'I don't believe in progress': Mary Harrington on how modern

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I've been listening to both Mary and Louis Perry for the last couple years and it sounds like Mary's ideas have continued to germinate.

She's been saying for a while that most decisions related to social structure that we tend to make are zero sum, ie. that there isn't 'progress' so often as there's rearrangements of contract with pluses and minuses and that overall these tend to wash. Perhaps her most interesting historical insight was that there were two competing stands of feminism - one of them would be considered the 'feminism of care' and the 'feminism of freedom'. The later, feminism of freedom, was much more palatable to neoliberal economic policy so it got boosted by the establishment and the former, feminism of care, mostly got wrung out. What she's said in other interviews is that the 'feminism of freedom' is inherently transhumanist in that it's hopes for intervention aren't so much about trying to make things that aren't working work (physiologically) but getting things that work the way they're supposed to naturally to be modified down to fit within the range of human convenience - thus the transhumanist tendency is toward removing the frictions and inconveniences of being human for the sake of expediting convenience over other concerns and that includes things like surrogacy where women in third world countries lease their wombs to women in first world countries who aren't able to carry children anymore.

He goal seems to be to point out that feminism, as a movement, overshot women's interests in the libertarian direction and needs to be pulled back from that, hence both she and Louis Perry have taken to calling themselves reactionary feminists.

'I don't believe in progress': Mary Harrington on how modern feminism has harmed women | SpectatorTV