466. Reappropriating Feminism, Maternity, and the Woman’s Role | Mary Harrington
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Hello, everybody. I had the chance today to talk to Mary Harrington, author of Feminism Against Progress, which was published in 2023. Mary's analysis is that the feminist body of thought emerged in the aftermath of the

Industrial Revolution, when men and women were both recalibrating their social roles, and that it had divided into the feminism of care, which is less classically feminist, and the feminism of freedom, which is what most people would identify with feminism now. We talked also about the transhumanist spin, let's say, on the feminism of freedom,

discussing the invention of the birth control pill and its radical effects on individuals and society. Radical and in many ways perverse effects, because the pill was touted as the gateway to the hedonistic sexual utopian universe of ultimate equality and gratification of every whim, and actually turned very rapidly into

universal abortion at the rate of a million a year in the United States, the radical destabilization of sexual relations between men and women, handing women over to their worst whims and also to psychopathic men who are much more likely to engage in short-term sexual abuse.

strategies and then the general commodification of female sexuality, let's say on the pornography front, which occupies about 25% of internet traffic. Anyways, we weave our way through all of that. And so join us.

So, Mary, you launched your book, Feminism Against Progress, in spring of 2023. So, why don't you start by walking us through the book and the argument that you were making there?

Okay, well, it's a story in three parts, I guess. There's a past, a present, and a future. And really what I set out to do was answer a question which had become clear to me after I myself had a child, which was, why is it that motherhood is such a blind spot, it seems, in the women's movement? And as I read into that, I

pushing my buggy around the streets of small town England and reading, as you do, I began to realize that it's not exactly that motherhood is a blind spot in the women's movement. And in fact, a great many feminist writers have tackled the question of motherhood one way or another. But somehow, whenever somebody sets out to make the case for mums within feminism, it ends up as the poor relation. It ends up being just left to one side and

and forgotten and then somebody has to come up and say, well, what about mothers all over again? And then that gets forgotten again and it keeps happening. And so I had this question, why? And to cut a very long story, rather shorter, as I just delved into the question, I began to think that we were looking at the question of feminism wrong, right?

I mean, it all started when I found myself having to answer the question, is it possible to be a feminist if you don't believe in progress? Really, and this, I mean, I realized I stopped believing in progress before I had a kid. And then when I had a kid, I realized I was still a feminist, but I had these questions about the women's movement. And I also still didn't believe, and I also no longer believed in progress. And when I put those pieces together, it didn't seem...

It didn't seem obvious to me what the solution should be because it's always been the case. Whenever I've said to somebody, well, I don't believe in progress, they say, ha-ha, but do you want to go back to being without the vote?

Would you like to be the property of your husband, perhaps? What about all of those other ways that life has changed for the better for women? And I thought, well, this is kind of a head-scratcher because actually these people can have a point. But on the other hand, here I am feeling pretty lonely and pretty invisible in terms of the women's movement, pushing my buggy around small-town England. And I feel as though in some respects things have got a whole lot better and in other respects they kind of haven't.

And so how do I put together the picture of, you know, progress on the one hand, feminism on the other, and try and make sense of where we are? And eventually I came to the conclusion that...

Yes, you can be a feminist if you don't believe in progress, but it depends a bit what you mean by feminism and a bit what you mean by progress. And so I embarked on this extended reread of the history of the women's movement really in terms of technology, in terms as a phenomenon which began with the Industrial Revolution and with the transformations that came about in women's lives with the Industrial Revolution.

And as a set of usually very legitimate and very justified responses to a wholesale disruption and upending and upheaval of what family life had hitherto more or less been.

And I mean, of course, this varies a little bit from geography to geography and culture to culture. But I mean, I'm broadly writing about white bourgeois women in the English-speaking West because, I mean, that's where I stand. So it seems, and if we're honest, you know, the majority of the history of feminism is really anglophone and bourgeois and white. So it seems a reasonable place to start. Yeah, none of that is to say that there are no other worthwhile perspectives, but this is the one that I have. So I decided to tell that story.

And that's a story of women making a transition from broadly an agrarian subsistence life in the Middle Ages where everybody worked, but they worked in the context of productive households. So really the home was the basic unit of work.

in the pre-modern world. And women had... There was women's work and there was men's work, but really, you know, outside very aristocratic households, everybody worked. And women's work just happened to take place with children underfoot. And it was generally of a kind which was compatible with having children underfoot. And none of this was really a sort of...

None of this was so much a kind of prescriptive thing about who ought to be doing what because of some set of moral characteristics, but more a pragmatic response to men and women's different physiologies and the needs of infant children, which are considerable, as you'll know as a parent.

And so that was the pre-modern world. But then when the Industrial Revolution came along, it first removed men. It first removed fathers from the productive household and drained male workers away into factories, into offices, into other working environments elsewhere.

increasingly. And then as time wore on, it also began to drain away women's work by producing as consumer products most of the goods which women had previously made at home. So, for example, textile making has some sort of 20, 30, 40,000 years of that being classically women's work.

There's an absolutely ancient history of weaving being women's work, which makes sense in the context of an ordinary subsistence home because you can lift a loom off the ground so the baby doesn't get tangled up in it. It's social work, which you can do in company with children underfoot.

And anthropologists and historians have done extensive work and research into why it just makes sense from a material and a practical point of view for textile making to have been historically women's work. And yet textile making was one of the first domains to be industrialized, first with the spinning jenny and then...

And then later on with mechanical looms. And there's a whole radical history in Britain in the early period of the Industrial Revolution when the textile makers were smashing the mechanical looms because they could see the end of their home-based subsistence life looming up in front of them in the form of these machines, which had just taken the work from them.

And the secondary effect of that was that women's work went away because you could just buy cloth, and that was a whole lot easier. And there are countless other examples of a similar dynamic taking place. And the upshot of all of this is that an increasing body of the work that women had previously done in the home simply went away, and their role was, in the course of that, very much reduced.

And so until far from being, as in a lot of pre-modern contexts, an equally economically active and socially active participant in the work of a productive home, they've become, as it were, a sort of chief consumer. The bourgeois housewife is a kind of chief consumer in a private home. And I've drawn from Ivan Illich's 1980 book Gender in the book to...

to understand the transition which Illich reads, and I agree with him, as really not a moment of empowerment, but as a significant loss of agency. And the point which, as Illich puts it,

Women make the transition from being active participants in a kind of ambiguous complementarity with men, where there's men's work and there's women's work, but everybody's working, to what Illich describes as economic sex, which is to say a condition of notional equality, but where in practice, because of our physiology and because of the allotted role given to women within a bourgeois private domestic sphere, women are in practice structurally disadvantaged.

For Illich, sexism begins with the arrival of modernity. So this is really my history of the past. And women responded to this in two characteristic ways.

