TRIGGERnometry - Why 'Progress' is Bad for Women - Mary Harrington

00:00:00.700 Broadway's smash hit, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.

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00:00:15.780 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.

00:00:22.600 Now through June 7th, 2026 at the Princess of Wales Theatre.

00:00:26.800 Get tickets at murbish.com.

00:00:30.440 The contraceptive pill is the first transhumanist technology. 0.89

00:00:34.760 It's the first major widespread social biomedical intervention,

00:00:39.960 which aims not at fixing something which has gone wrong with normal health,

00:00:44.360 but upgrading normal, you know, in line with what people want.

00:00:47.860 It's impossible to separate liberation from commodification.

00:00:50.900 And the same goes as well for the fertility industry,

00:00:54.820 which is to say the moment in theory I can control my fertility,

00:00:58.640 it becomes theoretically possible to commodify my fertility.

00:01:02.540 I've argued that the technologies which enable us to flatten the differences between the sexes,

00:01:08.460 fundamentally, you know, beginning with the pill and abortion,

00:01:11.340 are in logical continuity with the technologies now being employed by transgender-identified people

00:01:18.620 to become, as they see it, their true selves.

00:01:22.580 And the fundamental difficulty we have at the moment is that a lot of these policies are being driven by elite women 0.96

00:01:31.320 who simply don't see the downsides because they're less likely to encounter them.

00:01:36.560 There's a lot of women who would actually disagree with you, who say,

00:01:40.120 look, I live in a society which is freer than ever.

00:01:42.540 I have more choice than ever before.

00:01:44.480 I can pick a wide range of careers.

00:01:46.760 I can choose when I want to have a child.

00:01:50.140 Surely these are all positive things, Mary.

00:01:51.740 Yes, but they're not without cost.

00:01:52.860 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.

00:02:05.540 I'm Francis Foster.

00:02:06.780 I'm Constantine Kishin.

00:02:07.880 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:02:13.140 Our terrific and returning guest today is a writer and the author of an upcoming book.

00:02:18.180 In fact, it's out already here in the UK.

00:02:20.180 It's called Feminism Against Progress, which is exactly the kind of feminism we like on this show. 1.00

00:02:25.160 Mary Harrington, welcome back to Trigonometry.

00:02:27.120 Thank you for having me again.

00:02:28.440 It's a real pleasure to have you on.

00:02:29.900 How have you been?

00:02:30.580 You've been writing this book for a while.

00:02:33.140 Yeah, I've been.

00:02:34.720 Well, it's been a very strange sort of hiatus for me because the book,

00:02:39.980 obviously, I finished writing writing late last year.

00:02:43.380 And then there's this period where you go through it and you check to make sure,

00:02:46.520 you know, people tell you off for your sloppy footnoting.

00:02:48.420 And it goes through the whole post-production process.

00:02:52.340 And then you just have to wait.

00:02:54.440 And that's where I've been for a little while.

00:02:56.180 And it's a bit like the point where I ran out of things to revise at university.

00:02:59.440 And then it was just waiting for finals.

00:03:02.080 So that's about where I am at the moment.

00:03:03.720 It's just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

00:03:06.140 Well, having read the book, we can say you've passed.

00:03:09.480 But more interestingly, of course, to our audience, tell us, what is the central case?

00:03:16.360 Because last time we had you on the show, we talked about this idea.

00:03:19.540 You said you don't believe in progress.

00:03:21.620 Well, I still don't believe in progress.

00:03:23.040 But now you also don't believe, you know, you want feminism that's against it. 1.00

00:03:28.020 Well, 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. 0.94

00:03:43.780 And specifically of women's responses to changes in how we live together as a consequence of technological advancements. 0.94

00:03:51.620 And so the book traces the development, you know, traces women's responses to first the Industrial Revolution.

00:03:58.160 And 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.

00:04:12.120 And 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. 0.67

00:04:34.380 Well, before we get into the way that that is making things worse, you mentioned the response to the Industrial Revolution and so on.

00:04:43.560 Give 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.

00:04:52.000 Like, 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?

00:05:02.960 So what's actually happened throughout history?

00:05:04.960 Give us a brief overview.

00:05:06.120 Well, 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.

00:05:20.280 You 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.

00:05:27.100 But 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.

00:05:36.560 And there was an awful, there was a lot of it.

00:05:38.160 And 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.

00:05:53.320 It 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.

00:06:07.540 In the Middle Ages, most work happened in the home, you know, and both sexes worked. 0.84

00:06:12.120 You know, it's a mistake to imagine that women only entered the workplace or women only worked from the mid-20th century onward.

00:06:22.380 In fact, so that pretty much has it backwards.

00:06:24.360 Almost 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.

00:06:37.440 So 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.

00:06:52.740 So 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.

00:07:04.240 And 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. 1.00

00:07:13.580 So that's the sort of pre-modern template for a productive household.

00:07:17.180 But when you think about what happens when so much of that work industrializes, it changed things radically and particularly for women.

00:07:26.480 I'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. 0.97

00:07:32.980 And 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.

00:07:46.160 You know, it's semi-interruptible work.

00:07:48.660 You 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.

00:07:55.220 If you, you know, and it's social as well.

00:07:59.360 So, you know, you're not just stuck at home on your own with a baby.

00:08:02.120 So 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. 1.00

00:08:08.740 But 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.

00:08:22.500 So 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.

00:08:31.920 You 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?

00:08:40.400 You know, it's a problem that you never had to face before.

00:08:43.120 So 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.

00:08:51.280 And 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.

00:09:03.920 But I've argued that actually relative to, in some respects, the medieval era, women actually lost agency with industrialization. 0.99

00:09:12.060 And everything that followed in terms of feminist activism has been in response to that radical disempowerment that happened with industrial modernity. 0.99

00:09:18.620 So, and looking at the 19th century, that took two distinctive forms.

00:09:25.120 On the one hand, you know, there were women whose activities at home were now just confined to spending money and looking after kids, 1.00

00:09:35.520 who 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.

00:09:43.760 And this was the so-called cult of domesticity.

00:09:46.760 So 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. 0.99

00:09:57.200 And 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. 1.00

00:10:08.000 But 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, 0.89

00:10:15.360 defending a space outside the marketplace is important and the stuff that can't be done within the market, which still matters.

00:10:22.560 And we're trying to make the case for actually that being important and valuable.

00:10:26.780 So in a sense, it was a kind of proto-maternal feminism that's going on in the quote-unquote cult of domesticity. 0.95

00:10:32.140 And then against that, you've got women who say, no, actually, you know, we don't want this domestic life. 1.00

00:10:37.740 We want to enter the market on the same terms as men. 0.98

00:10:40.020 We want to be able to go out into the workplaces where some of the work is now stuff we can do.

00:10:44.540 You know, I want a shot at being a barrister or a doctor.

00:10:47.800 And these tended to be more sort of upper bourgeois women. 1.00

00:10:50.200 And so you have this sort of bifurcation of, you know, where there are women who push for greater valorization of care. 1.00

00:10:58.120 And then there are women who push for women to have personhood understood as being an atomized market participant on the same terms as men.

00:11:07.060 And these are the two poles of pre-cyborg feminism, which I think of as feminism proper, 0.94

00:11:14.740 which is the feminism of freedom and the feminism of care. 1.00

00:11:18.880 And there's a huge range of views within those two poles, you know,

00:11:23.900 and the back and forth between them and the negotiation and trying to find a healthy balance between freedom and the needs of dependence

00:11:31.280 is, I think, probably the best characterization you can give of what feminism looked like up until the cyborg revolution. 0.97

00:11:40.360 Before we get to the cyborgs, though, there's also the sexual revolution to consider, which we kind of skipped over.

00:11:47.680 Oh, that is the cyborg revolution.

00:11:48.400 You did?

00:11:49.000 Oh, that is the cyborg.

00:11:49.980 That is the cyborg revolution.

00:11:51.200 Oh, because I thought the cyborg revolution was going to be slightly more recent.

00:11:53.960 But anyway, tell us about the cyborgs.

00:11:56.960 Well, I mean, this isn't actually, this is a, I've made the case more starkly since I finished writing Feminism Against Progress.

00:12:03.840 But I realized actually the pithiest way I can say this is to make the claim that the contraceptive pill is the first transhumanist technology.

00:12:15.120 And by that, I mean, it's the first tech, it's the first major widespread social biomedical intervention,

00:12:22.540 which aims not at fixing something which has gone wrong with normal health, but upgrading normal, you know, in line with what people want.

00:12:30.340 I mean, if you think about what contraceptive pill does, I mean, it actually interrupts normal healthy fertility in the interests of essentially personal freedom.

00:12:39.440 And in that sense, it's a radically different paradigm for what biomedical technologies can and should do.

00:12:49.600 And that obviously, as we know, was legalized and spread like wildfire in the 1960s.

00:12:55.820 And downstream of that came a whole load of other technological transformation.

00:13:01.580 You know, we're a good way further down the path that that started.

00:13:05.800 But 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.

00:13:23.460 Wow. I mean, that's a really, really good way of putting it.

00:13:28.980 My question to you is this. What does feminism now mean, Mary? 0.99

00:13:32.280 Because we've got first, second, third. I mean, we've got more waves in the Mediterranean Sea.

00:13:38.640 So what does it actually mean when we use this word? Because I think that's important when we have this discussion.

00:13:45.400 Well, it really depends who you ask.

00:13:48.740 I mean, there are.

