00:02:54.440And that's where I've been for a little while.
00:02:56.180And it's a bit like the point where I ran out of things to revise at university.
00:02:59.440And then it was just waiting for finals.
00:03:02.080So that's about where I am at the moment.
00:03:03.720It's just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
00:03:06.140Well, having read the book, we can say you've passed.
00:03:09.480But more interestingly, of course, to our audience, tell us, what is the central case?
00:03:16.360Because last time we had you on the show, we talked about this idea.
00:03:19.540You said you don't believe in progress.
00:03:21.620Well, I still don't believe in progress.
00:03:23.040But now you also don't believe, you know, you want feminism that's against it.
00:03:28.020Well, the central thesis of the book is that much of what we understand as feminism is less an effect of endless moral improvement towards some kind of imagined future heaven on earth as a side effect of technology.
00:03:43.780And specifically of women's responses to changes in how we live together as a consequence of technological advancements.
00:03:51.620And so the book traces the development, you know, traces women's responses to first the Industrial Revolution.
00:03:58.160And then more importantly, from the point of view of my case against progress of what I think what I call the cyborg revolution, which is much more recent and is really everything which has come since the contraceptive and the digital revolutions in the mid 20th century.
00:04:12.120And I argue that at that point, progress, which previously seemed to be delivering never-ending dividends of more freedom and more good things for everybody and particularly for women, has now increasingly turned against women and is delivering not just diminishing returns, but actively making life worse for everyone, all women except an increasingly shrinking elite.
00:04:34.380Well, before we get into the way that that is making things worse, you mentioned the response to the Industrial Revolution and so on.
00:04:43.560Give us a quick run through of some of the changes, the technology, because I think in the modern consciousness, people don't think about it at all.
00:04:52.000Like, they think that women's rights were achieved in the way that we currently conceive of them, purely through campaigning, protesting, you know, throwing yourself in front of horses, that sort of thing, right?
00:05:02.960So what's actually happened throughout history?
00:05:06.120Well, what I, this was, this part of the story was the result of me doing a deep dive into first wave feminism, which doesn't really get much of a look in, in terms of sort of school, school history lessons, if you like.
00:05:20.280You know, apart from the suffragettes, you know, everyone knows that, you know, there was the one who threw herself under a horse and, you know, they jumped up and down and said votes for women.
00:05:27.100But people don't really talk about the century or so of women's activism and women's arguments over the relations between men and women and really of feminism prior to that.
00:05:36.560And there was an awful, there was a lot of it.
00:05:38.160And really, people were intensely preoccupied from the Industrial Revolution onward with the changing roles of men and women and how families should be formed and how men and women should relate to one another, because the Industrial Revolution changed that radically.
00:05:53.320It had, you know, profound effects, you know, really, for the fundamental reason that work no longer happened for a growing number of people in the way that it had done for a very long period of time.
00:06:07.540In the Middle Ages, most work happened in the home, you know, and both sexes worked.
00:06:12.120You know, it's a mistake to imagine that women only entered the workplace or women only worked from the mid-20th century onward.
00:06:22.380In fact, so that pretty much has it backwards.
00:06:24.360Almost all women, apart from very, very, very aristocratic ones, worked in pre-modern England, because most work happened in farmhouses and in artisan, in what historians call a productive household.
00:06:37.440So that might have been a couple and possibly extended family members as well, producing subsistence goods for the family, possibly producing artisan goods for sale, possibly, you know, producing goods for use within the family.
00:06:52.740So in a farmstead situation, that might be the men producing raw materials and the women producing, processing those into fabric or food or, you know, other goods for the family.
00:07:04.240And a huge amount of that just happened in the home and women who were mothers would have done that with kids underfoot and the kids would have worked, would have chipped in as well the moment they were old enough to do it.
00:07:13.580So that's the sort of pre-modern template for a productive household.
00:07:17.180But when you think about what happens when so much of that work industrializes, it changed things radically and particularly for women.
00:07:26.480I've taken the example of textile making because for tens of thousands of years prior to the Industrial Revolution, that was always women's work.
