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Mary Harrington's Plan to Repeal the 20th Century. [1]

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Date: 2023-08-01

I’ve written recently about Mary Harrington and Abigail Favale’s Trojan Horse misogyny in my last two posts. Harrington’s plan deserves some attention on its own.

In her book “Feminism (sic) Against Progress,” Harrington proposes three specific changes that society should make to fix the problems of what she calls Meat Lego Gnosticism: 1. Abolish Big Romance; 2. Let Men Be; and 3. ‘Rewild’ Sex. I will devote a post to each of her bad ideas, beginning with the one that should have been good, “Abolish Big Romance.”

When I first saw this, I thought for a minute that she finally said something I could endorse. I thought “Big Romance” was the corporate interests in media and fashion that sell women starting from infancy on the idea that our only existence should be for men. That our entire purpose in life is to find The One Man and ‘live happily every after.’ In fact, her idea is that we shouldn’t seek any kind of emotional fulfillment in marriage but should form ‘productive’ households like it’s still the Middle Ages. She says that marriage should be about ‘less personal fulfillment, or even romantic love, than an enabling condition for building a meaningful life.’ She does not define ‘meaningful life,’ but from the context that apparently excludes personal fulfillment and emotional closeness.

She gives examples of women who have businesses with their husbands from their houses, as though this is somehow empowering for women. ‘Willow’s’ husband owns a carpentry business in which Willow occasionally helps out. Willow has young children and therefore does very little toward earning a living, but wanted kids at a young age. “Ashley” lives in Uruguay with her husband where they work as part-time language tutors and teach low-carbon living. She and her husband wanted to center ‘family as the core of our meaning-making.’

Two anonymous examples of young women in exceptional circumstances are not enough to support Harrington’s premise. The first problem with her program is that very few jobs can be performed at home, and none of the working-class jobs she professes to be concerned about. It is not possible to be a truck driver, home health aide, or cashier from home.

More seriously, Harrington knows nothing about the legal issues involved in businesses. If a woman is in business with her husband, especially one where she doesn’t contribute quantifiable business-related work, she is just as vulnerable as any 50’s housewife to her husband’s roving eye. Harrington lives in England, and the English common law ascribes ownership of the money and property in a marriage to the person who earned it, almost always the husband. Willow has no claim on the overwhelming majority of the proceeds from the business if her husband decides to dump her. Willow is a little better off legally in community property states, where the property acquired during marriage belongs equally to each spouse.

Still, even if she is entitled to have the existing proceeds, Willow is not a carpenter. If her husband kicks her out, she can’t continue the business because she doesn’t have the skills it requires. She is almost useless to this particular enterprise. Harrington never considers the fact that one person is almost always more important to a business than the other one, and she doesn’t appear to care about how vulnerable that nonessential person is to the whims of the person the business needs.

Let’s examine this using the example of Wendell Berry and his wife. Berry is the author. It’s his name on all the book spines, flyleaves, and copyrights. He owns the proceeds from the books. It is within his power to keep every dime he makes; anything he gives to Tanya is a favor to her. She knows that, even if she never admits it. Her work is necessary to turn his sloppy notes and half-baked smeared pencil scratching into something that can be published, but it is never HERS. She does the tedious shit work and he gets all the credit and all the money He can replace her anytime he wants to, although it’s going to costs him money he doesn’t want to spend. No matter what the man says, he IS exploiting his wife, and their relationship is abusive.

There is no way to make the division of labor in ‘productive’ households fair and just. One partner is going to end up with the drudgery while the other partner gets the interesting and engaging parts. One parent will end up with the shit work of domestic life that can’t be accounted for as part of the business, leaving that person economically depended on the other. No one should have to depend on the continued good mood of his or her spouse in order to eat and live indoors, yet this is what Berry, Harrington, and entirely too many other people suggest.

Harrington really has a grim view of marriage. She advises men who can’t find a wife to ‘lower your standards.’ “Choosing one person also means continuing to choose them; that is, opting to ignore all the ways the grass might be greener somewhere else, even when things are a bit ‘meh.’’ “You can get a long way on stoicism and common purpose — but to do so, you have to foreclose separation as a possibility.’ Apparently the key to stable marriages is to learn how to be just miserable enough. “I think you’re gross but you're the best a loser like me can do” is not a good basis for any kind of relationship, much less one in which to raise children.

Harrington could have performed a service by noting that the real Big Romance — the toy, media, and Wedding Industrial industries that sell an unachievable ideal to young women — is, in fact, trying to sell us something. She could have argued for better stories about real relationships between men and women that aren’t romantic; that men and women can be colleagues as well as lovers. Of course, the people who need to hear those stories are young men, whose media diet consists of violent video games and movies in which impossibly-proportioned women exist to be saved and then discarded. There are good reasons to object to modern versions of Action Girl Hero, especially how she’s usually mostly a sex object and rarely shown as competent at anything but fake-fights. Show young men that competence and intelligence can be sexually appealing and better for long-term relationships than eye candy. Instead of telling men to ‘settle,’ tell them that there are other, better standards.

It is highly ironic that the best recent story of how to have a relationship is the Barbie movie. Ken exists as Barbie’s accessory; he only sees himself through her reaction to him, and if she doesn’t see him, he’s miserable. He reacts by creating “Kendom” with its horses and ‘brewski beers’ and mindless adoring Barbies as a response. After Barbie corrects this problem, she tells Ken she’s not interested in him as a boyfriend, but they can be friends. Friends are important! Friends can learn from each other and then be better romantic partners to other people. We need stories that don’t end in weddings. We need more stories showing good, stable, marriages where both partners are emotionally satisfied. Her program of ‘well, I guess I can’t do any better than you, and you can do the shit work I want to avoid” only makes people miserable, and will lead to worse problems later.

Next up, Number Two, Leave Men Alone.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/1/2184581/-Mary-Harrington-s-Plan-to-Repeal-the-20th-Century

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