How Feminism Created Cyborg Theocracy: Mary Harrington's Radical Critique

Former feminist Mary Harrington exposes how the liberation movement became a technological war against human nature, turning women into commodified cyborgs while destroying authentic relationships between the sexes.

Key Takeaways

• Feminism isn't moral progress but a response to Industrial Revolution disrupting traditional family structures and work patterns
• The contraceptive pill and abortion legalization created "cyborg theocracy" - using technology to escape human nature rather than fix medical problems
• Modern feminism wages war on three fronts: relationships between sexes, mothers and babies, and our relationship with our own bodies
• "Big Romance" culture has transformed marriage from pragmatic partnership into self-expressive consumerism, destroying long-term commitment
• Hormonal birth control fundamentally alters female psychology, attraction patterns, and relationship formation in devastating ways
• The commodification of sexuality through dating apps and OnlyFans represents the logical endpoint of treating sex as consequence-free consumer activity
• Women need to reject the premise that they're "defective males" requiring technological fixes to achieve personhood
• Post-romantic marriage based on radical loyalty and interdependence offers the only sustainable alternative to endless optionality
• Male Single Sex spaces must be preserved to allow men to form each other into marriage-worthy partners

Timeline Overview

• 00:00–18:30 — Personal Journey from Feminism: Mary's transformation from "rabidly fully paid up second wave feminist" to critic after hitting quarter-life crisis and discovering motherhood contradicted feminist messaging
• 18:30–35:45 — Historical Context of Feminism: How Industrial Revolution displaced work from homes, creating new power dynamics and forcing women to seek legal personhood independent from husbands
• 35:45–52:20 — The Contraceptive Revolution: How the pill and abortion legalization in the 1960s created "cyborg theocracy" by making women's personhood dependent on medical technology
• 52:20–68:15 — Commodification of Sexuality: From Playboy clubs opening when the pill was legalized to online dating as product marketing leading inevitably to OnlyFans
• 68:15–85:40 — War on Relationships Between Sexes: How consequence-free sex ideology creates adversarial, exploitative dynamics making genuine love and vulnerability nearly impossible
• 85:40–102:25 — War on Mother-Baby Relationships: Why pregnancy now triggers "body horror" responses and how surrogacy commodifies reproduction for elite convenience
• 102:25–118:50 — Transhumanist Trajectory: How gender ideology leads to unlimited body modification and creates markets where poor people sell organs to rich buyers
• 118:50–135:15 — Evolution of Marriage: From Medieval pragmatism to Victorian companionate marriage to modern self-expressive consumerism destroying commitment
• 135:15–151:30 — The Case Against Hormonal Birth Control: How the pill makes women "fat, sexless and insane" while enabling degrading hookup culture
• 151:30–167:45 — Abolishing Big Romance: Why we need post-romantic marriage based on radical loyalty, letting men form men, and occupying our own bodies

From Feminist True Believer to Heretic

• Mary Harrington spent her teens as a "rabidly fully paid up second wave feminist" and her twenties as an early adopter of "woke postmodern worldview" until age 28 when she experienced a complete philosophical crisis
• The transition took seven years of intellectual reconstruction, ultimately leading her to reject the foundational premise of progress that underlies modern feminist ideology
• Becoming a stay-at-home mother revealed the fundamental contradiction between feminist messaging that positioned motherhood as oppression and her actual experience of finding it "quite a nice life" despite loneliness and financial dependence
• Her intellectual journey involved "pushing a buggy around the empty daytime streets of a small town in England" while reconsidering everything she'd been taught about women's liberation and the nature of human progress
• The realization that feminism and belief in inevitable progress were inseparable forced her to question whether it was possible to care about women's interests without accepting the progressive framework
• Walking through this philosophical transformation while caring for a baby demonstrated that "your mind doesn't stop working just because you've had a baby" - challenging feminist assumptions about maternal intellectual capacity