00:07:32.980And there are historians who've looked at textile making, you know, throughout the millennia and argued that it's historically been women's work because it can be, you know, you can raise a loom off the ground so it doesn't get, your baby doesn't eat it.
00:07:48.660You know, if you're flinging a shuttle back and forth, you know, you can stop because the baby's about to climb into the fire or whatever.
00:07:55.220If you, you know, and it's social as well.
00:07:59.360So, you know, you're not just stuck at home on your own with a baby.
00:08:02.120So it works, you know, it makes sense for, it makes sense for you if you've got kids underfoot for women to be doing that.
00:08:08.740But now if you think about what happens with industrialization, suddenly textile making, you know, the spinning and the weaving are both done via heavy, expensive industrial machinery, which has to be centralized in a factory.
00:08:22.500So instead of making textiles in the home, suddenly, even if you're a woman and you want to go on textile making, you know, you've got this decision to face.
00:08:31.920You know, if you have a breastfed baby at home and suddenly you have to go, you have to travel some distance away and work a 12-hour shift in a factory, what do you do?
00:08:40.400You know, it's a problem that you never had to face before.
00:08:43.120So this is just one way of illustrating the fact that work and the home separated in a way which actually reduced women's agency at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
00:08:51.280And it's a sort of common kind of pop feminist idea is that women were radically disempowered until feminism came along and saved us all at the beginning and it's sort of some distance into the modern era.
00:09:03.920But I've argued that actually relative to, in some respects, the medieval era, women actually lost agency with industrialization.
00:09:12.060And everything that followed in terms of feminist activism has been in response to that radical disempowerment that happened with industrial modernity.
00:09:18.620So, and looking at the 19th century, that took two distinctive forms.
00:09:25.120On the one hand, you know, there were women whose activities at home were now just confined to spending money and looking after kids,
00:09:35.520who argued that, no, no, no, actually, the work of the home is good, actually, and we need to make sure it's still valued and it's not treated as second class.
00:09:43.760And this was the so-called cult of domesticity.
00:09:46.760So you have a proliferation of women's magazines, essentially, most of which are focused on bigging up the domestic work that women do at home.
00:09:57.200And feminist historians have often framed this as a kind of false consciousness, you know, parroting the tropes of patriarchy in order to accustom women to their subjugation.
00:10:08.000But another way of looking at it might be that, you know, these are women who recognize that actually caring for children and the work of the home and, you know,
00:10:15.360defending a space outside the marketplace is important and the stuff that can't be done within the market, which still matters.
00:10:22.560And we're trying to make the case for actually that being important and valuable.
00:10:26.780So in a sense, it was a kind of proto-maternal feminism that's going on in the quote-unquote cult of domesticity.
00:10:32.140And then against that, you've got women who say, no, actually, you know, we don't want this domestic life.
00:10:37.740We want to enter the market on the same terms as men.
00:10:40.020We want to be able to go out into the workplaces where some of the work is now stuff we can do.
00:10:44.540You know, I want a shot at being a barrister or a doctor.
00:10:47.800And these tended to be more sort of upper bourgeois women.
00:10:50.200And so you have this sort of bifurcation of, you know, where there are women who push for greater valorization of care.
00:10:58.120And then there are women who push for women to have personhood understood as being an atomized market participant on the same terms as men.
00:11:07.060And these are the two poles of pre-cyborg feminism, which I think of as feminism proper,
00:11:14.740which is the feminism of freedom and the feminism of care.
00:11:18.880And there's a huge range of views within those two poles, you know,
00:11:23.900and the back and forth between them and the negotiation and trying to find a healthy balance between freedom and the needs of dependence
00:11:31.280is, I think, probably the best characterization you can give of what feminism looked like up until the cyborg revolution.
00:11:40.360Before we get to the cyborgs, though, there's also the sexual revolution to consider, which we kind of skipped over.
00:11:51.200Oh, because I thought the cyborg revolution was going to be slightly more recent.
00:11:53.960But anyway, tell us about the cyborgs.
