You may drive Nature out with a pitchfork, but she keeps on coming back.

—Horace, Epistles

The story so far, then: over the course of industrialization workers were disembedded—or, if you prefer, “liberated”–from agrarian life by enclosure and industrialization. This process radically reordered how bourgeois women understood family life: marriage became a vector for social aspiration, even as the home was framed as a space for respite from the rigors of market competition.

This ambivalent relation was kept more or less together by Big Romance: an ideal of lifelong partnership founded on personal affinity and mutual respect that could then serve as the basis for all the more material and practical work undertaken within a family. This ideal served to fuse the material economic and reproductive asymmetries of men and women. But that balance began to fall apart after contraception eliminated (or nearly enough so) the central asymmetry. This so-called “sexual revolution” was less a moral change than a technological one, with ramifications as far-reaching as those of the industrial factory technologies of preceding centuries. And like those innovations, reproductive technologies have been in many ways genuinely emancipatory. But they also serve to illustrate the dual face of progress: freedom, and trade.

What travels under the term "progress" is revolutionary destruction of previously immutable-seeming limits. This is usually framed as moral advancement, but in practice it follows a two-step ratchet. This first is a shining picture of the utopia that will follow when all the old norms are dissolved and new, improved ones are free to form in the space thus cleared. Then, whatever has been smashed in pursuit of progress ends up reordered to the atomized laws of the market.

Since the days of Adam Smith, freedom and trade have functioned as two sides of the same coin, or two coins of the same side. Smith himself would never have imagined that his theories might be applied to sex. The moral traditions he took for granted were, he emphasized, an essential framework for ensuring markets functioned properly. More recent conservative enthusiasts of the market, such as the United Kingdom’s Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the United States, also shared this view. But why apply the solvent of freedom to some social norms and not others? As the political theorist Patrick Deneen has observed, liberalization doesn’t halt at the barriers of those social norms conservatives would prefer to retain. Instead, it serves as the solvent for norms across the board, and trade—the logic of individual profit—moves into the space.

Where this process takes place in the intimate sphere of human relations, it’s common among Western conservatives to argue that its negative externalities are the fault of feminism. Some suggest it could be cured by eradicating feminism. It’s more accurate to view feminism, and commerce underwritten by technology, as facets of the same phenomenon. To illustrate, we can compare this process in two distinct geopolitical entities: the West and China. In the West, the liquefaction of family structures seemed to happen organically, or perhaps as a consequence of feminism. In China, though, it was imposed from the top down with the aim of creating a modern urban labor force. Social scientists were already reporting in 1984 on the concerted effort by the Chinese government to disrupt traditional family bonds in the interests of mass urbanization and modernization. The disruption worked: according to World Bank data, between 1980 and 2020 the proportion of China’s population living in urban areas went from 19% to 61%. Meanwhile, between 1982 and 2010, multigenerational households have plummeted and single-couple and single-person households have seen rapid growth. All these are changes that we see reflexively attributed to feminism, by conservatives in the West.

Similarly, if Western conservatives often point the finger at feminism for social atomization and the decline of the family, in China feminism has emerged as a byproduct of the social atomization and decline in family size resulting from top-down interventions aimed at transitioning to a market society. One such intervention was the “one-child policy” imposed by the Chinese state from 1978 to 2015. Along with spiking rates of female infanticide, this policy also produced a number of “feminist” changes to the social expectations placed upon those Chinese girl-children who did survive to adulthood. In traditional Chinese society, for example, women were expected to become mothers and wives. But women born under the one child policy were now their parents’ only offspring, and as such obliged to take on the traditional Chinese burden of “filial piety” that includes supporting their parents in old age. This has, in turn, weakened patrilineal inheritance conventions, driven female careerism, and fanned Chinese women’s frustration with a persistent male expectation that they should continue to perform traditional female domestic roles alongside these new aspirations.

In both China and the West, then, feminist viewpoints emerge in tandem with technological advancement and social atomization and direct their efforts at mitigating the sex-specific impacts of a high-tech market society on women. But if the causal relationship between feminism and atomization is complex, what’s indisputable is its deep implication in what it seeks to remedy. And thus many of the solutions proposed by feminism in response to women’s specific challenges under market society serve in practice to worsen women’s alienation and subordination to that market. As we move further into the transition from the industrial to the cyborg age that began with the contraceptive and digital revolutions, the resulting liquefaction is reaching an endgame—and the negative effect of these ideas on women’s concrete interests is growing more difficult even for feminists to deny.