So there were those which in turn gives rise to the two poles of what I think of as feminism proper up to the middle of the 20th century. And the first of those poles was the feminism of freedom. Well, the first of those poles was the feminism of care, which was—and here I've slightly counterintuitively read a body of work, a body of writing and a body of cultural work—

which is not typically read by women's historians as feminism, precisely. I've drawn on the various women's social reform movements, which were legion across both sides of the Atlantic, actually, in the 19th century. There were countless social reform movements. There was work to rescue prostituted women. There was social reform work. There was outreach to the poor. There were civil societies. Women ran civil society.

It wasn't as though these bourgeois housewives sat at home doing nothing all day or just spent all their time shopping. They went out, they organized, and they formed the backbone of civil society. And they also wrote copiously. They wrote journals and publications and letters and books.

and articles and huge amount, there's a huge body of writing and a great, and, and, and one of the central themes in it is the, the intrinsic value of the home. Um, so women may have been, women may now no longer work directly. Um, but, but, but, but instead these, these women sought to make the case for women's continued, um, value and, and, and the, the,

the really fundamental moral and social and cultural importance of the private sphere as a space outside the market, a space of respite. And it was sort of idealized as a space of moral elevation and a haven away from the pressures of the competitive market society. So in that space, women could educate children, children could be nurtured,

And everybody could, as it were, find refuge from the harsher pressures of the world outside. So that's the ideal. And this is really what I think of as the feminism of care. And it's a bunch of women whose much of whose economic agency has been radically reduced relative to their grandmothers, perhaps, because they're no longer economically active.

And so they're setting out to make a case for the ongoing value of those parts of women's work, quote-unquote, which they still see as important and which are still irreducible, particularly around the care of children. And so that's feminism care. But then on the other side, there was a whole bunch of other women who were like, well, hang on a minute. This is all very well, but this only works if your husband is a good guy.

You know, what if your husband drinks all the money? What if your husband beats you? What if your husband leaves you? What if he rapes you? You know, you have no redress. You have no leverage. And so they set out to make the case for women's entry, as it were, into market society on the same terms as men. So the right to own property on the same terms as men, which was not available within a legal and a social system, which was structured around productive households.

So at the point where two adults married, the women's person was subsumed into that of the man because that was what made sense juridically in the larger context of productive households. And this no longer made nearly as much sense in the industrial context where an economic actor is increasingly an individual rather than a household. And so you've got this legal and political tension there.

in play between women who still don't have separate personhood from men and who are finding increasingly, as a growing number of the feminists of freedom began to argue, that they were severely vulnerable in that context. And so increasingly, you start seeing campaigns for women's right to own property, for women's right to enter the market as workers.

on the same terms as men. And increasingly, for women to be treated effectively the same as men in all contexts. And I think of this as the beginning of the feminism of freedom. And there's a really rich interplay, if you look at the history of the 19th century women's movement between these two poles, because they're by no means that far apart. Most of these women knew each other, and it wasn't a sort of crazy back-and-forth culture war the way it feels sometimes now. It was a very... Most of the...

The supposed feminists and anti-feminists actually knew each other and often agreed on more than they disagreed on. Most of them were active in the same social reform movements. Most of them agreed, for example, on the question of temperance. Most of them agreed on issues like sexual morality and the importance of tackling the sex trade. And there are a great many issues where, and most of them were very devoted, very devout women of faith.

And so there was a great deal on which even the feminists of freedom and the feminists of care broadly agreed and collaborated on. And in the middle, there are these two polls.

between the women who see their interests as lying in a political project of sameness with men and of the right to enter the market on the same terms as men, and those women who seek to ring-fence a distinct sexed space for women within the context, which makes space for motherhood, which makes space for nurture, and which makes space for those dimensions of women's lives which are irreducibly, distinctively sexed.

And this is a dialectic which goes on through various iterations, all the way up really until the beginning of the 20th century. The middle of the 20th century, sorry.

where the feminism of freedom definitively won over the feminism of care at the point where a new technology came into the picture, which allowed us medically to flatten those irreducible differences between the sexes, or so it seemed, to the point where really there was no reason not to argue for a feminism of freedom.

And that technology was hormonal birth control, which led inexorably towards a ratchet towards the legalization of abortion, which most 19th century feminists would have viewed as not dissimilar, as broadly the same thing as infanticide.

and would have recoiled from. It was extremely unusual for a feminist to support abortion in the 19th century. But by the middle of the 20th century, the popularization of hormonal birth control had paradoxically increased the number of unplanned pregnancies simply because there was more sex happening. It became a matter of social justice, and women began increasingly to see it as a matter of social justice, that young women were no longer compelled to

run off to another country or take their life in their hands with a backstreet abortion or various other horrors that proliferated downstream of

of this radical transformation in sexual mores. And the upshot of that was, again, on both sides of the Atlantic, within, I believe, a decade of one another, the legalization of abortion across both sides of the Atlantic. Now, I mean, I'm deeply ambivalent on the question of abortion, and I have friends who are pro-life, and I have friends who are pro-choice. And really, the stance I've taken on that question in the book

is to say, well, wherever you sit on the absolute moral question, it's difficult to dispute that if...

If what you're arguing for is a right to assert, is for women to have the right to assert their bodily autonomy, even at the expense of another potential human life, then that's about as definitive a stance as you could possibly take in favor of the feminism of freedom over the feminism of care, which would make a greater amount of space for women

For the needs of really the most dependent imaginable other that you could possibly think of.

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The moment where abortion is legalized, and that then within the 20th century women's movement becomes inexorably hitched to the question of women's political personage as such, to the point where, I mean, particularly in America, the debate is now so toxic, I'm not cautious to say anything more on it, but it's arrived at the point now where the

There are people who genuinely wholeheartedly believe that for that right to be taken away would mean women are no longer able to access personhood as such. And really what you're saying at this point, and the statement that you're implicitly making there, is to say that freedom is so much more important than anything else, that it's worth sacrificing a potential human life for if it comes down to what feels like a zero-sum contest.

that even more about the most defenseless human life there is, which is to say one which is still in utero and can't survive outside a woman's body. Even that life is forfeit if the price of sustaining that life is the curtailment of a woman's freedom. Now, and again, wherever you stand on the absolute moral question, that's a very strong stance in favor of freedom. And really, and so the...

I see that as a real caesura moment, a profound inflection point in the women's movement, which it...

It embraced as the baseline of women's political personhood as such a technologization of women's bodies in the name of individual freedom. And really, I see that the 10-year arrival from the legalization of the pill, approximately 10 years, to the legalization of abortion as our entry into the transhumanist era.