00:11:56.960Well, I mean, this isn't actually, this is a, I've made the case more starkly since I finished writing Feminism Against Progress.
00:12:03.840But I realized actually the pithiest way I can say this is to make the claim that the contraceptive pill is the first transhumanist technology.
00:12:15.120And by that, I mean, it's the first tech, it's the first major widespread social biomedical intervention,
00:12:22.540which aims not at fixing something which has gone wrong with normal health, but upgrading normal, you know, in line with what people want.
00:12:30.340I mean, if you think about what contraceptive pill does, I mean, it actually interrupts normal healthy fertility in the interests of essentially personal freedom.
00:12:39.440And in that sense, it's a radically different paradigm for what biomedical technologies can and should do.
00:12:49.600And that obviously, as we know, was legalized and spread like wildfire in the 1960s.
00:12:55.820And downstream of that came a whole load of other technological transformation.
00:13:01.580You know, we're a good way further down the path that that started.
00:13:05.800But my argument is that, you know, we became cyborgs and women became cyborgs arguably ahead of men at the point where we accepted transhumanist medicine as a basic enabling condition for women's participation in society, which really began in the 1960s.
00:13:23.460Wow. I mean, that's a really, really good way of putting it.
00:13:28.980My question to you is this. What does feminism now mean, Mary?
00:13:32.280Because we've got first, second, third. I mean, we've got more waves in the Mediterranean Sea.
00:13:38.640So what does it actually mean when we use this word? Because I think that's important when we have this discussion.
00:13:50.980I would if you want to take the sort of consensus view of what I think of as magazine feminism,
00:13:56.440if, you know, the kind of pop version that comes out in articles about who you should or shouldn't date and why, you know, that kind of the sort of Jezebel feminism.
00:14:06.880I would say the broad consensus is probably that feminism is actually I'm just going to quote the onion at you here.
00:14:57.880Or why is legalization of abortion a consequence of the pill?
00:15:01.820Well, yeah, people hope when they campaign first for the pill, the hope was that there would be as a result of the pill,
00:15:08.440there would be fewer accidental pregnancies and therefore, you know, it would it would make women's reproductive choices much more within women's control.
00:15:16.840But what happened in practice was, well, the absolute number of accidental pregnancies went up, not down.
00:15:23.460And that was because there was just so much more casual sex happening because it didn't it radically moved the goalposts for what you could or couldn't do.
00:15:30.780And it's only mostly effective. It's not 100 percent effective.
00:15:33.900So there were still enough oops pregnancies, despite, you know, the the the rate of accidental pregnancy went down.
00:15:42.840But there was so much more sex happening that the absolute number went up.
00:15:46.620And at that point, it created an inevitable ratchet towards saying, well, what are we going to do about all these accidental pregnancies?
00:15:52.080Because then it was very difficult to put back in the box.
00:15:54.160I mean, it was pretty much impossible to put it back in the box.
00:15:56.420People saying, well, well, they have the pill now and everybody's got the pill.
00:15:59.660And so they're all at it like rabbits. And, you know, we can't we can't stop this now.
00:16:02.780So, you know, we have to do something about, you know, this is obviously not a tenable situation.
00:16:07.060You know, women are bleeding out in alleyways with coat hangers up.
00:16:10.620And, you know, this is horrendous. We've got to do something because, you know, they'd opened Pandora's box.
00:16:16.460And so many of the the very strict social controls which is which had previously obtained around premarital sex were beginning to fall away.
00:16:25.560And, you know, the case became very compelling to legalize abortion.
00:16:30.720But of course, once you do that, you're saying that that women's autonomy is fun to be in women's autonomy is that much more important than the needs of a dependent.
00:16:43.680And it doesn't really get much more dependent than an unborn baby that's, you know, can't survive outside its mother's body.
00:16:49.520That, you know, that you can you can end the end the potential life of the dependent in order to safeguard the freedom.
00:16:57.140You know, so. So at that point, the the feminism of freedom and the feminism care of care collided.
