Updated at 4:05 ET on June 19, 2023.
Was the sexual revolution a mistake? From the 1960s through today, the majority of feminists would instantly answer no. Easier access to contraception, the relaxation of divorce laws, the legalization of abortion, less emphasis on virginity, reduced stigma around unmarried sexall of these have been hailed as liberating for women.
But in the past few years, an emergent strand of feminism has questioned these assumptions. Reactionary feminismthe name was popularized by the British writer Mary Harringtonrests on a premise that sounds far more radical today than it once did: Men and women are different. In her 2022 book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Louise Perry argues that individual physical variation is built upon a biological substrate. Liberal feminists and trans activists may do their best to deny this, but it is still true that only one half of the human race is capable of getting pregnant, andfailing the invention of artificial wombsthis will remain true indefinitely. Perry also argues for evolved psychological differences between the sexes. Men are innately much hornier, more eager for sexual variety, and much less likely to catch feelings from a one-night stand, she believes. Modern hookup culture serves men very well but forces women to deny their natural urges toward seeking commitment, affection, and protection.
These are heretical thoughts. For more than a decade, the dominant form of American feminism has maintained that differences between the sexeswhether in libido, crime rates, or even athletic performancelargely result from female socialization. Anything else is biological essentialism. The feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon recently declared that she did not want to be part of a movement for female body parts Women are not, in fact, subordinated or oppressed by our bodies. We do not need to be liberated from our chromosomes or our ovaries. This view extends to the assertion that male and female bodies do not differ enough to justify strict sex segregation in sporting competitions or prisons, domestic-violence shelters, and public changing rooms. Recently, a reporter asked the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, for a response to parents who worry about the safety of daughters competing in sports against genetically male athletes. Jean-Pierre responded with a terse smackdown. The reporters question, Jean-Pierre said, implied that transgender kids are dangerous and was therefore itself dangerous.
The reactionary feminists have no patience for this line of argument. In her new book, Feminism Against Progress, Harrington writes that the internet has encouraged us to think of ourselves as a Meat Lego, hunks of flesh that can be molded however we want. For women, that involves suppressing the messy biological reality of the female bodytaking birth control, having consequence-free casual sex, even outsourcing pregnanciesto achieve something that might look like equality but is really just pretending to be a man. Realizing my body isnt something Im in but something I am is the heart of the case for reactionary feminism, she writes.
Reactionary feminism is having a moment. Harrington recently toured the United States, where Feminism Against Progress was plugged in The Free Press, the heterodox equivalent of a glowing New York Times review. At the recent National Conservative conference in London, she shared the stage with Perry, whose book covers similar themes. Another NatCon speaker was Nina Power, a former leftist who is now a senior editor at Compact, an online magazine whose editors declare that they oppose liberalism in part because we seek a society more tolerant of human difference and human frailty.
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All three women are Britishwhich is no coincidence. In Britain, where I live, feminism has developed around the assumption that women belong to a sex class with specific physical vulnerabilities. In America, the movement has been filtered through a progressive legal tradition of outlawing discrimination against a variety of marginalized groups, and because of the decades-long abortion fight, American feminism relies heavily on the concepts of choice and bodily autonomy. In the view of many mainstream U.S. feminist writers, Britain is TERF Island, a blasted heath of middle-class matrons radicalized by the parenting forum Mumsnet into conservatism and weaponized white femininity. The response of some British feminists is that, in practice, the agenda of mainstream American feminism has shriveled down to the abortion fight and corporate-empowerment platitudes, and is hamstrung by its strange refusal to accept the relevance of biology.
That said, Harrington was radicalized by Mumsnet, which she started reading more than a decade ago. At the time, I was still a fully paid up Butlerite, she told me in clipped English tones. She was referring to Judith Butler, the high priest of queer theory, which argues for the subversion of categories and norms. In her 20s, Harrington hung out in bohemian communities online and offline, and sometimes went by the name Sebastian. My first glimmers of ambivalence about queer theory, Harrington said, were when I realized that pretty much every butch woman Id ever dated had subsequently transitioned, and now thought of themselves as a man. As a married mother of one, living in a small town, she went on Mumsnet and met other women who shared her ambivalence about the new ideology around gender.
Both Power and Perry had similar experiences that peeled them away from the progressive consensus. Perrys was in the early days of motherhood, realizing her deep connection with her babyand her economic dependence on her husband. Power, a scholar of Marxist and continental philosophy, told me that her apostasy was driven by a general frustration with the progressive movement. Its just gone mad.