The Industrial Revolution's Disruption of Gender Relations

• Pre-modern agrarian and artisan economies operated on household-based production units where both men and women were economically productive within family structures rather than as individual market participants
• Legal structures that later seemed oppressive to women were originally designed to accommodate productive households where women wielded considerable informal power through reputation control, information access, and community influence
• The Industrial Revolution fundamentally disrupted this system by moving work outside the home, initially creating economically dependent bourgeois housewives while forcing working-class women into factories and away from their children
• Women at both ends of the economic spectrum found themselves in unprecedented situations - upper-class women suddenly had comfortable but economically meaningless lives, while working-class women faced new forms of exploitation
• First-wave feminism represented a rational response to these material changes rather than moral enlightenment, seeking legal remedies for the disadvantages created by industrial disruption of traditional family economics
• The early feminist split between "feminism of care" (accepting women's maternal roles while seeking protection) and "feminism of freedom" (seeking equality in public life) reflected different class interests and different solutions to industrial disruption

The Contraceptive Revolution as Technological Turning Point

• The 1960s contraceptive and digital revolutions marked the definitive end of the industrial era and beginning of what Mary calls the "transhuman" or "cyborg" era of human development
• The contraceptive pill represents the first instance of medical technology being used to "upgrade normal" rather than restore health, making women's personhood dependent on pharmaceutical intervention
• Abortion legalization makes an unprecedented statement that women's freedom and political participation are so important that they justify ending unborn life - representing the ultimate prioritization of individual autonomy over dependent relationships
• These technologies enabled the sexual revolution by making sex appear consequence-free, allowing it to be treated as private leisure activity rather than socially consequential behavior affecting entire communities
• The first Playboy club opened the same year the pill was legalized, demonstrating how quickly liberation from biological constraints gets commercialized into market opportunities
• Second-wave feminists sincerely believed sexual liberation would create "polymorphous erogenous zones of orgy joy" without considering how market forces would inevitably colonize and exploit consequence-free sexuality

The Commodification Pipeline from Dating to OnlyFans

• Online dating represents the crucial hinge point where people first learn to package themselves as products in digital marketplaces, essentially identical to e-commerce marketing strategies
• Creating dating profiles involves the same skills as digital commerce - creating appealing packages designed to generate clicks, with the checkout process being the only difference from actual shopping
• The progression from online dating to parasocial relationships to subscription-based sexual content like OnlyFans represents differences of degree rather than fundamental qualitative shifts in commodification
• Dating apps normalize the experience of browsing human beings like products, making the transition to literally purchasing sexual content feel like a natural evolution rather than a moral boundary crossing
• The cultural messaging that commodifying yourself through platforms like OnlyFans is "not only legitimate but empowering" creates a situation where refusing to participate seems economically disadvantageous
• This commodification cycle creates "incredibly adversarial and incredibly hostile and incredibly exploitative dynamics between the sexes" making genuine vulnerability and love nearly impossible to achieve

The War on Relationships Between the Sexes

• The fundamental premise that individual sexuality is purely private business only makes sense when contraception eliminates the community consequences of sexual behavior
• Without contraception, "the rest of your village really does have skin in the game about who you sleep with" because pregnancies affect entire communities that must deal with resulting children
• Modern sexual culture has created a "slow breakdown of any sort of groundedness to why we fuck" - disconnecting sexual desire from fertility, relationship formation, or any purpose beyond immediate gratification
• The combination of endemic online pornography with cultural messaging about sexual empowerment creates conditions where "it's now almost impossible to extend enough trust and enough vulnerability to another person to be willing to take the risk of loving someone"
• Young people increasingly avoid sex entirely because the cultural landscape seems "chaotic, disorganized and frightening" rather than offering meaningful connection or pleasure
• Women face particularly poor prospects in hookup culture with only 10% chance of orgasm in casual encounters, making "macrame" or "OnlyFans" seem like more attractive alternatives than dating

The War on Mother-Baby Relationships

• Growing numbers of young women experience "visceral fright" and "body horror" at the prospect of pregnancy, viewing it as an alien invasion rather than natural biological process
• This horror stems from cultural expectations of complete atomization and self-containment where "it's shameful to depend on somebody else" and "you have to be in command of all of your own shit all the time"
• Pregnancy fundamentally violates modern autonomy ideals because "you can't be pregnant and not need other people" - making vulnerability and dependence unavoidable
• The premium on controlling physiology and appearance (where "even just not being fat is a massive flex in the Instagram world") makes pregnancy's involuntary bodily changes seem catastrophic
• Once society accepts that women's autonomy justifies commercialized medical interventions into reproduction, logical extension leads to markets in "gametes, IVF, gestational surrogacy" - cutting reproduction "into pieces" for individual purchase
• Pregnancy "doesn't just create a baby, it also creates a mother" through irreversible brain changes that optimize women for caretaking - benefits lost through technological reproduction substitutes

