Reactionary Feminists Offer Bad Solutions to Real Problems

To more and more people, the promises of sex-positive liberal feminism feel empty. The sexual ideas that have dominated feminism in the last two decades — including that sexual liberation always serves women’s interests, that consent is the only relevant sexual ethic, and that consuming porn and buying sex are benign practices like any other — are beginning to ring hollow.

In this context, an emergent theoretical strand with the pointed, self-chosen name “reactionary feminism” has drawn considerable attention. It calls into question the liberal assertion that every form of sexual morality is anti-feminist — a view the Left has absorbed in recent decades. Although they work to maintain an appearance of ideological ambivalence, reactionary feminists are aligned with the post-liberal right, and they are finding success in attracting to that project women who are disenchanted with feminism’s wholesale embrace of sexual openness for its own sake. Their prescriptions are often at odds with what many feminists would consider emancipatory, but they are identifying real flaws in liberal feminism, and the Left should take notice.

At the forefront of this new conservative feminism are British authors Mary Harrington and Louise Perry. Both have written popular books on how postwar sexual liberation in the West has failed women.

In her 2022 book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Perry argues that shifting cultural norms around casual sex have led to a hookup culture that frustrates many women — even if they endorse these norms politically. In Perry’s telling, this is no wonder: as rigid sexual morality has receded, a liberal feminist paradigm has taken its place, one that de-exceptionalizes sex and portrays it as inconsequential. With contraception and a sexual culture in which casual sex doesn’t require emotional commitments, why would we need to have special guardrails around sex? For straight women on the dating market, this often manifests as feeling simultaneously sexually pursued and emotionally neglected.

Many liberal women are responding to this dilemma with heteropessimism, or a bleak outlook on male-female pairings altogether. While reactionary feminism indulges its own form of gender fatalism (I return to this below), Perry is suggesting that these disappointed women look elsewhere: the problem is not heterosexuality but a culture of sexual casualness pursued erroneously in the name of progress.

By making implicit liberal assumptions about casual sex and social progress explicit, Perry taps into intuitions most people share: for instance, that the expectation of emotional commitment after having sex is not too much to ask, or that sex can be a site of exceptional vulnerability and risk. Her willingness to say these things aloud has earned her an audience eager to hear something more nuanced than slogans about sexual autonomy.

Frustration With Liberal Sexual Culture

In academic feminism, sex is often presented as a banal activity, like going on a walk together. What happens in the course of sex is equivalent to deciding to go down this path or climb up this hill — with both people able to say at any time that they would like to turn around and go back home.

This neutralized view of sex might appear emancipatory, promising as it does to overturn the sexual scripts and social stigmas that hold up the status quo. But unfortunately, it doesn’t align with actual experience. The vulnerability and boundary crossing involved in sex can have far-reaching consequences if someone takes advantage of them. For most people, the stakes of sex going well or poorly are thus much higher than those of going on a walk, even when people consider it casual.

The broad Left’s consensus on this view of sex poses a dilemma for many women. If I’m expecting emotional engagement from a man after a hookup, does that secretly make me “trad” and a conservative? If monogamy fosters moralism and possessiveness in sexuality, does that not make nonmonogamy far more feminist? The success of Perry’s book, which came out when #MeToo was still relatively fresh, and there was cultural space to consider the potential downsides of sexual liberalism, suggested that many women had been privately entertaining these questions for years. Perry shined a light on the gap between political endorsement of goals like sexual freedom and conflicted attitudes about what that actually looks like in real life.

There is no doubt that being “sexually liberated” — expressed, for instance, by engaging in nonmonogamy and kink or BDSM — has accrued social status and moral value among progressive feminists. Countless self-help books and articles about ethical nonmonogamy have come out in recent years. It seems simply cool to be chill enough to have an open relationship and not to really want someone to commit only to you. The alternative of wanting a committed romantic partner is, by contrast, conservative and uncool. Last year, writer Chanté Joseph went viral with a Vogue article that aptly captured this dynamic and asked, “Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now?” One of the women Joseph quotes says that having a boyfriend feels “Republican.” A hard blow for romantics.

