have a family, you can have a family. you can have a family, there are certain things you're going to sacrifice in order to do that.

Yes, sir. And that's why I think it's really important to hash this point out, because people still have agency, people still have the opportunity to choose to live their life in a particular way, and that will have trade-offs. And like all aspects of life, everything has trade-offs, right? Absolutely. And I think, I mean, it's fair to say that, you know, if you're going to be the bow-wave of something, quite new or, you know, extremely retro, depending on how you live at it. You know, you're going to be

at the sharp end of some of those trade-offs. But avant-gardists, you know, get followed by more people. You know, once a path has been forged, you know, it's easier for other people to follow. And, you know, things don't, things are not that fixed and social norms are not absolutely set in stone. And, you know, a wave of avant-gardists, of avant-garde reactionaries now, you know, could be the vanguard for something which becomes much more normal and much more normalized in 20 years' time. But somebody has to lead by example, I think, is the point. And so, you know, if I'm framing it as something quite radical at this point, I think there's the potential for, there's the potential to lead the way in potentially huge and

beneficial social changes down the line. But for that, you really do have to have hope. And faced with the situation that we currently have, I think it's also fair to say that you have to have some courage if you're going to buck the prevailing trends quite as radically as saying, saying yes to marriage, yes to benevolent sexism and no two condescension, which is very reductively the case that I'm making. If you're going to try and follow that path, you know,

you really are swimming against the tide and that takes a measure of courage, particularly if you say you're doing it for feminist reasons. Mary, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. It's been great. We are always in with the final question, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?

Sort of hard to know where to begin. I'm going to be slightly more, as a society, I'm not going to focus on that. What I will just say is I think the right is hopefully. The conservatives in particular are hopelessly confused on technology. And I think that's something which is very under-discussed. particularly among conservatives. You know, you have guys on the one hand

who are fantasizing about, you know, going back to the Middle Ages. And then another bunch of guys who are fantasizing about colonizing Mars. And you've got the Tories in government who are saying, you know, we want the white heat of technology or whatever they're calling it this week

and then, you know, paying $30,000 a year to whoever it is whose job it is to set about, you know, making a roadmap for shipping shipbuilding back to the year. UK and they're only going to pay them, you know, less than you, even kind of new starters salary or, you know, half of what that would be in a bank. And you just think, none of this, none of this makes sense. Conservatives are just completely confused about, you know, whether it makes, whether it's, whether it makes sense to, you know, dig everything up and, you know, cut down the last

tree in pursuit of economic growth or whether, whether, in fact, that there are, there are things which are worth conserving. I think there are some, there are some deep tensions there, particularly in terms of how disruptive technology is to long-held social norms that really need to be taken out and shaken considerably more. And what would, sorry, because I can't leave it like that. Once shaken, what are you thinking the result of that ought to be? I honestly don't know. Honestly, you know, I think between the kind of agrarian distributists and the space fascists,

you know, I don't know who's going to win. Why are the space fascist? Why is colonizing Mars such a dangerous idea for you? I don't think it's a dangerous idea. I don't even want to get into this. People get very wound up about the idea. It is called trigonometry. I think it's a category error.

I mean, we're going to get into very metaphysical territory in a moment. I think trying physically to colonize Mars is just, is looking at the whole thing completely wrong. We should colonise it metaphysically. Yes. How is that? What would that look like? Yeah, I think physically trying to go into space is looking at it wrong.

I'm sorry, this is going to get, I'm going to back away from this because I'm on the brink of just far too esoteric. You don't want to have this conversation. That's fine. No, no worries. Mary, thank you so much for coming on the show. If people want to find your work online, if they want to get your work online, if they want to the book, where is the best place to do that? The book is published by Forum Press.

You'll be able to find your way to it via my substack, which is reactionary feminist.substack.com or by looking up my work on Unheard, or by looking me up on Twitter at Moving Circles. Perfect. Mary Harrington, thank you so much for coming back. Thank you so much for having me. It's been such a pleasure.

You're the first interview, or rather we are the first interview you've done for the book, which we're very honored. Thanks for coming on. And thank you for watching and listening. we will see you very soon with another terrific into it won't be quite like this but it will be equally terrific or also all of them go out at 7 p.m. UK time and for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go it's also available as a podcast take care and see you soon we'll see you on locals in a second with some bonus questions from you that mary's going to answer and only you the supporters will get to

see what's your opinion about the future of the british and american universities are they irredeemably woke in a way that will undermine the teaching of science and engineering as foundations of our prosperity or do you think they're salvageable?