The virtues of masculinity, or a reactionary feminist speaks her mind

“It’s not obvious to me that humanity is morally improved from over 2000 years ago.” – Mary Harrington

Like many doomists, she is personally cheerful. In my limited experience, sample size 3,  the depressives are hopeful about the future and cheerful about what is going on, while the doomists are personally happy but inclined to see everything going to shit, which it is.

 

Apparently today it is sufficient to be a reactionary that one believes the following:

  1. There is no progress. There are only trade-offs.
  2. People cannot change sex.
  3. Men and women do not have perfectly aligned interests and our negotiations are eternal and never completely resolved.

Mary Harrington appears as a columnist in  UnHerd. 

For what it is worth, she was gay. “Every woman I dated in the nineties is now a man”, She is now married to a biological man.  She has borne at least one child. She relates as a fact that the child’s DNA lingers in the body of their mothers, and that mothers are  permanently affected by having borne children.

She writes: on “The Virtues of Masculinity”:

Gender studies courses should only be open to people who either have children, or have spent time working with farmyard animals. What else am I to conclude after learning that academics in this field (especially childless ones) think all sex-based traits are down to “nurture” rather than “nature”, even when it comes to the difference between hens and roosters?..

 

“..the underbelly of the internet is full of men violently hostile to the norms of a “feminist” mainstream that deplores the things they value, and who daydream increasingly vividly about the search for glory. Perhaps they will confine this to the realm of fantasy forever. But perhaps they won’t….

“None of this is to offer an unqualified endorsement of these traits, which have many downsides. But wouldn’t we be better-advised to seek constructive roles for the men who possess them, rather than trying to “educate” (in other words shame) “toxic masculinity” out of existence. Especially if the alternative is a growing subculture of men who have gone beyond daydreaming online about “Vikings”, to actively seeking to recreate their violent, restless and hypermasculine world in the 21st century.”

 

I am increasingly of the view that a great reaction – masculinist, inegalitarian, heroic – is coming, and that it MUST come if we are not to be reduced into a life equivalent to the collectivism of slime mold.

Back to the interview and Mary Harrington, to conclude: she says some really interesting things at minute 52:00

“Central to my reactionary feminist thesis is that we have come to the end of the gains we can make by centering freedom….we need a root and branch reexamination of the material conditions we are in now…If you are stuck in the industrial paradigm and you think  more liberation is self evidently better…I can see why you think you are a feminist… we are all of us, men and women alike, liberated enough, and what we need is more and better obligations…”

An interesting thinker. I shall pay more attention to her. You should think about subscribing to UnHerd.