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Even the most well-read World War II enthusiast is likely unaware of one major military operation that happened in 1945. It involved Royal Air Force bombers, 24 Sherman tanks, and 36,000 troops—some of them British, the rest Indian and Nepalese Gurkhas under British command. More than 600 of these soldiers died, including a British brigadier general.Despite the year, the fighting happened after the war ended. It took place in Indonesia. One of the dirty secrets of 1945 is that just as the Allies were speaking loftily of having saved the world from German and Japanese tyranny, they began new battles to regain colonies they had lost in the war: France retook Algeria and Indochina, and the Dutch wanted Indonesia back. With the Netherlands half a world away and devastated by war, the British stepped in to help.Few Anglophones know either Dutch or Indonesian, and that’s likely one reason we know far less about that archipelago’s long and painful history than, say, about India’s ordeals under the Raj. Yet Indonesia is the world’s fourth-most-populous country, and the one with the largest number of Muslim inhabitants. A single island, Java, has more people than France and Britain combined. David Van Reybrouck’s immensely readable new history of the nation, Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World, fills an important gap.Van Reybrouck is a Dutch-speaking Belgian best known for his Congo: The Epic History of a People, published in 2014. Although his writing is dazzling, some of us who follow events in that country felt he was a mite too gentle in dealing with Belgian colonial rule, especially the forced-labor system that so enriched the colony’s founder, King Leopold II. But he shows no such reticence when it comes to the Dutch in Indonesia.How, he asks, did the once-tiny settlement that today is the immense city of Jakarta “ever become a thriving hub of world trade? The answer was simple: by enslaving people.” Between 1600 and 1900, an estimated 600,000 people were traded by the Dutch in Asia. Some 150,000 slaves came from Bali alone. All of this began under the Dutch East India Company, which, like its British counterpart (they were founded a mere two years apart), had its own army. The company ran the colony for two centuries and was the first corporation anywhere to have tradable stock.The colonial regime brought vast riches to the mother country and much bloodshed to the islands; a single war from 1825 to 1830 cost roughly 200,000 Indonesian lives. Several decades later, slave labor in the archipelago was in some years generating more than half of the total Dutch tax revenue. (Surprisingly, Van Reybrouck does not mention someone who noticed this, Leopold of Belgium. Enviously eyeing these huge profits set the king on a similar path in his new African colony. Forced labor, he declared, was “the only way to civilize and uplift these indolent and corrupt peoples.”) As with many colonial conquests, the resources that first loomed large for the Dutch—spices—were soon eclipsed by others that proved even more lucrative: coffee, tea, tobacco, and sugar. Ultimately, major profits came from feeding an industrializing world’s hunger for coal and, above all, oil.Although many scattered revolts took place throughout the centuries of Dutch rule, a profusion of local languages and the expanse of the islands (stretching a distance as far as from Ireland to Kazakhstan, Van Reybrouck points out) meant that national consciousness was slow in coming. An official independence movement did not begin until 1912—by coincidence the same year that saw the African National Congress born in South Africa. The charismatic orator Sukarno, the man who became the movement’s often-imprisoned leader, had the ability to knit together its nationalist, Communist, and Islamic strands. When the Japanese occupied the islands during World War II, they imprisoned Dutch officials and professed anti-colonial solidarity with the Indonesians, but before long began seizing natural riches and imposing their own forced-labor system. A mere two days after Japan announced its surrender to the Allies but before the Dutch could again take over, Sukarno saw his chance and issued a declaration of independence, the postwar era’s first.Then, in response, came the British invasion, the first round of a four-year colonial war as vicious as any in the 20th century. Heavily armed by the United States, the Dutch battled, in vain, to reestablish control over the sprawling territory. Possibly as many as 200,000 Indonesians died in the conflict, as well as more than 4,600 Dutch soldiers.As in most counter-guerilla wars, captured fighters were routinely tortured to force them to reveal the whereabouts of their comrades. The Dutch soldier Joop Hueting left a chilling memoir, which Van Reybrouck summarizes: “The platitudes in the letters home. ‘Everything still fine here,’ ‘how lovely that Nell has had her baby,’ because why worry them with stories that they, with their crocheted doilies and floral