00:17:03.080And and and, you know, history history tells us which one won.
00:17:07.100And that's the world we've been living ever since.
00:17:08.600And so I think that's the long answer, Francis, to your question of what is feminism.
00:17:13.060It's the it's the feminism, as we understand it today, in its mainstream sense, is a doctrine which argues that we can and should use technology in every, you know, to the fullest extent possible to flatten the differences between the sexes.
00:17:52.720I entirely agree with you that these are all positives, but they're not cost free, I think.
00:17:57.000And that's that's really what so so that that gets us to the end of part one.
00:18:00.080And part part two really is about some of the undercounted costs of the victory of freedom over care when it comes or other tech enabled freedom over care in the domain of feminism.
00:18:13.880And so I've looked at I've looked at the war it's been waging on our relationship, on the relations between men and women, on the war it's been waging on the relations between mothers and babies.
00:18:24.540And finally, the war it wages on our relationship with our own bodies.
00:18:36.260That's the thing. How do I characterize this?
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00:19:07.420The point at which you can use technology to flatten the difference between the sexes is the point at which sex leaves the domain of management by social norms and becomes something which is theoretically free.
00:19:52.720You know, and you're warned at all, you know, and you're supervised carefully by your aunties and your mum.
00:19:57.700And this is all with a very pragmatic intent.
00:20:01.100And it might seem unfair because guys don't get this level of supervision and constraint.
00:20:05.540But there's a very practical intent behind it, which is that, you know, if I get knocked up by mistake with somebody who then, you know, disappears on me, it's a problem.
00:20:15.240You know, it's not just a problem for me.
00:20:16.520It's a problem for everybody in my immediate family, and it's a problem for wider society.
00:20:21.280So, whether or not it's unfair, the basic asymmetry between the reproductive roles of men and women just forces, you know, a pragmatic response to that at scale, you know, in order to manage the challenge posed to everybody in general by babies, by unplanned babies.
00:20:37.200So, there's this intense social pressure from all directions, which is aimed at funneling couples into something like functional dyads, which can raise children together because it's just – the result is just less messy when you do it like that.
00:20:55.820All of a sudden, all of those rules are theoretically weightless.
00:20:58.360You don't need them anymore because I can just take this medicine, which means that I can have as much sex as I want.
00:21:05.020But the thesis I've advanced for what happens at that point is that when – in theory, you know, my sexuality is now my private domain.
00:21:16.000But what happens at that point isn't just a dividend of freedom, but the market also moves into that space because once something belongs just to me, in theory, I can buy or sell it as I see fit.
00:21:26.520And really, the governing – the common thread to these various wars on relationships is the way that technologies – the intervention of technologies into our bodies, you know, seems to privatize the different facets of our bodies, whether that's our fertility, our sexuality, or even really our embodiment itself.
00:21:49.820But in practice, what happens then is that that becomes commodified.
00:21:53.820So in the context of sex, the empire of – you know, the porn industry and the sex industry began to mushroom the moment those constraints on sex went away.
00:22:05.280I mean, you know, the prostitution isn't called the world's oldest industry for nothing.
00:22:09.580You know, it's always been there, but it absolutely boomed from the 60s onwards.
00:22:14.780I mean, Hugh Hefner's Playboy and Playboy Clubs appeared the same year as the pill was legalized.
00:22:23.400And by the 1970s, you know, radical feminists were protesting against the endemic and increasingly violent and degrading nature of pornography, which was now just being marketed pretty much openly.
00:22:34.640Because sexuality was privatized, you know, suddenly there was this libertarian argument for letting women do whatever they wanted with their bodies.
00:22:40.280Now, in practice, if you speak to a survivor of the sex or the porn industries, they'll tell you that, in fact, there's a great deal more coercion that goes into that than the libertarian arguments might like to believe.
00:22:52.700But fundamentally, you know, this is the pattern that I wanted to sketch out, is that it's impossible to separate liberation from commodification.
00:23:03.460And the same goes as well for the fertility industry, which is to say the moment the moment in theory I can control my fertility, it becomes theoretically possible to commodify my fertility.