00:13:50.980 I would if you want to take the sort of consensus view of what I think of as magazine feminism, 0.97

00:13:56.440 if, 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. 1.00

00:14:06.880 I would say the broad consensus is probably that feminism is actually I'm just going to quote the onion at you here. 1.00

00:14:15.720 Feminism is anything a woman does. 1.00

00:14:17.120 That's to put it very crudely, you know, and really this this also is downstream of the cyborg revolution,

00:14:26.040 because it's I've argued that the arrival of the pill and particularly with the the inevitable consequence of the arrival of the pill,

00:14:33.200 which was the legalization of abortion, the feminism of freedom decisively defeated the feminism of care. 1.00

00:14:40.780 Because I'm so sorry to interrupt.

00:14:43.720 And also, I don't want to interfere with Francis line of questioning, but I'm curious.

00:14:48.760 I think I know why you say that the legalization of abortion is a consequence of the pill.

00:14:53.540 Is it just like a more advanced version of the same thing, essentially?

00:14:57.120 Is that what you're saying?

00:14:57.880 Or why is legalization of abortion a consequence of the pill?

00:15:01.820 Well, yeah, people hope when they campaign first for the pill, the hope was that there would be as a result of the pill,

00:15:08.440 there would be fewer accidental pregnancies and therefore, you know, it would it would make women's reproductive choices much more within women's control. 1.00

00:15:16.840 But what happened in practice was, well, the absolute number of accidental pregnancies went up, not down.

00:15:23.460 And 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.

00:15:30.780 And it's only mostly effective. It's not 100 percent effective.

00:15:33.900 So there were still enough oops pregnancies, despite, you know, the the the rate of accidental pregnancy went down.

00:15:42.840 But there was so much more sex happening that the absolute number went up.

00:15:46.620 And at that point, it created an inevitable ratchet towards saying, well, what are we going to do about all these accidental pregnancies?

00:15:52.080 Because then it was very difficult to put back in the box.

00:15:54.160 I mean, it was pretty much impossible to put it back in the box.

00:15:56.420 People saying, well, well, they have the pill now and everybody's got the pill.

00:15:59.660 And so they're all at it like rabbits. And, you know, we can't we can't stop this now.

00:16:02.780 So, you know, we have to do something about, you know, this is obviously not a tenable situation.

00:16:07.060 You know, women are bleeding out in alleyways with coat hangers up. 1.00

00:16:10.620 And, you know, this is horrendous. We've got to do something because, you know, they'd opened Pandora's box.

00:16:16.460 And so many of the the very strict social controls which is which had previously obtained around premarital sex were beginning to fall away.

00:16:25.560 And, you know, the case became very compelling to legalize abortion.

00:16:30.720 But 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.

00:16:43.680 And it doesn't really get much more dependent than an unborn baby that's, you know, can't survive outside its mother's body.

00:16:49.520 That, you know, that you can you can end the end the potential life of the dependent in order to safeguard the freedom.

00:16:57.140 You know, so. So at that point, the the feminism of freedom and the feminism care of care collided. 1.00

00:17:03.080 And and and, you know, history history tells us which one won.

00:17:07.100 And that's the world we've been living ever since.

00:17:08.600 And so I think that's the long answer, Francis, to your question of what is feminism.

00:17:13.060 It'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. 1.00

00:17:27.320 And what's wrong with that?

00:17:28.140 Even at the even at the expense of unborn lives.

00:17:31.480 And but what's wrong with it, I think?

00:17:34.560 But there's a lot of women who would actually disagree with you, who say, look, I live in a society which is freer than ever.

00:17:41.520 I have more choice than ever before. I can pick a wide range of careers.

00:17:45.740 I can choose when when I want to have a child.

00:17:49.540 Surely these are all positive things, Mary.

00:17:51.140 Yes, but they're not without cost.

00:17:52.720 I entirely agree with you that these are all positives, but they're not cost free, I think.

00:17:57.000 And that's that's really what so so that that gets us to the end of part one.

00:18:00.080 And 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.

00:18:13.880 And 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.

00:18:24.540 And finally, the war it wages on our relationship with our own bodies.

00:18:30.400 Bless those out for us, please.

00:18:31.680 OK, so the wrong turn of phrase.

00:18:34.080 War on relationships.

00:18:36.260 That's the thing. How do I characterize this?

00:18:38.740 Broadway's smash hit, the Neil Diamond musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.

00:18:44.500 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more featuring all the songs you love, including America, Forever in Blue Jeans and Sweet Caroline.

00:18:53.280 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here.

00:18:57.840 The Neil Diamond musical, A Beautiful Noise.

00:19:00.640 April 28th through June 7th, 2026.

00:19:03.660 The Princess of Wales Theatre.

00:19:05.600 Get tickets at mirvish.com.

00:19:07.420 The 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.

00:19:31.460 It becomes private.

00:19:32.580 So, I mean, let me back up a little bit.

00:19:36.520 So, if you imagine, it's 1910.

00:19:40.860 You know, I'm female. 0.98

00:19:42.020 You know, I'm a young woman.

00:19:43.300 I get horny like all humans do in adolescence.

00:19:47.340 There are very, very, you know, my mum tells me never be seen alone with a guy.

00:19:51.040 You know, they can get ideas.

00:19:52.720 You know, and you're warned at all, you know, and you're supervised carefully by your aunties and your mum.

00:19:57.700 And this is all with a very pragmatic intent.

00:20:01.100 And it might seem unfair because guys don't get this level of supervision and constraint.

00:20:05.540 But 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.

00:20:15.240 You know, it's not just a problem for me.

00:20:16.520 It's a problem for everybody in my immediate family, and it's a problem for wider society.

00:20:21.280 So, 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.

00:20:37.200 So, 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. 0.65

00:20:52.760 Then you add the pill into the mix.

00:20:55.820 All of a sudden, all of those rules are theoretically weightless.

00:20:58.360 You don't need them anymore because I can just take this medicine, which means that I can have as much sex as I want.

00:21:05.020 But 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.

00:21:16.000 But 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.

00:21:26.520 And 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.

00:21:49.820 But in practice, what happens then is that that becomes commodified.

00:21:53.820 So 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.

00:22:05.280 I mean, you know, the prostitution isn't called the world's oldest industry for nothing.

00:22:09.580 You know, it's always been there, but it absolutely boomed from the 60s onwards.

00:22:14.780 I mean, Hugh Hefner's Playboy and Playboy Clubs appeared the same year as the pill was legalized.

00:22:23.400 And 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. 0.96

00:22:34.640 Because sexuality was privatized, you know, suddenly there was this libertarian argument for letting women do whatever they wanted with their bodies. 0.99

00:22:40.280 Now, 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.

00:22:52.700 But fundamentally, you know, this is the pattern that I wanted to sketch out, is that it's impossible to separate liberation from commodification.

00:23:03.460 And 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.

00:23:15.060 So if you fast forward a number of decades on from the arrival of the pill, we're a long way down that path.

00:23:20.400 I mean, we have we have young women who have been rendered infertile by selling their eggs in order to pay for college tuition.

00:23:26.880 You know, we have the entire I'm sure you saw the headlines during when the war in Ukraine began of these these Ukrainian surrogates. 0.53

00:23:34.980 And 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.

00:23:49.780 And all these all these babies.

00:23:51.220 Or who, by the way, have postponed having children to the point where they're physically and precisely because of the society we now have.

00:23:56.840 Precisely because of. Yeah. Yeah. Precisely because of that.

00:23:59.540 And all these babies, you know, lined up in rows in bomb shelters without your motherless babies, essentially.

00:24:04.820 You know, their their gestational surrogates have left.

00:24:07.700 And 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.

00:24:13.820 You 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.

00:24:23.900 And 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. 0.92

00:24:47.420 You 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.

00:24:58.760 So 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. 0.74

00:25:13.700 Because 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?

00:25:31.760 You know, why shouldn't we just take that a little bit further and just remodel ourselves as we see fit?

00:25:35.820 You 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. 0.99

00:25:46.980 And 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.

00:25:55.200 So, 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. 0.60

00:26:08.700 But wait, no, not like that.

00:26:10.520 It doesn't make sense. 0.97

00:26:11.660 So 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? 1.00

00:26:23.160 Yeah, they're pro surrogacy. 0.99

00:26:25.760 Yeah, and they're pro trans.

00:26:27.480 And it stems right the way back to this.

00:26:29.460 It's all it's all entirely coherent.

00:26:31.820 It's it would make no sense at all to be for some for some of those things and against some of the others.

00:26:37.840 It all it all goes back to the the definitive defeat of the feminism of care by the feminism of freedom.

00:26:45.080 You 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.

00:27:00.400 But, Mary, then why is it with these feminists when they see the negative effects of their arguments? 1.00

00:27:07.240 For instance, we know that sex work is not good for women. 1.00

00:27:10.700 We just know it isn't.

00:27:12.220 I mean, people will try and dress this up and they'll try and give you, you know, arguments.

00:27:16.200 But if we no one would want their daughter to participate in the sex industry. 1.00

00:27:20.860 That is pretty much obvious.

00:27:22.280 If we look at abortion, again, no one would want their child or very few people want their child to have an abortion.

00:27:30.260 And 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. 0.57

00:27:41.720 At what point does this break and do people start to wake up?

00:27:45.920 And are we actually seeing that at the moment?

00:27:48.240 Well, I think people are breaking and people are waking up.

00:27:50.620 But one of the difficulties is, or rather, one of the tensions is social class, fundamentally.

00:28:05.660 And by that I mean all women are not the same. 1.00

00:28:08.820 I mean, you can talk about something being universally in women's interests, but I'm fundamentally, my feminism is anti-universalist.

00:28:15.880 And 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.

00:28:26.580 And 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.

00:28:40.140 So, 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.

00:28:54.260 You know, Penny Mordaunt has been a big flag waver for that in the United Kingdom. 1.00

00:28:57.960 And these are women who likely grew up in fairly comfortable bourgeois homes because those are the people who become politicians. 0.98

00:29:04.780 You know, they've been to universities, surrounded by men who are mostly reasonably well-behaved relative to the way some can behave.

