Mary, a reactionary feminist and Unheard editor, traces her shift from radical 1990s feminism—rooted in postmodernism—to rejecting its deconstructionist extremes after motherhood exposed its contradictions. Her book, Feminism Against Progress, argues abortion and birth control fuel a "cyborg" era erasing biological differences, while her anti-capitalist critiques now target techno-biopolitics from a right-leaning stance. Publishing April 25 via Regnery, she frames traditional values as the only true liberation, dismissing labels like "conservative" in favor of reactionary defiance. [Automatically generated summary]
So we're talking about reality and facing reality, which is a very difficult thing to do when all the powers that be are trying to sell you a fantasy version of your life, which is one of the reasons I have just been thrilled to be reading this new book by Mary Harrington.
I talked about Mary a couple weeks ago, and I'm now almost done.
I'm more than halfway through her book, which is called Feminism Against Progress.
Mary is a reactionary feminist, the only kind of feminist we talk to on the show.
And her book is Feminism Against Progress.
It is really terrific, just a riveting work of intellectual incisiveness.
She is also a contributing editor at Unheard.
Mary, thank you so much for coming on.
Thank you for having me.
So I'm just enjoying this book so much, but to begin with, can you explain to the audience, you come from a very, very odd history to get to where you are, to become a reactionary.
You're actually reacting to your own life in some ways.
Can you explain a little bit of your journey here?
Yes, I'm a progress apostate.
I'm a progress atheist, but I'm also an apostate from a great deal of the stuff that you talk about on this show and you talk about on the Daily Wire generally.
I guess I was born in the late 1970s and grew up in the 1990s at peak progress, when we all believed that progress, never-ending progress, could go on forever before 9-11 and before the great crash and everything which has happened since.
And I was an early adopter, I guess, of all of the woke worldviews and all the progressive beliefs, which have since come to eat pretty much everything you care to name.
I leaned into all of that stuff and took it very seriously.
And it was just part of how I wanted to approach life.
And I genuinely thought that this was the only ethical and authentic way to be in the world.
I guess I fell off the wagon, to cut a very long story short, very short.
To cut a long story short, I fell off the wagon.
A number of personal events just lifted the scales from my eyes in a very painful way.
A whole set of things which I was working on fell apart.
And I came out the other end of that, having realized that everything, well, having discovered that nothing that I thought I could rely on, I really could rely on, and that nothing I really believed seemed very true or very stable or really very, very like it offered any hope for a way out of where I'd found myself.
And the recovery from that personal disaster took a number of years.
And by the time I came out the other end, I was, well, there wasn't really anywhere else to go from radical on every front, you can imagine, apart from the advice my grandmother gave me when I was in my late 20s.
And she put it in a very, very grandmarish way.
You know, she was the wartime generation.
She said, you know, Mary, you should, I think you should grow your hair and get married.
And because at the time, I realized I was really not doing that.
I think I couldn't have been further from that if I'd tried.
But what she meant and the way I took it and on reflection was, Mary, have you considered being normal?
And actually, it was very good advice for somebody who's I'd had a go at pretty much everything except being normal.
And I thought, well, you know, there's sort of nothing left.
You know, where else is there to go apart from having making a sincere, having a sincere go at being normal?
And so I tried it.
And actually, as it turned out, you know, a lot of the things which I'd believed about being normal just turned out to be, well, it's kind of propaganda.
And it turned out that actually there's a lot to be said for being normal.
And there are some bits of it which I found a bit uncomfortable, but on the whole, embracing beneficial limits turned out to be much more liberating, paradoxically, than the supposedly much more liberated life that I'd been inhabiting before, which was as it, as I'd discovered the hard way, riddled with covert power dynamics and In hot to exactly the same set of exploitative tendencies as it was supposedly fighting against, and really didn't offer much of a way out at all.
And as it turned out, being normal offers much more of an opportunity to be free and much more of an opportunity, or at least I can say for myself, to be happy.
So, by the time I'd figured all of that out, it was about seven years hence, and I'd rethought at least half of my beliefs and decided which of my old beliefs I wanted to keep and which I didn't.