The Transhumanist Trajectory and Body Commodification

• The transgender movement represents "the on-ramp to transhumanism" according to activist Martine Rothblatt, who explicitly connects gender transition to unlimited body modification and eventual digital consciousness uploading
• Gender clinics increasingly offer diverse surgical modifications beyond traditional transition procedures, with some clients requesting to retain both male and female sexual characteristics simultaneously
• The technological infrastructure for transgender procedures includes complex mechanical devices like saline pumps and one-way valves that require ongoing maintenance and manipulation to simulate natural sexual function
• International examples show how body commodification creates exploitative markets - like female farm workers in Maharashtra voluntarily choosing hysterectomies to become more employable in agricultural work
• American legislation has been introduced offering convicted felons reduced sentences in exchange for organ or bone marrow donation, creating explicit markets where vulnerable people trade body parts for legal benefits
• The logical endpoint of treating bodies as customizable resources is a system where "people at the top do really nicely" while "people further down get all of the disruption and considerably less of the benefit"

The Evolution from Pragmatic to Self-Expressive Marriage

• Medieval marriage was primarily pragmatic and economic, contracted quickly between families and nearly impossible to dissolve, focused on productive household management rather than emotional fulfillment
• The Industrial Revolution created economically dependent bourgeois housewives who needed husbands who loved them, giving rise to "companionate marriage" epitomized by Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy relationship
• Women's entry into the workforce and contraceptive technology eliminated economic interdependence, evolving marriage into "self-expressive" consumerism where partners are expected to continuously optimize each other's self-actualization
• Modern marriage operates on the premise that "if they're not delivering on that front you're wholly entitled to just walk away at any time for any reason" - treating relationships as easily replaceable consumer products
• The shift from economic necessity to voluntary association means "choosing one person is by definition settling" because everyone eventually finds something annoying about their partner
• Dating culture now avoids exclusivity conversations even after months of sexual involvement, creating anxiety and preventing the formation of commitment-based relationships

The Devastating Effects of Hormonal Birth Control

• Mary stopped taking the pill at 21 because "it made me fat and sexless and insane" - an experience increasingly common among young women who discover dramatic personality changes after discontinuing hormonal contraception
• Women report that stopping the pill results in returning libido, attraction to different people, elimination of depression, increased energy, and what amounts to "a total personality transplant"
• The pill fundamentally alters brain chemistry affecting attraction patterns, relationship formation approaches, and basic sexual psychology in ways that pharmaceutical companies present as "cost-free risk management"
• Hormonal birth control enables hookup culture by removing pregnancy fears, but many women find these encounters "degrading" and end up in situations where they "say yes kind of out of politeness" then "feel really gross afterwards"
• The fundamental enabling condition of hookup culture is contraception - removing it naturally motivates women to "set the bar higher" by avoiding sexual encounters with men they don't trust with their long-term interests
• Birth control's widespread adoption actually increased single motherhood rates because although pregnancy rates per sexual encounter decreased, the total number of sexual encounters increased so dramatically that absolute pregnancy numbers rose

Abolishing Big Romance Through Post-Romantic Marriage

• Economic instability and social chaos will force couples to embrace interdependence because "being interdependent is just a better way to be" when the world becomes "more dangerous and more unstable and more expensive"
• Post-romantic marriage requires embracing "radical loyalty" that persists "even when your partner is annoying the shit out of you for years at a time" unless serious abuse or psychological distress occurs
• Society needs to "tilt the balance back towards a presumption in favor of stability" rather than treating relationships as easily disposable consumer experiences
• Women must lead by example in "letting men form one another" because "women don't make good men - good men make each other" and men simply don't listen to women's attempts at moral instruction
• Preserving male Single Sex spaces is essential both for men's psychological health and for creating marriage-worthy partners, while also building male support for protecting female-only spaces
• The solution requires rejecting the premise that women are "defective males" who need technological interventions to achieve personhood, instead embracing that "being female doesn't make me less of a person"