00:29:12.720 You know, they mostly socialize in situations where men are not routinely violent or unpredictable or just outright dangerous.

00:29:19.780 And 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.

00:29:28.700 It's just that they're just not able to picture it.

00:29:31.060 And 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.

00:29:43.980 And, yeah, and the problem is that pushing for effectively the abolition of sex in law is in the interests of the upper crust women. 1.00

00:29:56.120 You 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,

00:30:02.600 it is not in your class interests for there to be a serious conversation going on which says men and women are different.

00:30:09.780 You know, it's not, it's, you know, because professionally at work, you can see how that could very easily become, you know,

00:30:16.340 are you going to perform less well in your spreadsheet jockeying job?

00:30:20.940 You're going to end up making the coffees again and stuff.

00:30:23.040 Right, exactly, exactly.

00:30:24.480 You know, red flag, you know, alarm bells start going off in your head when people start talking about how men and women are different.

00:30:29.420 And frankly, if you're a barrister or an accountant, you probably don't see it.

00:30:33.480 I mean, there's no earthly reason why I shouldn't be a better or worse barrister than some guy,

00:30:37.600 apart from the fact that I'd be terrible, but that's my personality, not my sex.

00:30:41.840 It's not a sex-based difference.

00:30:42.540 No, no, no, it's just I'm, yeah, I'm basically unemployable in that way.

00:30:46.520 But that's nothing to do with my sex.

00:30:48.020 That's my bad attitude. 0.66

00:30:49.480 Yes, I found that.

00:30:50.980 But, I mean, you understand the point I'm making.

00:30:53.080 And also there's another way these women benefit because if we are in a situation, as you described, 0.63

00:30:58.040 where there are certain things that have become commodified,

00:31:01.200 well, if you want to be a barrister and you want to have a child at 45 and have a Ukrainian woman.

00:31:07.200 Again, it's in your interest.

00:31:08.440 And you've got money to pay for a Ukrainian surrogate.

00:31:10.880 That's fine. 0.99

00:31:12.040 I mean, going down a slightly darker path, if you want to, you know, if your husband's using prostitutes, 0.99

00:31:19.080 that's fine, you know. 0.98

00:31:21.560 What's the problem, right?

00:31:23.140 And in fact, it may be better for your marriage.

00:31:25.200 Just so.

00:31:25.520 It's not in your class interests, if you're a barrister or an accountant,

00:31:30.040 to go very far down the rabbit hole of how different men and women are.

00:31:33.440 And it's not a coincidence that the highest rates of support for trans rights are among the most educated women.

00:31:40.820 It's very obviously in those women's interests to believe that the sexes are fundamentally the same, 0.94

00:31:46.480 apart from some trivial differences of genital topography, you know,

00:31:49.740 because that works for you from a professional point of view.

00:31:53.000 But if you're a bin man or you're married to a bin man, you know, the sex differences are obvious. 0.88

00:31:57.360 You know, nobody's campaigning for a 50-50 representation of the sexes in waste collection or, you know,

00:32:02.860 or working on an oil rig for very obvious reasons.

00:32:05.440 You know, men and women are different, you know, in terms of muscle mass and physiological, you know.

00:32:11.780 And discuss thresholds, which are matters for women.

00:32:14.300 Right.

00:32:14.720 Yeah, yeah, yeah, working in the sewers or, you know, waste collection.

00:32:18.360 I mean, you watch those guys go, they move, they move, and it's physically arduous work.

00:32:22.980 I don't think most women wouldn't last 10 minutes because we're just not physically as strong. 1.00

00:32:26.560 You know, which is fine.

00:32:28.020 We have other talents.

00:32:29.140 But the point is that once you start taking apart how much sex matters,

00:32:35.800 you can see very quickly that it's a question of class.

00:32:39.340 Yes.

00:32:39.480 It's fundamentally infected by social class.

00:32:41.300 So elite women have a particular worldview that is shaped by their circumstances, 1.00

00:32:45.740 for which they could perfectly be forgiven, by the way,

00:32:47.660 because people act in their own interest as they understand them.

00:32:51.060 So we are in a situation where, as in many other things,

00:32:55.760 I think we'd agree that there is a certain elite view of how things ought to be

00:33:00.260 that is not in the interest of the majority.

00:33:04.020 Is that fair to say?

00:33:04.720 Yes, I would say that's accurate.

00:33:06.000 So you are not a tech determinist.

00:33:09.440 We discussed this on the way here.

00:33:10.820 So I said to you, well, if technology is, you know, driving all of this,

00:33:15.060 what's the point of writing a book about the feminism against progress? 0.99

00:33:18.420 But your point is you're not a determinist and you think culture matters.

00:33:21.240 I think culture matters.

00:33:22.380 I mean, it's obvious that culture matters because otherwise everywhere in the world

00:33:25.840 would have the same level of economic development and technological advancement,

00:33:29.380 and they don't.

00:33:30.880 And the only obvious explanation for that is, I mean, geography matters, obviously.

00:33:35.880 Geography, I was going to say.

00:33:37.100 Geography, but also culture.

00:33:38.600 Geography shapes culture.

00:33:39.860 I mean, this is what people don't say about Russia.

00:33:42.200 Just so.

00:33:42.340 The reason Russians are the way they are is because it's pretty hard to survive in that kind of environment. 1.00

00:33:46.200 Have you seen Russia?

00:33:47.040 And so the question inevitably is, what do we do about this?

00:33:56.060 What do we do about this?

00:33:57.120 Well, the argument, my argument is that it doesn't follow that just because many knowledge class women 1.00

00:34:06.300 unthinkingly adopt these positions which are having a number of heavily negative downstream effects

00:34:12.720 that we should necessarily, that we just have to, you know, this is precisely my point is I belong to that class.

00:34:19.640 You know, I'm laptop class.

00:34:20.560 I work remotely.

00:34:21.260 I write for a living.

00:34:22.500 You know, I belong to, you know, I'm a class traitor in even making these arguments.

00:34:28.040 But that in itself is testimony to the fact that it's, you don't, you know, people are not robots.

00:34:34.740 You know, we're not determined, we're not overdetermined by our economic circumstances and it's possible to take different views.

00:34:41.900 And there are other, growing numbers of other knowledge class women like me who look around and think,

00:34:48.260 no, actually, this isn't good.

00:34:50.680 This is making things worse for everybody.

00:34:53.140 This is profoundly wrong for a number of, for a whole host of reasons.

00:34:58.560 And the backlash is coming back up the food chain and it's heading for me and it's heading for my daughters 1.00

00:35:05.180 and really it's heading for all of us.

00:35:07.020 And so what are we going to do about it, which is your question?

00:35:10.280 Because I don't hear you or Louise Perry, who I imagine is one of the people you refer to as these very bright women 0.97

00:35:15.620 who are looking at these issues with a focus on this side of it.

00:35:19.640 I don't hear you talking about banning abortion.

00:35:22.560 I don't hear you talking about reinstating gender roles. 0.99

00:35:26.360 Like, what do we do?

00:35:27.480 Well, I've made a three-part case for some things which I think would help and all of which I think can and should be led by women.

00:35:40.120 The first of these is the case for marriage.

00:35:45.080 And this is really, this is the Duma case for marriage, I suppose. 0.93

00:35:49.000 You know, if essentially we're facing a sort of all-out war on relationships,

00:35:53.820 one of the things I think, you know, one of the first moves that men and women really need to make

00:36:00.300 is towards rethinking what marriage means in the context of the 21st century.

00:36:05.540 And I've argued that we need to step away from this very individualized, very consumerist,

00:36:12.500 very picky, sort of high romantic vision of marriage, which is what it's sort of degraded into

00:36:20.420 in the context where everybody is an individual economic agent, including women, 0.90

00:36:24.280 and try and try and move towards something closer to the pre-modern understanding of marriage as a covenant rather than a contract

00:36:33.400 and marriage as the enabling condition for life together on the basis that if the world carries on getting worse,

00:36:39.920 as I anticipate it will, you know, we're well past peak progress in my view, as we discussed last time I was here.

00:36:47.100 And I think for, again, for all but the wealthiest, life, the future is looking like, is looking scarcer,

00:36:57.020 potentially more volatile, potentially more unstable for a lot of people.

00:37:02.500 And if men and women are going to thrive together, and if fundamentally for women who are mothers,

00:37:09.060 it's an urgent feminist project to try and rebuild a slightly more stable society. 1.00

00:37:13.320 And the smallest possible functioning unit of social stability is marriage.

00:37:17.800 And we just need to rethink a little bit what it means.

00:37:20.200 And I think we need to start with what I coined the abolishing big romance,

00:37:25.060 which is to say the idea that marriage should always be about personal gratification.

00:37:29.880 Sometimes it has to be about forming a household together and just keeping things going.

00:37:37.960 And actually, well, really, I mean, if you're going to be very reductive,

00:37:41.180 what I'm saying is staying together for the kids is good, actually.

00:37:44.920 And in most cases, you know, I mean, I'd make an exception for cases where a relationship is violent or outright abusive.

00:37:51.820 But in most cases, the numbers suggest that, you know, where couples separate in marriages,

00:37:56.960 which weren't terrible, they were just not ecstatic, those are the most disastrous outcomes for children,

00:38:02.880 because actually it was good enough for them.

00:38:04.880 And my argument is that particularly now we're at the other side of peak progress,

00:38:09.420 you're making a big gamble, assuming that the world is going to remain stable enough for it to be wise to continue going it on your own.

00:38:17.520 And actually, if we're going to have even the remotest shot of rebuilding some kind of functional social stability

00:38:23.820 out the other side of total atomization, it has to begin with being willing to take the rough with the smooth in your partnership.

00:38:30.460 And just seeing that as an indissoluble long term thing, you know, for all but the most extreme cases of challenge.