Because that's the point where women's existence as such comes to seem inextricable from a set of medical technologies. And remember, what's so radical about these technological innovations is that unlike more or less every other medical practice up to that point, certainly every licit medical practice up to that point,

And these don't set out to fix what's broken. I mean, if I have a broken arm, I go to the doctor and I say, hey, doctor, can you fix my arm, please? And the doctor has a, you know, you go to medical school for years to learn what normal human health looks like.

and to learn what to do with people's bodies in order to fix what's broken and make it normal and healthy again. And what's radical and transformative about birth control and later about abortion is that they don't fix what's broken in the name of normal human health. They break what's working normally, which is to say women's fertility or a normal pregnancy in the name of individual freedom.

And I think we still underestimate what a radical transformation that was. And I think we're still working through the downstream consequences of that. And really, the second part of the book explores some of the downstream consequences of having entered into the transhumanist moment in the middle of the 20th century. Because, I mean, we're more than half a century further into it now.

And I think we're beginning to see some of the contours of that new reality more clearly as time has gone on. So Mary, the argument you've made, I'm going to summarize it and tell me if I've got it right. So you went back far enough in time to assess the role that men and women played in home-centered agrarian societies. And you made a case that that was a stable solution of relative growth.

economic equality, let's say. And then the Industrial Revolution kicked in and it pulled men away from the home first, but then it replaced women's work. And that meant that women were up in the air about what their role was, but it also turned them into something approximating comparatively wealthy individualist consumers.

Then you said there were two responses to that. One was the emergence of a feminism of care that detailed out the realm of women's responsibilities and opportunities really in the domestic sphere with regard to, say, relationships with their husbands, their immediate family, and more importantly, their children. And then you detailed out another stream of feminism, which was the feminism of freedom,

You associated that to some degree with women's concern about being tangled up with men who weren't really good for anything. And so that's an interesting little twist on that. But your fundamental point was that once women became independent actors in the free market, in the industrialized free market, there was every reason to move towards the transformation of law so that women as independent economic actors would have the same economic rights as men.

But then there's that problem with bad men lurking in the background there that contaminates things. And then you talked a little bit about

the transhumanist movement, identifying that at least in part with the rise of the birth control pill, which is a radical innovation, basically equivalent to a genetic, a major genetic mutation, a species altering mutation. And then you pointed out that oddly enough, in concert with the rise of the pill, we got the rise of legalized abortion and its widespread prevalence. Okay, so that's where I want to drill into. I want to tell you something biological about

And I want you to tell me what you think about it, because I think it's key in some mysterious way to this entire problem. The problem you've laid out is that women and men, for that matter, have been recalibrating their identity since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. It made us into more atomized individuals who were more consumer-oriented, let's say. And that's a major social disruption.

But then on the pill and the abortion side, here's something that is worth considering, I believe. So, you know, the evolutionary biologists have identified two fundamental reproductive strategies. So imagine there's a continua, okay? On the one end, you have

They're called R-selected or R-strategists. And the R stands for reproduction, essentially rapid reproduction, let's say. And so mosquitoes and puffballs and fish are R-strategists. And so the R-strategy is fairly straightforward. Many, many, many potential offspring, millions or even billions of them, zero post-sex investment.

So that's the R investment strategy. Okay, and so most of your fertilized offspring, gametes, are going to perish. Enough will last for them to replace you or maybe even for the population to thrive, but it has nothing to do with you after the sexual act. Okay, on the other side are so-called K investment, K strategists. And those are creatures, mammals would be a reasonable example,

that have very few offspring, but pour a lot of resources into them. And the ultimate case strategists are human beings. So our investment strategy is long-term, high-cost investment, even spanning multiple generations. Okay, so there's a real distribution, and humans are on the extreme end of one of those categories.

directions, let's say, one of those poles of the distribution. Okay, now there's a subsidiary observation that goes along with that. And this is where the point is really germane. So now imagine that among human beings, there are R strategists and K strategists. Okay, so the R strategists are ones who have many sexual partners and low investment.

Now that's a lot easier for men than it is for women because of course if women get pregnant, they're high investment strategists immediately, unless they circumvent that. But the men can get away with it, let's say being our strategists. Now a further question is just who the hell are these our strategist males? So these would be the men who are interested in multiple sexual partners,

low emotional investment and low post sexual investment say in any result in children. And we know the answer to that. Our strategist males are narcissistic, Machiavellian, psychopathic and sadistic. And so what that means, I think as far as I can tell, is that when you free up women to be sexually available with the technological transformation,

You both deliver them into the hands of our strategist males who have all the lovely personality features that I just described. Or maybe something even worse is that you train men who might otherwise be high investment maters to adopt our strategy with all of the psychopathy and Machiavellianism and narcissism and sadism that goes along with that. And so this is a very perverse outcome because

And I guess I don't really know what people expected to begin with.

You said that, for example, you implied that women are pursuing their freedom, let's say, with regards to untrammeled sexual access on the reproductive front. But that's not exactly a freedom. It's more like a subjugation to sexuality as the prime motivator in life, right? I mean, you could identify yourself with your sexuality, which is, of course, what people are doing in spades now. But the idea that

The opportunity, the ability to pursue untrammeled sexual expression is actually a manifestation of freedom, is an error if you believe that untrammeled subjugation to biological whim is

doesn't constitute freedom. This is especially true if it turns out that it's delivering women into the hands of psychopathic men, which seems to be the case. There's a great deal of truth in that, and really that speaks to the epigraph, actually, which I gave the second part of the book, which comes from Horace. I'm not going to try and quote the Latin at you, but the translation is, you can drive nature out with a pitchfork, but still she comes back.

It's a very famous quote. I think I've taken it slightly mischievously out of context, but it's a very important piece because the governing theme of the transhumanist era is using technology to try and abolish our nature. And really, that's the governing theme, the governing project of the transhumanist era, which is the point where we embrace the

or as we hope, the power of technologies to transform ourselves. So we're no longer industrializing the world. We're no longer using machines to, say, make weaving easier. Instead, we're using technologies to remodel ourselves, to make us more like we think we ought

to be, at least. Or that's the idea. And that really begins with the contraceptive pill, which is a medical technology which we... And the original utopians, the first wave of feminist responses to the pill, were hugely optimistic about what it would do. I mean, we're some decades further down that track now, and we can see that it hasn't really worked out like that. And our mutual friend Louise Perry recently wrote a very persuasive book

detailing all of the ways it hasn't really worked out like that. And all of the ways which, as you've just outlined, the sexual revolution was considerably more to the benefit of our selected, all these narcissistic, psychopathic, highly sexed and not particularly fatherly men seem to have been the net beneficiaries of this technological transformation. Contra the utopians who imagined sex

that it would open out a kind of sexual utopia in which everybody could be free to be themselves, women could finally express themselves free from the gossiping old ladies in the street and free from the risk of pregnancy, and it would make everything sort of sunshine and rainbows and kittens and it would all be lovely. Now, we know at this point that that's not exactly what happened, but really this serves to illustrate the utopian...