Standout Quotes and Insights

"Today women especially are sincerely frightened by the idea of becoming just a wife and a mother. American women willingly run from the home, from the Specter of becoming a prisoner or a parasite or even worse a domestic prostitute into the arms of a corporate employer laughably, we call this process Freedom"

— Helen Roy on the paradox of modern female liberation

"Pregnancy doesn't just create a baby it also creates a mother... pregnancy realizes the mother's brain in irreversible ways and primes her for caretaking in ways which are just not repeatable if you haven't been through that process"

— Mary Harrington on the irreplaceable nature of gestational motherhood

"It's now almost impossible to extend enough trust and enough vulnerability I think to another person to be willing to take the risk of loving someone and I think that's catastrophic over the long term for people just being able to find happiness or kids or anything really"

— On how sexual commodification destroys the possibility of genuine relationships

"Society is man-made and in the modern world men have put themselves out of a job"

— Joyce Benenson on how male innovations eliminated male economic necessity

"Women don't make good men - good men make each other"

— On why preserving male Single Sex spaces is essential for creating marriage-worthy partners

"Choosing one person is by definition settling because everybody everybody annoys their partner after a while"

— Challenging the modern expectation of perfect romantic compatibility

"How dare you suggest that I only get to access personhood if I'm willing to exert biomedical Mastery over the things that make me female... being female doesn't make me less of a person"

— The core feminist argument against technological "solutions" to female biology

Key Statistics and Research

• Four out of five childless women didn't intend to not have children, according to Professor Renska Kaiser's meta-analysis
• Only 10% of women in casual sexual encounters achieve orgasm
• First Playboy club opened the same year the pill was legalized
• Farm workers in Maharashtra voluntarily undergo hysterectomies to become more employable

Conclusion

Mary Harrington's critique reveals feminism not as moral progress but as a series of technological responses to material disruptions that ultimately created new forms of exploitation. The contraceptive revolution that promised liberation instead created "cyborg theocracy" - a system demanding technological mastery over female biology as the price of personhood. This trajectory inevitably leads to the commodification of sexuality, reproduction, and ultimately human bodies themselves. The current crisis in relationships stems from treating consequence-laden human behaviors as consequence-free consumer activities. Rather than continuing down the transhumanist path toward unlimited body modification and technological dependence, Harrington argues for embracing post-romantic marriage based on radical loyalty and interdependence.

This requires rejecting both the premise that women are defective males requiring technological fixes and the consumer approach to relationships that treats partners as easily replaceable optimization tools. The solution involves a feminist argument for occupying our own bodies, preserving Single Sex spaces for both genders, and rebuilding solidarity between men and women based on genuine human nature rather than technological transcendence.

Practical Implications

For Young Women:

• Consider the psychological and relationship effects of hormonal birth control before automatically accepting it as necessary
• Reject the cultural message that career optimization requires technological mastery over female biology
• Practice higher standards in dating by avoiding sexual encounters with men you wouldn't consider marrying
• Embrace interdependence and loyalty over endless optionality when forming committed relationships

For Young Men:

• Recognize that male Single Sex spaces are essential for character formation and psychological health
• Understand that women need men to form each other rather than trying to please female moral instruction
• Focus on becoming someone worth committing to rather than optimizing for casual sexual success
• Prepare for economic conditions that will make interdependent partnerships necessary for survival

For Couples:

• Embrace post-romantic marriage based on radical loyalty rather than continuous self-actualization expectations
• Accept that choosing one person necessarily involves settling and that all partners become annoying sometimes
• Prioritize stability and interdependence over individual optimization and emotional fulfillment
• Understand that economic pressures will likely force greater cooperation regardless of personal preferences

For Society:

• Recognize the exploitation inherent in markets for human reproduction, sexuality, and body parts
• Preserve Single Sex spaces for both men and women rather than pursuing total gender integration
• Question whether technological solutions to human nature ultimately create more problems than they solve
• Build solidarity between sexes based on complementary strengths rather than identical capabilities