00:38:37.520 So that's part one. But part two is, you know, that's all very well.

00:38:42.500 But, you know, there's no point in telling women to embrace a slightly more pragmatic approach to marriage if there's no one to marry.

00:38:49.080 And so part two really has to be men thinking seriously about the feminist case for letting men, leaving men alone.

00:38:56.140 Or rather, letting men be, that's how I put it.

00:38:59.740 Letting men be men, is that what you're saying?

00:39:01.180 Let men be. Well, to dig down into that a little bit, I'm arguing that there is in fact a precedent for the incursion

00:39:12.540 which is currently afoot into women's single-sex spaces by transgender-identified men, males.

00:39:21.380 You've just been demonetized, thank you.

00:39:22.680 We were demonetized a long time ago.

00:39:26.960 The moment we said marriage is good, you know, that was too far.

00:39:31.020 I'll say that again, just in case you do want to cut it.

00:39:33.540 There's a precedent for the current contest which is going on over transgender-identified males in women's prisons.

00:39:41.340 And 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.

00:39:51.160 You know, and I think that one paradigmatic, and it was asymmetric as well.

00:39:55.080 You know, a paradigmatic example of that is Boy Scouts, where scouting went co-ed a long time ago,

00:40:01.800 while 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

00:40:12.120 as long as they said they were women, or female.

00:40:15.800 But, I mean, from that point of view, you know, what's happened more recently in Girl Guides,

00:40:20.080 it just mirrors something which happened a long time ago in Scouts.

00:40:22.640 And I've made the case that, in fact, there are aspects of single-sex male sociality which have been lost.

00:40:30.840 And the biggest loss has been to working-class men, for whom there haven't been any corresponding benefits to outweigh the loss. 0.99

00:40:40.880 And I think it's painful and striking when you look at the rates of mental psychiatric distress

00:40:48.260 and elevated rates of suicide, you know, and other indicators of distress.

00:40:53.720 They're absolutely the highest amongst working-class men, and particularly amongst men who are divorced.

00:41:01.940 Because without any, with very limited access to any kind of male sociality,

00:41:07.220 which has become routinely the case in the modern world, you know, men are getting lonelier,

00:41:11.120 and the statistics bear this out consistently.

00:41:14.140 Pretty much the only social contact a lot of men have is via their wives,

00:41:17.520 and if they lose that, there's really nothing left, you know, and these are utterly alienated men.

00:41:22.940 And the consequences of that are there in the statistics, and it's pretty great.

00:41:29.300 So that's one facet of it, which is, you know, if we're...

00:41:35.340 But I've sort of taken that a little bit further.

00:41:37.300 Bring back the gentleman's clubs.

00:41:38.540 Yeah, exactly.

00:41:39.020 What?

00:41:39.660 Bring back the Bullingdon.

00:41:41.540 But, I mean, you know, I don't really care about the Bullingdon, to be honest.

00:41:44.580 You know, that's a very small subset of men.

00:41:46.960 And what I do, what I care a great deal more about is those other clubs for ordinary guys,

00:41:52.580 which have just fallen by the wayside, with the result that a lot of regular guys are just lonely.

00:41:57.960 But more importantly, younger guys don't receive the same level of mentorship

00:42:02.440 that they might otherwise have done from older guys.

00:42:05.460 And it's very obvious to me, I'm not going to try and make the case for you,

00:42:08.200 but it's very obvious to me that women don't form men.

00:42:10.720 Men form each other. 0.93

00:42:11.480 And they do that in ways that are opaque to me, because I'm not one.

00:42:16.540 But they do it, you know, in some kind of hierarchical fashion in all-male groups.

00:42:21.300 And older men tell younger men how to behave, and that's just how it works.

00:42:24.280 Show.

00:42:24.620 More show than tell.

00:42:25.700 Right.

00:42:26.060 I mean, there's a certain amount of chest beating and kind of monkey stuff that I don't really understand,

00:42:30.100 but it happens.

00:42:31.160 It's necessary.

00:42:31.720 You can see it happening, and the upshot of that is broadly in women's interests. 0.98

00:42:36.780 You know, being around it while it's going on isn't fun, you know,

00:42:40.060 and you just want to kind of not be there when it's going on.

00:42:42.680 But the net effect is generally beneficial to women, 0.87

00:42:45.820 because you end up with men who sort of more or less know how to behave.

00:42:49.220 Well, this is what women often don't understand, is women can never civilize men. 1.00

00:42:54.140 You first need other men to do it, and then a woman can tinker at the edges. 1.00

00:42:58.100 Right. So I think an underpriced downside of abolishing male single-sex spaces 0.93

00:43:04.400 has been the attrition of that kind of socialization of young men.

00:43:09.580 You know, and I don't think it's a coincidence that we now have this sort of

00:43:12.140 proliferating class of basement-dwelling needs who are, you know,

00:43:16.360 these miserable, alienated, disaffected guys who spend their time computer gaming

00:43:20.320 and interacting with one another on the Internet while lamenting the impossibility 0.97

00:43:25.120 of getting a girlfriend and fomenting their general bitterness and hatred towards women

00:43:29.920 whom they blame, you know, not totally unreasonably for some of their ills.

00:43:34.520 I mean, I don't think – and here I'm on very dangerous ground,

00:43:38.620 because I'd like to make it very clear that I don't endorse, you know,

00:43:42.960 I don't endorse that entire worldview.

00:43:45.880 But I do think that if you listen to it – how do I say this without just having

00:43:56.940 it blow up completely in my face?

00:43:59.780 It's not exactly – I mean, these things get expressed as the most horrendous,

00:44:05.240 virulent, just deeply unpleasant misogyny, which in turn feeds the kind of hostility

00:44:11.340 from women, which, you know, and that's a vicious cycle which goes round and round. 1.00

00:44:14.940 It's really unpleasant.

00:44:16.120 And, you know, I read – every so often I dip into these forums

00:44:19.220 and I come out feeling like I need to take a shower.

00:44:21.300 You know, it's not nice.

00:44:23.180 But I think, you know, there's just the most minute grain of –

00:44:28.200 I have some sympathy with these guys because something has been lost.

00:44:32.580 And, you know, they're not being taught how to behave by older guys.

00:44:36.800 And some of that genuinely is downstream of, you know, the co-edification of social life.

00:44:43.600 It really is.

00:44:45.100 And some of that is downstream of feminist activism. 0.99

00:44:48.360 You know, and I'm not saying it's all the fault of feminists that incels are such deranged psychos. 1.00

00:44:54.740 That's really not what I'm saying. 0.90

00:44:56.060 But there's a set of complex systems which shifted in a way which has been very harmful for everybody

00:45:03.940 as a consequence of making slightly too much stuff co-ed.

00:45:06.800 I think that's what I'm trying to say.

00:45:09.080 And so the upshot of all of that is I think – I honestly think the reactionary feminist stance on all of this

00:45:19.000 is we have to just care a little bit less if men want to do their thing on their own without us. 0.99

00:45:23.900 You know, we just have to not mind as much.

00:45:28.220 And an important positive consequence of this, I think, would be that we'd have more of a leg to stand on

00:45:37.280 asking for men's help in defending women's single-sex spaces in sports and prisons.

00:45:42.280 Because I think as it stands, you know, basically we're saying you can't have your boys' clubs,

00:45:48.560 but can you help us protect our girls' clubs?

00:45:50.340 And I think not unreasonably, there's a lot of guys who are like, you made your bed, ladies. 0.61

00:45:56.080 You know, you can lie in it now.

00:45:57.820 And we're just going to be over here laughing. 1.00

00:45:59.740 And I'm like, you know, that's a really stupid and short-sighted kind of schadenfreude to be enjoying. 0.99

00:46:06.580 Because at the end of the day, you know, the cyborgs are coming for all of us 0.99

00:46:09.980 and they want to upgrade your kids as well.

00:46:11.520 But I think actually here, it's incumbent on feminists to give a little bit of ground. 1.00

00:46:18.060 And so really, I'm making the reactionary feminist case for a bit more constructive sexism, 1.00

00:46:23.600 you know, and actually for that to be a two-way street.

00:46:27.100 And then there was a third part, was there not?

00:46:28.520 Oh, yes.

00:46:30.120 Sorry, Francesca.

00:46:31.120 I just want to let Mary.

00:46:32.420 She's hiding all the super dangerous ideas behind that sweet smile.

00:46:36.620 So I'm waiting for the third part.

00:46:39.860 The will get you can.

00:46:40.800 You've been dancing around on this very thin ice.

00:46:45.200 And what is the final piece?

00:46:46.560 So part three, well, I've argued that we need to grant more serious central position to marriage,

00:46:57.520 that we need to be realistic about what it will take to create the kind of men

00:47:04.400 that, you know, we want to marry and spend our lives with.

00:47:07.700 And the final piece of that is that we need to give sex back the seriousness that it has.

00:47:14.620 And this, for me, means the feminist case against the pill. 1.00

00:47:19.440 Now, to be clear, I'm not making the argument for taking legal measures against the contraceptive pill,

00:47:28.060 because that's just nowhere near the Overton window.

00:47:30.700 But you'd like to.

00:47:34.400 Those are your words, Frances, not mine.

00:47:37.440 Well, what I do think we can do at this point is just lean a little bit harder into something

00:47:41.920 which is already happening, which is a female, particularly young, Gen Z female backlash against the pill. 1.00

00:47:49.040 And that's a phenomenon which I've been tracking for some years.

00:47:52.420 I mean, I was genuinely shocked to hear how usage and prescription of these really quite mind-altering medicines

00:48:02.260 has changed since I was in adolescence.

