Modern WisdomThe Dark Side Of Feminism's "Liberation" - Mary Harrington
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Mary Harrington Challenges Feminism, Freedom, and the Cyborg Future
- Mary Harrington argues that modern feminism is less a linear story of moral progress and more a reaction to changing material and technological conditions, from the Industrial Revolution to the pill and the internet.
- She contrasts a “feminism of freedom” that prioritizes individual autonomy with a “feminism of care” that centers dependence, motherhood, and relational bonds, claiming the former has decisively won and left serious human costs.
- Harrington critiques the sexual revolution, hormonal birth control, commodified online dating, porn, and OnlyFans as creating adversarial, transactional relations between the sexes and undermining trust, intimacy, and family formation.
- She warns of a coming “cyborg theocracy” and transhumanist market in bodies and reproduction, and calls for a post-romantic, solidarity-based model of marriage, limits on technological “freedom,” and a renewed respect for female embodiment and dependence.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasReframe feminism as historical adaptation, not automatic progress.
Harrington urges listeners to see feminism as women’s strategic response to technological and economic upheavals (e.g., work leaving the home, the pill), rather than as a simple moral arc toward ever-greater freedom; this allows a more honest audit of gains and losses.
Recognize the trade‑offs of the “feminism of freedom.”
Prioritizing autonomy, paid work, and detachment from dependency has delivered real benefits, but has also devalued motherhood, care work, and interdependence, leaving many women lonely, ambivalent about pregnancy, and structurally set against their own bodies.
Treat hormonal birth control as a powerful psychoactive technology with social costs.
Harrington and others report that the pill alters libido, attraction, and mood, and enabled hookup culture by decoupling sex from consequences; she argues a feminist “pushback” on routine pill use could reduce degrading sexual encounters and re-raise the bar for intimacy.
Interrogate how markets colonize sex, bodies, and relationships.
From Playboy to online dating to OnlyFans and surrogacy, once sex and reproduction are treated as private and consequence‑free, they quickly become sites of trade; Harrington warns that commodification tends to benefit elites while exploiting poorer women’s bodies and fertility.
Resist the slide into transhumanist treatment of bodies as modular parts.
She connects gender medicine, organ-for-sentence-reduction schemes, and commercial surrogacy to a broader “cyborg theocracy” that sees human bodies as Lego-like resources, arguing this will create class‑based markets in organs, wombs, and gametes unless politically resisted.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesPregnancy doesn’t just create a baby; it also creates a mother.
— Mary Harrington
Feminism isn’t about moral progress; it’s a response to material conditions.
— Mary Harrington
We’ve finished industrializing the world, so now we’re colonizing the human body and soul.
— Mary Harrington
Choosing one person is by definition settling, because everybody annoys their partner after a while.
— Mary Harrington
We need an Occupy Ourselves movement.
— Mary Harrington
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