wallpaper and milk bottles on the doorstep, wouldn’t understand … stories about bamboo huts burning so fiercely that the roar of the flames drowns out the screams of the people who lived there, stories about naked fifteen-year-olds writhing on the concrete with electric wires attached to their bodies.”Hueting went public for the first time in a television interview he gave in 1969, two decades after his return from Indonesia, provoking death threats so severe that he and his family sought police protection. For the rest of his life, he collected testimonies from fellow Dutch veterans, but, Van Reybrouck writes, “it is bewildering that shortly before his death, the NIOD, the Dutch Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, showed no interest … As a result, the legacy of the post-war Netherlands’ most important whistle-blower is languishing in the attic of a private house in Amsterdam.” No country, including our own, reckons easily with such parts of its past; few Americans learn much about the similarly brutal colonial war we waged in the Philippines from 1899 to 1902.To their credit, some Dutch people were uneasy about the war. Although 120,000 draftees were sent to Indonesia, a remarkable 6,000 refused to board the ships, many of them sentenced to prison as a result. An unknown number of others, foreshadowing our own war resisters during the Vietnam years, concocted medical or psychiatric ailments or quietly slipped out of the country. Among those who did go to Indonesia, at least two—echoing a handful of Black American troops in the Philippines a half century earlier—switched sides.The best-known of them, Poncke Princen, had been jailed in Holland and Germany by the Nazis, then joined the Dutch army after liberation. Sent to Indonesia, he deserted and took up arms with the rebels. He remained after independence, becoming a member of the Indonesian Parliament and an outspoken human-rights advocate. Those activities won him lengthy prison terms under both Sukarno and his successor, Suharto; sadly, postindependence Indonesia saw long periods of repression.Many voices we hear in Revolusi are of people whom Van Reybrouck himself talked with. Another Dutch deserter who went over to the rebels was 90 years old when the author tracked him down, in the Dutch city of Assen. With astounding energy, Van Reybrouck found dozens of other elderly eyewitnesses in huts, apartments, and nursing homes all over the world—in Holland, Indonesia, Japan (veterans of the World War II occupation force), and Nepal (Ghurkas from the British army). And even when all the participants involved in a particular event are now dead, he often manages to find a daughter or grandson with a story to tell. Van Reybrouck has visited just about every place that figures in Indonesia’s history, and evokes them with a narrative zest all too rare among historians. When approached from the air, for example, a pair of islands look “like two emerald-green cufflinks on the sleeve of the Pacific.”That 1945–49 war saw scenes of appalling savagery. One notorious Dutch commander, Raymond Westerling, would have “his men surround a suspicious kampong in the early morning … Anyone who tried to escape … was gunned down … After searching the houses, Westerling addressed the silent crowd and went through his list of suspects … One after the other, the suspects were forced to squat.” If he thought someone had information he wasn’t yielding, Westerling would begin firing bullets.“The first one shot was Regge, a cousin of mine,” a woman told Van Reybrouck. “They shot him six times. In his right foot, his left foot, his right knee, his left knee … It was Westerling himself who shot him. He didn’t say anything. He drank a soft drink, threw the bottle in the air and shot it.” Westerling claimed to have personally killed 563 people. After the war, he ran a secondhand bookstore in Amsterdam, took opera lessons, and ended up as a swimming-pool lifeguard.Many things make colonial wars particularly brutal: the colonizers’ lust for wealth; their fear that their enemies might be anywhere, instead of behind a clearly defined front line; their belief that the colonized people belong to an inferior race. But in the case of the Dutch in Indonesia—as of the French in Algeria, who also practiced torture and murder on a huge scale—was there an additional factor as well?Immediately before its war against Indonesian independence fighters, the Netherlands itself emerged from five years of ruthless German occupation. The country had been plundered. The massive bombing of Rotterdam had leveled the city’s medieval core and left nearly 80,000 people homeless. The occupiers had banned all political parties except a pro-Nazi one. Those suspected of being in the resistance had been jailed and tortured; many of them had been killed. In the winter of 1944–45, the Germans had cut off heating fuel and food for much of the country, and some 20,000 people had starved to death. More than 200,000 Dutch men, women and children had died of causes related to the war, just over half of them Jews who’d perished in the Holocaust. As a percentage of the population, this was the highest death rate of any country in Western Europe. And more than half a million Dutch citizens had been impressed as forced laborers for the Nazis, usually working in war factories that were the targets of Allied bombers.When victims become perpetrators, are they unconsciously taking revenge? Many conflicts, including those raging today—think of Gaza, for instance—have this underlying subtext. The whistleblower soldier Joop Hueting reported a haunting piece of graffiti he saw as Dutch troops advanced in Java, which answered the question definitively: “Don’t do to us what the Germans did to you!”

