Mary Harrington on sex and the Pill, part II.

In my first post (here) on Mary Harrington’s (2023) Feminism Against Progress, I focused on her views on the family and suggested that not unlike Yoram Hazony (in his (2022) book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery), she rejects the patriarchic ‘nuclear family’ embraced by American, Christian-ethno-nationalists. Instead they both defend what they call the ‘traditional family,’ which in Harrington’s argument involves commitment to joint projects centered on home-based work and family. As she puts it, “households formed on this model can work together both economically and socially on the common business of living, whether that’s agricultural, artisanal, knowledge-based or a mix of all these.” (p. 21)

However, there is an important contrast between Harrington and Hazony. As Hazony recounts in Chapter IX, “Some Notes on Living a Conservative Life” of Conservatism, rejection of the morality of abortion as a student was a major pathway into a more conservative political orientation for him. This does not seem to be the case for Harrington (who also explicitly notes that abortion plays out differently in the US and the UK). Harrington’s transformative conversion moment (rejecting ‘progress theology’) seems to have been much later in life during her sense of isolation in a commuter town after a near death experience in giving birth (pp. 3-4; 24; 27-28).

Harrington treats abortions as a necessary, inevitable albeit regrettable by-product of the sexual revolution. On her view legalized abortion is to some degree inevitable once relatively secure contraception like the pill is available. For, on her view, this makes casual sex massively more likely. And because contraception is not full proof, it makes many more unwanted pregnancies likely. She is quite pragmatic about abortion, and its politics:

The downstream effect of making birth control widely available has been de-stigmatising extra-marital sex; abortion serves as the material backstop for that change in social norms. Banning the backstop would not put the broader changes back in the box. (p. 170)

As this passage hints at, Harrington is against the Pill (and Big Pharma). This is not a mere idiosyncrasy, for it ties many of her arguments together. She thinks it is a victory for a social world-view that sets women against their own bodies — the “radical project of tech-enabled emancipation,” (p. 149) — that promotes for-profit practices where there should be none, and that reinforces fluidity about our bodies (“meat Lego”) more generally. She views the Pill as poisonous for women’s bodies, for natural ecology, and social ecology.

The Pill is an ecological catastrophe on an immense scale, thanks to the literal poisons it leaks into the water table. And after 50 years of its reign, the figures are in: its effect on the delicate social ecology of sexual relations has been every bit as bad. The Pill plays a central role in opening the door for a host of figurative poisons, which have percolated into every facet of our intimate relations. And on both ecological and social fronts, bio-libertarian feminism simply chooses to look past these side effects, because progress means individual autonomy at any price. (p. 208)

In her telling the sexual revolution failed on its own epicurean terms. Rather than unleashing sexual pleasure, it generated massive amounts of mostly bad sex that is, more often than not, unwanted. (Here Harrington echoes some of Audre Lorde’s views on the sexual revolution.) The way Harrington explains it, this is due to the fact that (i) in virtue of the Pill it became socially unacceptable to decline sex for single women (p. 211); (ii) drawing on Louise Perry and Harry Fisch, she claims porno has ruined “the capacity for mutual pleasure.” (p. 210)

As my insertion of Lorde implies, Harrington is not alone in having qualms about the sexual revolution. But the more standard feminist hesitation about it is shaped by the observation that the sexual revolution preceded economic and other forms of material equality, and so ended up simultaneously glorying (and mutually reinforcing) women’s subordination and pleasure. (This is an argument (recall) I have ascribed, for example, to Manon Garcia’s interpretation of De Beauvoir in We Are Not Born Submissive.)

By contrast, Harrington briefly hints at the argument that pornography is a form of sexual violence (but primarily to note that Andrea Dworkin lost the ‘sex wars’ (p. 65)), but does not connect it with women’s subordination or patriarchy more generally. While repeatedly emphasizing “material conditions,” she never engages MacKinnon.