00:23:15.060So if you fast forward a number of decades on from the arrival of the pill, we're a long way down that path.
00:23:20.400I mean, we have we have young women who have been rendered infertile by selling their eggs in order to pay for college tuition.
00:23:26.880You know, we have the entire I'm sure you saw the headlines during when the war in Ukraine began of these these Ukrainian surrogates.
00:23:34.980And so it's a big industry over there, impoverished young women in the Ukraine who essentially who essentially rent their wombs to wealthy Westerners who don't who either don't want to gestate themselves or, you know, don't have a uterus between them or, you know, for whatever reason.
00:23:51.220Or who, by the way, have postponed having children to the point where they're physically and precisely because of the society we now have.
00:23:56.840Precisely because of. Yeah. Yeah. Precisely because of that.
00:23:59.540And all these babies, you know, lined up in rows in bomb shelters without your motherless babies, essentially.
00:24:04.820You know, their their gestational surrogates have left.
00:24:07.700And then they're just sort of being cared for under kind of semi factory conditions by by a couple of nurses with the bombs falling overhead.
00:24:13.820You know, just astonishingly dystopian images, which is which is, again, what what you begin to see once you privatize something which was previously governed by social norms.
00:24:23.900And finally, you know, in the same context, I've argued that the technologies which enable us to flatten the differences between the sexes fundamentally, you know, beginning with the pill and abortion are in logical continuity with the technologies now being employed by by transgender identified people to flat to become, as they see it, their true selves.
00:24:47.420You know, in ways, you know, in ways which use technology to flatten the differences between the sexes or to remodel, remodel secondary sex characteristics in line with in line with their preferred felt sense of self.
00:24:58.760So so really, I mean, I'm very straightforwardly, I'm arguing that you couldn't have you couldn't have trans people without the pill and abortion and that without and any coherent critique of trans identity has to begin with a coherent critique of what the pill does.
00:25:13.700Because fundamentally, because fundamentally, if you're going to say women are allowed to emancipate ourselves by by by using technology to flatten what makes us distinctively female, why shouldn't other people become more fully themselves using technologies to flatten what make them distinctively themselves?
00:25:31.760You know, why shouldn't we just take that a little bit further and just remodel ourselves as we see fit?
00:25:35.820You know, if you're if you're if you're if you're bought into the cyborg feminist paradigm, you know, trans activism is just is absolutely in logical continuity with it.
00:25:46.980And and I would I would I would go as far as to say that the the cyborg feminist argument is is is is more coherent.
00:25:55.200So, you know, quite a lot more coherent than those radical those gender critical ones which say we should have the pill and abortion, but we can't we can't have trans activism because we're going to we're going to flatten second we're going to flatten reproductive characteristics of women.
00:26:11.660So is that the reason, Mary, these cyborg feminists are in your in the words you use a pro porn sex workers work is a mantra that they like to say?
00:26:31.820It's it would make no sense at all to be for some for some of those things and against some of the others.
00:26:37.840It all it all goes back to the the definitive defeat of the feminism of care by the feminism of freedom.
00:26:45.080You know, if we're allowed to use technology to to remodel our bodies as we see fit, then that just goes all and when we invite the market into ourselves as a side effect of the emancipation that produces, then you just have to follow that all the way down the rabbit hole.
00:27:00.400But, Mary, then why is it with these feminists when they see the negative effects of their arguments?
00:27:07.240For instance, we know that sex work is not good for women.
00:27:22.280If we look at abortion, again, no one would want their child or very few people want their child to have an abortion.
00:27:30.260And thirdly, as we've seen with the case of Isla Bryson, the end game for the transgender ideology is profoundly negative to women, rapists and female prisons.
00:27:41.720At what point does this break and do people start to wake up?
00:27:45.920And are we actually seeing that at the moment?
00:27:48.240Well, I think people are breaking and people are waking up.
00:27:50.620But one of the difficulties is, or rather, one of the tensions is social class, fundamentally.