Inevitably, reactionary feminisms focus on sex differences has been welcomed by many on the political rightwho enjoy portraying liberals as reality deniers and themselves as no-nonsense realists. It has also been welcomed by the manosphere, that loose collection of blogs and YouTube channels whose content melds positive advice and help for men with anti-feminism and misogyny. Perry has appeared on podcasts with Jordan Peterson and Rod Dreher; Harringtons American publisher is Regnery, the conservative imprint whose top authors include Ann Coulter and Republican Senator Josh Hawley. I walk a very strange line, Harrington told me. The best engagement I get is when my work hits a sweet spot between conservative Catholics, radical feminists, and the weird online right. Thats not a Venn diagram that I really thought existed, but apparently its an underserved niche.
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In her advocacy for marriage and opposition to the birth-control pill, Harrington finds fans among religious conservatives. In her opposition to commercial surrogacy, the sex trade, and gender self-identification, she is aligned with radical feminists. And in her language and arguments, you can see the influence of internet micro-celebrities such as the pseudonymous author Bronze Age Pervert, whose self-published manifesto warned that modern society was replacing masculine strength with phalanxes of weedy bugmen. (His book became briefly popular with junior staffers in the Trump administration.)
Reactionary feminists and the manosphere like to cast liberal feminists as daydreaming utopians. Both groups argue that, look, men are men and women are women, and evolution ordained it so. Yes, they say, a small percentage of people are gay or gender-nonconforming, but that doesnt change an overall picture shaped by millennia of sexual selection. Both groups invoke evolutionary psychology to explain their conclusions on female dating preferences, the reasons men cheat, and why so-called short kings struggle in the dating market.
I asked Stuart Ritchie, an academic psychologist turned science writer who has previously criticized the evidence base for Perrys claims on porn use causing erectile dysfunction, if he finds this pop-science approach troublesome. He told me via email that evolutionary psychologists stress that their findings merely describe reality, rather than morally endorsing the effects of natural selectionwhats known as the naturalistic fallacy. Both reactionary feminists and manosphere red-pillers are often committing exactly this fallacy, assuming that everything natural must be good, and that things that are more prevalent in the modern world [than in the past]contraception, divorce, surrogacy, etcmust therefore be bad, he added. Thats not necessarily to defend any of those modern things, but just to say that the arguments used against them are often very weak and fallaciousand that might be the main overarching thing reactionary feminism and the manosphere have in common.
Because it argues that men and women are fundamentally different in ways shaped by millennia of evolution, reactionary feminism is deeply fatalistic about the possibility of social change. (Political horndogs will always abuse power, claims the subhead of a recent Harrington article.) In Perrys book, her belief, derived from evolutionary psychology, that men are uncontrollable sex beasts sits uneasily alongside the assertion that monogamous marriage and children are the optimum conditions for female flourishing. Her core message seems to be simultaneously that men are usually ghastly and often potential rapists, and yet that women should also try very hard to marry one and never divorce him, the British journalist Hugo Rifkind wrote after reading it. Which, I must admit, I found a little unsatisfactory.
When I asked Harrington how Americans had received her book, she said that Baby Boomers had been more defensive of the post-1960s ethos than younger generations have been. Many Gen Z and Millennial women are disillusioned with the modern sexual marketplace of abundant porn, dating apps, and unfulfilling hookups: In 2021, Billie Eilish told Howard Stern that shed started watching porn at age 11, and it destroyed my brain. In the novels of Sally Rooney, sadomasochism is repeatedly presented as abusive and miserable rather than kinky and funmuch to the chagrin of sex positive feminists. In The Right to Sex, the ultraliberal Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan describes being challenged by her own students over what they see as her complacency about violent and misogynist porn. The widespread discontent felt by young people has led to unexpected collisions, such as the Washington Post columnist Christine Emba being interviewed by Church Times, a religious magazine, about her book-length critique of consent-only culture, Rethinking Sex: A Provocation. Generation Z might not all agree that New Yorks Hottest Club Is the Catholic Church, as a New York Times trend piece put it, but they arent all libertines either.
Reactionary feminists take these concerns to their logical end. Louise Perrys book begins by imagining the grave of the Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, who asked to be buried next to Marilyn Monroe. The sexual revolution worked out well for Hefner, she argueshe gained a house full of playmates and built an empire on female flesh bared in the name of empowerment. But for Monroe, being the sexiest woman alive brought mostly misery, including a string of men who wanted to bed her for the bragging rights. There is never a reckoning with what sexual liberation does to those women who follow its directives most obediently, Perry writes.
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Reactionary feminism also lionizes motherhood with a zeal that, in the case of Perry and Harrington, feels very personal. Perry wrote her book while pregnant, and Harrington wishes she could have had more than one child. I came to motherhood pretty late, and I wish Id started sooner, Harrington told me. Thats an ongoing source of regret for me. Power, who does not have children, is nonetheless sympathetic to the other two womens pro-family stance. Ive spoken to people in their 30s who desperately want to have a family and cant, she told me. Theres something tragic about women who want to have a child but miss the moment. Louise is saying: Be realistic. Think about it sooner than later.