And I guess ever since then, my writing career has been about trying to thread that needle, trying to explain why I kept the bits I did, which included to some extent some of the takeaways I took from the postmodernism I injected into my eyeballs and which scrambled my brain for a solid 10 years.
Redefining Freedom00:08:49
And to an extent, those things which I've brought with me from the feminism, which has been a part of how I approach the world since I was a teenager, again, for personal reasons.
And the life lessons which all of us bring with us.
You know, some of which my concern for exploitation, my concern for overweening governance, a great deal of the anti-capitalist commitments which I had as a young radical, I still have.
It's just that, broadly speaking, those tend to be embraced by the new right rather than the left, or such as it is these days.
Most of the critiques which now emerge against techno-capital and the biopolitical, the tyrannical biopolitical state now come out of the right, whereas in my 20s, they would have come out of the left.
And so a huge amount has shifted.
And to a great extent, my political priors are still more or less the same.
But if there's one governing theme which has changed, it's that I don't believe in progress.
And if you take those political priors, you know, the critique of the critique of techno-capital, you know, a recognition of the importance of material reality and of sex reality and of the grand sweep of human culture and human history, and you just take off the progress theology goggles, you know, you still have some of the same themes.
You're playing some of the same tunes, but you're playing them in a slightly different key.
And although I've never really thought of myself as a conservative, I tend to be published by conservative magazines because I'm simply not legible anywhere else.
It just doesn't make sense for me to be so people call me a conservative, but I prefer the term reactionary because it just leaves me a lot freer to do and think as I think is appropriate.
Well, it is interesting how simple it is to become a conservative nowadays when the left has gone so far into its own weird fantasy world.
One of the things you talk about in the book is you had a baby and you kind of liked your baby.
Right.
Well, I mean, this throws up all sorts of very fundamental conceptual problems from the point of view of liberal feminism.
Because if you think about the structural, the underlying preconceptions of liberal feminism, somewhere pretty near the root of that is the idea that more freedom, conceived of as freedom, freedom from, is by definition always better.
But the problem with, I mean, which is fine if you're, I don't know, 22 and you don't really have any commitments or obligations or anywhere pressing to be.
That's kind of sort of all right.
I say that in a qualified way, but it's sort of all right.
But if you're, I mean, if you've got a screaming six-week old baby and it's 4 a.m. and that baby needs feeding, you can't very well just lie there and say, no, I don't want to.
It just doesn't work like that.
You know, there's a visceral set of instincts which, you know, in all but the most unfortunate and exceptional circumstances are going to kick in.
And it's like you've grown an extra body, as I've described it in the book, it's like you've grown another organ.
And that's as who's that's existentially, it's existentially dependent on you, but also your existence is dependent on sustaining this extra bodily organ that you've grown, actually in your own viscera.
But it just happens to be separate from you physically, and yet you have to care for it as though it were your own kidney or your lungs or your heart.
It feels that immediate and that brain scrambling.
Literally, the only time in 20 years of driving that I've ever damaged the car was when I was trying to go around a tight corner with my hungry baby screaming in the back, his fat brain scrambling.
And it just left me rethinking everything which I'd believed about the separate autonomous individual subject.
And I was thinking, well, no, this, hang on a minute.
If, if in order to be a functioning participant in the liberal world, you know, as an autonomous subject, I have to erase this entire facet of my physiological self, my reproductive role, and also my loves and my priorities, then either there's a problem with women being functioning members of a liberal polity, or there's a problem with liberalism.
And, you know, and I just reject out of hand the idea that women can't be functioning members of the polity.
That seems absurd to me.
There's nothing wrong with my brain.
And so I concluded that this is clearly a liberalism problem rather than a mother's problem.
And whereas liberal feminism has chosen to junk mothers, I prefer to junk liberalism.
So as I was reading, you give a very concise history of some of the feminist thought that goes on and some of the concerns that you have as a feminist.
And one of the things that just struck me repeatedly was how flimsy the framework is on which critical theory and postmodernism is built.
They've taken a few observations that people have made since at least ancient Greece and the old Hebrews, you know, that language segments reality and that culture is different in different places.
They've taken a few kind of minor observations and they've built on an entire vast structure that cannot be supported on those ideas that make human reality disappear.