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via VKChechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has responded to a bombshell report that he is on the brink of death and the Kremlin is actively searching for his successor by doing exactly what Vladimir Putin himself would probably do: posting a cringe video of himself working out.“Remember, taking care of your health is an investment in the future, and consistency and perseverance will lead you to success, both in sports and in life,” the self-proclaimed Putin foot soldier wrote in a post on social media. Kadyrov squeezed himself into a bright blue jogging suit for an accompanying one-and-a-half-minute video in which he can be seen doing his stretches before lifting weights.Tellingly, the video seemed to play up Kadyrov’s aides struggling with the workout, before showing a clearly rehearsed–and maybe a little homoerotic–moment in which the Chechen tyrant easily tosses his aide to the ground.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Hundreds of “Freedom Convoy” supporters march in downtown Ottawa on Canada Day, July 1, 2022, in Ottawa, Canada. | Dave Chan/AFP via Getty Images Justin Trudeau’s true dough plans to fight populism with policy. Canada has a growing populism problem. Even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau thinks so. Like many other countries — including the United States — Canadians have spent the last several years dealing with pandemic restrictions, a rise in immigration, and a housing affordability crisis (among much, much else). And like many other countries, that’s showing up in a host of ways: Trust in institutions like the government and media is down. Sentiment on immigration is becoming more negative. “Well, first of all, it’s a global trend,” Trudeau told Sean Rameswaram in an exclusive interview on Today, Explained. “In every democracy, we’re seeing a rise of populists with easy answers that don’t necessarily hold up to any expert scrutiny. But a big part of populism is condemning and ignoring experts and expertise. So it sort of feeds on itself.” As Trudeau points out, Canada is not alone. But our northern neighbor’s struggle is notable because the country has long been seen as resistant to the kind of anti-immigrant, anti-establishment rhetoric sweeping the globe in recent years — in part because multiculturalism is enshrined in federal law. It goes back to the 1960s, when French Canadian nationalist groups started to gain power in Quebec. They called for the province’s independence from Canada proper. The federal government, led then by nepo daddy Pierre Trudeau, stepped in. Rather than validating one cultural identity over the other, the elder Trudeau’s government established a national policy of bilingualism, requiring all federal institutions to provide services in both English and French. (This is why — if you ever watch Canadian parliamentary proceedings, as I did for this story — politicians are constantly flipping back and forth between the two languages.) Canada also adopted a formal multiculturalism policy in 1971, affirming Canadians’ multicultural heritage. The multiculturalism policy has undergone both challenge and expansion in the half-century since its introduction. But Pierre Trudeau’s decision to root Canadian identity in diversity has had lasting impacts: Canadians have historically been much more open to immigration — despite having a greater proportion of immigrants in their population — than their other Western counterparts. But in more recent years, that’s begun to change rapidly as large numbers of immigrants have entered the country amid a housing affordability crisis. An Environics Institute survey showed that in 2023, 44 percent of Canadians felt there was too much immigration — an increase from 27 percent the year before. That’s where Conservative opposition leader Pierre Poilievre comes in. Known as a “soft” populist, he’s started calling on Canada to cut immigration levels (so far, without demonizing immigrants, as we’ve seen from his populist counterparts elsewhere in the West). That said, he looks like a traditional populist in a lot of other ways: Poilievre embraced Canada’s 2022 Freedom Convoy protests, opposed vaccine and mask requirements, voted against marriage equality, has proposed defunding the Canadian Broadcasting Service, wants schools to