“Reactionary feminist” pens broadside against “meat lego gnosticism”

Mary Harrington’s new book Feminism Against Progress makes the bold assertion that women are women. Human embodiment matters because we are our bodies, rather than being some sort of disembodied minds that just happen to be piloting meat suits. Consequently, a feminism focused on effacing the differences between men and women does not serve women’s interests.

Harrington writes from experience. After an extended adolescence exploring and experimenting with sexual liberation and queer theory, she lost her faith in progress and discovered the value of marriage and motherhood. She explains that she had

taken for granted the notion that men and women are substantially the same apart from our dangly bits, and ‘progress’ meant broadly the same thing for both sexes: the equal right to self-realization, shorn of culturally imposed obligations, expectation, stereotypes or constraints. The experience of being pregnant, and then a new mother, blew this out of the water.

A unisex world of atomized individuals freed from the limitations and obligations of tradition, faith, family, and even embodiment is not good for women. Harrington traces the sources of this ideology through material and intellectual developments, emphasizing the importance of technological change in driving social change. She begins with the Industrial Revolution, which increased economic asymmetry between the sexes by moving production out of the home. Consequently, households became consumers of wages earned elsewhere, and labor became defined by wage-earning.

This shift away from a home-based economic interdependence provoked an emphasis on companionate marriage and the “cult of domesticity.” This was an attempt to protect women’s interests and to assert the continued interdependence of the sexes even as men became the sole breadwinners. The home was held up as a refuge amidst the competitive instability of the market—a haven in a heartless world. Given the reproductive asymmetry between men and women, in which the latter bear far more of the risks and burdens, this division between breadwinners and homemakers was defensible as the genuine pro-women view against more liberationist strains of feminism that sought to have women compete with men in an androgynous world of autonomous individualism.

The duel between these two forms of feminism was ended by the Pill. Contraception (backed by abortion) seemed to liberate women from the perceived handicap of their natural fertility. Control over fertility meant that sex would no longer render women at least potentially dependent upon men for support. They could pursue education, careers, prestige and sexual pleasure with all the freedom and independence of men in the modern liberal world.

But it was not so simple. Nature persists, and contraception and abortion did not eliminate all of the sexual asymmetry between men and women. As Harrington puts it: “A few short decades of sexuality unmoored from reproduction via technology are no match, it seems, for millennia of evolution.” Sexual liberation has established a ruthless relational and sexual market that creates a lot of losers and inflicts a lot of pain. Far from establishing solidarity, the sexual marketplace exacerbates the war between the sexes. Instead of encouraging stable interdependence, it pushes men and women to exploit each other in highly sexed ways.

The result is increased alienation, loneliness, and—despite the promises of the sexual revolution—sex that is less frequent and less satisfying. Harrington concludes that for “men and women alike, then, the sexual revolution has not delivered in practice. Rather than grant all a marvelous new world of polymorphous sexual freedom” it has delivered “mutually antagonistic caricatures of those features of male and female sexual differences which persist despite our best efforts.” The result is a world of dating apps and camgirls, incels and OnlyFans. And in this world relationships and commitment are declining, and fertility is falling.

This is to be expected. Motherhood, more than any other relation, is in the way of the individualistic liberation modern feminism seeks. Thus, “the pursuit of progress demands the displacement of women from our own bodies.” The progressive hope for transformation/liberation finds its culmination in what Harrington memorably labels “Meat Lego Gnosticism.” This is a mystical understanding in which the true self is ethereal, with a right to remake its own body to better match its incorporeal sense of identity. “In this vision, our bodies cease to be interdependent, sexed and sentient, and are instead re-imagined as a kind of Meat Lego, built of parts that can be reassembled at will.” And so surgeons amputate the breasts of adolescent girls unhappy with their developing bodies.

This malevolent metaphysical vision is increasingly embedded in our culture and even law, with educated women—”the priestesses of cyborg theocracy”—its primary enforcers and champions. They are committed to the effacement of sex, and therefore they assist the tech-fueled abolition of women as embodied. And so female fertility is chemically suppressed, and women themselves are displaced by men wielding surgery and stereotypes to claim their place. The insanity of putting male murderers and pedophiles in women’s prisons is what happens when people get in too deep—which is to say, are too proud to repent.

Harrington concludes that if this is progress, then we need a reactionary feminism that defends the interests of actual women, rather than an abstract “women’s rights” championed by those who cannot even say what a woman is. She proposes three forms of resistance. The first is to revive marriage, albeit not in the current model of self-expression or even as the cult of domesticity. Rather, Harrington wants a “way of viewing lifelong solidarity between the sexes that owes more to the 1450s than the 1950s.”

Bringing production back into the home is a worthy goal, but Harrington seems to still be feeling her way toward a fuller understanding of marriage even as she advocates for it. The same is noticeable in her other suggestions, which are laudable but established on unstable ground. She argues that we need to allow men single-sex spaces and institutions that allow them to develop as men. And she wants to “rewild sex” by rejecting the view that “women as sterile by default, with fertility as an optional extra.” But as rebellious as her advice to readers is—“Don’t take the Pill. Don’t encourage your friends to take the Pill”—it seems to be more of a visceral reaction than part of a coherent view of what sex should be. And Harrington gives credence to this interpretation, writing that “I doubt I’m the only one trying to reverse-engineer a workable mode of life in common, from what feels like a heap of rubble.”

She is right that she isn’t the only one trying to rebuild. But more has been conserved that she realizes, and the place where she will find more than rubble is the Church. To be sure, this book was deliberately written to appeal to those who are wary of Christian arguments. Nonetheless, in confronting the wreckage of the sexual revolution, it will eventually be necessary to look to the foundation that Christianity offers, and the living traditions that Christians have kept.

The reluctance to engage with Christianity produces a notable shying-away from a more complete account of what sex is for and how it should be bounded within our male and female embodiment. As Alexandra DeSanctis argues, Harrington is not yet radical enough. This contributes to other omissions in this generally excellent volume. For instance, Harrington does not reckon with the contributions of the LGBT movement to cyborg theology and meat lego gnosticism. Though the rainbow flag was not the source of this ideology, it was an accelerant, especially in the West.

In fairness, Harrington is trying to reach readers who would never, unfortunately, consider reading a book critical of the sexual revolution written by a Catholic such as Mary Eberstadt. And there is much to cheer in Harrington’s excellent work, which is an essential contribution to the growing body of feminist critiques of the sexual revolution. In making her case Harrington proves herself to be both intellectually adroit and able to turn a phrase. Her writing blends anecdotes with historical and intellectual insights, all presented with the clear concision that bespeaks the hidden labor of the author.

Harrington’s focus on the material conditions that enabled the sexual revolution is salutary for the many socially conservative Christians who tend to be neglectful, or even suspicious, of such accounts. It is essential that we take material conditions seriously in order to shape culture and policy in ways friendly to marriage and family—for instance, by pushing back against the trend of delaying marriage. Likewise, her refusal to idealize the model family as depicted by 1950s magazine illustrations is a reminder that many traditionalists are not nearly traditional enough.

Feminism Against Progress provides a tour of the wasteland of the sexual revolution. The challenge this insightful book poses to Christians is to exemplify, in deed as well as word, the truth of how men and women are meant to live together to love and serve God and each other.

Feminism Against Progress
By Mary Harrington
Regnery Publishing, 2023
Hardcover, 256 pages