And so one of the questions I have is: how do you conceive when you say I loved my baby?
I wanted to be with my baby.
Who is the I in that sentence?
Because this is the thing, I haven't finished the book yet, and I'm not sure, and I'm not sure where you're going with it entirely, but it seems to me that the postmodernism that you followed, the critical theory that you followed, kind of erased that person in some very important way.
Well, yes, absolutely.
It does erase that person.
And I remember really grappling with that in my 20s.
And eventually, I went through some very long, dark, long, dark nights of the soul trying to make sense of all of this in my 20s.
What is this I that exists?
And I don't think I really stopped.
I don't think I really exited the kind of the full-on, I mean, I won't call it a full-on psychotic break, but it was definitely sort of, it was a very deranging experience.
And it went on for quite some years, really, really some years.
And I don't think I exited that until I was able to formulate what the I was that was observing.
And I mean, this is this is very metaphysical territory to get into, but I mean, I'll just, I'll just say in this context, that I had a direct personal experience of just being me and came, which I felt that I could trust in.
And I was able to begin building back from there.
But yes, I mean, it's in as much as, in as much as this is a set of, a set of, really, I would call them theologies, which set about stripping away and dismantling and disaggregating and deconstructing all the way down to the grand level and then telling people that there's really nothing left there at all, which to me, in my view, is just not true.
It's not true that there's nothing left there.
And all I can really offer is, I mean, they're all very, very keen on lived experience.
And I would just like politely to offer my lived experience to say, no, no, you're wrong.
You're wrong.
There isn't nothing there.
I mean, there is not only is there not nothing there, we are all making decisions about what is good and what is bad.
When you say that you love your baby, you're not just saying that you love your baby, you're also saying it is a good thing that you do, and that you are siding with that love over the ideas.
I mean, some of the feminists you quote sounded like they needed to be put into padded cells to me.
I mean, people who were talking about babies as parasites, people who were talking about how horrible it was that this should happen, these things should occur to a person in a free society.
It sounded like they had left the reservation in some way.
Where did you get?
I mean, having gone through a huge transition in my life, it takes a certain amount of guts.
Where did you find where did that particular courage come from?
Is that something that everybody needs to have, or is that something that can be taught?
You mean the courage to have a baby or the courage to change your mind?
I don't even know that I set out to change.
I was just left with no other option.
And I, you know, for better or for worse, I've always been stuck with the kind of mind that follows arguments to their conclusion.
And I guess that's a yeah, no, that's it's it's a personality thing, you know.
And I'm thinking, well, if if this, then that, then it follows that, oh, crap.
I mean, I never, I never expected, honestly, until I was, I never expected until I was halfway through writing the proposal for the book that I would end up arguing for a feminism against progress.
And I typed it out and I was like, no, no, no, this is actually that's this is where this is going.
Feminism Against Progress00:01:43
You know, feminism has to be against progress.
There's no other way for it.
And then I was well into writing in into working out the book itself when I realized that the metaphysical place that abortion and birth control occupy within this, the, the, the long arc of the contest between the feminisms of freedom and of care.
And really, and and and it's subsequently, having reflected on those and laid out those arguments, I've come to see that as just one cut at a very much larger problem which I've described in the book as our entry into the cyborg era, or rather the transhumanist era.
And in a sense, you know, feminism has been a vector for delivery for the delivery of that entry into the cyborg era, in as in that to the extent that women believe ourselves to be persons by virtue of having this technology which undergirds our freedom, which is to say we can access personhood to the extent that it's underwritten by the technology, which flattens our reproductive difference from men.
To that extent, every woman who's on the pill is a cyborg.
You know, I'm out of time.
I'm really sorry to be out of time because I'd like to talk to you more about the specifics of this.
Where can people find your writing besides reading your book, Feminism Against Progress?
So Feminism Against Progress is published on the 25th of April, Regnary Books.
My weekly column is at Unheard, U-N-H-E-R-D, which is published in the United Kingdom.
My substack is reactionaryfeminist.com at Substack.
And you can find me on Twitter at Move in Circles.
Mary, I hope you'll come back.
I'd like to talk to you more about more specifics.