leave LGBTQ issues to parents, and has talked about repealing a litany of government regulations — from the country’s carbon tax to internet regulations. Basically, he’s against any “gatekeepers” to Canadians’ “freedom.” And that message? It seems to be resonating with voters, including young ones. The plan: Fight populism with policy Enter: Trudeau’s half-trillion-Canadian-dollar plan for “generational fairness,” also known as the “Gen Z budget” for its focus on younger generations feeling the economic squeeze most acutely. “People are facing an anxiety that the economy doesn’t work for them anymore. That the deck is stacked against young people in a way that is different from previous generations,” Trudeau said on Today, Explained. “And that’s a problem because it leads to a sense of uncertainty about the future and a sense of, ‘Okay, the institutions and society and government can’t actually help.’ And that sort of feeds into populism.” To demonstrate that government can work for young people, Trudeau has allocated C$6 billion to help Canadian provinces build new housing — if they agree to certain conditions, like building denser neighborhoods and more climate-friendly housing. It also includes provisions to expand child care, provide school lunches, and invest in the Canadian AI sector. To pay for it, the country plans to increase capital gains taxes on the wealthiest Canadians — C$19 billion over the next five years. “I know there will be many voices raised in protest. No one likes paying more tax, even — or perhaps particularly — those who can afford it the most,” Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland said. “But before they complain too bitterly, I would like Canada’s 1 percent — Canada’s 0.1 percent — to consider this: What kind of Canada do you want to live in?” Though the Conservatives will oppose the plan, it’s likely to pass. Arlyn McAdorey/Bloomberg via Getty Images Trudeau speaks in April about the government’s proposal to provide low-cost leases of public land to developers and push factory construction of homes as part of a “historic” plan to alleviate Canada’s housing crisis. Can it work? The bet Trudeau is making is this: The best counterpoint to anti-establishment rhetoric is … using the establishment to make people’s lives better. “The biggest difference between me and the Conservatives right now is: They don’t think government has a role to play in solving for these problems,” Trudeau told Today, Explained. “I think government can’t solve everything, nor should it try. But it can make sure that if the system isn’t working for young people, that we rebalance the system. Market forces are not going to do that.” A key challenge will be demonstrating progress by the time elections roll around. Housing and real estate experts generally cheered the announcement — but noted that it might be years before people on the ground see any real change. Elections, on the other hand, aren’t yet scheduled but have to happen by October 2025 (parliamentary systems, man). In the meantime, Conservatives are still ahead in the polls, though there’s some evidence that their lead is starting to diminish after the Liberals spent a month previewing their budget. If he’s successful, Trudeau argues that his strategy could be a blueprint for other nations confronting similar trends — particularly during an election year in which we expect populist rhetoric to play a significant role. “There’s no question that democracies remain a lot more advantageous to human beings than any other structures, but it’s not as obvious as it used to be,” Trudeau told Today, Explained. “We have to remember: Democracies didn’t happen by accident, and they don’t continue without effort.” This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

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Paige Vickers/Vox; Getty Images American conservatives are cozying up to British feminists who argue that the sexual revolution has hurt women. In February, America’s most prominent conservative activist declared his opposition to having sex for fun. In a post on X, the “anti-woke” crusader Christopher Rufo wrote, “‘Recreational sex’ is a large part of the reason we have so many single-mother households, which drives poverty, crime, and dysfunction. The point of sex is to create children—this is natural, normal, and good.” Much gawking at Rufo’s grimly utilitarian take on sex ensued. Yet the firestorm largely ignored the woman whose anti-birth-control tirade had ignited it. Rufo’s remarks were sparked by a video of a 2023 Heritage Foundation panel. In that clip, a bespectacled British woman details the supposed ravages of both oral contraception and the sexual culture that it birthed. She claims that the normalization of birth control has condemned women to higher rates of mental illness while offering them little in recompense beyond the freedom to endure “loveless and sometimes extremely degrading” sex. Therefore, she continues, the world needs “a feminist movement” that is “against the Pill” and for “returning