What, if any, limitations are there to this ongoing process? How you answer this turns on a fundamental question: whether or not men and women have a nature as such. This metaphysical theme has filled whole books written by writers far more erudite than I am. For the purposes of this volume, I’ll just say that in my view we do. What specifically our “nature” looks like is to some degree relational and context-bound, and this book addresses some of those relational and context-bound evolutions over time. But it’s not infinitely malleable.

This, though, is an affront to the dream of freedom pursued by Progress Theology. It suggests that we can’t, in fact, be “whoever we want to be” and that constraints exist on what our “true selves” may realistically become. The counter-argument might be as follows: if we can defy “nature” by using pumps to make water run uphill, or defy a local climate by creating air-conditioning to keep homes cool, why should we not defy “nature” in our own bodies and societies, in the name of imposing our will on ourselves as well as our natural environment as well? And why shouldn’t we make a profit while we’re at it, if we want to?

But this triumph over nature hasn’t been as complete as its 20th-century visionaries might have wished. Whether at the small or large scale, human nature refuses to be entirely liquefied. And this resistance prompts increasingly frenzied efforts by the proponents of liquefaction-as-progress to stamp out the last traces of resistance. This can be seen across countless areas, but I’ll discuss three in particular: the drive to liquefy sexual intimacy, the effort to interrupt the bond between women and children, and the push for medical victory by a disembodied “self” over the flesh that “self” inhabits.

In each case, liquefaction doesn’t free us from normative, embodied patterns of behavior or inclination. Rather, it dissolves social codes developed over millennia to manage such patterns, and reorders the still-existing patterns to the logic of the market. And while the result may sometimes benefit a subset of wealthy, high-status women in the West, the class interests of this group are increasingly at odds with those of not just many men but also the young, women with fewer resources, and women who are mothers.

The zipless marketplace

How couples meet is the subject of endless romantic books, songs and movies—as is what happens after you meet. How do we govern desire? What, if any, are the rules? What’s the point?

Throughout history, the answers to these questions have been shaped by the fact that only one sex gets pregnant, and the risks of an unchosen pregnancy don’t fall equally on the man and woman who caused it. But by the time I was an adult, birth control could be had from clinics and GPs, no questions asked. And with free, pervasive tech in place to manage the sexual risk, the rules of courtship felt genuinely arbitrary, archaic and puzzling: quaint traditions at best.

I spent my single years alternately longing for the orderly and heavily gendered dance those rules implied, and also aware at a fundamental level of their weightlessness. When individuals of both sexes really can just fuck, with no material consequences, what is even the point of going out for dinner first? As I was reaching adolescence, the sociologist Anthony Giddens argued that, with women now equal to men, for the first time ever the “pure relationship” was possible, and with it a “plastic sexuality”’; that is to say, a “decentred sexuality, freed from the needs of reproduction” and oriented not towards wider social goals but personal identity and the rewards of another’s company. In the context of my own intimate life, I conducted many experiments in just this “plastic sexuality.”

The passionate life I wanted was the authentic, liberated, and libidinal one imagined by Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch: emancipation not just politically but for women’s passionate lives too. In her view, even if our bodies differed, purported differences between the characters of men and women were imposed by stereotype. And these malign stereotypes had induced women to internalize a stunted image of our own desires, due largely to sexual shame. This served, she thought, to “castrate” women, dimming a fully engaged and emancipated female libidinal energy to "femininity," indistinguishable from the attributes of “the castrate”: that is, “timidity, plumpness, languor, delicacy and preciosity.”

Greer called for feminists to move beyond what she saw as the conservative political demands of first-wave feminism, and of campaigners such as Betty Friedan. These merely represented accommodations to bourgeois domesticity: different shades of the same self-imposed prison. For Greer, then, passionate emancipation was the foundation of revolution. Women “are not by nature monogamous” and ought to reject domesticity as “an attitude of impotence and hatred masquerading as tranquility and love,” instead opting to be “deliberately promiscuous.” For Greer, “revolution” meant the “freedom to be a person, with the dignity, integrity, nobility, passion, pride that constitute personhood.”

And she saw men, too, as crippled by these norms—in particular by shame, which she viewed as a key driver of men’s hatred of women. “As long as man is at odds with his own sexuality,” she argued, he will regard women “as a receptacle into which he has emptied his sperm, a kind of human spittoon.” For such men, every instance of sexual intimacy creates not love or bonding but “violent hatred.” And the more repressed we are, the more violent men will become: “The more hysterical the hatred of sex, the more extravagant the expression of loathing.”