Unfortunately, these paeans to the nuclear family sound judgmental, no matter how many times the reactionaries insist that they arent demonizing gay couples, single parents, and people without childrennot least because they hand ammunition to anti-feminists who really do want women barefoot and pregnant.
Harringtons jeremiad against the pill is the kookiest part of Feminism Against Progress. Put simply, she thinks sex is hotter when it might lead to conception, because a woman who refuses birth control will be highly motivated to be choosy about her partners. She lost me with the assertion that the rhythm method is freakier than BDSM because its sex with the real danger left in. And theres more: In a lifelong partnership, the possibility of conception itself is deeply erotic. If theres anything less sexy than imagining that your future child will soon be in the room with you, I dont want to hear it.
While Perrys book specifically castigates those conservatives who are silly enough to think that returning to the 1950s is either possible or desirable, renouncing effective birth control would immiserate many women and imprison some in abusive relationships. The pills reported downsides, such as irritability and anxiety, also have to be weighed against the toll that decades of childbearing took on previous generations, both physically and economically. While researching my 2020 history of feminism, Difficult Women, I found wrenching letters that the contraceptive pioneer Marie Stopes had received, and I told Harrington about some of them. I have a very Weak Heart if I have any more it might prove fatal my inside is quite exausted [sic] I have a Prolapsed Womb, it is wicked to bring children into the world to Practicly [sic] starve, read one from a 37-year-old mother of nine children. Another woman wrote: He says if you wont let me at the front, I will at the back. I dont care which way it is so long as I get satisfied. Well Madam this is very painful to me, also I have wondered if it might be injurious.
Is that a world to which any woman would want to return? You can be sure that Stopes would have selected them to underline the point she wanted to make, Harrington told me. And the demographic that would have been writing to Stopes would have been self-selecting, for the reasons you would expect.
Again and again, reactionary feminism offers a useful corrective and then goes to the edge of overkill. For example, its proponents argue for the revival of mens single-sex spaces: sports clubs, bars, voluntary associations. This sounds unobjectionable, but could bring back the Mad Men days, when deals were sealed at the golf club or the strip club or a weird elitist retreat with a 40-foot owl. But Louise Perry takes the idea further by arguing that women should never get drunk or high in public or in mixed company, because of the risk of sexual assault. She thinks this is pragmatic; I find it incredibly bleak. As I told her during an interview about her book, I dont want to live in a voluntary Saudi Arabia.
Reactionary feminism is not the dominant strain in Britain, any more than its opposite (what Harrington calls Verso feminism, after the radical-left publisher) is. Most British feminists, as far as I can tell, are centrists and soft-left moderates, the heirs of a tradition that developed in tandem with labor unions, placing hard constraints on both its conservatism and radicalism. The movement has stayed grounded in material conditions arising from physical sex differencesthe challenges of pregnancy and motherhood, the threat of violence by bigger and stronger males. In the absence of a strong religious right and red-state governors banning abortion and passing punitive bills on LGBTQ issues, the gender debate is not so polarized here, and feminist thinkers and LGBTQ activists have more space to acknowledge that their interests are not always identical.
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Because of fears of being tarred as fascists or bigots, some American feminists refuse to even engage with any reactionary-feminist arguments. That is a shame, because the movements final tenetthat the unfettered free market should be kept away from bodies, particularly female onesis one you might expect the political left to embrace. Reactionary feminism offers pungent criticism of liberal choice feminism and its laissez-faire attitude to the exploitation of women who have ostensibly chosen their circumstances. The reactionaries dare to say that some choices are better than others, and that being offered two bad options is no choice at all.
Many liberals support commercial surrogacy: Let women do what they want with their bodies, the argument goes. The reactionaries, meanwhile, reply that the industry is driven by inequality: Rich couples open their wallets, and poor women provide the labor. (They also argue that separating a newborn from its mother is cruel unless absolutely necessary.) Similarly, they note that the shibboleth that sex work is work is complicated by the fact that rich men buy sex, and poorer women (and men) sell it. Harrington sees trans medical care, too, as unhappily consumeristan empowerment movement acting as a sales rep for Big Pharma. She also believes that feminists who advocate for government-supported day caredownplaying the importance of maternal attachment to small babies, in her vieware useful idiots for corporations who want women back at their desks.
There are a great many conservatives who havent noticed quite how much Marxism Ive smuggled in, Harrington says. Dont put that in The Atlantic. Then she relents: Reactionary feminism was coined half as a joketurning an insult into a badge of honorand half as a signal scrambler. If it isnt provoking you, then it hasnt worked.
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Feminists Against the Sexual Revolution - The Atlantic
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