the consequentiality to sex.” That woman, the writer Mary Harrington, is an unlikely spokesperson for fundamentalist Christian morality. A onetime leftist, Harrington remains a fierce critic of free-market economics and an opponent of abortion bans. Yet her 2023 book, Feminism Against Progress, won her an avid following among American social conservatives, receiving adulatory notices in the Federalist and the National Review and earning her bylines at the conservative Catholic journal First Things. Harrington’s appeal to these institutions isn’t hard to discern. She is a proponent of “reactionary feminism,” an ideology that shares Christian conservatism’s hostility toward permissive sex norms, birth control, rights for transgender people, and mainstream feminism. But instead of indicting social liberalism on theological grounds, Harrington does so on entirely secular and avowedly feminist ones. Her complaint with birth control is threefold: First, Harrington argues that the Pill undermined sexual norms that had previously protected women from the hazards of single motherhood and exploitation. Second, she insists that the advent of oral contraception led the feminist movement to embrace an excessively individualistic vision of women’s liberation. Before birth control, according to Harrington, the movement aimed to challenge the values of capitalism, insisting that familial caregiving was socially indispensable even if it had no market price. But once they gained control over their fertility, feminists no longer felt compelled to defend the value of caregiving. Their critique of capitalism ceased to be that it valued what was profitable over what was socially valuable and became that it merely didn’t pay women equal wages. Third, by dramatically reducing women’s vulnerability to unplanned pregnancy, the Pill led feminists to indulge in the fantasy that there were no innate differences between the sexes that couldn’t be transcended through social reform and biotechnology. In sum, for Harrington, feminism is now defined by the quixotic pursuit of women’s freedom from all social and biological constraints. And this anti-social, utopian quest has served most women poorly, condemning them to a sexually exploitative dating market, alienating them from their own bodies, leaving them vulnerable to the predations of Big Biotech, and exacerbating their caregiving burdens by promoting social atomization and male irresponsibility. Harrington is not alone in staking out this ideological turf. Louise Perry, a fellow British feminist, championed a similar vision in her 2022 book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Like Harrington, Perry evinces opposition to free markets and blanket bans on abortion yet has nonetheless received a warm welcome from US conservatives. The American Christian right’s enthusiasm for sex-negative British feminists may reflect the conservative movement’s present challenges. As the reaction to Rufo’s condemnation of “recreational sex” demonstrated, the moral intuitions of religious conservatives have become deeply alien to an increasingly secular American public. With religiosity and church attendance in sharp decline, conservatives need nonscriptural arguments for traditional social mores. Reactionary feminism offers them precisely this. And the ideology appears to have some potential appeal among young women alienated by online dating, pornography, and birth control’s side effects. In recent months, Harrington-esque diatribes against contraception, online dating, and porn have trended on TikTok, a social media platform dominated by Gen Z. Reactionary feminism therefore warrants liberals’ attention — and our critique. Harrington and Perry are both strong writers whose work speaks to some genuinely problematic aspects of sexual modernity. But there are (at least) three broad problems with their worldview. First, where reactionary feminism speaks to genuine social problems, it offers few compelling answers for addressing them. Second, contrary to Harrington’s theorizing, there is no sharp trade-off between increasing women’s individual freedom and meeting society’s caregiving needs. Finally, this brand of feminism is reactionary in the pejorative sense: Many of Harrington’s and Perry’s complaints with sexual modernity are rooted less in careful reasoning than in a reflexive skepticism of change. Why reactionary feminists want you to have less casual sex Reactionary feminism is built atop one fundamental premise: There are unalterable differences between the sexes, and mainstream feminism has ignored them at women’s expense. This idea is at the core of Harrington’s indictment of casual sex. In her telling, the Pill may have reduced women’s susceptibility to pregnancy, but it did not erase the psychological predispositions that males and females inherited from millennia of evolution. By downplaying or denying the persistence of these differences, Harrington argues, feminists abetted the emergence of sexual norms that harm women and benefit predatory men. (Her analysis of modern