The following is a transcript excerpt from Andrew Klavan’s conversation with Mary Harrington on what reclaiming “feminism” could look like. In this section, Harrington explains her advocation for embracing certain feminist values without abandoning the entire ideology. She believes in upholding “the positives which came out of women’s emancipation” and that women should not “lose the privilege of being considered a person.” You can listen to or watch the full podcast episode on DailyWire+.
Start time: 1:06
Andrew Klavan: Just the other day, I got into a debate with my son Spencer. He had written a piece for Fairer Disputations — where you [Mary] sometimes appear — about chivalry, and I described it, I described Fairer Disputations, as women who are smart enough to realize that feminism has gone bad but refuse to get rid of the name “feminist.” And he rebuked me. He said that I was allowing the Left to co-opt the term “feminism,” and that since I care about the rights of women, I myself am a feminist. But who’s right there? I mean, I feel that feminism has been a failure, and maybe we should just say that. But does he have a point?
Mary Harrington: I’m going to be ecumenical on this. I’m going to say you’re both right. Spencer’s right in the sense that there is more than one feminism, and I don’t think it’s self-evident that we have to hand feminism to the Left. But I think you’re right in the sense that, particularly in the United States — and I do think this is especially pronounced in the United States, for reasons that I can bore you with for hours if you let me — but it’s especially pronounced in the United States that a certain subset of feminism has become so dominant that everybody on the Right thinks that’s just the entirety of the movement. And they don’t get the history because it’s been memory hold by people who don’t like us.
And so what America, in particular, understands about feminism is a very limited, a very narrow, and a very aggressively liberal, aggressively disembodied, and aggressively, I would argue, elite bourgeois version understanding of the movement, which is hostile to a great many conservative aims and actively sets out to attack a great many conservative keystone positions. So, I mean, from an American perspective, I’d say you’re right, but from a more historical, more nuanced, more international perspective, I would say Spencer has a point as well.
I can elaborate. Historically, the women’s movement is internally very fractious. You know, we’ve always argued amongst ourselves about what it means. My framing for why that is is that I think we need to throw the progress story out of the window. I think the progressivist narrative that says we’re going from the bad past to the good future and that this can continue indefinitely and this always means more freedom and it always means more stuff and it always was means more Leftism, I think that’s B.S., if you forgive me. It’s simply simply false.
We’re obviously reaching a point now with a lot of these liberatory movements where we’re really scraping the barrel; we’re reaching diminishing returns. And I would say that for all but a very elite subset of women, the liberal feminist narrative is very obviously at that point now. It’s actively degrading life for all but the wealthiest women. And again, from an American perspective, if I thought that was all of feminism — as I think you’d be forgiven for thinking if you were an American conservative, you know — I would absolutely want to chuck it out of the window and say, “A plague on all of your houses. Be gone.” You know, let’s start again with a fresh slate.
When I stuck “reactionary feminist” in my Twitter bio, it was kind of as a joke. It was the end of a long-running Twitter argument, all through Twitter direct message with a friend, about whether or not post-liberal meant anything. We argued about this for months, and eventually he said, “No, no, you should use reactionary.” And I said, “No, no, post-liberal is useful.” And I’m not going to bore you with the details, but, in the end, I conceded the point. I was like, ok, no, I buy “reactionary.” It’s more punk. Ok, fine. Let’s get rid of “post-liberal”; let’s have “reactionary” instead. It’s fight-ier.
So I changed my Twitter bio just to see how long it would take him to notice. It took about three days, I think. But in the meantime, a bunch of other people noticed, including First Things who said, “Would you like to write something for First Things about what you mean? This is an interesting term.” And then I had to figure out what I meant. And now it’s a book. So that’s kind of the origin story. It literally started as a meme, which then became a thing. And I like it because it’s a signal scrambler. It poses the question, which really you [Klavan] started with, which is to say, you know: Do you have to believe in progress if you want to be a feminist? Can you care about the interests of women without signing up to the whole of the rest of that baggage train? And it’s a long baggage train now — as you spend every week discussing, as does The Daily Wire is very fond of going into in some depth. It’s a long baggage train, and there’s a lot of stuff there that you might or might not be signed up to. There’s a great deal of it that I’m not signed up to.
But I still think that men and women are fundamentally different in some ways, which you can’t just, you know, innovate away and that you can’t just pretend are not true and that we all irreducibly, you know, we’re equal. We’re equal in dignity and our capacity for excellence; however, there are some irreducible differences, particularly where it comes to sex, reproductive roles, and those things have political consequences. You know, at scale, they matter politically and they still matter, even though we live pretty comfortable, materially frictionless lives, you know, as denizens of the high-tech developed first world.
There are still some material differences. I mean, particularly when you have kids, the rubber hits the road and, you know, men can’t breastfeed; men can’t gestate, and there’s a whole bunch of subtler differences as well. Those things still matter. You know, if we’re not going to call giving a stuff about that and wanting to talk about it and wanting to have a politics which engages with that, if we’re going to call it “feminism,” what are we going to call it? Because it’s a thing, right?
So I say, why shouldn’t we? Let’s just take the word back, you know? Why should they have it?
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Catch the full interview with Mary Harrington on The Andrew Klavan Show on DailyWire+.