00:48:05.660 I mean, when I was a teenager, if you went to your GP and said,

00:48:08.380 can you put me on the pill, you'd get the third degree about, you know,

00:48:11.740 are you in a steady relationship and, you know, X, Y, and Z, and, you know,

00:48:16.000 is this an appropriate relationship and do we need to talk to your parents and so on.

00:48:18.920 And now, as far as I can make out, you know, it's pretty routine, you know,

00:48:23.620 for GPs just to stick a girl on the pill at about the age of 15 and that's just it.

00:48:27.960 And there's a book that came out last year, I think.

00:48:31.680 Is it called Your Brain on the Pill or something?

00:48:34.460 Anyway, it goes into just how radically mind-altering the effects are of this drug.

00:48:40.140 It changes who you find attractive.

00:48:43.140 It changes your entire hormonal cycle.

00:48:46.340 It changes your attitude.

00:48:47.740 It can have major mental health implications for young women whose brains, let's not forget, 0.73

00:48:52.060 are still developing.

00:48:53.800 You know, the downstream, you know, the mental, the psychoactive impacts of this drug are immense.

00:49:01.740 I mean, I was on it briefly and, you know, and I stopped in my early 20s

00:49:06.120 because I just realized it was making me fat and sexless and low-key insane.

00:49:10.800 And I was just, it's just not worth it. 0.81

00:49:14.200 You know, what's the point of taking this thing so I can have sex if I no longer enjoy having sex? 0.57

00:49:18.580 What am I doing? 0.95

00:49:19.800 Now, I think I'd rather just not have sex with men, which is the solution,

00:49:24.520 which I adopted for a number of years.

00:49:26.540 So now we're seeing a growing body of young women who are just saying,

00:49:36.300 I don't want this, and who are embracing, you know, less invasive, you know,

00:49:40.400 less psychoactive, you know, non-hormonal contraception or just cycle tracking.

00:49:44.860 And my argument is that this is just where we have to start here.

00:49:49.520 You know, don't take the pill.

00:49:50.300 Don't encourage your friends to take the pill.

00:49:51.700 Or, you know, reject this idea that you can't be a person

00:49:55.900 unless you make sort of radically psychoactive cyborg interventions in your own body.

00:50:00.880 And there are a number of things that follow from that

00:50:03.080 in terms of how you relate to men and to your own sexuality.

00:50:08.520 And one of them is that, you know, of necessity,

00:50:11.440 you become choosier about who you sleep with,

00:50:13.560 which from women's point of view, when you think about hookup culture, 1.00

00:50:16.920 is obviously beneficial.

00:50:18.000 Because one of the things that women complain about is ending up 1.00

00:50:22.200 basically consenting to loveless or degrading sex

00:50:25.140 because there's no obvious reason to say no. 0.87

00:50:27.720 And, you know, if you sort of neutered yourself sexually by taking this medicine,

00:50:33.400 you know, there sort of is no reason to say no.

00:50:38.220 And sometimes it might just seem politer to put up,

00:50:41.500 which is a pretty kind of grim position to be in if you're a woman.

00:50:44.820 And I think privately, I think a lot of what flew under the Me Too banner

00:50:49.640 was basically this.

00:50:52.960 It was young women who assented to things sort of out of politeness

00:50:57.520 or found themselves railroaded into sexual encounters,

00:51:01.020 more or less out of politeness, that they couldn't say no to

00:51:04.020 or didn't have a robust enough reason to say no to

00:51:07.100 because they were already contraceptive.

00:51:09.740 And if you're in a situation where there's a meaningful risk of pregnancy,

00:51:12.960 you know, that's a pretty solid motivation for saying,

00:51:15.240 no, actually, no, actually, I'm not coming home with you

00:51:17.380 or no, you know, now I'm here, you know, we're not doing this.

00:51:20.960 And it's also, you know, for all but the most, you know, straight out toe rag,

00:51:26.720 it's a fairly robust reason as a guy to not go there as well.

00:51:29.820 If you're like, I'm not on birth control and I'm not going to use birth control.

00:51:32.660 You know, you're not, you're, yeah, it would take a fairly serious, 0.99

00:51:36.620 a fairly serious scumbag. 0.99

00:51:38.600 Anyway, so it reduces, it reduces the opportunity for bad sex, 0.99

00:51:42.800 which I think is obviously in women's interests. 1.00

00:51:45.380 It also makes sex better.

00:51:48.020 You know, if you're, as speaking as a woman, you know, 0.99

00:51:50.080 I'm not going to give you grisly details and I'm too old and ugly 0.96

00:51:52.360 to be talking about this stuff anyway.

00:51:54.420 But if you're in tune with your own cycles, you just, it's just nicer.

00:51:57.940 You know where you are and, you know, there are certain kind of moods

00:52:03.840 go up and down over the course of the month in ways

00:52:06.120 which are interrupted if you're on the pill.

00:52:10.000 And, but, but I think one of the, and taking that a little bit further,

00:52:16.120 it's my view that you can't have, you can't have the intensity

00:52:25.240 and the mystery and the beauty of a sexual encounter without the danger.

00:52:30.260 The, fundamentally, we should, we, we, we take sex seriously

00:52:37.420 or have historically taken sex seriously because there's the potential

00:52:40.860 of creating another human.

00:52:42.380 And once you take that out of the picture, something,

00:52:45.260 something strange happens to the entire field of sexuality.

00:52:48.860 And again, I can't prove this because it's just a hunch,

00:52:51.380 but I'm willing to bet that if, if we didn't have,

00:52:54.840 if contraception was no longer part of the picture,

00:52:56.700 most of the cultural interest in BDSM would go away.

00:53:00.340 You know, most of the choking, most of the role-playing,

00:53:02.920 most of the other ways that people look to put the danger

00:53:05.380 and the intensity in to a sexual encounter,

00:53:07.760 which has been sort of neutralized.

00:53:09.460 It's kind of vegan bacon equivalent of, of, of the sexual encounter.

00:53:13.040 You know, it's almost, it's almost the same, but not quite.

00:53:16.100 And so you have to add more hot sauce.

00:53:17.860 And that's where you get all of these, you know, escalating,

00:53:20.420 escalating levels of degrading, disgusting kind of kink 1.00

00:53:23.720 and, and extremities.

00:53:26.220 People are trying to add the hot sauce back into something

00:53:28.060 which is fundamentally vegan bacon.

00:53:30.100 And, and the, the, the, the obvious solution,

00:53:32.780 if you're starting to get inured to the hot sauce is, you know,

00:53:35.600 have the bacon, but that means you have the,

00:53:37.980 you put the danger back in.

00:53:39.680 And I, and I called this, I don't,

00:53:41.460 so I don't think of this as a purity-based argument

00:53:43.620 against contraception.

00:53:44.980 I think of it more as rewilding sex, you know,

00:53:47.380 and when you, when you, in an ecological context,

00:53:49.620 when you talk about rewilding,

00:53:50.940 that means sometimes introducing apex predators

00:53:53.780 back into an environment.

00:53:55.500 I don't know if you've seen that amazing viral video

00:53:57.440 about what happened when they,

00:53:58.700 when they introduced wolves back into Yellowstone.

00:54:01.260 And, and it had all of these incredibly complex effects

00:54:04.700 on the ecosystem,

00:54:05.600 which ended up with a river changing course

00:54:07.720 because the, the, the, the deer followed different patterns

00:54:10.720 and then other things happened in a different pattern.

00:54:12.580 And eventually, you know, things,

00:54:14.260 things righted themselves in a whole ecosystem,

00:54:16.600 which hadn't, which had been going slightly wrong before.

00:54:18.700 And, and it couldn't have happened

00:54:20.120 without the apex predator back in.

00:54:22.040 So I've, I've sort of, I've used that as an,

00:54:23.640 as an analogy for thinking about how we can correct

00:54:26.180 some of the things which have gone wrong

00:54:27.660 in our sexual ecology by, by reintroducing the,

00:54:31.140 the danger and the intensity.

00:54:33.580 I mean, this, this is a risky argument to be making.

00:54:36.340 I feel like I'm on genuinely heretical territory here,

00:54:38.600 but, you know, essentially I'm making the pro-sex case

00:54:41.500 against contraception.

00:54:42.480 Mary, there's one aspect of this, of this discussion

00:54:47.900 that people at home will be watching,

00:54:49.880 particularly the left-wingers,

00:54:51.260 particularly the people who, dare we say it,

00:54:54.140 would identify as socially going, come on, Mary.

00:54:56.480 Isn't this just what happens at what they would call

00:54:58.640 late stage capitalism, where jobs

00:55:02.240 don't make the money that they used to?

00:55:06.260 Inflation.

00:55:07.080 Therefore, people need to go out to work.

00:55:08.940 Therefore, people need to go out to work for longer.

00:55:10.640 We're doing longer and longer hours.

00:55:12.200 There's no longer a choice for women anymore 1.00

00:55:14.000 as there was for women 30 years ago

00:55:16.340 to be able to stay at home, to have children,

00:55:18.900 where a man can then go out to work 0.81

00:55:20.780 and be able to provide for a family.

00:55:23.200 Are we not ignoring that element of this as well?

00:55:28.920 Well, here, just going back to what you were saying

00:55:31.440 about tech determinism and my critique of technology

00:55:36.200 and technologies, I say I'm not a tech determinist

00:55:39.800 and I'm also not rabidly anti-all technologies.

00:55:44.620 I mean, as a case in point, I wouldn't be able to do

00:55:47.760 what I do were it not for the fact that it's possible

00:55:50.560 to work remotely.

00:55:51.780 You know, I couldn't have juggled writing around having

00:55:54.600 a small child, you know, if I wasn't able to work from home.

00:55:57.980 And I think, you know, there are a lot of pitfalls

00:56:02.040 that come with particularly internet technologies.

