“Feminism has never been short of enemies. Evangelicals, red state conservatives, anti-abortion groups, grassroots organizations like Eagle Forum founded by the Napoleon of all anti-feminists, Phyllis Schlafly, have been standing athwart the Ms. Revolution, yelling “stop” since its beginning. Now, a new generation of feminist critics has come along—Louise Perry, Helen Joyce, Helen Roy, and Erika Bachiochi, to name just a few—who look nothing like past dissenters. They’re hip, (mostly) urban, highly literate, and accomplished knowledge-economy workers, yet they see a contemporary feminism—defined by girl power, lean-in careerism, sex positivity, and sexual monomorphism—as essentially a formula for immiserating young women.
Mary Harrington’s bracingly intelligent new book, Feminism Against Progress, adds both a historical and futuristic dimension to the discussion underway. Harrington’s coming of age story—a middle-class girl grows up in a traditional home, goes to college, and becomes radicalized—would seem to be the biography of a familiar sort of young activist-in-the-making. She “mutinied against every form of ‘normal,’” devoted herself to the “pursuit of life freed from power, hierarchy and all limits,” slept around, took drugs, and hung out with a “genderqueer” crowd; she even briefly changed her name to Sebastian. But she was too restless and passionate a truth-seeker to stay in a predictable lane. Discovering that the communes she knew were dens of toxic power relations, she began to doubt her radicalism; when she became a mother, the scales fell from her eyes. Her near-death during childbirth and her visceral connection to her newborn put the lie to her utopian fantasy of individual freedom and, more generally, of feminist ideas of liberation and progress.”
Feminism’s Failures
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