spirit that people have brought to the project of technologizing ourselves using essentially biotech, beginning with the chemical intervention of the contraceptive pill. But we're considerably further down that path now. And at every stage, we've set about embracing new innovations in biotech in the hope that

really of remedying perceived flaws in our nature, whether that's a pill to stop us being sad or whether it's a technology which will...

which will mean women's fertility no longer has to fall off a cliff at the age of 40 because now there are technologies which will enable her to go on having kids into her 50s or her 60s or whatever. I mean, we could be here all evening enumerating the technologies, the opportunities and the biomedical advances. And at every stage, what happens is there's a utopian promise of being able to escape a previous embodied limit. There is a...

a new set of constraints on us, if you like, aspects of our nature which were previously managed by social means in the way that the difference between women's and men's reproductive role was previously managed by what now gets dismissively referred to as the sexual double standard, which was in the area prior to reliable contraception an extremely pragmatic measure, avoiding a proliferation of unwanted children within a community.

So that's one example of a way an asymmetry or some awkward aspect of our nature was managed socially in a way which just went away more or less overnight the moment technology came along that seemed as though it would fix the problem for us. And there have been countless other examples since then. And what invariably happens is you get a dividend of freedom and then whatever it is that's been technologized in that way is then reordered to the market.

And you see this very clearly with the sexual revolution, which promised a great utopian dividend of self-expression and free love and, you know, everybody having orgies and it'll be fine. And actually what it gave birth to was the porn industry. And it gave birth to a ballooning sex industry. And now, you know, 50 years on from that, we have Pornhub, which is one of the biggest websites, one of the most high-grossing websites in the world, and which is already notorious for sex trafficking. Right.

for countless other atrocities and for coarsening the appetites of children, frankly, who are the majority of its consumers and much else besides. But really what I want to emphasize there is the dynamic at work. We think technologizing ourselves will liberate us from some aspect of our nature. What in fact happens is that that aspect of our nature becomes opened up to commerce. And in the meantime, our nature is unchanged.

So the differences, as you pointed out, the differences between men and women in terms of mating strategies and courtship preferences and so on are still there. Our mutual friend Louise Perry sets this out very clearly in the case against the sexual revolution. Men still want slightly different things out of a date to women, on average. Of course, there are outliers, but women still broadly want an affectionate relationship. A subset of men, at least, are very happy with a quick...

a quick sexual encounter and then no ongoing encumbrances. You know, all the ancient dynamics are still very visibly there. Nothing has changed. All that's happened is that the social mechanisms we had for trying to manage those asymmetries between the sexes have disappeared. They've bled away. They've been dissolved. And instead, what we have is a seemingly limitless commercialization of the environment around them.

You know, we have whole industries, whether it's the dating app industry or whether it's the porn industry or whether it's the romance industry or you name it, whole industries which have grown up off the back of the dissolution of our social codes around sex and courtship.

And if you look further, closer to the present, for example, the reproductive industry, big fertility, you'll see that the technologization of ever further aspects of our nature in an effort to liberate us from its constraints. So to allow two men to liberate us, quote unquote, just for example, to allow two men to have a baby.

or to enable a man to resemble a woman or any one of the other innumerable ways that we've set out to abolish our own nature or to render it plastic and subject to our control. It never works. You know, humans still can't change sex.

Two men still can't have a baby. Men still can't get pregnant. The fundamentals have not changed. Our nature is still there. All that happens is that it's made a whole lot of people rich because it's opened up new domains of our embodied selves to the market. And so really, that's the story I set out to tell in part two of the book. And I also set out to show how this...

This relationship to our own bodies, this pursuit of medical mastery of our own bodies has been radically accelerated by the internet.

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And particularly by the very disembodied childhoods that a lot of young people now experience, where they grow up socializing fundamentally through digital avatars and then take as a matter of basic social justice the possibility of the idea that they should be able to reskin their meat avatar at will.

And which is, you know, combined with social contagion and common emotional pathologies which have been typical in adolescent girls since time immemorial, the upshot has been, as we know, the social contagion of trans identities, which has had catastrophic and irreversibly harmful effects on thousands of girls now. You know, the detransition movement is growing. I mean, these are familiar topics to you.

But this is Dan's dream of a kind of escalating fantasy of total mastery of our physical selves and this fantasy of a...

of a physical self which is separable from our inner sense of ourselves, as though our bodies and ourselves are two separate things, which can seem believable if you spend a lot of time on the internet, but isn't believable for a moment if you spend nine months pregnant, for example.

Or, you know, fall over and break your leg or really spend any time in the actual physical world at all. And so that's the story I set out to tell in the second part of the book. And in the third, I set out to offer some reflections on where we are now and where we might go next on the basis that we've already passed peak progress and the heady 1990s years of...

having solved boom and bust and ended world conflict and so on, and all of those other things we were promised we'd achieved are not coming back. And that in fact, life is likely to get worse. Let me ask you some questions about the second part, and then we'll move into the third part. So I'm going to summarize what you said again. So

You characterized the pill as the first major technology in what you describe more broadly as the transhuman movement, which is an attempt to free us or to escape from, let's say, the hypothetical limitations of our embodied selves. And so this was sold as a movement to freedom.

Now, that was freedom described as instinctual licentiousness, right? Because what free sexual access means is that you can have your wants and needs gratified at any moment. And maybe that's beyond the mere sexual right into the consumer domain itself.

So that's a very peculiar view of freedom. But as you pointed out, it was also accompanied by something that was naive, immature, and possibly even malevolent, which was this notion that we would bring about a sexual utopia where men and women were somehow equal, and that that would be an improvement in all regards, including on the male side. Now, we've already talked about the difference between R and K strategies and the fact that

When we switch to an R strategy, which is exactly what happens with the pill, we facilitate the psychopathic men. So that seems like a bad idea for the men and for the women. And I think it's actually irrefutable. There's good research evidence for this already, but it also makes technical sense at a much deeper biological level. So...

It's obviously the case that men who want short-term sexual relationships aren't the same men who want a long-term stable monogamous partner that requires responsibility Obviously, so okay. So now

And now we have this movement to freedom too, which you could be more skeptical about and call it a flight from responsibility. And then you might say, well, why the hell not fly from responsibility if it's so burdensome? Nine months of pregnancy, the fact that you have a dependent infant for multiple years, like 40. And why not fly from that? And I would say at least part of the answer to that is when you escape from responsibility in that matter, you also demolish the meaning of your life.