As we move further into the transition from the industrial to the cyborg age that began with the contraceptive and digital revolutions, the resulting liquefaction is reaching an endgame—and the negative effect of these ideas on women’s concrete interests is growing more difficult even for feminists to deny.

Three years after The Female Eunuch, Erica Jong published Fear of Flying, a hugely successful novel depicting the extra-marital sexual exploits of a frustrated young female writer. Jong’s book is remembered for one catchy phrase, which encapsulated women’s longing for consequence-free sexual jouissance—the “zipless fuck”:

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not “taking” and the woman is not “giving.” No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn.

Greer’s and Jong’s books were bestsellers. Women raised to go on respectable dates and resign from their jobs upon marriage were thrilled at the idea of launching from dull domesticity into a higher, wilder, more authentic and passionate sexual world. It also promised to extend to women a liberatory zeitgeist that already animated many men.

When The Female Eunuch rocketed Greer to international fame, the West was already a decade into the “counterculture,” which began with the Beat Generation. Of the literary figures lionized by this era, one of the most famous is Dean Moriarty, the central figure in Jack Kerouac’s 1957 On the Road. Moriarty is a fictionalized account of the drifter, petty criminal, and serial bigamist Neal Cassady. He lives seemingly conscience-free in every liberated moment, floating from place to place and leaving chaos in his wake. He’s also a prolific and faithless shagger, taking up with lover after lover before abandoning them—in one case with a newborn baby.

When Greer demanded that women’s response to underwhelming marriages should be to “run away,” she was claiming the same countercultural liberation from ingrained social norms for women as the Beat Generation had already claimed for men. Contraception promised to level the reproductive asymmetry gestured at in Kerouac’s story, by the baby Dean Moriarty leaves behind, when he walks out on its mother–a change that should, in theory, have liberated women to be as free as Moriarty. But this assumes that such a liberation would actually be possible. And what’s transpired since suggests it’s more complicated than this.

Above the neck

Half a century on from the contraceptive technology transition, and Greer’s call for women to emancipate desire from family formation, some 40 percent of Americans now meet their partners via the frictionless, boundary-less, disembodied free-for-all of online dating. And what this delivered wasn’t the blossoming of sexuality Firestone imagined: it was the modern “sexual marketplace.” In this “marketplace,” age-old sexed asymmetries have returned in cartoon form—without social codes to govern their action.

Liberalization doesn’t halt at the barriers of those social norms conservatives would prefer to retain.

Greer’s passionate erotic individualism is now the default, rather than the emancipatory exception–for the logic of this “sexual marketplace” is obviously inimical to marriage. This is visible in the numbers: the average age of first marriage grows later and later: one survey puts this at 33 for women and 35 for men in the United States in 2021, while in the United Kingdom in 2019, for opposite-sex couples, it was 32 for women and 34 for men. This is when they marry at all, a rate that’s been trending steadily downwards since 1972. This decline is usually attributed to unfavorable economic conditions for forming new households. But material conditions can’t be the whole story; after all, men and women have continued forming families through more extreme social and economic hardship than the challenges we currently face. The rest of the story lies in the memes we’ve inherited from the Sexual Revolution.

It’s now widely understood that women and men who marry young are impeding their own individual personal growth. Marriage is no longer a foundation and a starting point for growth within interdependent family life, but tacitly treated as an obstacle to individual flourishing. This is especially the case for bourgeois women, who face sometimes intense social pressure not to marry young.

Anecdotally, young women I’ve spoken to corroborate this. Charlotte, 23, was raised in a well-off, liberal New York family, but rebelled against the imperative to pursue only freedom as an adult. When she got to college it was, as she put it, “all about empowerment” which seemed to mean claiming “I don’t have feelings, I’m all about money and my own stuff.” And this mindset delivers, in her view, “an incredibly miserable existence.” Charlotte met her now-husband aged 20, and when she got engaged in her senior year of college, “people looked at me like I was crazy.” In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, I hear the same story from Lucy, now 30, who married her university boyfriend when she was 24. In bourgeois circles, she tells me, getting married in your early twenties is widely viewed as eccentric, low-status or just outright “crazy.”

While the culture looks askance at women like Charlotte and Lucy, it energetically lionizes those who reject marriage altogether. Liberal pop-feminism of the kind found in consumer magazines abounds with celebration of single life for women, with titles such as “This New Year’s Eve, Celebrate the Women Who Choose to Stay Single” or “5 Reasons Why So Many Women Love Living Alone.” The business press joins the chorus, with articles celebrating the fact that single, childless women now out-earn single, childless men.

