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

... pervasive cultural message that says commodifying yourself, even to the point of making yourself a subscription product on OnlyFans, is not only legitimate, but it's also empowering. It leaves people in the situation where you've got this incredibly kind of adversarial and incredibly hostile and incredibly exploitative dynamic between the sexes, such that it, it's now almost impossible to extend enough trust and enough vulnerability, I think, to another person to be willing to take the risk of loving someone. And I think that's catastrophic over the long term for people just being able to find happiness or kids or anything really. Tell me, how do you arrive at giving a critique of feminism? Why do you have any credentials to do this? (laughs) Well, I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm a woman, which is a start. Um, I was a fairly rabidly, fully paid up, um, second wave feminist in my teens, and then third wave/woke/ well, early adopter of the whole kind of woke, um, post-modern world view in my 20s, and did my level best to live it, I'd say, until I was about 28. And then for a whole load of very complicated reasons, kind of lost my faith in that way of living. Um, and in the process of kind of reassembling a world view which made sense, um, which, which I reckon took about seven years, um, having, having kind of hit that quarter life crisis, um, I came out the other end thinking, "Well, I don't believe in progress anymore." And then I thought, "Well, I've always thought of myself as a feminist, but if being a f- if feminism is held up as one of the kind of central planks in the, in the sort of evidence stack that says we're, we're on a sort of never-ending upward path of progress," right? Um, like, and people say, you know, the first thing people say when you say, "Well, you know, prove it," like, well, I- if you say, "I don't believe in progress," and they'll be like, "Well, how can you say that? You're a woman." Like, you know, things are much better for women now than they were before. Mm. You know, that's just kind of treated as self-evident. And I thought, "Okay, well, this, um, is it, is it still possible to be a feminist if you don't believe in progress?" And I thought, "Well, I still care about women's interests and I still think those are often sidelined." Um, but, but then I- that sort of started me down a whole rabbit hole of, um, you know, the, the relationship between feminism and progress, and, um, and that, in the course of which I got married, I had a baby, and having a baby made me think a great deal more about what feminism thinks, considers progress to mean, most of which seems kind of, um, structurally predicated on not being a mother, or, you know, being a mother, put, put it this way, like, being a mum and being, um, emancipated in the terms that are sort of normally set out by what I think of as magazine feminism, you know, the kind of Jezebel kind of cosmopolitan variant, um, (coughs) they just don't, they don't stack, they don't, they don't square very comfortably. And so I spent, I spent, uh, you know, personally quite a bit of time trying to, trying to make sense of that problem, um, pushing a buggy around the empty daytime streets of a small town in England, um, trying, um, you know, it's not like your mind stops working just 'cause you've had a baby. Um, so there I am, sort of pushing the buggy around, thinking about, thinking about second wave feminism and thinking about being a stay-at-home mum and thinking about how different it was actually to the impression that I'd always absorb- internalized of it from feminists, from the, the, the sort of liberal feminist orthodoxy which says there's, there's nothing more