It's like a lot of the meaning in people's lives is obtained as a consequence of sacrifice, right? You sacrifice for your siblings, you sacrifice for your parents, you sacrifice for your friends, for your wife, for your children. And there's dignity and purpose in that sacrifice. And if you sacrifice,

lift that burden from people then they're left wondering just what the hell they are and what they're supposed to be doing and that doesn't seem like much fun given the radical increase in mental health problems particularly among women aged 18 to 34. So you move to freedom in this narrow naive immature and even pathological sense you escape from responsibility and

You demolish meaning and consequence and you facilitate the psychopaths. And then you put another twist on that, which is real fun, because there's the psychopaths and the narcissists and the Machiavellians that you're going to meet with a dating app and in the sexual marketplace, let's say. But that isn't...

the limit to the commodification of female sexuality. I mean, we know that about 25% of internet traffic and a tremendous amount of the motivation for its initial construction, by the way, was the commodification of female sexuality. So the engineers, for example, who couldn't get a date could at least

pictures of nude women or videos so much the better and obtain their gratification that way. And so that's 25% of net traffic. And you talked about Pornhub, for example, and the commercial commodification of

female sexuality. And so then what do we say? We say on the negative side, the pill emerges, that's part of the demolition of humanity in the name of transhumanism. It facilitates the psychopaths and the Machiavellians and the narcissists. It turns women over to precisely those men. It produces a massive commodification of female sexuality in the marketplace. And it engenders abortion at a rate that would have horrified

The early feminists and anyone else who's actually thinking about it's like safe legal and rare Well, we pretty much failed on the rare side a million abortions a year in the United States at the moment So that I don't care who you are what were your stances, but if you don't see that as a moral catastrophe There's something wrong with your soul now that's independent of its how we sort this out legally so okay, so

There's a question I want to ask you then that'll lead us into the third part of your book, I think. So, you know, I spent a lot of time teaching at the University of Toronto and at Harvard and then more publicly looking at the core stories that motivate humanity. The core story is a hero myth.

And the hero goes off into the adventure of his or her life and confronts the dragon and garners the treasure and brings it back to the community and distributes it. Okay, but in classic mythology, the heroes are virtually always men. And so the women in my classes always had a problem with that. If the hero myth is the central story of humanity, well, what does that mean for women? Well,

In Christianity, Christ is the savior of women and men. And Christ's passion story is a extreme variant of the hero myth. And so there's a notion at the bottom of our culture that the pathway to redemption for women is the adoption of a heroic mode of being, you know, in the face of life's difficulties and problems. But there's more, eh? Because

The thing about women is that their mythological orientation, I think, is it's multidimensional and complex. So there's a couple of other mythological variants that stack up beside the hero myth for women. There's Beauty and the Beast, where a woman finds a man who might otherwise be somewhat monstrous and predatory, but maybe is oriented positively in his fundamental nature, and she tames him. And that's a story of how

women find a man who's sexually attractive and also productive, responsible, and useful. That is the most common female pornographic fantasy by orders of magnitude, Beauty and the Beast variant. And then there's also the image of women that's put forward, let's say in Christianity, where you don't have an individual woman. You have woman and infant as a unit, right? And so now I would perhaps hesitate to

Suggest that part of the reason that you felt isolated when you were pushing your pram around small English town is because in our society I saw the same thing with my wife by the way when she had little kids our society does not hold sacred the image of women and infant woman and infant as the fundamental unit of female

as a fundamental unit of female identity. Now, you know, women's nervous systems too, as far as I can tell, women's nervous systems are calibrated not for their own happiness, but for the joint success of woman plus infant. So women are more agreeable, which means they're more empathic and more interested in people.

And they're higher in negative emotion, which means they're a pretty good alarm system. Now that increase in negative emotion makes them susceptible to depression and anxiety. And that increase in agreeableness makes them susceptible to exploitation by psychopathic men.

But it's very much benefit to their infants because you have to be agreeable to take care of an infant. And you have to be an alarm system to be sensitive enough to detect all the threats in the environment that might beset a vulnerable infant. So, okay, so that should move us into the discussion of the third part of your book. It's like this is a way of conceptualizing something approximating

female identity that will actually work for females. Possibly. Taking a very short detour from the book, I mean, on the question of why I felt isolated pushing a baby around small-town Britain, actually the explanation for that was very simple. Most of my peers had a year's maternity leave, which, by the way, is pretty good compared to how things are for most American women in Britain.

you have a statutory six months maternity leave everybody gets that paid maternity leave and then you can take in a further six months unpaid and most women take the full year which is which is a staggering amount of maternity leave compared to the situation in america where i believe something like one in three mothers is back at work pretty more or less before she's even stopped bleeding after having a baby which to me is frankly just barbarous um but leaving that aside i mean this is the the

How we got to a point where most women with dependent children work, and it's around 75% in the United Kingdom, is a long story in which the feminism of freedom is intricately bound up, as I'm sure you're aware. But really, the reason I felt lonely pushing a baby around small-town England was very straightforwardly, there was no one to talk to.

because most women were at work. And really, I think that was the first article I ever wrote when I first started to write in public, was a reflection on the slow draining away and the slow whittling away of civil society, which had taken place as a consequence of most women embracing paid work, which, to be clear, has a great many positive consequences, but also has had this effect

that really it's only retirees and a dwindling proportion of those public-spirited boomers who are left who are really holding my small town up in terms of having a functioning social fabric, full stop. And, you know, I clung to those older women who organized baby groups and what have you. And gradually I found a social life and, you know,

began to feel more normal again. But yeah, I mean, very, very straightforwardly, the reason I felt lonely was because I didn't want to talk to you. And this is a coordination problem, as I'm sure you can see. You know, if there's nobody to talk to, the only way for there to be more people to talk to is for there to be more people and nobody wants to be a stay-at-home mum because there's nobody to talk to. So it's kind of a vicious circle. But just

Just secondly, on the question of hero's journeys for women, I actually wrote, not in the book, but elsewhere, I wrote a short essay about this a couple of years ago, because in my observation, there is a hero's journey for women. It just doesn't follow the same track as the male one. And in fact, it has three parts which correspond to a very ancient archetype for a very ancient female archetype, which is the maiden, the mother, and the matriarch, the triple goddess.

who's a figure out of some pagan traditions, some...

in which these are the three faces of the same goddess, as it were. But they take on different aspects at different parts of a woman's life. And anecdotally, to me, it stacks pretty closely with what actually a majority of normally women's lives look like. You know, as the maiden, you're free, you have a sort of warrior aspect. Perhaps that's the point where you're pursuing ambitious professional projects.

The mother is more oriented towards home and the domestic sphere and probably just doesn't, bluntly, doesn't care about work as much. I mean, I know a great many very high-powered maidens who reached motherhood perhaps in their early 30s and then just found they just didn't care about the deadlines and the spreadsheets anymore, couldn't give a stuff. I mean, this anecdote, I'm sure, yeah, anecdotally, that's pretty common. Yeah.