At the same time, it has also become cool to enjoy more physically violent sex. We can see this most evidently in the mainstreaming of “kinky sex” in popular culture since Fifty Shades of Grey. Data backs this up. If you’re a woman under twenty-four, the chance that your partner choked you during your last sexual encounter is about one in three, according to a representative survey by Indiana University researcher Debby Herbenick. Among millennial women (age twenty-five to thirty-nine), the figure was only 11 percent, and for women above the age of forty, it was 3 percent. This is an immense shift in sexual behavior across a single generation.

In interviews with psychologist Nicola Gavey, young women who experienced such “rough sex” said they felt pressured by current sexual norms to make themselves want it in order not to seem boring or prudish. The reality of these parallel cultural developments is what makes Perry’s critique of liberal sexual culture more complicated than closed-minded conservative moralism.

Marxist Rhetoric

Reactionary feminists are not hesitant to offer women well-established conservative solutions for sexual liberalism’s discontents: refrain from casual sex, don’t get drunk with strange men around, get married. But they wrap these solutions in new leftist rhetoric.

For many liberal and leftist feminists, marriage is a historically sexist institution aimed at controlling women and property. For Mary Harrington, by contrast, marriage enables “radical solidarity between the sexes.” It acts “as the smallest possible unit of resistance to overwhelming economic, cultural and political pressure to be lone atoms in a market,” as she writes in her 2023 book Feminism Against Progress. Rather than striving to be a girlboss or buying yourself flowers, Harrington proposes an attractive vision of monogamous marriage as radical solidarity. Who wants to be a lone atom in the market?

In her book, Harrington argues that the belief in progress has led feminism astray: toward individual freedom, away from solidarity and care for others. For Harrington, this has to do with extending the concepts of freedom and trade from the economy to human relationships. But this “logic of individual profit” goes against our human nature as social animals. Harrington therefore wants to defend the relational interests of humans against “the market’s power to liquefy, to commodify and to alienate.”

The concepts of commodification and alienation are laden with the Marxist critique that capitalism is not the right way to organize work and production. From a Marxist perspective, commodification and alienation are wrong because they thwart what is most distinctive about being human: free conscious activity (you could call that human nature).

In the reactionary feminist view, things are not as clear. The cases of commodification they focus on are surrogacy, prostitution, and paying another woman to take care of one’s children.

Reactionary feminists are quick to use leftist rhetoric in their critiques, but they remain vague about why surrogacy and prostitution are wrong. Is it because no one should divert women’s bodies from their “proper” use — reproductive sex within heterosexual marriage? Or is it because of the exceptional nature of exploitation involved in renting a woman’s womb or circumventing the mutuality of sexual attraction with money? We can find indications for both lines of argument in Harrington and Perry.

Struggle of Interests

For Perry, it is no wonder that men and women have had very different experiences in this liberated sexual culture. She argues that men and women have fundamentally opposing interests in the “sexual marketplace,” as she calls it, a contention that revolves around divergent proclivities and vulnerabilities rooted in biological reality. Women may be choosier about mates, for example, because women are uniquely vulnerable to becoming pregnant and bearing children after a sexual encounter, whereas men’s reproductive imperatives may motivate them toward sexual novelty and variety. For Perry, drawing on a concept that the Marxist radical feminist Shulamith Firestone first introduced, women thus constitute a “sex class,” which is locked in conflict with an opposing class, even while heterosexual men and women are oriented toward each other.

If women and men simply have different interests by nature, then the possible political solutions seem reassuringly simple. One can become a revolutionary to overthrow nature (Firestone wanted to outsource pregnancy to artificial wombs) or become fatalistic about sexual relationships between men and women. While reactionary feminists tend to push back against heteropessimism, they are guilty of a version of it themselves. To them, women and men can never fully overcome their fundamental struggle of interests. We must all instead make peace with them and tame them through institutions like marriage, which they argue contains the excesses of an unchecked sexual marketplace.

The problem with proclaiming an eternal struggle of interests between women and men is that it obscures the forces of socialization on gender relations and sexual violence. It takes women’s submission and men’s aggression to be natural facts.

For Perry in particular, each notable difference in men and women’s behavior ultimately comes down to how women and men are simply wired differently and always have been. Although she is a critical thinker in other regards, Perry is captivated by evolutionary psychology and very keen to incorporate every “just-so” story that emanates from the field. Feminists have often disputed and criticized this science for naturalizing what is inherently social: gender roles.

