Mary Harrington

So, Bakayoke is trying to push forward a different kind of feminism, and you mentioned reactionary feminism.

That is a term that Bakayoke's acquaintance, and I guess you could say friend, Mary Harrington, who also runs in these circles, used to describe her version of feminism.

And Mary Harrington is a British journalist who says, well, it's not that feminism itself is bad.

What's bad is progressive feminism.

She wrote a book a few years ago called Feminism Against Progress, and she tries to recover a more conservative version of feminism Beth Greene- That is communitarian to go back to the need that kind of takes care of people in local communities.

Nobody dares to stop you.

You see, I was thinking when I began this sort of an event on the inauguration night of the second Trump term, when I was at a debate with amongst other people, Mary Harrington, who some people think is a a wonderful Olympic intellectual, and James Orr, who's now distinguished himself working for Reform UK.

And they were both completely relaxed over the point that I was making, which was that this man is lawless.

The pardoning of the people who tried to storm the Capitol was plainly an act of total lawlessness which no serious Democrat or believer in law-governed states could possibly endorse.

Welcome to Socrates Dialogues.

I'm Mary Harrington.

And today I have the tremendous privilege of being joined by Joe Laconte, an author, an educator and filmmaker, and also now my colleague as a guest presenter at Socrates Dialogues.

Joe, it's a tremendous pleasure to finally meet you in the flesh.

Be sure to tune in for future episodes of Socrates Dialogues.

You might be thinking, that's not Eric Metaxas.

My name's Mary Harrington.

I'm a writer and a past contributor to Socrates in the City.

And I hope it, I don't want it to be crusader symbols.

And as Mary Harrington says, you know, suicide bombers for Christ.

I really, you know, that's not where it's going, is it? I hope not.

Well, it's interesting because, you know, when you had the Unite the Kingdom rallies with Tommy Robinson, they've usually been rather disorganized affairs compared to the left.

Rain Fisher Kwan said, the lyrics to this song only make sense if you comprehend that McRae is presenting a searing Marxist feminist critique of the double shift, which sees women shouldering the burdens of both wage and domestic labor.

Which, by the way, is interesting because we talked about here, I think one of Mary Harrington's most trenchant observations about modern feminism is actually that it's operating from this assumption that work outside the home is empowering and valuable and something that women should seek to achieve parity with men on when that's actually sort of an industrial capitalist proposal for women.

work home separation, meaning throughout most of human history, there wasn't like a Don Draper commute on the train from Connecticut or upstate into the city where you get to Madison Avenue and you go up to your office and you have this like very clear separation between work and home that that in itself is actually kind of the capitalist patriarchy saying women should want to have this type of existence they should want to have parity right it's one thing to have like legal equality which women have achieved uh thanks to some people I like really disagree with and the second wave and we could get into that another time but disagree with the legal equality legal equality is great but uh then does it become demanding that equality for woman for women means doing these like miserable commutes and working outside of the home in a job that might not feel as purposeful for many women as tending to like the domestic sphere in some very important and consequential ways that we have come to to be convinced are less consequential by who industrial capitalist right because we've outsourced so much of uh domestic life to for example nannies uh or you know just other technologies that sort of thing so for tate mccray to say my own housewife a very interesting comment on the wife aspect of that right my own housewife a wife with ownership right so what it sounds like is actually this kind of gen z conception of the ideal life which is very understandable and sympathetic especially in a post-pandemic world where you can have a much more robust domestic life you can have a lot of a lot less friction in some very bad ways i think there's lot of benefits to be gained from having things like that take you outside of your house to interact with other human beings and we do lose something uh but also it's pretty interesting because she's talking about money too like just materialism just plain materialism think my paradise is tabloids and flashing life truth is it's more like loads of cash and a nice guy and a life lived right well right is leaving a lot to interpretation when you're also talking about how you want loads of cash like you don't need the trappings of fame that kind of take you into these high friction environments with tabloids and flashing lights you just want a bunch of money and in the video you can see like a bunch of money to just like have fun at home have some material things that you hoard at home, like, what does she say? Acres of open stars, headlights of precious cars, life imitating art, and then I just want to make a lot of money, be my own housewife.

And again, you see it in this video, like have an amazing yacht, have an amazing home, have loads of cash to have all of these material things, but you don't want to do it on someone else's terms, whether that's marriage or whether that's fame.

I had...

Do you know Mary Harrington from UnHerd?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

I haven't really got a good answer.

Maybe, uh, Mary Harrington.

[audience laughing] She's a very good, uh, feminist writer.

Huh.

Yeah, it's-

So, when I was teaching on this first in 2024, it was at the time Mary Harrington's book, um, Feminism Against Progress.

Mm.

And, um, Louise Perry.

The Case Against...

Those had both just come out, and I'd just read both of them.

And I thought, I mean, Mary Harrington wouldn't call herself Christian.

Louise Perry has subsequently started calling herself Christian.