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The Dark Side Of Feminism's "Liberation" - Mary Harrington

Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd and an author. Women have been subject to a lot of changes over the past 200 years.

Mary HarringtonguestChris Williamsonhost

Mar 2, 20231h 44mWatch on YouTube ↗

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CHAPTERS

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Chapter summaries

OnlyFans, commodified sexuality, and the collapse of trust between the sexes
Mary opens with a critique of the cultural message that self-commodification—up to and including OnlyFans—is framed as empowerment. She argues this market logic corrodes trust, making vulnerability and long-term love feel too risky, with downstream effects on happiness and family formation.
- •Sexual self-commodification is widely marketed as empowerment
- •Porn and subscription models intensify adversarial gender dynamics
- •Erosion of trust and vulnerability undermines relationship formation
- •Long-term consequences: fewer stable partnerships, fewer children
Why Mary Harrington thinks she can critique feminism: from 'card-carrying' to disillusioned
Mary explains her personal trajectory: early second-wave feminism in her teens, then third-wave/woke commitments in her 20s. A prolonged period of rethinking—shaped by marriage and motherhood—leads her to question the idea of linear progress and the assumptions of mainstream 'magazine feminism.'
- •Former second-wave then third-wave/woke adherent
- •A seven-year worldview rebuild after disillusionment
- •Motherhood exposes tensions in liberal feminist narratives
- •Question: can feminism exist without belief in progress?
Work leaving the home: the Industrial Revolution as the real driver of feminist change
Mary reframes feminism as a response to material and technological change rather than moral awakening. She argues the Industrial Revolution shifted the household from a productive unit to a private/dependent sphere, creating new vulnerabilities for women and catalyzing legal reforms.
- •Pre-industrial household as the main unit of production
- •Industrialization pulls work out of the home and reshapes family life
- •Women’s dependence increases as economic productivity is externalized
- •Early feminist reforms respond to new structural risks
Power before modernity: informal female influence vs formal male authority
Mary challenges the simplistic story that pre-modern women were merely chattel. She notes that while men often held formal power, women could wield substantial informal power via reputation, community networks, and social enforcement mechanisms.
- •Formal power often male; informal power often female-coded
- •Literature and village studies suggest nuanced female agency
- •Reputation, gossip, and social sanctions as community power tools
- •Modern frameworks often miss non-institutional power
Progress as a contested metric: 'things change' doesn’t mean 'things improve'
Chris presses whether gains in women’s rights prove progress; Mary distinguishes change from improvement. She argues that choosing any metric for progress often presupposes the conclusion, making “progress” philosophically slippery.
- •Better on some metrics, worse on others
- •No neutral metric for total human wellbeing across eras
- •Progress claims often beg the question
- •Feminism read as adaptation to conditions, not moral evolution
Class fractures inside feminism: who benefits from 'equal treatment' policies?
They explore how policies framed as universally beneficial often optimize outcomes for higher-status women while harming working-class women. Mary uses historical disputes over sex-specific labor protections to show recurring tensions and parallels to today’s gender-ideology debates.
- •Women’s interests differ by class and circumstance
- •Factory protections vs professional equality creates policy conflict
- •Middle-class feminist priorities can align with industrial interests
- •Parallels to single-sex spaces and modern gender debates
Two feminisms: care/interdependence vs freedom/market entry—and the pill as the decisive win
Mary describes feminism’s long-running internal polarity: a care-oriented tradition versus a freedom-oriented one aiming for parity in public/market life. She argues the 1960s (contraception plus digital modernity) locked in the “freedom” model and squeezed out the logic of care.
- •Care/interdependence vs freedom/parity as recurring poles
- •Motherhood and high-powered public life can become zero-sum
- •1960s as the turning point where 'freedom feminism' wins
- •Contraception and abortion become technological backstops
White-knighting and 'male feminist' paradoxes
