A Reformed Feminism Still Sees Men as Accessories to Women

Mary Harrington’s criticisms do not touch the heart of feminist injustice and hatred

Mary Harrington, author of the just-published Feminism Against Progress, is one of a number of women (Louise Perry is another) criticizing feminism from the inside. In particular, Harrington has taken aim at birth control technology—the pill—as an aspect of what she dubs cyborg feminism, the bio-medical upgrading of the body in the service of a false conception of female freedom. She is calling for the revaluing of marriage not as a guarantee of individual happiness but as the foundation of social stability and caring. She thinks that abortion has been a net-negative for women. She recognizes trans ideology—particularly its emphasis on creating oneself as one desires—as a logical extension of cyborg feminism. And she is even willing to hold feminism (indirectly and partially) responsible for some male misery and resentment. Overall, Harrison’s arguments, explored in a substantial interview with Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster on Triggernometry (her book is not yet available in North America), provide a welcome opportunity to consider the possibilities and limitations of a feminist critique of feminism.

Nothing says “Women are wonderful” quite like the applause in conservative and non-feminist circles that greets a feminist who makes even the mildest criticisms of feminism, and Harrington’s criticisms are not minor. If I understand her correctly, she sees much of what followed the 1960s as a terrible miscalculation, in which insistence on sexual and other freedoms eviscerated women’s affiliation with caregiving and home. In her willingness to cast a jaundiced eye on the downstream effects of women’s so-called liberation, Harrington is both the answer to many men’s advocates’ hopes and the stuff of our continuing unease. On the plus side, she is an intelligent, quirky woman who is advocating a major pushback against feminist assumptions in order to improve the lives of women (and perhaps men). On the minus side, Harrington seems to be, like the vast majority of feminists, unable to think outside a framework in which women’s interests vastly override those of men or even children. Here are a few examples, based mainly on the Triggernometry interview (also one at UnHerd), and therefore necessarily partial.

Front and center, Harrington proclaims the folly for women of pretending that biological sex is trivial. She points out that elite women tend to be pro-trans because trans ideology supports their belief that there are no significant differences between men and women that cannot be “flattened” through bio-medical interventions like abortion and sex-change. That idea may work for them in their corner-office environment, but it is disastrous for women in other spheres of life, where some men are “violent and volatile.”

Perhaps understandably, Harrington’s main concern in this regard is the convicted rapist who claims a female identity in order to be placed in a women’s prison. But there are many other areas of human interaction in which sex differences also matter, perhaps somewhat less urgently but no less significantly, and it’s not clear that Harrington is prepared to take them on too. In the workplace, for example, as researcher Daphne Patai has shown, male well-being and job security have been under attack through a decades-long feminist campaign to protect and promote women at men’s expense: this has occurred through affirmative action hiring and the insistence on transforming workplace culture to make it welcoming of women (and hostile to men). Restrictions on men’s speech, jokes, behaviors, and preferences have all been a part of this successful campaign in which the salient differences between men and women have less to do with men’s (formerly denied, now widely admitted) superior strength, more to do with women’s higher rates of anxiety and men’s higher work-related drive and ambition. The refusal to see such differences has meant decades-long unfairness—often legally enforced—to shoe-horn women into elite jobs they didn’t earn and to support their oft-unreasonable demands for accommodation, up to and including the firing of men deemed to have caused female discomfort.  

It’s not clear if Harrington is willing to consider whether men have any rights to the work spaces they pioneered—not if their right threatens the advantages seized by women over the past 50 years.

Marriage is another arena in which Harrington’s residual feminist blind spot looms large. One of her concerns is the need to bring back marriage as the foundation of social stability. Harrington even goes so far as to say that marriage needs to be reinstated as a covenant rather than a mere contract, a vehicle for the support of the family rather than for personal fulfillment. But she has nary a word to say about how the divorce industry has been destroying husbands and fathers for decades, as Stephen Baskerville has shown, ruining them financially, psychologically, and socially in the name of protecting women’s freedom and financial security. How is marriage to be reformed so that it might be, once again, a viable institution for men? How is a man’s right to father his own children to be protected from a feminist family court and social service system?

It’s hard to believe that Harrington has not heard of the hell that divorce has become for many men; and she must know that it is women who choose divorce in the vast majority of cases. Her attitude toward men and marriage seems little different from the classic position that men should “man up” and accept their responsibilities, even if that means risking everything that matters. If women are justified, as Harrington concedes they are, to act in their class interests—even when those interests create problem for other women, as in the case of trans ideology—then shouldn’t men be expected to act in their interests (or at least not to act directly against them)? The shallowness in Harrington’s thinking about men is particularly evident on this score.

