Harrington's reactionary feminism - some thoughts

Well, I have now read Harrington cover to cover. It took me six hours, and several mugs of Ovaltine. It is a good book, yes – worth reading through once, I think. I'm not going to write a précis of the book here, and so I shan't go through her historical analysis. It is interesting, however, how things were much better for women, in terms of functioning social relations, before the Industrial Revolution. It reinforces my prejudice that small village communities where everyone knows everyone else are really the only form of society that humans can live in without pervasive social dysfunction, mental illness and sexual neurosis! Harrington says much the same things that I and SR and others have been saying on this site. For example, she reacts to transgender surgery in the same way as I do – with visceral horror. To her, as to me, it is Meat Lego Gnosticism (a superb phrase!) predicated on alienation from our own bodies and from the material universe. This Gnostic attitude will not bring us happiness, because we are evolved creatures, and our nature is rooted in biology. All it can offer us is alienation and anomie. Actually, the philosopher Santayana predicted that this would be the outcome of liberalism. Ultimately, feminism is false because liberalism is false, because we are not bodiless, genderless and asocial selves. But anyway, back to Harrington. Harrington has three positive proposals. The first is that there should be a revival of all-male spaces, and that women should allow them to exist. She does mention the Scouts and how the Scouts opened their movement to girls whereas the Guides were allowed to remain an all-female environment. Of course, when referring to the Scouts she doesn't mention the gigantic elephant in the room, which is the pederastic bonding (even if mostly chaste) between men and boys that was the source of the strength and value of the institution. Her second proposal is that marriage should be considered a real, preferably lifelong, commitment, and that divorce should not be easy. Marriage should not be primarily about 'personal fulfilment', but about a commitment to work together to build a family, and the fulfilment should derive from this endeavour and the deepening spousal and familial relationships that go along with it. The third proposal is that women should stop taking the pill, and accept that (hetero)sex always involves a risk of pregnancy. She describes the deleterious side-effects that the pill has on women, but she also thinks that we should restore the connection between sex and fertility. This means that women should be less promiscuous, and aim for a relationship with one man. She even suggests that it would be best to postpone sex until the nuptials. I'd like to see all these proposals adopted, but I don't suppose they will in the west. However, maybe there's a benign Darwinism at work on the scale of civilisations. The collapse of the fertility rate in the west hardly augurs well for those societies in which feminism has been nurtured. My only gripe about the book is that she still calls herself a feminist. What she has set out is a systematic demolition of feminism. She shows in her book how, far from liberating women, feminist ideology has simply resulted in an endless and useless war between the sexes, one which has led to the degradation of both sides. But the feminist movement that has actually emerged from the historical process is feminism. Harrington's “reactionary feminism” is an oxymoron, because feminism as an actual historical movement and ideology is embedded in Progress Theology (another of Harrington's felicitous phrases) and in liberal notions of the unencumbered self. I cannot see how what she advocates is in any way, shape or form still recognisably feminist. The fact that feminism as historically constituted has failed to bring fulfilment to women, and that her own proposals would be more conducive to their interests, is not sufficient to make those proposals into feminism. Yes, I agree, her proposals would benefit women. But they would benefit men too. In fact, one of the strengths of her analysis is that she shows how modern liberalism and feminism have been a disaster for men and women alike. But I suppose that for a woman in the media not to identify as some sort of feminist would effectively lead to her being marginalised or traduced as an apologist for “the patriarchy”. So all-pervasive is the ideology of feminism that even Harrington feels she cannot disown it. But Harrington is not really a feminist, whatever she might say. This is entirely to her credit.