But then later on, and this was something that I found very interesting when I did a psychotherapy training in the late aughts and early tens, was just how many of the trainees on that course were women in their 50s and 60s.

So these were women who, for the most part, already had young adult children. Their kids had gone off to university or were soon to leave for university. So they'd pretty much done the motherhood arc. They'd done the mother part of that. And they were moving into a new phase of life. They were moving into what I think of as the matriarch space. I mean, I think the classic matriarch.

three-part goddess term for this is crone. But I mean, you know, they were some way from cronehood. These were lively, vital, energetic, public-spirited women who had some life experience. They had a lot of connections. They had a rich social life. They'd met lots of people and they were ready to give something back.

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And in my observation, there are a huge number of women who reach the end of the mother arc, the mother part of that hero's journey, and will then retrain. So they'll have three careers. So they'll be very professional in their 20s. They'll be

a bit more, somewhat more part-time, maybe 30 to 50. And then they'll retrain and they'll do something like psychotherapy or they'll do ministry or they'll do spiritual counseling or they'll do...

or in some other way become involved in the community and they'll want to do something public spirited and give back and those women are a hugely rich force for deepening reflection in the culture for public service for all manner of incredibly positive usually quite

self-effacing but incredibly positive, constructive and life-giving contribution to the social fabric. And they're incredibly marginalized. They're almost completely invisible in terms of the liberal feminist narrative, which really centers the maiden. And it wants to foreground the maiden and to tell women that the hero's journey means essentially being the maiden for their entire life.

And everything else is just, you know, the mother is pretty much, you know, at best, if the mother is noticed, it's as a problem to be solved. And the matriarch doesn't really get a look in at all. And if she does, it's only so that she can be denounced for being a TERF or, you know, in some other way, you know, spat on for being a dinosaur or obsolete or, you know, old fashioned or, you know, out of touch or in some other way irrelevant or ridiculous. Right.

And in fact, these women are the backbone of the social fabric. I mean, those are the women who are making weak cups of tea for slightly traumatized new mothers like I was in small-town England and telling me I'm doing fine. And really, that mattered a lot at the time. Those are the women who are running brownies groups for no money every Wednesday because they can and because they want to give back. Those are the women who are retraining as counsellors and helping traumatize people for free. Those are the women who keep things going.

And yet somehow the liberal feminist version of the hero's journey just doesn't see them at all. And I think... So I've been very keen to make a case for a richer, if you like, a three-part...

Opening a space for thinking about women's hero's journeys in a more spacious way, which actually just observes what life looks like for mothers and in the arc of what the average woman's life looks like when she does become a mother.

Well, so that de-emphasis on mother and matriarch, let's say, if you look at it through the same lens that we assess short-term mating strategies, that we use to assess short-term mating strategies in men, you can make the same case for women.

So if you assume that not all ideology is motivated by positive and upward striving, you know, what would you say? Love of humanity. So why downplay the role of mother and matriarch? Well, because you want to maintain your freedom not to be who you choose, right?

but to maintain your freedom for an excess of, let's say, immediate gratification on the sexual and consumer front. And so what that would imply, and I don't know of any research done on this, because mostly it's been done with men on the psychopath side with regards to sexual behavior. My suspicions are that a fair number of these feminists who are pushing the freedom idea,

when freedom is the same as licentiousness, are naive, immature, and somewhat dark triad or tetrad oriented women, psychopathic, cluster B, borderline, etc. Who are looking to justify their refusal to grow up and accept responsibility by clothing it in ideological guise and offering a utopian story.

You know, it reminds me of Pleasure Island in the Pinocchio movie, you know, where all the delinquents go to have a very fine party all of the time and to trample over everything underfoot and who end up, you know, sold to the invisible slave masters that are toiling far below. So, you know, it's very...

dangerous for us to underestimate the role that the R strategist psychopathology plays in the construction of ideologies.

It's a major problem, and we're not good at dealing with it. I think when it comes to the motivations of feminists, I'd be a little bit cautious about... I personally would be cautious about writing them all off as immature inhabitants of Pleasure Island. There are certainly some among what I would characterize as magazine feminism, which is to say not serious feminist theorists, but the...

The feminism which falls out of Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl in the 1960s, which is really the girl boss feminism. It's the feminism of Cosmopolitan magazine. And it's really, it's a thin ideological veneer over what is fundamentally, as you say, a hedonistic project.

It has very little to do with feminist political theory in any sort of meaningful, thoughtful, well-worked-out sense. I mean, there's a huge body of very serious, very passionate, and very worthy, legitimate feminist work which still goes on, which I would wholeheartedly defend.

Those women who are active on behalf of incarcerated women, for example, or the great many women who are standing up to protest the incursion of men into women's sports or women's prisons, for example. Those I would also characterize as feminist. And so, really, I just want to offer a moment or two of really positive feedback.

positive sentiment on behalf of the great many women who stand up, as I would like to think I do as well, and say, no, actually, sometimes women's interests really do differ from those of men. And sometimes we need to defend ourselves on our own terms and our sexed interests in their own right, because sometimes those things can be marginalized. I believe that remains a legitimate project because men and women still exist.

And we still differ from one another in some politically salient ways. So I would not lend my support to a project to dismiss all of feminism as a childish, hedonistic project. However, I'm 100% with you on the kind of magazine feminism, and particularly where that has...

where that has reached a point where it's not even willing to accept that sex differences as such exist, even meaningfully, anymore, and has instead moved into a project of pretending that we can all just be formless animals

and identify as we choose in the interests, I don't know, of further self-actualization or further hedonism or whatever it is that those guys want. To me, that's not feminism. It's barely skin transhumanism or some other kind of ism, but it has very little to do with the serious political work which is still ongoing, which I believe has a right to a place at the table. Okay, so let me ask you then why you would consider that more serious work

feminism and political because perhaps you could make a counter argument that good men and good women aren't opposed in their fundamental orientation and that the project to demonstrate that needs a nomenclature that's other than feminism. I mean, I don't know. This is a genuine question, right? Because the problem with feminism is that, well, you pointed out one of the problems is the cosmopolitan version of feminism. That's actually also not the worst version

The worst version is a extraordinarily bitter and devouring,

What would you say, antipathy to the patriarchy as such, conjoined with fundamental hatred of men. And now you touched on why that might be. I mean, one of the things I've seen about the screechy blue haired mob types is that, and this is actually an expression of sympathy, is that there are no shortage of women out there who've never had anything even approximating a positive relationship with any male.

Right? Their fathers were absent or alcoholic or criminal. And all of the boys that they ever spent any time with were, well, the R types who are out for immediate gratification and who are basically good for nothing. And so I can understand why it's another one of these vicious circles that you described.

