Hello everybody I had the chance today to talk to Mary Harrington author of Feminism Against Progress which was published in 2023.

Mary's analysis is that the feminist body of thought emerged in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution when men and women were both

recalibrating their social roles and that it had divided into the feminism of

care which is less classically feminist and the feminism of freedom which is what most people would identify with

feminism now. She we talked also about the transhumanist spin, let's say, on the feminism of freedom,

discussing the invention of the birth control pill

and its radical effects on individuals and society.

Radical and in many ways perverse effects

because the pill was touted as the gateway

to the hedonistic sexual utopian universe

of ultimate equality and gratification of every whim and actually

turned very rapidly into universal abortion at the rate of a million a year in the United States,

the radical destabilization of sexual relations between men and women,

handing women over to their worst whims and also to psychopathic men who are much more likely to

engage in short-term sexual strategies and then the general commodification of female sexuality, let's say on the pornography front,

which occupies about 25% of internet traffic.

Anyways, we weave our way through all of that and so join us.

So Mary you launched your book Feminism Against Progress in spring of 2023.

So let's, why don't you start by walking us through the book and the argument that you were making there?

Okay, well it's, it's a story in three parts I guess. There's a there's a past, a present and a future and really what I set out to do was answer a question which had become clear to me after I myself had a child, which was why is it that

motherhood is such a blind spot, it seems, in the women's movement.

And as I read into that,

...