“...feminist viewpoints emerge in tandem with technological advancement and social atomisation, 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 atomisation 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.”

“For women, this ideal of personhood took definitive legal form in the legalisation of abortion, and broader form in the rejection of ‘care’ as in any sense a female domain or obligation. But the net impact of women rejecting a sexist obligation to shoulder the burden of care hasn’t yet been men taking on an equal part of that burden. Rather, it’s been an awkward mixture of poorer people—usually women—being deputised as paid substitute carers, and those most in need of care often going without.”

“The industrial era raised new questions about how the economics of life in common could and should mesh with sexuality and the asymmetric material realities of child-rearing. Over the first two centuries of industrial-era life, men and women re-negotiated those parameters, co-constructing twin spheres of emotional sensibility and market competition: spheres that articulated via the axis of romance. But with the advent of the sexual revolution those spheres began to dissolve into one another. And as we’ll see, the romantic vision of marriage has shed the crucial role it played in balancing relations between the sexes, becoming instead an active impediment to those relations.

Underwritten by economic and technological changes that freed wives from financial dependence, and sexual intercourse from pregnancy risk, feminist advocates for that dissolution envisaged a utopia of joy and pleasure. Liberated from the burden of social constraint heaped for millennia on women, as a means of discouraging unplanned pregnancy, women could at last explore their sexuality untrammelled. They succeeded.

Accelerated by the pervasive metaphor of the virtual ‘marketplace’, in which individual men and women are packaged as products to browse, select and enjoy, casual sexual encounters are normalised today. Now, in a world where romance has lost its function as the connective tissue between desire and material reality, and the Hayekian marketplace serves as governing metaphor even for our most intimate encounters, the prospect of making, or trusting another to make a binding promise of mutual commitment seems ever more remote. Instead, the ‘human’ dream of radically malleable sexual and reproductive identities envisioned variously by Kollontai, de Beauvoir and Firestone has set the stage for a new, nominally feminist vision, foundationally premised on the power of reproductive technologies to eliminate or at least de-nature every embodied limit experienced by men and women.

Under the sign of this bio-libertarianism, governed by the ‘spontaneous order’ of digital markets, relationships are formed and dissolved in an unbounded space marked by what one millennial man of my acquaintance describes as a ‘general film of impermanence. And the radical pursuit of unattached individual freedom this both presumes and legitimises comes at considerable, if asymmetrical, cost to both men and women.

For the price of transition first into an industrial-era marriage marketplace, and now from that into a cyborg-era sexual marketplace, has been the steady dwindling of any space for solidarity - not just between men and women, but between individuals of any kind. As I’ll show, it has instead set off an all-out war on relationships.”

“What travels under the term ‘progress’ is revolutionary destruction of previously immutable-seeming limits. This is usually framed as moral advancement, but in practice 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 this cleared. Then, whatever has been smashed in pursuit of progress ends up reordered to the atomised laws of the market.”