Anyone familiar with Mary Harrington’s columns in UnHerd will know her as a thinker of exceptional originality, acuity and freshness. Her first book does not disappoint her fans. It is an eye-popping analysis of what she calls “reality denying” woke feminism as it has evolved since the 1960s.
Harrington describes herself as a “revisionist feminist” because she believes the stances of self-declared feminists are inimical to the welfare and interests of most women and that it is people like herself who have a better right to describe themselves as feminists.
Harrington has come full circle from buying into and living the most extreme expressions of the feminist liberation creed. She was, as she acknowledges, woke and radically so before the term was coined. She experimented with “drugs, kink and non-monogamous relationships” in her 20s. She was committed to living in complete freedom and rejected all hierarchies. Her experience of living with other radicals showed her that power dynamics are part of all human interactions and not, as she believed, the preserve of capitalism and patriarchy. That seems to have been her first reality check….