This dynamic raises a fair question. If everyone is economically independent, and sex needn’t result in babies, and none of us needs to rely on anyone else at all, why would any young, heterosexual woman get married? Some simply argue that we shouldn’t: a stance held today across both feminist and anti-feminist sides, where solidarity between the sexes is routinely treated as a bad-faith cover for exploitation and reframed in transactional terms. In 2008, for example, the feminist Sheila Jeffreys argued that marriage is a form of prostitution. It’s a view shared by the pro-porn, anti-feminist activist Jerry Barnett, who characterizes graduate women who marry high-earning men as “switching some of their corporate earnings for sex trade earnings.”

It’s expressed, too, by many in the “incel” (involuntary celibate) subculture, in which men gather online to bemoan their sexual deprivation and among “Men Going Their Own Way” (MGTOW), for whom a core precondition for male well-being is rejecting relationships with women altogether. One “incel” website defines marriage as “a system of legalized prostitution”—a cynicism made tragic by evidence that male sexlessness is principally an effect of rising marriage age. At the same time, these subcultures dismiss marriage as part of the problem, exacerbated by the ease with which such commitments may be dissolved under no-fault divorce law.

In other words: feminist and male-separatist views differ mainly in what advantage they claim the opposite sex is covertly pursuing via marriage. For feminist critics, it’s a bait-and-switch designed to trap women into low-status drudgery and sexual subordination. For male-separatists, it’s a bait-and-switch designed to trap men into a permanent “provider” status. With the material constraints on desire grown weightless, and marriage treated as suspect by separatists of both sexes, the mutual respect and affection of the Austen-era “companionate marriage” ideal has come to seem implausible. Perhaps in response, the purview of marriage has shrunk from a social to an individualistic one.

As we’ve seen, prior to the contraceptive revolution sex asymmetries were managed via social codes that negotiated between a relative male monopoly on resources, and a relative female monopoly on sexual access. These converged under what I’ve called Big Romance: an ideal of lifelong partnership that centers not on practical cooperation but on sexual and romantic affinity. In Jane Austen’s day, this found expression as the ideal of companionate marriage: a vision with real-world practical benefits for women within a context where they could be very vulnerable.

But as companionate marriage has grown materially less necessary, it’s become less a matter of survival than an optional enhancement, evolving into what psychologist Eli Finkel calls the “self-expressive marriage”: coupledom as a vector for self-actualization. For this ideal, the purpose of a marriage—or indeed any relationship—is to enable each partner to become more fully themselves, while retaining peak emotional fulfillment and romantic and sexual spark.

The positive form of this ideal is evident in those boundless narratives about finding The One, where the emphasis tends to be on the intensity of the bond, and rarely on what life looks like once you’ve found them. It appears more clearly, though, in shadow form, in the justifications offered for severing a bond with someone whose status as The One has been withdrawn.

The central justification given by 19th-century feminist campaigners against marriage was freeing women from abusive relationships. And there’s no doubt such relationships exist, and being trapped indissolubly in such a situation must surely be a kind of living hell, as it was for Mary Gove Nichols. But if the feminist case for divorce travels under the banner of protecting women from abuse, the liberal demand is far broader: for the right to sever long-term commitments at will, for any reason.

At the extremes, this could simply be a desire to shake off the dull constraints of everyday life, and live more completely (like Dean Moriarty) in the moment. The writer Honor Jones gives such an account, describing in the Atlantic how she ended her marriage simply because it stood in the way of her individual self-actualization: “I loved my husband; it’s not that I didn’t,” she says. “But I felt that he was standing between me and the world, between me and myself.” And this was, she felt, worth the disruption and pain she’d caused to others. “I had caused so much upheaval, so much suffering, and for what?” Jones admits. “So I could put my face in the wind. So I could see the sun’s glare.”

For Jones, her husband’s selfhood acted as a filter on hers, and she found the constraint intolerable: “Everything I experienced—relationships, reality, my understanding of my own identity and desires—were filtered through him before I could access them.” Sharing her sense of identity with another in this way was, for Jones, in zero-sum contest with fashioning herself: “How much of my life—I mean the architecture of my life, but also its essence, my soul, my mind—had I built around my husband? Who could I be if I wasn’t his wife? Maybe I would microdose. Maybe I would have sex with women. Maybe I would write a book.”

