Reactionary Feminists Diagnose Real Flaws in Liberal Feminism but Offer Fatalistic, Biologically Essentialist Solutions
Source: Kaja Kröger. "Reactionary Feminists Offer Bad Solutions to Real Problems." November 9, 2026. jacobin.com
The Gist
The author says that conservative-leaning feminists like Mary Harrington and Louise Perry are right that the 'anything goes' approach to sex has let many women down, and the Left should take that seriously. But she argues their fixes, like marriage and restraint, depend on a fatalistic belief that men's and women's interests are fixed by biology, and on fuzzy borrowed leftist language. The Left should build its own sexual ethics rather than adopt theirs.
Conclusion
Reactionary feminists such as Mary Harrington and Louise Perry correctly identify real failures of sex-positive liberal feminism and correctly imply that a substantive feminist vision needs some form of sexual morality, but their prescriptions (marriage, sexual restraint) rest on vague Marxist-sounding rhetoric and a biological fatalism about gender, so the Left should take their critique seriously while rejecting their solutions.
Premises
- Liberal feminism's dominant sexual ideas (that sexual liberation always serves women, that consent is the only relevant ethic, that porn and sex purchase are benign) are increasingly ringing hollow because they diverge from women's actual experiences.
- Sex carries unusual vulnerability and risk and is not equivalent to a neutral activity like a walk, and cultural pressure toward nonmonogamy, kink and rough sex (e.g., about one in three women under 24 reporting being choked at last encounter, versus 3% of women over 40) leaves many women pressured and dissatisfied.
- Reactionary feminists tap these real intuitions and show that the liberal-left assumption that any sexual morality is anti-feminist is mistaken, so the Left must grapple with their critique.
- Harrington and Perry borrow leftist concepts like commodification, alienation, and 'sex class' but remain vague about why practices such as surrogacy and prostitution are wrong (misuse of women's bodies versus exploitation).
- Perry and Harrington ground male-female conflict in innate biological differences in interests and vulnerabilities, which obscures the role of socialization in gender relations and sexual violence.
- If interests between men and women are fixed by nature, the only options are to overthrow nature or accept the conflict and tame it through institutions like marriage, which is a fatalism parallel to the heteropessimism they criticize.
Assumptions
- Gender differences in sexual interests are substantially shaped by socialization rather than being fixed by biology.
- A feminist politics should aim at structurally transforming gender relations rather than managing them through traditional institutions.
- Survey data on rough sex and women's reported dissatisfaction reflect social pressure rather than genuine preference.
- A sexual morality can be formulated without being reactionary or tied to the traditional family and heterosexual marriage.
- Marxist concepts like alienation and commodification must be applied with consistent grounding to be legitimately invoked.
- The Left has in fact broadly absorbed the view that all sexual morality is anti-feminist.