Crucially, this is because while she repeatedly emphasizes differences in physical strength between the sexes, she rejects the idea that economic, legal, or political inequality is a fundamental cause of these phenomena. Harrington (who presents her own backgrounds as “an average middle class girl” (p. 4)) allows that women’s material interests lag at the very top, “highest-status,” professions and very bottom social rungs (“where mothers are compelled by economic necessity or the pressures of career to return to work two weeks post-partum” (p. 131)). She sometimes pays lip-service to more global inequality. But her main arguments are structured around the claim that in “knowledge-based” areas of the economy and material equality, women have achieved de facto equality. This shows up in claims like, “female knowledge workers are unlikely to be confronted, in the course of working life, with any stark contrasts between their ability to perform professionally and that of their male peers.” (p. 150) But also in her larger, more sociological tinted arguments:

The elite of the United States today is increasingly female dominated…the institutions that set and manage social and cultural norms – such as education, media, law and HR – are all increasingly female dominated. Female law students outnumber male ones two to one. Women outnumber men in journalism. Seventy-five percent of nonprofit workers in the United States are female, and the UK proportion is nearly as high, at 68 percent.

Such workers are chiefly graduates, notably from the arts and social sciences – subjects where women outnumber men two to one in the UK and which lean strongly towards a progressive worldview. And if the disproportionately female graduates of disproportionately progressive elite liberal arts courses, who then disproportionately make up the nonprofit seor, have seized enthusiastically on a set of moral principles and institutional changes that downplay the role of biological sex in a way that benefits elite women overall, so a second key terrain for the contest over the political salience of sex dimorphism is corporate HR. This is the division of the business world tasked with managing the acceptable social (and, by extension, moral) parameters of everyday working life. Sixty-three percent of UK HR workers and over 70 percent of those in the United States are women. (pp. 151-152)

On Harrington’s account, then, credentialed women’s material success fosters a conception or ideology (a term she uses) of the functionality of the Pill that emphasizes women’s self-control and autonomy and embraces fluidity of identity (including gender and sexual identity [as before, I am skipping over my strong disagreement with her on trans issues]), but that in reality alienates women from their own bodies and structurally devalues motherhood and care (especially maternal care). As she puts it: “Side effects of this generalised desertion of interdependence in favour of freedom include widespread loneliness; abuse of the elderly and disabled in care homes; substandard childcare; family breakdown; and the well-documented disadvantage experienced by children in one-parent families, such as greater risk of poverty, reduced life chances, and adolescent mental health issues.” (p. 50)

As I hinted in my earlier post (and as the readers at CrookedTimber noted), when Harrington turns to her own positive vision it is not entirely clear who will care for the elderly and disabled in her account, because her conception of the home-based family seems to focus on joint projects centered on parenting and (managing a portfolio of) work. And while taking some material inequality in the household for granted, her vision does involve a change in social norms on the Pill, divorce, and motherhood. (Presumably porno, too, but I don’t recall any explicit suggestions.)

It’s not explicit she would be willing to ban the Pill, although it follows naturally from her account which is very critical of the intersection of markets and technology in re-shaping human nature. (She ignores potential medical benefits from use of the Pill.) She studiously avoids suggesting, which otherwise would follow naturally from her analysis, more welfare programs and infrastructure policies centered on supporting motherhood and its care-work. (In mainland Europe such policies used to be associated with Christian democracy; but they became unpopular when it entailed supporting Muslim families.) Rather, when it comes to explicit public policy (as distinct from voluntary changes in social mores) she seems to advocate more restrictive divorce laws, while denying that she is “arguing that anyone should remain in a violent or otherwise abusive relationship ‘for the sake of the children’. The case against easy separation isn’t a case against every separation.” (p. 185) But the details are left unclear.

Interestingly enough, while she implies that abandoning the Pill will improve the sex lives of couples, her vision of marriage is not centered on mutual pleasure. Rather, “it’s absolute, unshakeable loyalty.” (p. 186) This idea of loyalty. also frames her otherwise puzzling distinction between a contract and covenant: “if you want to pass through the looking glass into a world beyond the marketisation of everything, you have to treat your miniature commons as indissoluble: not a contract but a covenant.” (p. 185) Marriage should be a “post-romantic covenant.” (p. 188)

The rejection of pleasure, Big romance, and even “emotional fulfillment” (p. 188) is surely counter-cultural in our age. She does so in order to promote “companionship, belonging, solidarity, and children.” (p. 188) She believes such a program will make motherhood “less grueling” and lonesome (p. 188). With the rejection of the fluidity associated with markets, there is, also lurking in her program an argument for a certain kind of assortative mating; to be continued.