In the status quo, then, Perry might be right that women and men have different interests in the “sexual marketplace.” But when we take gender roles into account — and resist being satisfied by speculative stories that neatly explain how each gender stereotype has a deep root in our prehistory — we can begin to see that it needn’t be this way forever.

Conservative Materialism

With their Marxist rhetoric, reactionary feminists pick up, in a new and more explicit way, a well-established materialist thread in conservative argument: washing machines did more for the advancement of women than equal rights ever could. Conservative crusader Phyllis Schlafly declared as much in the 1970s. If we step back from the obvious political function of Schlafly’s assertion — cementing the view that homemaking is women’s true nature — we can see a materialist argument. Schlafly claims that what changed women’s lives and work most profoundly was not equal rights but electricity, mass food production, and household appliances.

Harrington argues in a similar albeit more sophisticated vein that “the story of feminism is one of economic transitions — and particularly of the Industrial Revolution.” What enabled feminism’s fight for women’s equal rights was that women went from being producers in the agrarian household to wage workers and consumers.

Harrington holds that as capitalism made work “more centralised, more mechanised and less agrarian, the resulting split between ‘work’ and ‘home’ drove women increasingly into a domestic-only role.” In the reactionary feminist view, then, the core of feminist politics is less a question of moral progress than of material conditions.

This sounds eerily similar to a Marxist feminist perspective. And it also seems at odds with propagating women’s and men’s eternal struggle of interests. But Harrington and Perry see the biologistic opposition of interests as part of the material conditions of women’s lives. In doing so, they muddle the concerns of those radical feminists who are hyperfocused on women’s biology, with those of Marxist feminists, who look at economic and structural reasons for women’s situation.

Reactionary feminists use ideological ambivalence as a strategy in their political project. As Harrington told The Atlantic about her book: “There are a great many conservatives who haven’t noticed quite how much Marxism I’ve smuggled in.” But she is also candid about the mission of reactionary feminists to build conservative and, if need be, “illiberal” institutions.

Why the Left Should Care

Reactionary feminists aim to convince us that, given the persistence of sexual violence and disrespect of women in liberal sexual culture, monogamous marriage is our best choice. They assert gendered behavior and preferences to be natural facts that we can only passively defer to — women and men will allegedly always have antagonistic interests due to their supposedly ingrained and static biological imperatives. Although they use Marxist rhetoric, their concept of women’s interests lacks a clear class analysis. While they acknowledge that not all women have the same interests, they never address class antagonism in capitalism but rather talk solely of the cultural expressions of “liberalism” and “market society.”

That said, the Left needs to take seriously the offer reactionary feminists make to women dissatisfied with liberal feminism: a clear-cut judgment that what flies under the banner of sexual freedom is not always good for women. The rapidly rising number of women who are choked during sex, often enough against their will, is just one telling example of a sexual culture in which women still experience a lot of harm. This harm persists even though rigid sexual moralism has considerably lessened or fallen away.

Adherents of sex-positive feminism have little to say about this — for fear of moralism — and understandably so. But that fear has created a void in which it is difficult to talk about what sex should and should not look like. A substantive feminist vision of sexuality and of what the good life for a woman is could fill this void. Instead, conservative women have mostly filled it with their gender fatalism.

Many on the Left mistakenly think of all feminist cultural critiques as moralism that distracts from the real concern: economic interests. As the Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai argued more than a century ago, even under socialism, people still need morality to guide gender relations and sexuality. Sexual violence does not disappear through economic reorganization.

Thus women also have a material interest in something that is difficult to grasp in purely economic terms: comradely men. But the feminist left rarely taps into this moral critique. There seems to be a larger focus on poses of political radicalism (like abolishing the family) that can be hard to relate to for the majority of people.

Reactionary feminists are right that it does women no favors when enjoying “rough sex” becomes a marker of being liberated. They are right that the sexual revolution’s promise of freedom has left many women feeling unsatisfied and vulnerable. But they are wrong in proclaiming women’s perpetual vulnerability for biological reasons.

What they ignore is that women’s vulnerability is socially made and culturally scaffolded, and that there can be a society in which biological sex does not make women vulnerable. However, such a world requires not only a widely shared vision of gender equality but also the willingness to proclaim some sex practices as bad for those involved. Even if it’s a hard pill to swallow for those for whom feminist politics means radicalizing liberalism, such a world will require some degree of sexual morality.

This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.