Chris raises online 'allyship' hypocrisy; Mary offers a cautious but pointed observation that self-styled male feminists repeatedly appear in sex-pest scandals. She suggests one mechanism is false equivalence between male and female sexuality; another is strategic camouflage.
- •Pattern: male feminist branding sometimes correlates with scandals
- •Hypothesis 1: mistaken belief men and women are sexually identical
- •Hypothesis 2: 'duck blind' camouflage for predatory behavior
- •Mary avoids imputations about specific names discussed
Sexual revolution meets the market: from Playboy to porn to OnlyFans
Mary argues the sexual revolution underestimated how quickly liberated domains get absorbed by commerce. Once sex is culturally reframed as consequence-free and private (via contraception), pornography and later digital platforms scale sexual commodification dramatically.
- •Freedom and trade are difficult to separate in modernity
- •Contraception reframes sex as private and 'consequence-free'
- •Porn industry expansion follows the new libertarian framing
- •OnlyFans as downstream of online market logic and parasociality
Online dating as the real hinge: turning romance into an e-commerce funnel
Mary suggests OnlyFans is not the main inflection point; online dating is. Dating profiles, she argues, train people to package themselves as products, making the shift to paid subscription intimacy a smaller conceptual leap.
- •Online dating normalizes self-packaging and market competition
- •Profile-building resembles digital marketing and conversion design
- •Parasocial dating and subscription models become adjacent behaviors
- •OnlyFans as 'difference of degree' after marketplace framing
Cyborg theocracy: freedom-underwritten-by-technology as a new moral order
Mary defines “cyborg theocracy” as a worldview where the good equals ever-more freedom enabled by technology. She claims modernity’s frontier has turned inward—toward colonizing the body (biomedicine) and the soul/sociality (digital systems).
- •Concept attributed to Ardian Tola; adopted by Mary
- •Moral order: more tech → more freedom → presumed better life
- •Industrial frontier exhausted; the new frontier is the human person
- •Biomedicine commodifies bodies; digital tech commodifies attention/sociality
Three wars on human nature: courtship, motherhood, and the body (gender/transhumanism)
Mary outlines three domains under pressure: the male-female courtship dance, the mother-baby bond, and the relationship to the body itself. She connects abortion politics, surrogacy/IVF markets, and gender medicine to a broader transhuman trajectory and class-based exploitation risks.
- •Courtship 'de-ordering': desire detached from fertility and commitment
- •Pregnancy framed as 'body horror' under atomized autonomy norms
- •Surrogacy/IVF as marketization that can sever mother-child bonds
- •Gender medicine as an on-ramp to wider freedom-of-form transhumanism
- •Risk: body-part markets exploit poorer populations (India example; prison organ-donation bill)
Abolishing 'Big Romance': from companionate marriage to self-expressive consumer marriage
Mary traces how marriage norms shifted from pragmatic interdependence to companionate romance (Austen as template) and then to today’s self-expressive model. She argues infinite optionality and economic independence turned relationships into consumer products, worsening the mating and birthrate crises.
- •Marriage meanings shift across eras; not a fixed institution
- •Industrial dependence increased the premium on being 'loved' by a husband
- •Modern 'self-expressive marriage' expects constant self-actualization
- •Swipe culture fuels 'Nexting,' anxiety around exclusivity, and fragility
- •Downstream: delayed commitment, unintended childlessness, grief over families not formed
What to do: let men form men, reject unlimited optionality, push back on the pill, rebuild solidarity
In the final stretch, Mary proposes practical and cultural pivots: more male single-sex sociality, a presumption toward stability over liquidity, and feminist resistance to commodifying fertility and bodies. She frames anti-pill arguments as pro-sex and sees her book aimed at young adults who still have time to choose different pathways.
- •Men need space to form men; single-sex institutions matter
- •Stability and 'radical loyalty' as antidotes to relationship liquidity
- •Feminist case against the pill: psychoactive side effects and cultural enablement of hookup norms
- •Raising the bar on sexual access changes incentives and reduces coercive/icky encounters
- •Goal: solidarity between sexes and resistance to marketization of the body
- •Intended readership: especially young women sensing a 'bait and switch' in liberation narratives

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