00:56:06.880 But there are also, for more families,

00:56:09.720 for quite a lot of families, there's an opportunity

00:56:12.680 to bring work back into the home, which I think

00:56:14.940 has a huge amount of potential.

00:56:17.400 And still, for many, unrealized potential

00:56:21.700 to create something a bit more like the productive households

00:56:27.140 that existed prior to modernity.

00:56:30.500 And in the book, I've given the examples of two families

00:56:34.800 I know who are already doing this,

00:56:36.380 who have some kind of trade-based home activity

00:56:43.140 combined with a bit of homesteading,

00:56:44.840 combined with a bit of remote digital work,

00:56:48.560 who have, if you like, a sort of home-based portfolio economy,

00:56:54.060 which is intentionally ordered around raising kids.

00:56:58.840 And, you know, I might be, of course,

00:57:01.200 it's wildly optimistic to imagine

00:57:02.520 this can never be the case for everybody,

00:57:04.340 but I think it offers a template

00:57:05.860 for how we might be able to rethink

00:57:07.420 for more people than is currently the case,

00:57:09.980 you know, the way we're ordering family life.

00:57:12.300 Because a large part of this

00:57:14.480 is also the way we identify ourselves.

00:57:17.180 When you ask someone,

00:57:19.360 the first question you ask someone, really,

00:57:20.960 in our society is what is your name

00:57:23.040 and what do you do?

00:57:25.060 And it's not really socially acceptable.

00:57:28.040 It's seen almost as a bit weird

00:57:29.620 for a woman just to go, 0.93

00:57:31.020 I'm just a mother.

00:57:33.340 Like, actually, that's the most important job in society.

00:57:36.400 Yeah, I've been that soldier.

00:57:37.760 And I can tell you that if you,

00:57:39.500 when you go to a party and you're a stay-at-home mum,

00:57:41.700 you know, every stay-at-home mum I've ever spoken to 0.99

00:57:43.960 knows what it's like when somebody says,

00:57:45.880 what do you do?

00:57:46.320 And you tell them,

00:57:47.000 and they're immediately looking over your shoulder

00:57:48.580 for someone more interesting to talk to,

00:57:50.060 without fail.

00:57:51.620 And it gets to you, it gets you down.

00:57:54.040 It makes me really angry

00:57:55.320 on behalf of every stay-at-home mum I know,

00:57:58.300 who throws herself into really important work

00:58:01.860 and just gets treated as though

00:58:03.840 they're just unimportant and probably a bit thick.

00:58:08.600 It's grossly unjust.

00:58:10.260 But what I would also say about that

00:58:12.500 is that very few stay-at-home mums I know just mum. 0.98

00:58:16.520 But what they do often do

00:58:18.580 is a whole range of other things

00:58:19.900 which are not immediately legible in market terms.

00:58:22.120 And I think part of the reason

00:58:27.420 why everything feels so kind of empty and atomised,

00:58:29.980 you know, even in a relatively lively small town

00:58:32.320 like the one where I live,

00:58:33.960 is that a lot of the mums who used to run, 0.99

00:58:37.620 in fact, basically run the fabric of civic life

00:58:39.560 are no longer doing that

00:58:40.560 because they're out at work.

00:58:42.300 And I think if it were possible,

00:58:45.260 or, you know, as it becomes possible for us

00:58:47.140 to bring a bit more of work back into the home,

00:58:49.400 there's just a possibility

00:58:50.620 that we might see some more of that liveliness

00:58:53.000 and that texture come back to,

00:58:54.860 in a distributed way,

00:58:55.800 to small towns and local communities.

00:58:58.040 You know, as people re-claw back

00:58:59.800 a bit more of an opportunity to work,

00:59:02.080 you know, to do voluntary,

00:59:03.300 to balance doing voluntary stuff

00:59:04.900 and professional stuff

00:59:06.500 in a more flexible way,

00:59:08.040 you know, from their own homes.

00:59:10.440 I think there also to be a cultural shift as well

00:59:12.880 because, you know, as you know,

00:59:14.460 my wife and I just had a baby.

00:59:16.360 My wife is looking after our son at the moment.

00:59:18.420 I mean, I always respected my wife anyway,

00:59:22.000 but I respect her way more now

00:59:23.620 because I can see how challenging

00:59:25.880 but also amazing she is at doing it, right?

00:59:29.100 And I think part of it is

00:59:30.460 there's got to be a cultural shift

00:59:31.780 around that thing, like,

00:59:33.320 you know, the idea that you would just stay home.

00:59:36.680 I mean, what does that even mean?

00:59:38.080 It's like saying,

00:59:38.580 well, I'm just a YouTube, you know, presenter.

00:59:41.500 What, why?

00:59:43.020 Do you know what I mean?

00:59:43.580 Do you think that's likely?

00:59:47.100 Do you think it's possible?

00:59:50.040 I think probably what's more likely

00:59:52.520 is that we'll find ways of making

00:59:55.280 a more textured kind of work-home mixture

01:00:01.040 more legible in social terms,

01:00:04.100 such that women who are mostly mothers 0.99

01:00:06.380 but who do a little bit of remote something

01:00:08.560 and a little bit and some certain amount

01:00:10.220 of civic organizing, you know,

01:00:12.040 find ways of telling their stories,

01:00:15.000 which isn't quite this stark split

01:00:17.440 between being a mum and being something else. 0.98

01:00:20.200 Does that make sense?

01:00:21.080 That makes a lot of sense, yeah.

01:00:22.560 And I very deeply hope that,

01:00:25.760 I think that will be a very, very, very good outcome.

01:00:28.240 There's really, you know,

01:00:30.180 this idea that trad wives, 1.00

01:00:32.200 that there's anything trad about trad wives,

01:00:34.340 you know, the woman who just keeps house, 1.00

01:00:36.340 the woman who keeps house 1.00

01:00:37.340 and raises kids and so on.

01:00:38.480 And the idea that there's anything trad about them

01:00:40.960 is actually, has it all backwards.

01:00:43.600 The thing about trad wives 1.00

01:00:44.840 is that they're actually very distinctively modern.

01:00:47.100 You know, they weren't a thing at all

01:00:48.600 until work disappeared out of the home

01:00:50.600 into factories and offices.

01:00:52.000 And now that it's theoretically possible

01:00:53.560 for at least some work

01:00:54.640 to come back into the home,

01:00:56.100 you know, I think, I prefer to call,

01:00:59.040 not for trad wives, but trade wives, 1.00

01:01:00.940 which is to say women who do stuff 1.00

01:01:02.640 as well as mumming.

01:01:03.480 And for, and actually for the opportunity

01:01:07.020 that that opens up for fathers

01:01:08.860 to be, to be, to be professionally active

01:01:11.600 and also present in their children's lives.

01:01:13.800 I mean, my husband works from home

01:01:15.060 and I mean, he's out some of the time

01:01:17.240 and he's traveling some of the time,

01:01:18.380 but he's had, he's had an opportunity

01:01:19.820 to be there for, for our daughter's infancy

01:01:23.280 in a way which, yeah, he was, he was working,

01:01:27.060 he was doing the commuter thing

01:01:28.460 when she was a baby.

01:01:29.420 And then, you know, basically chucked it in

01:01:31.440 to be, to work from home

01:01:33.140 running his own business.

01:01:34.580 Because he said, he said,

01:01:35.940 it's just like, I haven't,

01:01:37.100 I don't see her from one week to the next

01:01:38.340 and it made him so miserable.

01:01:40.000 And I don't think he's alone.

01:01:41.440 I think there's a lot of,

01:01:42.180 there's a lot of fathers who,

01:01:43.340 who take it for the team essentially

01:01:45.700 and who just feel pretty much alienated

01:01:47.960 from their, from their wives and children 0.96

01:01:49.760 because they don't see them

01:01:50.600 from one end of the week to the next.

01:01:51.900 No, I think that's really important as well.

01:01:53.400 And I've certainly found that

01:01:54.760 I've rearranged how I do this

01:01:56.820 to a large extent in order to be around a lot more.

01:01:59.780 Right, right.

01:02:00.500 And I, yeah, and I, so I think

01:02:02.180 there's a, there's a compassionate,

01:02:04.100 there's a, you know, case to be made for,

01:02:06.680 you know, not, not kind of

01:02:07.800 radically domesticated fatherhood

01:02:09.580 where, you know, dads have to be

01:02:11.080 pretending to breastfeed,

01:02:12.620 but just a slightly more flexible template

01:02:14.520 of, of work and home coming back together

01:02:17.560 in, in a slightly more textured way,

01:02:19.200 which offers opportunities for women

01:02:20.820 to do some work

01:02:22.240 whilst also being able to be present

01:02:24.660 for their babies, but also offers opportunities

01:02:26.420 for dads to be present more

01:02:27.720 in a way, which I think is just healthier

01:02:29.540 and more constructive for everybody.

01:02:31.100 Back to the happy pre-industrial age we go, Mary.

01:02:33.780 Yes, yes, yes, but with internet.

01:02:36.480 Mary, there's one thing

01:02:37.840 that I want to finish by exploring

01:02:40.820 that kind of, because there's a lot of time

01:02:43.200 where I hear a left-wing economic argument

01:02:46.020 and I don't give it much credence.

01:02:48.700 But in this case,

01:02:49.940 do they not have a point

01:02:51.460 that surely the, the end goal of capitalism

01:02:55.600 is commoditization of everything and everyone?

01:02:59.000 And what we're seeing

01:03:00.000 is a commoditization of women's bodies 1.00

01:03:02.660 a la OnlyFans, et cetera, et cetera.

01:03:05.720 Isn't this the logical end game?

01:03:08.360 Yes.

01:03:10.460 Okay.

01:03:11.360 Yeah.

01:03:11.520 Yes, I mean, my, my, I tend to get published.

