(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
More Bad Books I've Read [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-07-12
Fads exist in publishing. Usually this means that we suddenly get a ton of YA novels about vampires or picture books about cats. This year, we got the same book by two different authors: Abigale Favale’s “The Genesis of Gender,” published in 2022 by the Catholic publisher Ignatius Press, and “Feminism Against Progress” by Mary Harrington and published by right wing press Regnery. The two women have an obvious crush on each other. Harrington mentions Favale several times in her book. (NB: I read an electronic copy of Harrington which did not have an index or page numbers. She references Favale in the chapters on transpeople and in ‘re-wilding sex.’) Favale gave a favorable review of Harrington’s book at Public Discourse. Mostly their books say the same thing, so they merit being reviewed together. Given how much they like each other’s work, it is not surprising that their books say pretty much the same thing.
Both books rely on a biological essentialist view of humanity. The authors both endorse the idea that there is an unchosen ‘human nature’ which is divided into ‘male’ and ‘female.’ This idea is the body we inhabit limits our options and actions. Favale, page 83: “The concrete reality of the body puts a limit on choice, a limit on self-improvisation, a limit on social construction.’ Harrington describes this as her opposition to ‘Team Freedom,’ which she describes as those of us who ‘deny the reality of embodiment.’ Both women condemn Justice Kennedy’s famous line in Planned Parenthood v. Casey: ”At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."
While both women condemn self-definition, each one takes a different tactic to do so. Favale defaults to religious language, beginning with the title. She spends the first chapter of her book discussing the differences between the Book of Genesis and the Mesopotamian epic Enuma Elish. She claims that our distinct human natures are ‘given’ by God in completely separate boxes labeled MALE and FEMALE. Genesis gives a picture of humans as ‘part of a created order, a harmonious whole, that is brought into being and held in existence by a loving Creator’ and ‘our sexual difference is part of the goodness of the created order.’ [Page 43]
Harrington uses Marxist language and imagery, which makes it much harder for her to actually name who or what decides the unbridgeable differences between men and women. She condemns the influence of the market on personal relations and how the market ‘alienates’ women from necessary care work. In the first chapter of her book she says “The inception of feminism is the story of men and women adjusting to market society, and particularly of women’s response to the asymmetrical impact of that society on areas of our life in common that have historically been women’s domain: that of care and the household.’ She contrasts two versions of feminism: one that values care work and one she calls Team Freedom, dominated by “Progress Theology,” which sees humans as a ‘whittling away of every relational understanding of identity; and which sees humans as ‘raw resource for commodification.’ Team Freedom ‘dresses in feminist garb a commercially driven effort to deregulate all of human nature.’ Notably she never suggests that men could join in the tasks of care work.
Their different starting points produces a slight difference in how they justify their desires to end women’s rights. Favale just straight up thinks women are inferior to men based on her religious opinions. In her book, page 237, she states “If we take these biological realities as a mirror for God and humankind, the male sex is analogous to God because God endows life from himself but stands apart from it; he transcends. The female sex is representative of humankind because its power lies in receptivity.” Men are God and women are human because of gestation, which is clearly inferior to the five-second act of depositing sperm in a vagina. Harrington’s argument is more subtle. “If liberation for everyone means the radical separation of selfhood from embodiment, what does that mean for those who have to stay embodied? Who cleans the toilets?” The fact that the modern world hasn’t created perfect Fully Automated Space Communism means that we have to abandon everyone back to some kind of restrictive gender roles.
Despite starting from very different beginnings, both women arrive at the same destination, which is that we have too much freedom. Both women want to ban abortion, birth control, and gender-affirming health care. We need, in Harrington’s words, ‘a freedom haircut,’ which in both books is simply to repeal the 20th century. I note that both women fall into the same ideological category as Wendell Berry and the current crop of ‘post liberals’ who see expanding freedom as a bad thing. Our gendered bodies entirely determine our behavior so someone in government needs to enforce that separation.
Autonomy simply doesn't exist for these women. Favale describes pregnancy in treacly language as ‘an image of that Love that generates all things, the Love in which we live and move and have our being.’ [page 113] Not much room for morning sickness or pre-eclampsia in her world. Harrington rhapsodizes about pre-industrial households requiring men and women to accommodate to each other, without actually providing historical examples to check. Such cotton-candy fantasies of women’s actual lives leaves no room for volition, desire, or even self-improvement. What if a woman doesn’t WANT to weave cloth all day??