Harrington’s focus is on the ways that women have been “freed” by feminism into various new forms of subjugation, or at least unhappiness. When sex became a private matter thanks to the birth control pill, she explains, it also became a commodity to be exploited. She expresses particular concern about women harmed in the pornography industry, in prostitution, and also through new forms of reproductive technology. She mentions, for example, the case of women who have rendered themselves infertile by selling their ova. But aren’t these examples of self-commodification that women have freely chosen for economic gain? Harrington notes that if one talks to women who have worked in pornography, there is more coercion than might at first appear. This is anecdotal at best, and is an argument applicable to many spheres of human activity, including the horrific and dehumanizing work that vast numbers of men have had little choice but to perform—and continue to have little choice but to perform—all over the world and throughout human history. Are we really expected to believe that a woman who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars with an Onlyfans account—exploiting male sexual desire—is deserving of a social concern we routinely deny to male sewer workers? The answer, it seems, is yes.

That’s why when it comes to Harrington’s recommendations for reforming feminism, her marked lack of attention to men’s lives is so off-putting. Harrington advocates new social movements (rejecting the pill, valuing motherhood, and valuing women’s caring work) that will be led by women. She seems to side-step the obvious problem that the prior social movements she objects to were also to a large extent led by women: women acting in their own interests and capitalizing on their personal, sexual, and state-supported power over men. Why not suggest that the new movements be (at least) co-led by men, whose interests are also at stake and whose voices and perspectives have been sidelined as a result of feminism’s anti-male impetus? Why should men take part at all in movements led by women when women have shown themselves so spectacularly ill-suited to ensure women’s happiness or even to care about the well-being of others? If Harrington intends that men should be given the green light to lead their own distinctive spheres of society, she doesn’t mention how.

To her credit, Harrington does express awareness of the many men left behind by feminism, the working-class, socially undesirable, and disenfranchised men whose sources of meaning and status have been gutted by the drive to equalize public spaces and re-engineer male behavior. She recognizes the importance for men of their own single-sex spaces, male sheds and the like (though she draws the line at male-only pubs!), where they can engage in “male sociality” and where young men can be disciplined and formed by older men. She recognizes that men do more to civilize other men than women can do (I’ll pass over her frivolous conception of what men allegedly do in these spaces). Yet after decades of discrimination in law, hiring, government funding, healthcare, and higher education, the reinstating of male spaces is not likely to be enough to counter feminists’ all-out war on men.

Moreover, Harrington admits that restoring same-sex spaces to men is part of a necessary trade-off in order to convince men to aid women resisting the entry into their spaces by trans women; at least she is honest about the self-interest. But there are many other measures necessary if feminists are to begin to assure men that they’re serious about a sex-war ceasefire.

At the very least, such measures should include an immediate end to affirmative action hiring, promotion, equity targets, diversity mandates, and elaborate harassment protocols; the restoration of the full range of legal defenses for men accused of sexual assault; the public repudiation of the #MeToo movement, with a renewed insistence not on “believing women” but on presuming innocence for the male accused; an end to all special scholarships, set-asides, and opportunities for women in post-secondary schooling along with the resurrection of the merit principle in education and the job market; the permanent retiring of female chauvinism in academia, Hollywood, journalism, advertising, and public culture generally; and the restoration of equal protections under law for men’s free speech and free action. Harrington, of course, cannot control such macro-level problems, but it would be nice to hear her recognize and denounce harms to men.

She is energetic in deploring incel misogyny—a thoroughly marginal phenomenon—but she has next to nothing to say about mainstream expressions of anti-male hatred (“Why Can’t We Hate Men?”) that are commonly engaged in by feminist celebrities, politicians, pundits, and community leaders. If Harrington’s assertion that women will occasionally have to let men alone to do their thing represents the extent of her pro-male advocacy, she is truly at the baby-steps stage of reform.  

I can already hear the voices raised in Harrington’s defense: yes, these may be baby-steps, but they are steps in the right direction, and she should be applauded for her perspicacity and courage in making them. Very well. I applaud Harrington for her perspicacity and courage, and I look forward to reading her book. But I look forward with a sinking heart.

There was once a time when it was possible to talk about society’s best interests and to include men—as well as children—in the equation. Now all discussion must focus on women’s best interests. Men (and the women who love them) must content themselves with hoping that what is deemed in women’s interests may also moderately benefit men, or at least may halt the societal machinery that has been for so long working to demonize and exclude them. I’m delighted to see women like Mary Harrington realizing that women’s “liberation” has had unintended consequences for its alleged recipients. I’d be even happier if she could also consider men and boys in their own right, as vulnerable human beings with needs and interests that are just as legitimate as women’s and just as deserving of care and concern. That would be truly revolutionary.