{"id":2240517,"date":"2024-05-08T20:40:02","date_gmt":"2024-05-09T00:40:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/lets-just-take-the-word-back-mary-harrington-talks-feminism-with-andrew-klavan\/"},"modified":"2024-05-08T20:44:03","modified_gmt":"2024-05-09T00:44:03","slug":"lets-just-take-the-word-back-mary-harrington-talks-feminism-with-andrew-klavan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/lets-just-take-the-word-back-mary-harrington-talks-feminism-with-andrew-klavan\/","title":{"rendered":"Mary Harrington discusses reclaiming &#8216;Feminism&#8217; with Andrew Klavan"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">16<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Flets-just-take-the-word-back-mary-harrington-talks-feminism-with-andrew-klavan%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2240517&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>The excerpt captures a conversation between Andrew Klavan \u200band Mary Harrington about redefining &#8220;feminism.&#8221; Harrington advocates embracing key <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/review-cruella-gets-creative-with-a-surprisingly-pro-life-message\/\" title=\"REVIEW: \u2018Cruella\u2019 Gets Creative With A Surprisingly Pro-Life Message\">feminist values<\/a> while critiquing \u200bthe\u2063 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/gay-rights-organization-gets-deplatformed-by-paypal-while-pro-pedophile-group-remains\/\" title=\"Gay Rights Organization Gets Deplatformed By PayPal While Pro-Pedophile Group Remains\">dominant leftist narrative<\/a>. She highlights internal fractiousness within the women&#8217;s movement and\u2064 challenges the progressive\u2064 narrative, suggesting\u2063 a\u2064 reevaluation of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/eagle-forum-51-years-strong\/\" title=\"Eagle Forum: Still Going Strong After 51 Years\">liberal feminist ideals<\/a> \u200dfor a broader perspective. Klavan and Harrington discuss the nuances of feminism&#8217;s varying ideologies.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<p><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The following is a transcript excerpt from Andrew Klavan\u2019s conversation with Mary Harrington on what reclaiming \u201cfeminism\u201d could look like. In this section, Harrington explains her advocation for embracing certain feminist values without abandoning the entire ideology. She believes in upholding \u201cthe positives which came out of women\u2019s emancipation\u201d and that women should not \u201close the privilege of being considered a person.\u201d You can <\/span><\/i><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/podcasts\/the-andrew-klavan-show\/240417\"><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">listen to<\/span><\/i><\/a><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">  or <\/span><\/i><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/episode\/0417interview\"><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">watch<\/span><\/i><\/a><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">  the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/prayer-is-not-a-wish-but-a-practice-of-gratitude-to-stave-off-resentment\/\" title=\"Prayer is gratitude in action, not a mere wish to avoid resentment.\">full podcast episode<\/a> on DailyWire+.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Start time: 1:06<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p><b>Andrew Klavan: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Just the other day, I got into a debate with my son Spencer. He had written a piece for Fairer Disputations \u2014 where you [Mary] sometimes appear \u2014 <a href=\"https:\/\/fairerdisputations.org\/after-chivalry\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">about chivalry<\/a>, and I described it, I described Fairer Disputations, as women who are smart enough to realize that feminism has gone bad but refuse to get rid of the name \u201cfeminist.\u201d And he rebuked me. He said that I was allowing the Left to co-opt the term \u201cfeminism,\u201d and that since I care about the rights of women, I myself am a feminist. But who\u2019s right there? I mean, I feel that feminism has been a failure, and maybe we should just say that. But does he have a point?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Mary Harrington: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I\u2019m going to be ecumenical on this. I\u2019m going to say you\u2019re both right. Spencer\u2019s right in the sense that there is more than one feminism, and I don\u2019t think it\u2019s self-evident that we have to hand feminism to the Left. But I think you\u2019re right in the sense that, particularly in the United States \u2014 and I do think this is especially pronounced in the United States, for reasons that I can bore you with for hours if you let me \u2014 but it\u2019s especially pronounced in the United States that a certain subset of feminism has become so dominant that everybody on the Right thinks that\u2019s just the entirety of the movement. And they don\u2019t get the history because it\u2019s been memory hold by people who don\u2019t like us. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so what America, in particular, understands about feminism is a very limited, a very narrow, and a very aggressively liberal, aggressively disembodied, and aggressively, I would argue, elite bourgeois version understanding of the movement, which is hostile to a great many conservative aims and actively sets out to attack a great many conservative keystone positions. So, I mean, from an American perspective, I\u2019d say you\u2019re right, but from a more historical, more nuanced, more international perspective, I would say Spencer has a point as well. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I can elaborate. Historically, the women\u2019s movement is internally very fractious. You know, we\u2019ve always argued amongst ourselves about what it means. My framing for why that is is that I think we need to throw the progress story out of the window. I think the progressivist narrative that says we\u2019re going from the bad past to the good future and that this can continue indefinitely and this always means more freedom and it always means more stuff and it always was means more Leftism, I think that\u2019s B.S., if you forgive me. It\u2019s simply simply false.