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Modern WisdomModern Society Is Failing Men & Women - Mary Harrington
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
War On Relationships: Feminism, Tech, Porn And Broken Modern Intimacy
- Chris Williamson and Mary Harrington explore how modern feminism, technology, and market forces have unintentionally eroded organic human relationships, especially between men and women. Harrington argues that dismantling chivalry, liquefying sexual norms, and pushing everything through digital or commercial channels has produced loneliness, intimate violence, and widespread pornified dysfunction rather than liberation. They connect online culture wars, youth internet subcultures, porn dynamics, and COVID-era policies to a broader “war on relationships” that replaces embodied community with optimized, monetized interactions. The discussion ends with tentative prescriptions: re‑sacralizing marriage and family, recreating single‑sex spaces, and acknowledging persistent sex differences and power dynamics instead of pretending humans are infinitely malleable.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasEroding chivalry removed informal constraints on male aggression that many women relied on.
Harrington argues that attacking chivalrous norms (like codes against harming women) was a catastrophic feminist ‘self‑own’, especially for women in less privileged, more violent environments who benefited most from simple, widely understood guardrails.
The sexual revolution decoupled sex from consequences, often to women’s and children’s detriment.
Widespread contraception and abortion increased total sexual encounters, leading to more unplanned pregnancies, fewer ‘shotgun’ marriages, and social pressure on women to accept loveless or degrading sex because pregnancy was now seen as their responsibility to avoid or resolve.
Porn consumption tends toward escalation, reshaping desire and sabotaging intimacy.
Harrington’s ‘law of fap entropy’ claims that what initially arouses someone will soon become boring, pushing users toward more extreme content; this can rewire arousal patterns so far that normal relationships feel unsatisfying or impossible without intense, specific stimuli.
Digital culture creates parallel realities and meme-fueled extremism with real-world stakes.
From trans debates to Ukraine narratives, the same facts are curated into mutually exclusive worldviews, turning conflicts into zero-sum fandoms that can ‘meme’ societies toward extreme positions, including casual talk of nuclear war by people detached from its consequences.
Modern systems increasingly monetize and mediate all human connection through markets and screens.
Dating apps, OnlyFans, Zoom calls, and policies like South Korea’s ‘untact’ strategy channel desire and socializing into commercial or automated systems, crowding out unstructured, unpaid interactions like family gatherings, church, playgrounds, and informal community life.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesAttacking chivalry as a certain social code has been the biggest self‑own that feminism could possibly have come up with. It’s been absolutely catastrophic.
— Mary Harrington
Once you start seeing the war on relationships, you can’t unsee it.
— Mary Harrington
We’re gonna meme ourselves into international nuclear war, and that’s fucking terrifying.
— Mary Harrington
The consequence of liquefying all courtship rituals and sexual norms wasn’t a feminist paradise of non‑exploitative sex, but endemic intimate violence and a multi‑billion dollar porn industry.
— Mary Harrington (quoted by Chris Williamson from her writing)
People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people.
— Chris Williamson
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
