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Mary Harrington Profile picture
Mary Harrington
@moveincircles
Reactionary feminist. Contributing Editor at @unherd. Author of Feminism Against Progress
Mar 5 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Periodically someone who hasn't actually read me will say I want to ban modern medicine, send women back to high maternal mortality, blah blah

I don't. I'd be dead myself if it weren't for modern obstetrics. But we need to distinguish between restorative and meliorist medicine Restorative medicine holds to a Gestalt understanding of what human "normal" looks like, including normal human development, morphology, sex dimorphism and so on. On this model, we only intervene when something is wrong with "normal" and medicine can help restore it
Feb 5 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
“Cooking” describes two distinct skill sets, one coded female and the other male

Calling them both “cooking” is like saying street fighting and fencing are the same skill because both involve combat Family food is female-coded. You make family food with children underfoot and conversations ongoing, while juggling several other tasks

Excellence in family food is something everyone will eat, that you can make to budget in the available time, and with minimum washing up
Nov 16, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
It's not so much that the realignment betrayed as that it was a roaring success. It's just not the realignment we thought we were getting unherd.com/2023/11/nigel-… Upheaval that, we were promised, would return democratic accountability has just seen the second unelected Prime Minister appoint as Foreign Secretary a man who isn't even an MP. Real power rests with a network of courts, quangos, czars, insiders, and sometimes murkly funded NGOs
Nov 14, 2023 • 10 tweets • 6 min read
Famous Dictators and Twink Death: A thread

1: Saddam Hussein

Verdict: young Saddam looks like the kind of dork who wrote romance novels

Older Saddam looks like he wrote romance novels and got people to read them (fact: he actually did this)

Twink Death Survival Rating: 7/10
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Image 2: Muammar Gaddafi

Verdict: Gaddafi may have been propping up North African regional stability with brutal repressive measures, which with hindsight was actually quite useful (thanks, David Cameron), but he lost his looks doing it

Twink Death Survival Rating: 3/10
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Nov 6, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Who could have predicted that a generation which grew up micromanaged and surveilled by parents, daycare workers and teachers would reach adulthood with a model of good governance that is remote, totalising, and unaccountable We stopped forming young people for deliberative democracy two generations back and it’s far, far too late to put the toothpaste back in the tube now
Oct 9, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I want to propose a new award: the Winston Smith Prize for Political Euphemism

Of the top of my head, in recent contenders must surely include

"underage sex work"

"special military operation"

and

"armed migrant"

Anyone else got entries? In the Meat Lego category:

"top surgery"

"gender affirming"

and

"fertility equality"
Sep 17, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
The lesson for young women from the Brand scandal is the same as it was with Silvio Berlusconi unherd.com/2023/06/the-bu…

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Image It’s a bitter and ugly lesson, and I wish it were not so, but a great many scandals have come and gone and the lesson is unchanged

A great deal of the time, so-called sexual liberation mostly “liberates” pretty young women from the guardrails that used to keep them safe
Sep 13, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Remarkably consistent data from prisons across the Anglosphere showing around 50% of trans-identified male prisoners are sex offenders 👇 Around of Wisconsin trans-identified prisoners are sex offenders dailysignal.com/2023/08/24/exc…
Sep 1, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Thinking again about the France vs America food discourse, it strikes me that one thing which I haven’t seen is much discussion of the class component France has homestyle and country cuisines but also haute cuisine which you basically can’t make at home as it’s too fiddly for family meals
Jun 30, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I sometimes get accused of being a doomer or tech determinist. I’m not, though I do write more often about the dark side of tech than its potential. So this week’s newsletter is more optimistic Much of our innovation is aimed at evading the limits of our nature - but here and there I see people trying a different approach reactionaryfeminist.substack.com/p/the-sorcerer…
Jun 30, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Cancer charity advocates being more inclusive by calling women’s vaginas “bonus holes” humanevents.com/2023/06/29/uk-… I wrote recently about how Andrea Long Chu’s stunningly misogynistic work “Females” makes clear that this dehumanising reduction of women to penetrable orifices is the logical endpoint of severing sex from reproduction https://t.co/aQySF5xz3qreactionaryfeminist.substack.com/p/which-orific…
Jun 29, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
In writing about the rumours that RFK Jr’s physique is a result of steroid use, I found myself grappling with a question I still don’t really have an answer to: whether there’s a healthy relationship to tech, and especially biotech unherd.com/2023/06/rfk-jr… I’m always banging on about the cyborg era, aka the transhumanist era. So given we’re already there, and I don’t see any path to retvrn back to a tech-free world, can we use tech in a way that supports human flourishing, rather than just waging war on our nature?
Jun 19, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Enjoyed this from @helenlewis at @TheAtlantic on reactionary feminism, which is a generally fair-minded write-up though she clearly disagrees on quite a few points theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… One nitpick: my argument against surrogacy etc is not because it's 'unnatural', but because using tech to evade physiological givens doesn't *just* make us freer, it *also* leaves us in hock to the market and this comes with costs, usually paid by those who already have least
May 8, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
All hail Charles III, king of what can’t be mediated. A Coronation Bank Holiday thread unherd.com/2023/05/what-i… Charles was anointed on-screen on Saturday, but behind an embroidered screen. That was a moment of tremendous symbolic importance: a line in the sand on just how far we really can expose everything for the screens that reveal Image
Apr 20, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Abolish Big Romance The “self-expressive marriage” is a luxury hangover from the Peak Progress era, that no sane Gen-Z woman should touch with a 30-foot bargepole. Instead, look for someone who will show up for you
Apr 19, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
In Feminism Against Progress I’ve described those laptop-class professional women who dominate in HR, teaching and academia, and pursue their class interests by insisting that “feminism” and “equality” means pretending humans are interchangeable and biological sex is unimportant I called these “priestesses of cyborg theocracy”. In my view they steamroller the interests of the vast majority of women in pursuing this postman vision. Caroline Nokes, here, is a textbook example of this priestess class
Apr 12, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The idea that the only possible relation of authority is “property” is the most noxious market-society brainworm of the lot The natural bond of parental attachment is not a guarantee of safety from neglect or wickedness. But it’s infinitely better than the alternative, which is “liberating” children into the loveless hands of the market and, by extension, the total state unherd.com/2022/12/why-so…
Apr 10, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Liquid modernity intensifies nytimes.com/2023/03/31/sty… “Tinder Passport, a subscription service that allows users to match with people in a destination of their choice, is one of the app’s most popular features […] From 2022 to 2023, there was a distinct increase in the number of female members shifting interest to unique locations”
Mar 10, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
And you can watch teenage mental distress trending the other way on the same timescale

It’s almost as though spending all your time glued to your phone is really bad for adolescents And yet any time a conservative suggests regulating adolescent use of social media they’ll get a “muh liberty” broadside from people nominally on their own side nationalreview.com/2019/08/agains…
Mar 10, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I wrote yesterday about the how the Right is poised to embrace tech futurism, and how ambivalent I am about this delivering anything but more permanent revolution unherd.com/2023/03/does-t… As I set out here 👇 I see that revolution marching ever deeper into the enclosure and commodification of our bodies. In practice this is often brutally exploitative for the poorest - even as it’s celebrated and encouraged by the Left as ‘bodily autonomy’ compactmag.com/article/we-nee…
Sep 22, 2022 • 13 tweets • 1 min read
This morning, I was out for an early morning run with the dog, as usual. Running up a fairly remote hill where I never normally see anyone, I noticed someone running downhill toward me. As he got closer I thought “is he wearing some kind of pale onesie?” It seemed an odd and rather 1970s choice of outfit for rural Bedfordshire.