But it isn't obvious to me that all of these social movements that you describe, like is Riley Gaines, you know, Riley Gaines is the swimmer who's fighting hard in the United States against the entry of like idiot men. Will Thomas, to use the dead name, which I think we should all start doing all the time, by the way, is trying to chase him and he's clearly dead.

Well, he's not a... What would you say? He's not a faithful actor, let's put it that way. You know, and so... But is what Riley Gaines is doing reasonably classified as feminism or is... I mean, I don't know. And that's the question that I'd like to put to you. It's a very interesting question. And I mean, I suppose...

A few points to make on that front. Firstly, having offered a perverse read of what feminist historians call the quote-unquote cult of domesticity in the 19th century as, in my view, very straightforwardly a feminist project, as in making the case for women's continued value within the home. I read that as feminist, even though actually at the time I'm not sure they would have characterized themselves as such.

And certainly those women who did call themselves feminists at the time wouldn't have characterized them as such. And yet I choose to read them that way. So I suppose the first thing I'd say is that my understanding of what feminism constitutes is fairly expansive to begin with. You know, to me, it's really about speaking to and for those ways in which, as a sex, we have distinct interests.

And if that's what you're doing, then I think there's a reasonable case for employing the term. The second point I would make is, why shouldn't we have the term? I made the same point to Andrew Claven when he asked me that as well. He said, well, why would you call yourself a feminist, Mary? It doesn't sound like that's really what you're doing. And I was like, well, why shouldn't we take our ball and go home? Why should they have the term?

They're not doing anything which is in women's interest, as far as I'm concerned. You're a feminist if you're sticking up for women's interests as a sex class. And if actually your project is about abolishing biological sex in law and culture, then I've no idea what it is that you think you're doing. But it doesn't read like feminism to me. So I'm taking my ball and I'm going home. Yeah.

And I guess the third point I would make, just on the question of patriarchy, having made a full-throated defense of the very great many worthy feminist activists out there who are sticking up for women as a sex class, I'm now going to say that having said all of that, in my view, patriarchy doesn't exist in the modern world. It's not real. It's not a thing.

Once upon a time, I think you can make a fairly reasonable historical case that men and women both lived under a kind of a patriarchy where men owned the property, men were in charge, men had all the leadership roles, men had all the formal power, etc. and so on. That's patriarchy, right? That's just not the world we live in. Today, patriarchy doesn't exist. Right.

And in as much as women will point to this, that, or the other and say, well, that's the patriarchy, that's still there, I have yet to come across one of those cases which doesn't cash out as immutable sex differences I don't like, which, fine. I mean, humans can't change sex, we can't change our basic nature, and there are some aspects of that that I don't particularly like. Tough. You know, we still have to live with it. Yeah.

and pointing to some kind of invisible big bad that's out there and saying, well, this is all evidence of a grand conspiracy to oppress me. I think people are just looking at it wrong. They're looking for an external explanation of something which is just fundamentally an aspect of the human condition. It's a revolt against the tragic nature of the human condition, is probably how I would interpret it.

And I share your antipathy to it. It's also a revolt against the opportunities of the human condition because the burdens that we bear, let's say, in our mortal frames,

unique as they are to some degree to men and women separately are also the greatest opportunities of our life and there's a tremendous emphasis in classic religious tradition you see this particularly in the book of Job that you're to be grateful for your fate no matter what it is because being grateful for your fate no matter what it is is actually the best way of approaching your fate and so if you believe that

the mother and the matriarch are nothing but impediments to the maiden, then you're resentful and bitter about your eventual destiny. And that sounds like a really good recipe for mental distress. So I want to

further question you with regards to this feminism issue of nomenclature. You made a case for wanting to take back the domain, and I can understand that. Whether that will be successful or not, that's a different question, but I can understand your point. But then I'm also curious, it's not obvious to me that men and women have different interests, except when they're not cooperating properly and except when they're not

taking on their mature responsibility. And so that's another reason why I'm wondering if the project is best construed as feminist. I mean, women are going to be more likely to make a case for certain kinds of moral prescriptions. They're going to be more likely to suffer, let's say, the consequences of sexual licentiousness because they bear the fundamental responsibility for pregnancy and

childcare, but I would say that an ethos that's devoted to the sustaining and nurturing of women and children by men is also something that's radically in the best interest of men, especially of good men. And so I guess

If you're construing feminism as the need, it's tough, right? And like I said, I'm not sure I'm right about this. But if you're construing feminism as the need for women to stand up and make their case, what is it? To make their case with men or to make their case against men? Or is it to make their case against bad and exploitative men? So I'm not exactly sure why it's a feminist project rather than a moral project per se. Or even a traditionalist project.

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It's a good question. I mean, if you prefer to see it that way, help yourself. My project is, to be clear, it's not a universalist one. I don't have a prescription for what everybody should do because it's...

Because I think what works is beyond the broadly consistent patterns of our nature, what works is so inflected by cultural and material specifics that a good solution in one household isn't necessarily going to be a good solution in the next household. So I'm thus far a liberal that I'm very reluctant to offer universal prescriptions beyond saying that

that our embodied nature has not changed, and a look back at the last few hundred years of history will give us a fairly clear sense of those ways in which our embodied nature remains fairly consistent. And to make the case that actually...

Yes, I agree with you. We're liberated enough, all of us, men and women. And actually what I think at this point we need is probably more solidarity. And I think that's something that both of us have called for in different ways at different times. And in the book, in the third part of the book,

One of the aspects of that that I've argued for is a different attitude towards marriage, which is less oriented on treating marriage as the keystone achievement in a life and more as an enabling condition for solidarity and is less oriented on...

happy ever after big romance and more oriented towards radical loyalty. Now, I think that's a difficult case to make to somebody who's rich enough to be able to survive a divorce relatively unscathed. But it's a no-brainer if you're a young woman who would like to become a mother in a world which seems to be getting less stable, less certain, and perhaps also less wealthy.

I think under those circumstances, taking a more pragmatic approach and, for example, filtering from a relatively young age for a man who will make a loyal, devoted and virtuous partner is probably a better starting point than spending your 20s and early 30s having an exciting time with bad boys and then living hand to hand. What did you call it? Radical what?

Okay, so let me, so my sense with that, you tell me what you think about this, is that I think life is well conceptualized as a romantic adventure if it's lived properly. And part of that romantic adventure obviously is romance, and then you might ask, well, what are the preconditions for romance? Now, you're making a case that pursuing romance

short-term attraction as a maiden is not advisable, that that should be replaced by a more mature orientation that would have to do with radical loyalty. But then I might also point out that you could have your cake and eat it too on that front because

My suspicions are that the more radical the loyalty, the more romance there is in the relationship. So, for example, we know now, 60 years after the dawn of the transhumanist sexual revolution, that the people who have the most sex are religious married couples. So it could easily be, and I believe this to be the case, because I don't think

That a man and woman can give themselves to each other, like say fully on the sexual side. And I think this is probably particularly true of women. If that encounter isn't occurring within the confines of something like a relationship characterized by radical loyalty. Because the offering on the woman's side is much greater.