01:03:16.360 I read as a conservative these days

01:03:18.080 because I question some sacred cows

01:03:22.500 of what has become the kind of leftist orthodoxy,

01:03:25.240 but fundamentally the arguments in my book are,

01:03:28.060 but they're all left arguments.

01:03:29.840 You know, they're, my case,

01:03:31.900 my case against the marketization

01:03:33.500 of women's bodies, 0.75

01:03:34.380 my case against cyborg theocracy,

01:03:36.820 as I've called it as an anti-capitalist one.

01:03:38.580 You know, I'm, I'm, I'm pushing back

01:03:40.280 against the marketization of everything.

01:03:42.140 I'm, I'm arguing for, you know,

01:03:44.260 a reactionary feminism 0.98

01:03:45.660 as a way of clawing back some space

01:03:47.940 from the market

01:03:48.560 and rebuilding forms of solidarity,

01:03:51.740 you know, hopefully out the other side

01:03:53.260 of the marketization of everything.

01:03:55.140 You know, it's fundamentally

01:03:55.880 an anti-capitalist argument.

01:03:57.560 Fantastic.

01:03:58.020 Women of the world unite.

01:03:59.160 Well, right.

01:03:59.860 Well, that actually, it's quite.

01:04:01.120 Men and women.

01:04:01.640 Well, it's actually the opposite of that though,

01:04:03.660 isn't it, Mary?

01:04:04.140 Because you're not arguing against capitalism.

01:04:06.420 What you're arguing for

01:04:07.300 is for people to voluntarily make decisions

01:04:09.280 that they opt out of certain things

01:04:11.300 that capitalism can create.

01:04:12.320 I'm arguing for,

01:04:13.500 for reclaiming our agency

01:04:15.500 from the kind of machine,

01:04:17.300 machinification of everybody.

01:04:19.820 And I'm arguing against the idea

01:04:22.360 that we should just inexorably submit

01:04:24.040 to the commodification of ourselves,

01:04:25.920 even down to commodifying our bodies.

01:04:27.620 Well, exactly.

01:04:28.260 And saying that we have some agency

01:04:29.800 and we don't have to treat this

01:04:30.920 as deterministic.

01:04:31.860 And we can, you know,

01:04:33.060 even if we're just doing that

01:04:34.400 at the level of family life,

01:04:36.140 you know, family life is as important

01:04:37.800 as what you do at scale

01:04:39.000 in terms of political activism.

01:04:40.900 And I think, you know,

01:04:42.060 you know, my,

01:04:42.660 all of my work is really about emphasizing that,

01:04:45.920 you know, the micro and the macro

01:04:47.000 are both equally important.

01:04:48.840 But, and I think,

01:04:49.740 I think you can treat,

01:04:50.940 you can treat,

01:04:51.820 see, looking for ways

01:04:52.800 to just withdraw,

01:04:53.840 withdraw your labor essentially

01:04:55.060 from, from the marketization,

01:04:58.120 withdraw your body

01:04:59.260 from commodification.

01:05:01.120 I think that's a,

01:05:02.080 that it's an, it's, yeah.

01:05:03.920 Well, the reason I bring this point up

01:05:05.360 about capitalisms,

01:05:06.960 which is quite often

01:05:08.180 critiques of capitalism

01:05:09.280 end up with people going,

01:05:10.980 you know,

01:05:11.140 we must overthrow capitalism

01:05:12.500 and women of the world unite

01:05:14.420 or whatever it is.

01:05:15.680 But that isn't,

01:05:16.520 I just don't see that

01:05:17.340 as the path forward

01:05:18.080 on any of these things

01:05:19.000 because it seems to me

01:05:20.600 on a lot of these issues,

01:05:22.580 the path forward

01:05:23.740 is not going to be legislation.

01:05:26.000 The path forward

01:05:26.680 is not going to be

01:05:27.360 some top-down instruction to people.

01:05:29.340 It's going to be

01:05:30.500 changing the culture,

01:05:31.840 which is what we talked about earlier,

01:05:33.140 which is a culture

01:05:33.840 of people voluntarily,

01:05:35.360 deciding to do things

01:05:36.760 in a different way.

01:05:37.940 Voluntarily saying,

01:05:38.840 you know what,

01:05:39.620 being a barrister

01:05:40.520 actually isn't making me

01:05:42.040 as happy as I wanted.

01:05:43.620 I want to have children

01:05:44.620 and do something else

01:05:45.800 as you were talking about.

01:05:47.440 Or I want to not do this

01:05:49.660 and do that.

01:05:50.420 And I voluntarily choose

01:05:52.080 to do this.

01:05:53.240 The same will probably happen

01:05:54.620 with technology.

01:05:55.280 I mean,

01:05:55.940 there will be communities

01:05:56.940 of people who don't

01:05:58.040 give their children

01:05:59.100 mobile phones

01:05:59.840 until they're 18 years old

01:06:01.040 and whatever.

01:06:01.600 That, I think,

01:06:02.160 is probably much more

01:06:02.880 the path forward.

01:06:04.080 Whereas the sort of like,

01:06:05.360 we must end the capitalism

01:06:06.520 type of argument,

01:06:08.140 I don't see that happening.

01:06:10.360 Yeah, I mean,

01:06:10.720 I think there are

01:06:11.320 a number of different facets to it.

01:06:13.880 And I've focused in the book

01:06:15.540 much more on the question

01:06:16.540 of what you can do

01:06:17.260 at the small scale

01:06:18.080 than really what,

01:06:20.020 you know,

01:06:20.260 I've made a few points

01:06:21.800 in the afterword

01:06:22.500 for what I think,

01:06:23.380 you know,

01:06:23.980 some sketches

01:06:24.740 for what ought to happen

01:06:25.680 at scale.

01:06:26.520 But fundamentally,

01:06:28.280 yes,

01:06:29.200 I think

01:06:29.420 I've argued that

01:06:31.480 memes,

01:06:32.420 which is to say culture,

01:06:33.700 matters as much

01:06:34.380 as material conditions.

01:06:35.940 And, you know,

01:06:36.280 while material conditions

01:06:37.260 obviously shape

01:06:38.060 what a culture is,

01:06:39.300 but correspondingly,

01:06:40.340 the culture has a reciprocal effect

01:06:42.200 on material conditions.

01:06:43.660 And from where we are right now,

01:06:44.860 if we just throw up our hands

01:06:45.860 and say,

01:06:46.260 well,

01:06:46.360 the technology has us

01:06:47.380 and there's nothing we can do,

01:06:49.260 then we might as well

01:06:50.380 throw in the towel

01:06:51.100 and I can pulp the book.

01:06:53.420 Well,

01:06:53.660 this is what bugs me

01:06:54.640 about all of this stuff.

01:06:55.800 It's like people forget

01:06:57.180 about their own role

01:06:58.240 in their own lives.

01:06:59.000 Like I was talking to somebody

01:07:00.100 on Twitter today about this

01:07:01.440 and they were like,

01:07:01.920 well,

01:07:02.260 it's impossible for a woman now 1.00

01:07:03.780 to stay at home

01:07:04.500 and be a mother.

01:07:05.180 Well,

01:07:05.300 it's not impossible.

01:07:06.320 You just don't like the trade-offs.

01:07:08.120 There's a difference.

01:07:08.880 Just so.

01:07:09.440 And so if you want

01:07:10.520 to do certain things,

01:07:11.420 if you want to have a family,

01:07:12.580 you can have a family.

01:07:14.200 There are certain things

01:07:14.980 you're going to sacrifice

01:07:15.700 in order to do that.

01:07:16.880 Just so.

01:07:17.500 And that's why I think

01:07:18.960 it's really important

01:07:19.600 to hash this point out

01:07:20.680 because people still have agency.

01:07:22.600 People still have the opportunity

01:07:23.640 to choose

01:07:24.300 to live their life

01:07:25.380 in a particular way

01:07:26.240 and that will have trade-offs.

01:07:28.200 And like all aspects of life,

01:07:30.220 everything has trade-offs.

01:07:31.640 Right?

01:07:32.020 Absolutely.

01:07:34.940 And I think,

01:07:36.520 I mean,

01:07:37.080 it's fair to say

01:07:39.060 that,

01:07:39.440 you know,

01:07:39.740 if you're going to be

01:07:40.740 the bow wave

01:07:41.800 of something quite new

01:07:43.060 or,

01:07:43.560 you know,

01:07:44.240 extremely retro,

01:07:45.200 depending on how you look at it,

01:07:46.760 you know,

01:07:47.340 you're going to be

01:07:48.160 at the sharp end

01:07:49.580 of some of those trade-offs.

01:07:51.100 But avant-gardists,

01:07:53.840 you know,

01:07:54.180 get followed by more people.

01:07:55.820 You know,

01:07:56.140 once a path has been forged,

01:07:57.860 you know,

01:07:58.100 it's easier for other people

01:07:59.000 to follow.

01:08:00.320 And, you know,

01:08:01.680 things are not that fixed

01:08:03.720 and social norms

01:08:04.460 are not absolutely set in stone.

01:08:07.120 And, you know,

01:08:07.580 a wave of avant-gardists,

01:08:10.020 of avant-garde reactionaries now,

01:08:12.020 you know,

01:08:12.380 could be the vanguard

01:08:14.040 for something

01:08:14.920 which becomes much more normal

01:08:16.100 and much more normalized

01:08:17.160 in 20 years' time.

01:08:19.360 But somebody has to lead by example,

01:08:21.500 I think,

01:08:21.800 is the point.

01:08:23.200 And so,

01:08:23.760 you know,

01:08:24.240 if I'm framing it

01:08:25.300 as something quite radical

01:08:26.320 at this point,

01:08:27.040 I think that there's the potential

01:08:28.180 for,

01:08:30.440 that there's the potential

01:08:31.360 to lead the way

01:08:33.040 in potentially huge

01:08:35.980 and beneficial social changes

01:08:38.080 down the line.