It should be remember that Justice Kennedy’s formulation, each of us gets to define our OWN concepts of existence and meaning. If we can’t make our definitions, who does it for us? Neither book even approaches a good answer to that question. What happens to people who don’t like their ‘given’ position in society, on things other than gender? If we can’t decide our gender expression, what else can’t we decide? Our class position?
Nothing destroys a biological determinist argument quite like the existence of transgender people, and so both books spend most of their text attacking transpeople. If human nature is the result of our genitals, then there shouldn’t be anyone who finds their assigned gender identity painful. Thus, both books spend most of their pages attacking transgender people and gender-affirming healthcare.
Both women use the work of John Money to support their conclusions that human nature is irreducibly male or female. The problem with their analysis is that while Money’s treatment of David and Brian Reimer was clearly abusive, it was also imposed on the boys. Nothing about Money’s treatment was consensual. Money imposed a female gender identity on David Reimer at 8 months old, before the boy could speak. This is much more like traditional ways of raising girls and boys — the parents decide that boys wear blue and like trucks and girls like baby dolls and we are pink — that anything resembling contemporary versions. Money’s treatment of David Reimer imposed a rigid gender binary on the boy that followed tropes now condemned as sexist. Rather than proving that gender expression is determined by chromosomes, the Reimer twins’ nightmare shows the damage from imposing gender identity on unwilling subjects. In fact, as this Wikipedia article on Intersex conditions notes, previously most people born with ambiguous genitalia were assigned female based on sexist assumptions about low libido being a feminine characteristic.
The same faults appear in their discussions of hormonal birth control and abortion. Favale describes bodily autonomy as impossible for women. It is for women a temptation, ‘a promise that hides a lie.’ “’Take this pill, says the serpent of the new millennium, ‘and ye shall be as men’” [page 113] directly connecting the birth control pill with Satan. Harrington wants to ‘re-wild’ sex by abandoning the technological control of pregnancy. Harrington fancies that ‘many men would prefer a robust ‘no’ from a self-possessed young women unneutered by progesterone and in command of her own reproductive cycle’ but provides no evidence for this. Favale states that consent is ‘a precarious and hollow platform on which to build an entire sexual ethics.’ Harrington fancies that ‘many men would prefer a robust ‘no’ from a self-possessed young women unneutered by progesterone and in command of her own reproductive cycle’ but provides no evidence for this. Both books condemn abortion as the ‘taking of a human life,’ repeating ordinary right wing positions that can be found at any Republican Party website. Pregnancy and lactation are just what women ARE to these authors, so any analysis of its effects on women’s lives is irrelevant. Harrington at least acknowledges a few times that being a stay-at-home mother is only a good idea if the woman has a kind partner and enough money.
The final problem with both books is that they simply leave men mostly out of the picture. Women are expected to make men conform their libidos to women’s cycles and reward care work that women do for free, but neither women describes any actual method to make this happen. Harrington is actually more offensive here, in that she says we have to recreate men-only spaces such as social clubs and allow men to have the armed forces to themselves. She recounts a story told by Cherie Blair about how when she and her husband Tony were young professionals, their boss took Tony to the Garrick Club which didn’t admit women. Tony got the connections and Cherie did not. Harrington simply says that privileged women need to ‘lose a measure of the benefits’ that we’ve received from Civil Rights laws. She compares the Garrick Club to a working men’s club that didn’t admit women and had to be destroyed because one condition of getting a loan for repairs was that the club cease discrimination against women. Harrington laments that the working class men lost their recreation site because they held on to their bigotry. Harrington refuses to consider that something that benefits Cherie Blair would also benefit working class women.
What makes these books so very disappointing is that there is a real need for detailed discussions on how to recreate the best things that the acid of consumer capitalism have damaged or destroyed. We do need to restrain the Market’s reach into our personal and community lives. We do need robust communities in the physical world; cyberspace isn’t a substitute for families and neighborhoods. These two beneficiaries of the modern world’s support for self-creation decision that the answer to these questions is to return to rigid gender roles and restrict our most intimate decisions about private life only makes that chore harder. We don’t need to fight battles over conquered territory; we need to repair the damage those battles caused while maintaining our victories. These women do nothing but cede land back to the defeated enemy.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/12/2179067/-More-Bad-Books-I-ve-Read
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
