Episode 3 reading list
Now we've got The Pill
Contraception: The Good, the Bad, the Impossible?
Women have always made efforts to control their fertility. In this episode, we discuss a book about the (often) unacknowledged effects of hormonal contraception as well as Mary Harrington’s suggestion that a new feminist position (one “against progress”, as in the title of her new book Feminism Against Progress) that young women no longer go on The Pill as teenagers, as is routine among a large swath of the developed world. If you think that sounds idealistic/impossible, just wait to until you see what we highlight about the feminist past of contraception…
Contemporary texts
This Is Your Brain on Birth Control, by Sarah Hill
Hormones aren’t something that happen to you — they are you. This is the humbling and at times horrifying revelation at the core of Hill’s book. While Hill doesn’t have a pro- or anti-pill agenda (though she did take it to delay her fertility and remains grateful for that option), she doesn’t mince words when it comes to acknowledging that a woman whose hormones who are being chemically altered is — inevitably — a different version of herself.
Now, as you might expect from a brain that is wired for sex, sex hormone receptors are on virtually all the major structures of the brain. Think about what this means for a minute, because it’s actually kind of profound. When cells in the body are equipped with hormone receptors, it means that they’re programmed to do different things depending on whether that hormone is present or not. This means that your brain—that super-powerful CEO of your nervous system that is in charge of all the things about you that make you, you—has been programmed to act differently depending on the sex hormones being released in the body. This is pretty deep stuff. The version of yourself that your brain is creating right now is different from the version of yourself that would be created in the presence of a different set of sex hormones. (42)
Feminism Against Progress, by Mary Harrington
Like Louise Perry (author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution), Harrington is challenging the shibboleths of third-wave feminism as regards the re-norming of sexual mores in the birth control era. While for many women on the upper end of the socio-economic spectrum, contraception has been a net benefit, Harrington sees less benefit for women of other classes, particularly in the way that it has changed social mores regarding paternal responsibility for unplanned pregnancies.
And there’s more… (source is this interview; I’ve made light edits to make it readable)
If we’re going to lead, if we’re going to make a female-led push back against this idea that we’re all just dematerialized cells piloting meat suits that we can remodel as we see fit, then actually it has to begin with women because really the entry into the transhumanist era began with women. I’ve borrowed the metaphor of detransition to suggest how we might how we might take a step back from this very extreme trajectory which I see us as being on at present into this belief that we can dematerialize ourselves — which I don’t think is actually achievable or at least if it even if it is attainable, it’ll be attainable for a microscopic few and it will immiserate the vast majority of us. It will exploit and abuse and mutilate and leave people chronically dissociated and still fundamentally unsatisfied because they’ve tried to reach a state of fulfillment by denying most of what we are, which is embodied, an animal, this phenomenal mixture of flesh and and thought which is what what it what it is to be a person.
I wrestle every day with how to remain present, how to remain grounded. This isn’t just about trans body modifications, this is about a sort of permanent state of dissociation from the the here-and-now that really more of us than not are just in without really thinking about it. And if we’re going to step back from that it has to start I think with women, and so I've proposed as one of the approaches we might take: rejecting the Pill. It’s simply not workable to pronounce from on high that the Pill is going to be banned; the only way the Pill is ever going to become less of a feature in our social and cultural lives is if the young pretty women mutiny against it. And actually that's already happening the young the 20-somethings. There’s a growing movement among hundreds of thousands, millions, of our very young women who who are routinely put on the pill at the age of 14 or 15 who are now coming off it in their 20s and speaking up.
These girls are being put on this basically so that they can be sexually available without without any downstream consequences of that — from maybe 12 or 14, just as a matter of absolute routine. And so it’s completely normalized for them to have pretty loveless — and often very degrading — sexual encounters as a consequence of this. And they they come off it 10 years later having had all manner of possibly not very pleasant encounters and think “what was that for?”, “what was that even for?” So my my argument is a pro-intimacy, a pro-women, pro-pleasure argument for just saying no.
Since this book isn’t out in the US until late April (although you can buy the audio book — read by Harrington herself, which is what we did), you can watch the entirety of the interview that quote comes from as well as many others — she’s made the rounds on Triggernometry, UnHerd, Modern Wisdom, and Walk-Ins Welcome.
Older text:
Right Marital Living, by Ida C. Craddock (facsimile; as text here)
I could tell you Ida Craddock’s life story — but I doubt you’d believe me… Married to an imaginary man, hounded literally to suicide by a frighteningly real one, Anthony Comstock — that eradicator of obscenity and persecutor in particular of women, such as Craddock, who felt it was their lives calling to speak on such subjects. It is easy to dismiss her attitudes as prudish and outdated, but read against Mary Harrington, we’d be loathe to judge too quickly. I mean, for starters, at least she’s expecting men to do their part here…
Yet, to refrain from exercising the parental function (the ejaculation of creative semen) during coition, and to exercise only the love function (that is, the function of prolonged genital contact which mutually refreshes, stimulates and upbuilds the entire nervous system) is popularly supposed to be either unhealthy or impossible.
This is because, for many, many centuries, men have been perverting the natural functions of their sexual organism, until that which is really the best way has come to seem impossible to the many, and unwise to the few who have learned that it is not impossible. I refer to the suppression of the ejaculation of the semen upon all occasions, except at the time when the creation of a child has been prepared for by both husband and wife.
Listen to the episode…