sexual relations is focused exclusively on straight, cisgender relationships. Beyond her opposition to trans rights, she has little to say about the sexual revolution’s implications for LGBTQ people). Here, Harrington’s analysis converges with that of Louise Perry. In The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Perry notes that psychologists have consistently found large sex-based differences in “sociosexuality” — a measure of an individual’s interest in sexual variety and adventure. In every culture psychologists have studied, men tend to express a higher degree of interest in having lots of commitment-free sex than women do. This does not mean that every man is more interested in sexual variety than every woman. But in the aggregate, Perry argues, the divergence is clear. She further insists that these patterns are rooted in evolutionary biology. Males can pass on their genes merely by orgasming inside a female, while women cannot reproduce without enduring an extensive pregnancy and risky labor. This gives women a greater incentive to be selective in their choice of partners and men a greater interest in sowing their wild oats. Over millennia, she says, evolution translated these disparate incentives into distinct psychological tendencies. Alas, in Perry’s view, modern sexual culture ignores these distinctions. According to her, most women prefer a committed relationship to casual hookups. But the existence of oral contraception and legal abortion — combined with feminism’s insistence on male and female interchangeability — has left them without an excuse for withholding sex until commitment is offered. More crucially, such women face a collective action problem: Perry argues that in a culture where casual sex is normative, refusing to placate male desire puts a woman at a competitive disadvantage in the race for desirable men. Online dating exacerbates these problems. According to Harrington, natural selection has also bequeathed to modern women a preference for men with high social status (in addition to various coveted physical traits). Combine that predisposition with men’s taste for sexual variety and a norm of casual sex, and you end up with a highly dysfunctional dating market. Harrington and Perry note that on the dating app Hinge, 10 percent of men receive 58 percent of all women’s “likes.” From this, they extrapolate that predatory high-status men are each stringing along several women at a time, exploiting them for degrading and unfulfilling sex (only 10 percent of women orgasm in first-time hookups) before assembling new harems. Meanwhile, legions of mediocre men go sexless and mutate into misogynistic incels. Mutual hostility between the sexes festers. In the reactionary feminist narrative, all of this translates into fewer marriages, a collapsing birth rate, and, within Gen Z, a widespread, porn-addled celibacy. At the same time, partly because oral contraception is not always effective (especially when imperfectly used), the normalization of casual sex has yielded an increase in single motherhood. And although such mothers should not be stigmatized, Harrington and Perry argue, it’s nevertheless true that both mothers and children tend to fare better with a partner in the picture. Thus, reactionary feminists validate the Christian right’s deep-seated conviction that birth control is lamentable and that women have suffered from the decline of traditional sexual morality. And this is far from the only place where heterodox British feminists and fundamentalist American theocrats see eye to eye. As one might expect, reactionary feminists also share the right’s opposition to pornography, sex work, BDSM, and health care and inclusion for trans people. Even on reproductive rights, Harrington and Perry aid the conservative project. Although both oppose the legal prohibition of abortion, they also maintain that modern feminism favors personal autonomy over social responsibility to a pathological extent and see the normalization of abortion as a case in point. Harrington writes that “as long as we uphold women’s right to end a pregnancy, we conclusively favour the Hobbesian vision of selfhood over one that makes room for dependency and care.” Perry has suggested that the trivialization of abortion puts us on a slippery slope to normalizing a sexual culture on par with ancient Rome, up to and including infanticide. Modern sexual culture does fail some women Reactionary feminists get a few things right. Harrington and Perry aren’t entirely wrong about human sexual psychology, and they speak to some genuine flaws in contemporary gender relations. But their inattention to public policy and their warped political priorities leave them ill equipped to provide solutions to the real problems they identify. That cis men have, on average, a greater appetite for casual sex than cis women has been exhaustively documented. As the evolutionary psychologists David Michael Buss and David P. Schmitt noted in a 2011 journal article, a long list of studies have found that men are more likely