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.
Yet another moment in these various conservatisms where I get frustrated with their understanding of what was empirically true about the past as opposed to what was normatively asserted or ideologically stated. For example, in small Western, Christian preindustrial communities with a household production system, was extramarital sex stigmatized? Ideologically, yes--on a patriarchal basis, e.g. women were both the evidence of extramarital sex and the targets of the stigma. Did that mean that extramarital sex was rare? Private life is one of the harder things to study, but it doesn't seem that it was rare even in peasant communities, let alone among urban merchants or the aristocracy. Which introduces yet another problem: this kind of conservatism that invokes history as the basis for the reconfiguration of liberal society tends to simply ignore everything but separate rural households even if you just restrict it to Western history--it's as if cities didn't exist, as if aristocratic households and royal courts didn't exist, as if long-distance trade didn't exist, as if mobile pastoralists didn't exist, as if monasteries didn't exist, and so on.
I actually suspect that she assumes that prior to the introduction of the Pill use of reliable contraceptives was so rare that extra-marital sex was rare.
I think that's probably right: she thinks that no Pill = no extramarital sex. Certainly the Pill made it less consequential and thus easier to have sex outside of marriage, but any social or cultural historian of preindustrial Europe can tell you that there were: a) a fair number of ways to minimize the dangers of premarital or extramarital sex that were well known in European folkways (condoms, coitus interruptus, mutual masturbation/oral sex, rhythm method), there were folk forms of abortifacents, and then there were ways to hide a pregnancy/leave a foundling/make up a story about adopting your cousin's baby. (There's some highly contested evidence in early modern Europe and colonial America about everybody-look-the-other-way infanticide, also.)
So basically everyone must rearrange their lives so families are like what peasants had in Russia under the Tsars or something? This is just more atavism. I don’t trust any theorist who looks backwards for the ‘better, more moral form of relationships’ or who creates a utopia out of some imaginary projection into the past. The present is always degraded because we have the details. They erase the complexity of the present and the past.
Yet another moment in these various conservatisms where I get frustrated with their understanding of what was empirically true about the past as opposed to what was normatively asserted or ideologically stated. For example, in small Western, Christian preindustrial communities with a household production system, was extramarital sex stigmatized? Ideologically, yes--on a patriarchal basis, e.g. women were both the evidence of extramarital sex and the targets of the stigma. Did that mean that extramarital sex was rare? Private life is one of the harder things to study, but it doesn't seem that it was rare even in peasant communities, let alone among urban merchants or the aristocracy. Which introduces yet another problem: this kind of conservatism that invokes history as the basis for the reconfiguration of liberal society tends to simply ignore everything but separate rural households even if you just restrict it to Western history--it's as if cities didn't exist, as if aristocratic households and royal courts didn't exist, as if long-distance trade didn't exist, as if mobile pastoralists didn't exist, as if monasteries didn't exist, and so on.
I actually suspect that she assumes that prior to the introduction of the Pill use of reliable contraceptives was so rare that extra-marital sex was rare.
I think that's probably right: she thinks that no Pill = no extramarital sex. Certainly the Pill made it less consequential and thus easier to have sex outside of marriage, but any social or cultural historian of preindustrial Europe can tell you that there were: a) a fair number of ways to minimize the dangers of premarital or extramarital sex that were well known in European folkways (condoms, coitus interruptus, mutual masturbation/oral sex, rhythm method), there were folk forms of abortifacents, and then there were ways to hide a pregnancy/leave a foundling/make up a story about adopting your cousin's baby. (There's some highly contested evidence in early modern Europe and colonial America about everybody-look-the-other-way infanticide, also.)
Extra marital sex happened all the time. Everyone knows this. It's a made up world she's created.
So basically everyone must rearrange their lives so families are like what peasants had in Russia under the Tsars or something? This is just more atavism. I don’t trust any theorist who looks backwards for the ‘better, more moral form of relationships’ or who creates a utopia out of some imaginary projection into the past. The present is always degraded because we have the details. They erase the complexity of the present and the past.
I think she dislikes all pharmalogical contraceptives