00:28:05.660And by that I mean all women are not the same.
00:28:08.820I mean, you can talk about something being universally in women's interests, but I'm fundamentally, my feminism is anti-universalist.
00:28:15.880And by that I mean, I think you can talk, you can talk concretely about women's interests and you can care about women's interests, but the same policy could be pro-women and anti-women, depending on the context.
00:28:26.580And the fundamental difficulty we have at the moment is that these, a lot of these policies are being driven by elite women who simply don't see the downsides because they just never, they're less likely to encounter them.
00:28:40.140So, I mean, if you think about, I forget the names of the Scottish members of parliament who've been cheerleading for gender self-declaration recently, but there are lots of them.
00:28:54.260You know, Penny Mordaunt has been a big flag waver for that in the United Kingdom.
00:28:57.960And these are women who likely grew up in fairly comfortable bourgeois homes because those are the people who become politicians.
00:29:04.780You know, they've been to universities, surrounded by men who are mostly reasonably well-behaved relative to the way some can behave.
00:29:12.720You know, they mostly socialize in situations where men are not routinely violent or unpredictable or just outright dangerous.
00:29:19.780And I think it's possible, if you've just been sheltered in that way, simply not to be able to imagine just how depraved some people can be.
00:29:28.700It's just that they're just not able to picture it.
00:29:31.060And therefore, it's a fundamental blind spot that simply does, simply refuses for whatever reason to, simply refuses to grasp the fact that bad act, really, really, really bad actors exist.
00:29:43.980And, yeah, and the problem is that pushing for effectively the abolition of sex in law is in the interests of the upper crust women.
00:29:56.120You know, if you're a knowledge class worker, which is to say you're a barrister or you're a solicitor or an accountant or something,
00:30:02.600it is not in your class interests for there to be a serious conversation going on which says men and women are different.
00:30:09.780You know, it's not, it's, you know, because professionally at work, you can see how that could very easily become, you know,
00:30:16.340are you going to perform less well in your spreadsheet jockeying job?
00:30:20.940You're going to end up making the coffees again and stuff.
00:39:26.960The moment we said marriage is good, you know, that was too far.
00:39:31.020I'll say that again, just in case you do want to cut it.
00:39:33.540There's a precedent for the current contest which is going on over transgender-identified males in women's prisons.
00:39:41.340And it was led by feminists, which is to say the all-out assault on boys' clubs, which has been well underway all the way through the 20th century.
00:39:51.160You know, and I think that one paradigmatic, and it was asymmetric as well.
00:39:55.080You know, a paradigmatic example of that is Boy Scouts, where scouting went co-ed a long time ago,
00:40:01.800while Girl Guides remained single-sex, or rather it remained single-sex until the point where trans activists insisted that males could join the Girl Guides
00:40:12.120as long as they said they were women, or female.
00:40:15.800But, I mean, from that point of view, you know, what's happened more recently in Girl Guides,
00:40:20.080it just mirrors something which happened a long time ago in Scouts.
00:40:22.640And I've made the case that, in fact, there are aspects of single-sex male sociality which have been lost.
00:40:30.840And the biggest loss has been to working-class men, for whom there haven't been any corresponding benefits to outweigh the loss.
00:40:40.880And I think it's painful and striking when you look at the rates of mental psychiatric distress
00:40:48.260and elevated rates of suicide, you know, and other indicators of distress.
00:40:53.720They're absolutely the highest amongst working-class men, and particularly amongst men who are divorced.
00:41:01.940Because without any, with very limited access to any kind of male sociality,
00:41:07.220which has become routinely the case in the modern world, you know, men are getting lonelier,
00:41:11.120and the statistics bear this out consistently.
00:41:14.140Pretty much the only social contact a lot of men have is via their wives,
00:41:17.520and if they lose that, there's really nothing left, you know, and these are utterly alienated men.
00:41:22.940And the consequences of that are there in the statistics, and it's pretty great.
00:41:29.300So that's one facet of it, which is, you know, if we're...
00:41:35.340But I've sort of taken that a little bit further.