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">We\u2019re obviously reaching a point now with a lot of these liberatory movements where we\u2019re really scraping the barrel; we\u2019re reaching diminishing returns. And I would say that for all but a very elite subset of women, the liberal feminist narrative is very obviously at that point now. It\u2019s actively degrading life for all but the wealthiest women. And again, from an American perspective, if I thought that was all of feminism \u2014 as I think you\u2019d be forgiven for thinking if you were an American conservative, you know \u2014 I would absolutely want to chuck it out of the window and say, \u201cA plague on all of your houses. Be gone.\u201d You know, let\u2019s start again with a fresh slate. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">When I stuck \u201creactionary feminist\u201d in my Twitter bio, it was kind of as a joke. It was the end of a long-running Twitter argument, all through Twitter direct message with a friend, about whether or not <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/its-because-of-the-resurrection-that-the-culture-war-matters\/\" title=\"It\u2019s Because Of The Resurrection That The Culture War Matters\">post-liberal<\/a> meant anything. We argued about this for months, and eventually he said, \u201cNo, no, you should use reactionary.\u201d And I said, \u201cNo, no, post-liberal is useful.\u201d And I\u2019m not going to bore you with the details, but, in the end, I conceded the point. I was like, ok, no, I buy \u201creactionary.\u201d It\u2019s more punk. Ok, fine. Let\u2019s get rid of \u201cpost-liberal\u201d; let\u2019s have \u201creactionary\u201d instead. It\u2019s fight-ier. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I changed my Twitter bio just to see how long it would take him to notice. It took about three days, I think. But in the meantime, a bunch of other people noticed, including First Things who said, \u201cWould you like to write something for First Things about what you mean? This is an interesting term.\u201d And then I had to figure out what I meant. And now it\u2019s a book. So that\u2019s kind of the origin story. It literally started as a meme, which then became a thing. And I like it because it\u2019s a signal scrambler. It poses the question, which really you [Klavan] started with, which is to say, you know: Do you have to believe in progress if you want to be a feminist? Can you care about the interests of women without signing up to the whole of the rest of that baggage train? And it\u2019s a long baggage train now \u2014 as you spend every week discussing, as does The Daily Wire is very fond of going into in some depth. It\u2019s a long baggage train, and there\u2019s a lot of stuff there that you might or might not be signed up to. There\u2019s a great deal of it that I\u2019m not signed up to.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">But<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I still think that men and women are fundamentally different in some ways, which you can\u2019t just, you know, innovate away and that you can\u2019t just pretend are not true and that we all irreducibly, you know, we\u2019re equal. We\u2019re equal in dignity and our capacity for excellence; however, there are some irreducible differences, particularly where it comes to sex, reproductive roles, and those things have political consequences. You know, at scale, they matter politically and they still matter, even though we live pretty comfortable, materially frictionless lives, you know, as denizens of the high-tech developed first world.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are still some material differences. I mean, particularly when you have kids, the rubber hits the road and, you know, men can\u2019t breastfeed; men can\u2019t gestate, and there\u2019s a whole bunch of subtler differences as well. Those things still matter. You know, if we\u2019re not going to call giving a stuff about that and wanting to talk about it and wanting to have a politics which engages with that, if we\u2019re going to call it \u201cfeminism,\u201d what are we going to call it? Because it\u2019s a thing, right?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I say, why shouldn\u2019t we? Let\u2019s just take the word back, you know? Why should they have it?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>* * *<\/p>\n<p><em>Catch the full interview with Mary Harrington on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/episode\/0417interview\">The Andrew Klavan Show<\/a> on DailyWire+.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Read an excerpt from Andrew Klavan&#8217;s talk with Mary Harrington about reclaiming &#8220;feminism.&#8221; Harrington advocates for embracing key feminist values while not dismissing the whole ideology. She emphasizes preserving the gains of women&#8217;s liberation and avoiding a loss of valuable progress<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":276,"featured_media":2240518,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/dw-wp-production.imgix.net\/2024\/05\/MixCollage-08-May-2024-03-23-PM-1400-scaled.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[541],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2240517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-daily-wire"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/dw-wp-production.imgix.net\/2024\/05\/MixCollage-08-May-2024-03-23-PM-1400-scaled.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/276"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2240517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2240518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2240517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2240517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2240517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}