01:08:38.920 But for that,

01:08:39.560 you really do have to have hope.

01:08:41.200 And, you know,

01:08:41.900 faced with the situation

01:08:42.980 that we currently have,

01:08:43.840 I think,

01:08:44.500 I think it's also fair to say

01:08:45.620 that you have to have some courage

01:08:46.780 if you're going to buck

01:08:48.800 the prevailing trends

01:08:50.160 quite as radically

01:08:51.140 as saying yes to marriage,

01:08:54.300 yes to benevolent sexism

01:08:55.360 and no to contraception,

01:08:56.680 which is very reductively

01:08:58.640 the case that I'm making.

01:08:59.780 If you're going to try

01:09:00.680 and follow that path,

01:09:02.080 you know,

01:09:02.300 you really are swimming

01:09:03.000 against the tide

01:09:03.640 and that takes a measure of courage,

01:09:05.120 particularly if you say

01:09:05.840 you're doing it

01:09:06.220 for feminist reasons. 1.00

01:09:07.740 Mary,

01:09:08.260 it's been an absolute pleasure.

01:09:09.880 Thank you so much

01:09:10.720 for coming on the show.

01:09:11.480 Thank you.

01:09:11.880 Thank you.

01:09:12.340 It's been great.

01:09:13.120 We always end

01:09:14.160 with the final question,

01:09:15.120 which is,

01:09:15.400 what's the one thing

01:09:15.860 we're not talking about

01:09:16.720 as a society

01:09:17.540 that we really should be?

01:09:21.540 It's sort of hard

01:09:22.320 to know where to begin.

01:09:24.080 I'm going to be slightly more,

01:09:25.260 as a society,

01:09:26.500 I'm going to,

01:09:27.240 I'm not going to focus on that.

01:09:28.380 What I'll,

01:09:29.060 what I will just say

01:09:29.920 is I think the right is hopeful.

01:09:31.480 The conservatives in particular

01:09:32.900 are hopelessly confused

01:09:33.860 on technology

01:09:34.460 and I think that's something

01:09:36.300 which is very under-discussed,

01:09:37.500 particularly among conservatives.

01:09:39.480 You know,

01:09:39.980 you have,

01:09:40.500 you have,

01:09:41.760 you have guys

01:09:42.240 on the one,

01:09:42.720 on the one hand

01:09:43.380 who are fantasizing about,

01:09:44.540 you know,

01:09:44.700 going back to the Middle Ages 0.69

01:09:45.720 and then another bunch

01:09:47.460 of guys

01:09:47.800 who are fantasizing

01:09:48.520 about colonizing Mars

01:09:49.700 and you've got the Tories

01:09:53.960 in government

01:09:54.460 who are saying,

01:09:55.060 you know,

01:09:55.260 we want the white heat

01:09:56.300 of technology

01:09:56.800 or whatever they're calling it

01:09:57.760 this week

01:09:59.120 and then,

01:09:59.680 you know,

01:10:00.020 paying 30,000 a year

01:10:01.180 to whoever it is

01:10:01.960 whose job it is

01:10:03.100 to set about,

01:10:04.260 you know,

01:10:04.580 making a roadmap

01:10:05.480 for bringing shipbuilding

01:10:06.820 back to the UK

01:10:07.520 and they're only going to pay them,

01:10:09.000 you know,

01:10:09.320 less than you,

01:10:10.520 kind of new starter's salary

01:10:12.400 or, you know,

01:10:13.120 half of what that would be

01:10:14.060 in a bank

01:10:14.500 and you just think

01:10:15.580 none of this,

01:10:16.720 none of this makes sense.

01:10:18.680 Conservatives are just

01:10:19.360 completely confused about,

01:10:20.880 you know,

01:10:21.060 whether it makes,

01:10:21.820 whether it's,

01:10:22.680 whether it makes sense

01:10:23.380 to, you know,

01:10:24.000 dig everything up

01:10:24.720 and, you know,

01:10:25.520 cut down the last tree

01:10:26.520 in pursuit of economic growth

01:10:27.840 or whether,

01:10:29.920 whether in fact

01:10:30.540 that there are,

01:10:31.000 there are things

01:10:31.420 which are worth conserving.

01:10:32.600 I think there are some,

01:10:33.460 there are some deep tensions there,

01:10:35.200 particularly in terms

01:10:36.440 of how,

01:10:36.880 how disruptive technology

01:10:38.000 is to,

01:10:38.860 to long held

01:10:39.740 social norms

01:10:40.900 that,

01:10:42.100 that really need

01:10:42.640 to be taken out

01:10:43.200 and shaken considerably more.

01:10:45.220 And what would,

01:10:46.060 sorry,

01:10:46.660 because I can't leave it

01:10:48.740 like that.

01:10:50.140 Once shaken,

01:10:51.660 what should,

01:10:52.720 what are you thinking

01:10:53.620 the result of that

01:10:54.600 ought to be?

01:10:55.500 I honestly don't know.

01:10:56.960 Honestly,

01:10:57.400 you know,

01:10:57.580 I think between the,

01:10:58.920 between the kind of

01:11:00.360 agrarian distributists

01:11:01.580 and the space fascists,

01:11:03.040 you know,

01:11:03.380 I don't know

01:11:04.000 who's going to win.

01:11:07.220 Why are they

01:11:07.800 the space fascists?

01:11:08.820 Why is colonizing Mars

01:11:11.180 such a,

01:11:11.880 such a dangerous idea

01:11:13.980 for you?

01:11:17.280 I don't think

01:11:17.940 it's a dangerous idea.

01:11:19.200 I think it's,

01:11:21.400 I don't even want

01:11:22.180 to get into this.

01:11:22.880 People get,

01:11:23.260 people get very wound up

01:11:24.080 about the idea.

01:11:25.380 It is called trigonometry.

01:11:28.100 I think it's a category error.

01:11:30.120 I mean,

01:11:30.320 we're going to get into

01:11:31.040 very metaphysical territory

01:11:32.180 in a moment.

01:11:33.560 I think trying,

01:11:35.160 trying physically

01:11:35.860 to colonize Mars

01:11:36.800 is just,

01:11:37.240 is just looking

01:11:37.760 at the whole thing

01:11:38.340 completely wrong.

01:11:41.660 We should colonize 1.00

01:11:42.800 it metaphysically.

01:11:43.840 Yes.

01:11:44.740 How is that?

01:11:45.480 What would that look like?

01:11:47.380 Yeah,

01:11:47.780 I think physically

01:11:48.500 trying to go

01:11:49.060 and go into space

01:11:49.980 is,

01:11:50.240 is,

01:11:50.700 is looking at it wrong.

01:11:51.800 I'm sorry,

01:11:52.300 this is going to get,

01:11:54.120 I'm going to back away

01:11:55.040 from this because

01:11:55.760 I'm on the brink

01:11:57.760 of just far too esoteric.

01:11:59.520 You don't want to have

01:12:00.180 this conversation.

01:12:00.680 That's fine.

01:12:01.340 No,

01:12:01.540 no worries.

01:12:02.900 Mary,

01:12:03.540 thank you so much

01:12:04.500 for coming on the show.

01:12:05.180 If people want to find

01:12:05.900 your work online,

01:12:06.800 if they want to get

01:12:07.320 the book,

01:12:07.820 where is the best place

01:12:08.560 to do that?

01:12:09.420 The book is published

01:12:10.520 by Forum Press.

01:12:13.000 You can,

01:12:13.540 you'll be able to find

01:12:14.360 your way to it

01:12:15.280 via my substack,

01:12:16.600 which is reactionaryfeminist.substack.com

01:12:19.000 or by looking up

01:12:19.980 my work on Unheard

01:12:21.020 or by looking me up

01:12:23.800 on Twitter

01:12:24.340 at Moved in Circles.

01:12:26.120 Perfect.

01:12:26.660 Mary Harrington,

01:12:27.260 thank you so much

01:12:27.780 for coming back.

01:12:28.080 Thank you so much

01:12:28.580 for having me.

01:12:29.160 It's been such a pleasure.

01:12:30.140 You're the first interview,

01:12:31.320 or rather,

01:12:31.720 we are the first interview

01:12:32.600 for the book,

01:12:33.520 which we're very honoured.

01:12:34.780 Thanks for coming on

01:12:35.560 and thank you

01:12:36.440 for watching and listening.

01:12:37.440 We will see you very soon

01:12:38.540 with another terrific interview.

01:12:39.760 It won't be quite like this,

01:12:40.740 but it will be equally terrific.

01:12:42.520 Or also,

01:12:43.460 all of them go out

01:12:44.160 at 7pm UK time.

01:12:45.340 And for those of you

01:12:46.040 who like your trigonometry

01:12:47.220 on the go,

01:12:47.940 it's also available

01:12:48.740 as a podcast.

01:12:49.780 Take care

01:12:50.260 and see you soon, guys.

01:12:51.080 We'll see you on Locals

01:12:52.120 in a second 0.78

01:12:52.740 with some bonus questions

01:12:53.820 from you

01:12:54.360 that Mary's going to answer

01:12:55.320 and only you,

01:12:56.320 the supporters,

01:12:56.860 will get to see.

01:12:59.540 What's your opinion

01:13:00.360 about the future

01:13:01.180 of the British

01:13:02.340 and American universities?

01:13:03.740 Are they irredeemably woke

01:13:05.500 in a way that will undermine

01:13:07.180 the teaching of science

01:13:08.060 and engineering

01:13:08.680 as foundations

01:13:10.300 of our prosperity,

01:13:11.140 or do you think

01:13:11.540 they're salvageable?

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TRIGGERnometry - March 06, 2023

Why 'Progress' is Bad for Women - Mary Harrington

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