Is Reactionary Feminism Doomed to Fail?
A Gender-Critical Critique
This week, we bring you an exchange on whether reactionary feminism serves—or subjects—women. Feminist philosopher Kate Phelan begins with a critique of Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress.
Why 'Reactionary Feminism' Is Destined to Fail
Kate Phelan
As a gender-critical feminist philosopher, I read Harrington’s book with both pleasure and frustration. For every insight, I found an assumption or an unasked question. Harrington seems to assume that some can be free only while others do “the dull, sticky drudgery that keeps the world of freedom . . . turning,” and that these others are necessarily women. She seems to assume that women need an excuse—the possibility of pregnancy—in order to refuse men’s sexual demands. She seems to assume that sex is naturally “dark[] and danger[ous].”
Why must the free individual be accompanied by a carer, and why must women be the carer? Why can women not refuse men on the grounds that they do not want to have sex with them? Indeed, why must women cite grounds at all? Why must sex be dangerous, and why is it always dangerous only for women?
Harrington’s is a radical critique with fatal blind spots. The result is a proposal—“reactionary feminism”—that is destined to repeat contemporary feminism’s failure of women.
Mary Harrington responds to Phelan, rejecting the concept of the “liberal subject.”
Reactionary Feminism Rejects the Premises of the Social (and Sexual) Contract
Mary Harrington
To put it more plainly: the notion that the social fabric represents some kind of “contract,” the atomised individual, and the narrative of “progress” are all doxa within the same white-labelled religious faith that orders all of modernity. My argument is that you can’t hang onto these and also escape sexism. You can only strive fruitlessly in that direction by attempting to technologise away sex.
Phelan seems to misunderstand me as accepting these premises and seeking only to quibble over the standing of women within the modern catechism. But I question the premises themselves. Phelan, meanwhile, appears to accept the liberal subject without question, along with the “sexual contract” within which this creature is presumed to exist (however asymmetrically), opting to antedate her account of its sex-asymmetric origins in an account of ancient history drawn from Pateman.
This Week: Activist Librarians, the Divorce Trend, and Troubles with Modernity
This week: Nina Welsch on why she quit her job as a librarian, Kat Rosenfield on whether divorce makes you hotter, Mary Harrington and Louise Perry in conversation, matrescence, steroids, what Featured Author Katherine Dee is reading—and more!