And this relentless focus on self-actualization at any price doesn’t just affect the divorce rate, but how, why, or even if we form relationships—in ways that turn out to retrieve the normative patterns of each sex, just in grotesque form. For as we’ve seen, the pill and abortion conveyed the impression that sexual difference could finally be flattened out. Back in 1992, this prompted Giddens to envisage emancipation from the material constraints on sexuality as unambiguously positive. For Giddens, this meant intimacy might finally come to be seen as “a transactional negotiation of personal ties by equals,” which “implies a wholesale democratizing of the interpersonal domain.” But for this to add up to liberation on identical terms for both men and women, utopians and emancipators such as Greer would have to be right that the sexes differ in preferences only because of social norms. In this case, a political and cultural effort to change attitudes to sex would indeed equalize the “sexual double standard,” and free women to enjoy erotic freedom on the same terms as men.

What if Greer was wrong, though? As the sociologist Julia Carter observed two decades after Giddens, the sexual double standard remains alive and well. For we may have flattened the sex asymmetry, but this isn’t the same as abolishing it.

The feminist theorist Louise Perry argues that the sexual revolution is predicated on being able to eradicate embodied, sexed differences between men and women–but has so far failed to do so. These differences, Perry suggests, are relatively small at the individual level but significant at scale. And they’re present both in our physiology and also “above the neck” in our average interests and preferences.

Notably, despite half a century of arguments that we’re all basically the same apart from trivial variations in genital topography, Perry shows that heterosexual men and women persistently exhibit significant average differences in sexual desire and behavior. Data consistently indicate, for example, that men rate women as most attractive when in their early twenties—regardless of their own age. Men are also considerably higher in “sociosexuality”—that is, desire for and determination to pursue multiple partners. Women, meanwhile, tend towards “hypergamy”: that is, a preference for partners with social status or resources, a pattern that holds even for high-achieving and high-earning women.

Why? An influential psychology paper published in 1972, between The Female Eunuch and Fear of Flying, sheds some light on this stubborn dimorphism. According to the “parental investment theory” advanced by psychologist Robert Trivers, many widely observed differences between men and women can be explained by the sexed asymmetry in how much time and effort is required to pass on our genes.

Higher male levels of “sociosexuality,” for example, can be explained in terms of different “parental investment.” For, as Perry puts it: “[W]omen can produce offspring at a maximum rate of about one pregnancy per year, whereas promiscuous men can theoretically produce offspring every time they orgasm.” As such, there are two distinct routes men may take while effectively passing on their genetic material: either causing as many pregnancies as possible, or sticking around to raise children with just one partner. Attentive long-term fatherhood increases the likelihood of your progeny surviving. But, as Perry puts it, “[A] man who can game the system by abandoning a woman after impregnating her, and then riding off into the sunset to impregnate many more women, is also successfully spreading his genetic material.”

In contrast, for most of human evolution, passing on your genetic material as a woman necessitated a risky pregnancy and a lengthy period of infant dependency. In that context, it’s historically been advantageous to women to choose partners willing to stick around. So women have evolved to show a stronger preference for sex accompanied by emotional closeness, and for long-term partners with resources or social status conducive to raising dependent children in comfort: that is, for “hypergamy,” or what was known in Jane Austen’s day as “marrying up.”

In theory, by de-risking casual encounters for women, the contraceptive revolution leveled the sexual playing field. It opened up the possibility that women, too, could fuck ziplessly, without fear that we’d pay for it with nine months’ gestation and the subsequent difficult question of what to do with an unwanted baby. Thus, logically, it also rendered obsolete the “sexual double standard” that condemns women more strongly than men for irresponsible sexual conduct. But just because we want something in theory, doesn’t mean we always end up liking it in practice. As Perry shows, for women in particular casual sex is often just not very enjoyable. Consistently, intimacy is the best predictor of sexual satisfaction: in casual hook-ups, “only 10 percent of women orgasm, compared to 68 percent of women in long-term relationships.” I’ll spare you the grisly details of my own experiments in “plastic sexuality,” except to say that this sounds about right.

And in pretending male and female desire is indistinguishable, when it manifestly isn’t, we also obscure equally sexed asymmetries in who is most desirable. Numerous studies attest to normative differences that bear out Trivers’ theory: for example, women prioritize men with power or resources, while men are, on average, more likely to prioritize female features consistent with fertility. None of this is deterministic, and our desires remain rich and varied; but at scale the differences are significant. A few short decades of sexuality unmoored from reproduction via technology are no match, it seems, for millennia of evolution. On average, what heterosexual men and women desire is still heavily inflected by what we’ve evolved to desire. And even as these differences have thwarted our efforts to realize the high egalitarian idealism of the sexual revolution, they open new market opportunities for the commercial free-for-all enabled by the pursuit of utopia.

Mary Harrington writes at UnHerd and on Substack at Reactionary Feminist, and posts as @moveincircles.