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Mary Harrington's Second Terrible Idea [1]
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Date: 2023-08-02
So, more Mary Harrington. Her second proposal for fixing men and women is:
Leave Men Alone.
She begins her section on the need for single sex spaces by noting that women are out-competing men in many areas today, qualified by the fact that men still dominate the top of the socioeconomic layer cake. She will then spend an entire chapter arguing that women should accept being locked out of the top positions in society. Then, she spends the rest of the chapter arguing that women should stay locked out of the top positions in society.
She recounts an anecdote by Cherie Blair, about going with her boss and her husband Tony to lunch. Boss takes Tony to the all-male Garrick Club and leaves Cherie outside, presumably to find her own place to eat at her own expense. Harrington admits that ‘informal networks, such as private members’ clubs or golf clubs were more influential in securing directorships than formal qualification for the position.’ She gets this fact from this 2012 study from the University of Bristol which showed that at least in the UK, it’s still who you know not what you know. Harrington defends this system by noting that the only women affected by exclusion from places like the Garrick Club are women ‘from the upper crust,’ already-privileged women who see that they are still kept out of positions of real power. She openly states wants a ‘measured rollback of radial ‘gender neutrality’ in favor of sex-segregation where appropriate.’ She states that excluding a few elite Cherie Blairs from the opportunities presented to members of the Garrick Club is an acceptable sacrifice, even though it means that few women will ever really exercise power. The fact that the only women-only spaces she can find to compare to the Garrick Club are prisons demonstrates the hollowness of her position.
Harrington really does see the interests of educated women and working class men as hopelessly at odds. She compares women like Cherie Blair and Hillary Clinton (women who have been subjected for their entire lives to misogynist slurs from both the Right AND Left wings of Anglophone politics. I would very much like to know why she chose those two instead of powerful but less polarizing women) to the plight of working class men who have lost their jobs to capital flight, noting that the factories and mines have been replaced by less secure ‘gig’ or service industry jobs. This has caused a ‘devastating loss of agency, purpose, and dignity’ for lower-class men, ‘even as female employment in the same social strata has risen.’ Apparently to Harrington there’s a connection between women getting jobs and men losing theirs, even though the jobs weren’t in the same place or industries.
She discusses at length the closing of the Anstice Memorial Institute in Shropshire, a working-class men’s club. The Institute building needed serious repairs, but couldn’t obtain financing because it refused to admit women. The members voted to dissolve the organization rather than admit women and get the money for the repairs. Harrington defends these morons by noting some studies that say that men socialize differently than women and therefore need to be alone together to ‘cooperate with peers and compete with out-groups.’ Harrington states that if that is the case, then the single-sex group will have to ‘adjust its pattern of socialization’ when it goes co-ed. Harrington thinks that such adjustments are always detrimental to the members, but never provides any evidence to support this implication.
She gives a second example that illustrates the opposite of the point she thinks she’s making. She mentions that in 2022 Merseyside farmer Lisa Edwards ’received fierce backlash when she accused the 94-year-old Liverpool Agricultural Discussion Society of sexism for restricting membership to men.’ Harrington notes that there is a high incidence of mental distress and suicide in farming. She further mentions the number of ‘deaths of despair’ that are disproportionately a matter for white, working class males.
Harrington devotes several paragraphs to the importance of keeping women out of military combat units. She references “Matt” a former special forces soldier — and note that since he’s never identified we can’t confirm any of what he says — who reports that the unit formed a ‘natural hierarchy’ that enforced ‘proper behavior’ by “‘teasing and ribbing’ which served to ‘spotlight weakness, selfishness, dishonesty and disloyalty.’” Integrating women into such a group would ‘disrupt the balance within the group and introduce a level of dysfunction.’ No one ever specifies whether the ‘dysfunction’ was to the group’s hierarchy or to the military unit’s purpose. Harrington further notes that sexual relationships between soldiers in a unit were disruptive to unit cohesion.
It is a fairly obvious assertion that if what a person has been doing doesn’t work anymore, that person should stop doing that thing. Harrington’s prescription for single-sex male spaces is just more of what men have always done. If men are failing to thrive now, then the obvious solution is to change what they’ve been doing. Instead of more single-sex spaces where men ‘tease and rib’ each other, what we need are more integrated spaces, where men and women can work together as colleagues and coworkers, long before they try to form families with each other. Harrington’s objection to Big Romance would make a lot more sense if she then supported more opportunities for lower-class men and women to work together or socialize as friends instead of potential mates.
One thing Harrington never discusses but which is obvious to me, is that men don’t need any encouragement to think of women as aliens. A man who thinks that having women colleagues at his farmer’s coop will ruin the mood isn’t going to enjoy spending time with his wife later. Teaching men and women that we’re entirely opposite, separate beings with nothing in common is a recipe for disaster in a world where people live past age 35 or so. If we want people to form long-term commitments to each other, then we need to make sure people share something besides children. Both people need creative outlets and both people need respect for their ideas. It is easier to form the habit of open communication and respect at school or work than suddenly when sharing a home or negotiating 3 AM feedings. Harrington’s eternal separation between the sexes is no more just than separation between races ever was.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/2/2184772/-Mary-Harrington-s-Second-Terrible-Idea
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