Mary Harrington's Worst Bad Idea

So far we’ve covered two of Harrington’s three-part plan to fix feminism: Abandoning ‘Big Romance and Let Men Be.  Her third part, and clearly the worst, is “Re-Wild Sex.” 

She thinks women would benefit from giving up the Pill and abortion.  Her argument is rehash of Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, arguing that the Pill has been bad for women and that much of modern ‘hook-up culture’ has been bad for women.  Harrington argues that society has accepted a view of women as ‘sterile by default,’ and therefore has not accommodated women’s fertility and ‘embodiment.’ She offers no examples of what, exactly, those accommodations would look like, only that apparently it means women would be pregnant a whole lot more often.  

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Harrington’s evidence for the perniciousness of the Pill consists of two things: stories from young women of bad hookups and dubious claims of environmental harm from hormonal contraceptives. There is some evidence that synthetic estrogen lingers in wastewater, but so does natural estrogen and there’s a much larger amount of the latter.  Harrington just repeats the bad part about the Pill, actually quoting Alex Jone’s quip about the making the friggin’ frogs gay.  She never discusses the fact that better wastewater treatment will fix this problem or that progestin-only pills don’t cause it in the first place.  In other words, on this point she just flat lies. 

She is on somewhat firmer ground in cataloguing the problems contemporary young women have with porn-addled dates, such as being forced into dangerous or just kinda gross sex acts that the women themselves don’t want.  She gives an example of a young woman who, as a teen, had an affair with much older man who among other assaults shoved Adderall into the girl’s vagina while she was asleep.  She offers this anecdote without also noting that the guy here is guilty of sexual assault in every single state.  What happened to this girl should have led to the man getting sent to jail, and that it was feminists who advocated for those changes to the laws and practices that could get him prosecuted.  Notably Harrington provides absolutely no evidence suggesting that any mainstream feminist condones sexual assault like this.  In fact, Harrington could have compared the assault she describe to the assaults committed by Julian Assange, one of which involved him having sex with a sleeping partner, and noted how feminists reacted to that prosecution.  Here is a transcript of a debate between two feminists on the Assange case.

Harrington thinks that the cure for bad sex is to make sex ‘risky,’ without noting that women are the ones who bear all the risk without the Pill and the right to abortion. She claims that she isn’t legitimizing ‘purity culture’ by telling women not to have sex unless they want to get pregnant, but then IMMEDIATELY states: “While this means, for chose who take this path, an explicit insistence one sex only in the context of trust and intimacy, it doesn’t necessarily follow that women should refuse sex before marriage. But caveat emptor, if you’re playing with this kind of fire outside the context of a committed relationship. you’d better be absolutely sure you can trust your male partner.” In other words, if you’re a whore, you deserve what you get.  There really is no possible interpretation other than Harrington wants to reinstate the double standard where men get to be horny and women have to be virginal. 

She tries to sweeten her Virgin — Whore worldview by telling women that the Pill squelches women’s libido and without it, they will feel a lot more desire.  What she ignores is that this desire only comes when a woman is ovulating, so that if she doesn’t want to get pregnant, she can’t have sex when her body wants to and can only have sex when her libido is at its lowest ebb.  Even more, she doesn’t mention that so-called “Natural Family Planning” requires epic levels of commitment and rarely works for women who don’t have stone-regular cycles.  Women who have used NFP describe horrible experiences with it.  

Birth control and legal abortion created a world where women earn more college degrees than men, earn more money, at least before they have kids, and control more power than we have ever before in human history.  Harrington offers absolutely nothing to explain how we might preserve those gains without the technology that created them in the first place.  Harrington, and all conservatives, trivializes pregnancy.  Pregnancy takes an entire year of a woman’s life, during which time she is a prisoner of her body, even if she wants the baby.  No coffee, booze, heavy exercise, lifting objects, plus all the ugly clothes and generally grossness of producing a new human does not go with a demanding career or schooling.  This would be the case even if the US provided women with a robust safety net, which we don’t.  “Re-wilding” sex can ONLY mean returning to a world where men hold every single shred of power or authority and women have to grovel to continue to eat and live indoors.  

Coupled with her arguments that women shouldn’t expect emotional fulfillment in marriage and that men need to get away from women, her arguments that women shouldn’t have the right to divorce their husbands or to control our own bodies mean that Harrington is no way, shape, or form a feminist.  She doesn’t really even like women; she just wants every other woman to suffer as much as she apparently does. This is a shame, because she does describe some problems that really do need to be addressed, especially the need for men and women to be able to form and keep relationships with each other.  

After reading her book and her Substack, as well as Favale’s Catholic whine, I concluded that the people who need these books are not women but young men.  Men need to know that porn mostly shows destructive behaviors, that video games are largely a waste of time, but also that they do have things to offer young women other than large biceps and larger wallets.  Keeping themselves in male-only enclaves, where they learn from men who have largely failed at relationships of respect with women is the absolute worst possible advice for them.  Making sex “risky” only for women isn’t going to encourage young men to learn how to treat women any better.  

In fact, all of Harrington’s recommendations are completely counterproductive to her stated goal of improving women’s lives.  If young men want things from young women that make young women miserable, then young men need to spend more time talking to young WOMEN.  More opportunities to work and play together as buddies instead of potential sex or romantic partners is necessary and fewer single-sex spaces.  More time as colleagues will teach young men what women want more than anything else, as well as teaching everyone communication skills required to make a relationship work.  If there is a need for single-sex spaces, then groups like the Masons should fill that gap with ritual and also with public service work, and there should always be similar groups for women.  

Her refusal to consider anything that hasn’t already been tried and failed is a gigantic waste.  Young people need information on how to form relationships that work well for everyone. Instead, Harrington offers a world where women are weak, stupid, and cowardly appendages to males.  Whatever she calls herself. she is nobody’s feminist.