Yeah, this is very difficult terrain because so many young people are growing up now without healthy models of relationships themselves. They may have grown up in a broken home or a toxic family environment themselves. They may have very few relationship models to...

to draw inspiration from other than what they find on the internet, you know, whether that's some guru or the group chat or wherever it is that they're drawing inspiration from. And I suspect that we're going to go, you know, even if we see a backswing towards people trying to form more enduring relationships,

There are going to be some very painful teething troubles as people really fundamentally find themselves in a situation of having to reverse engineer healthy social solidarity from scratch with absolutely no pointers and very little in the way of inner...

inner resilience to build from. And I know personally of some people who've had intensely difficult times with that and sometimes been through quite harrowing experiences as a consequence of really, you know, taking a very reductive marriage ideology from the internet and then trying to apply that in the real world only to discover that actually, in practice, life is just more complicated than that.

And this is a sort of tragic situation that a great many young people find themselves in now, having had very little in the way of wider social fabric to draw from, often very little in the way of a support structure, and then find themselves trying to have kids and then live together in the long term with parents.

with almost no scaffolding around them at all. But they're trying, and I salute them for it. And I suppose at this point it's a bare hope on my part that we can find our way out the other side to the point where there are some older survivors.

of that first generation of pioneers who can, who will then be able to share their wisdom with younger men and women and say, you know, here are some things I learned from trying and screwing up in a bunch of different ways. And, you know, maybe here are some things to bear in mind.

But, yeah, I mean, we can only hope. Human cultures and the human social fabric is resilient over the long term. And even if we've reached a point of fairly extreme social liquefaction at this point, you know, I remain optimistic that we could come out the other side and find ourselves somewhere perhaps healthier and more constructive over the long term.

All right, Mary, look, I think that's probably a good place to draw this to a close. We got through the three sections of your book and had a fairly intense discussion about all three of those, certainly introduced everybody to the ideas that you're developing. And so I would very much recommend that people pay attention to your work. There's a number of, you mentioned Louise Perry, there's a number of

scholars in this more expansive feminist tradition who've emerged on the public stage as of late. And so that's all to the good as far as I'm concerned, rethinking our commitment to such things as, well, biochemical interventions to alter the way that we handle the deepest levels of our nature. Maybe we can close with this if you'd like.

What do you, you classified yourself earlier in the podcast as a classic liberal, and so you're tilting to the side of minimally regulated individual freedom as the best strategy for psychological development, long-term social stability. The open question there, of course, is how much that can actually function in the absence of an underlying uniting ethos. Let me ask you a question related to that.

Where do you stand with regards to such things as the liberalization of the divorce laws and also with regards to contraception? So what is all your thinking about this? Just to clarify, when I said I'm thus far a liberal, that was in the context of my generally describing myself to anybody who asks as a reactionary. So I really...

I'm some distance from being characterized, generally speaking, as a classical liberal, although I possibly started out there at some point or another. But as a reactionary feminist, as I like to style myself, my stance on no-fault divorce is that it's disastrous. My stance on contraception is that there's a robust feminist case against the pill.

And in fact, so much so that I devoted a chapter to it in Feminism Against Progress. So the feminist case against the contraceptive pill. What about other forms of contraception? I mean, there's a part of me that keeps thinking that maybe the damn Catholics were correct, you know. Now, that's a thought that I haven't been willing to entertain fully. Well, you know, you can make a case that

It might be possible for sensible people to use some intelligence when it comes to family planning. But, you know, the evidence that that's the way things have turned out is pretty damn shaky. So I'm curious about your stance on contraception in general.

I'm very ambivalent on this, to be honest. I think my central objection to the contraceptive pill is its transhumanist characteristics. And so I have a blanket objection to hormonal contraception across the board on that basis. It screws up. It screws women up at the biochemical level. It screws up relations between the sexes. It affects mate choice. I mean, we're familiar with the contemporary research on this. It's catastrophic. It's ecologically catastrophic. It's...

It's having a disastrous effect on aquatic life. It's bad across the board. And so there's also an ecological case against the pill as well as a feminist one. And other forms of hormonal contraception as well. With the rest of them, I'm more ambivalent about this. I think where you're not breaking something which is working normally, I'm less uncomfortable about contraception than I am.

that I am with hormonal interventions in our physiology. So I think I'd probably, for now, I think I'll take a squashy centrist stance on that and say... This podcast is sponsored by Talkspace. You know when you're really stressed or not feeling so great about your life or about yourself? Talking to someone who understands can really help. But who is that person? How do you find them? Where do you even start? Talkspace.

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What to me seems the approach most conducive to employing technologies in a way which is ordered to our nature rather than in revolt against our nature would probably be some form of fertility tracking in conjunction with a barrier method, for example, which I think is fairly common practice amongst not especially radical Roman Catholics, for example.

who will use some kind of barrier method or just abstain at the danger points. So I think, but to me, really, I think the way forward is not to try and not to pretend that we can put all of our technologies back in the box, but it's to try and find constructive ways of reordering those technologies that we have to the realities of our nature, which have not changed. And so I suppose the governing system

The governing approach that I would advocate on that basis for fertility planning, which is something that women have always sought to do, you know, long before we came up with something like the contraceptive pill, families have always sought to manage fertility at various times and for different reasons, would be to try and employ those technologies that we have in a way which is effective.

ordered to our nature and supports our flourishing in accordance with our nature rather than setting out to wage war on that nature. So I think that would be my centrist approach to contraception. I guess the question there is how do you distinguish between what's central and what's peripheral? But that's a perfectly reasonable thing to attempt to think through, and I can certainly understand your point. I mean, the pill, the hormonal effects of the pill are much more

pervasive than anybody had dared to imagine. They might have disrupted the relationships between men and women, young men and women on a permanent and political basis.

quasi-permanent political basis in ways that we can barely begin to understand. So, I mean, I know, for example, that women on the pill like masculine men less. And, you know, that's actually a major problem. You know, we have no idea what the political ramifications of that are. All right, Mary, so thank you very much for talking to me today and for providing your knowledge

for the benefit of everybody who's watching and listening. Thank you to all of those of you who are actually watching and listening as well, and to The Daily Wire for making this possible. I'm going to continue to talk to Mary.

on the Daily Wire side. I'm going to delve into the origins of her interests in such topics. And so we'll do something more autobiographical, which is generally the case on the Daily Wire side. And if you want to join us there, please feel encouraged to do so and also welcome. Thank you very much, Mary. Much appreciated. Thank you.