than women to 1) seek one-night stands, 2) consent to sex with a stranger, 3) agree to have sex with a partner after knowing them for only a brief period of time, 4) and express positive attitudes about casual sex, among myriad other behaviors indicative of high sociosexuality. A large-scale survey of 52 different nations — spread across six different continents — found that in every single culture surveyed, male respondents expressed more interest in sexual variety than female respondents. It is theoretically possible that these disparities are entirely the product of social conditioning. But their presence across cultures lends credence to the notion that biology plays some role. Evolutionary psychology can be put to ill use. But Harrington and Perry are certainly right that we are all products of evolution, and it’s doubtlessly true that ejaculating requires orders of magnitude less time and energy than carrying a pregnancy to term. Given the centrality of sex to natural selection, it would be surprising if this fundamental asymmetry between what it takes for a cis man to pass on his genes and what it takes for a cis woman to do so left no imprint whatsoever on their respective average predispositions. It does not follow, however, that the collapse of taboos against casual sex has been a disaster for women. Men may be more likely to desire casual sex than women. But plenty of women appreciate the prerogative to have a little fun (or, at least, to know whether they have sexual chemistry with a person before marrying them). This said, there is a little evidence to back up the reactionary feminist claim that modern dating is serving men better than women, if only slightly. In a 2022 Pew Research survey, 57 percent of men who used online dating platforms reported primarily positive experiences with the apps, while 48 percent of women did. Men were also more than twice as likely as women to say that they were using online dating to “have casual sex,” with 31 percent of the former saying it was a “major reason” they used the apps and only 13 percent of the latter said the same. But this data paints a far less dystopian portrait of modern dating than reactionary feminists do: Nearly half of women using online dating have had largely positive experiences, and a plurality of male daters (42 percent) are looking for a committed relationship, according to the Pew survey. Nevertheless, it appears to be true that some number of heterosexual women are having a rough time on the dating market, partly because their male dates tend to be more interested in commitment-free hookups than they are. Some of reactionary feminists’ other complaints with sexual modernity are more indisputably well founded. There is no question that the percentage of children growing up in single-parent households has increased in the US since the arrival of the sexual revolution, rising from 9 percent in the 1960s to 23 percent in 2019. It is also clear that the overwhelming majority of single parents are women, that children of married parents tend to fare better than those of single parents (all else equal), and that single mothers suffer exceptionally high rates of poverty. Reactionary feminists have few answers for what we should do about this But reactionary feminists offer little insight into what, precisely, we should do about any of this. Harrington and Perry both recognize that there is no going back to a world before the Pill (and grudgingly acknowledge that doing so would have significant downsides, in any case). In their prescriptive content, both Feminism Against Progress and The Case Against the Sexual Revolution more closely resemble self-help guides than political manifestos. Harrington’s book encourages women to reclaim their “sexual self-discipline” by going off birth control, thereby ensuring that they only go to bed with men whom they trust enough to wear a condom or pull out. Perry’s book, meanwhile, concludes with a chapter titled “Listen to Your Mother,” in which she advises young women to (among other things) love themselves, trust their moral intuitions, and hold off on having sex with a new boyfriend “for at least a few months” to discover whether he’s serious about them. It’s plausible that some young women will find this advice helpful. But given that — in reactionary feminists’ own telling — so-called hookup culture is a downstream consequence of reproductive technology, it is unclear how Perry’s call for chastity is supposed to produce social change. Meanwhile, if one’s aim is to reduce single motherhood, encouraging women to abandon the Pill in favor of “cycle tracking” and the pull-out method for pregnancy prevention seems unwise. Perry’s and Harrington’s books both evince disdain for free-market economics. And in an email to Vox, Harrington described American social policy as “frankly barbarous” in its failure to provide universal access to “perinatal healthcare or federally mandated maternity leave.” And yet if reactionary feminists support economic reforms that would ease the poverty of single mothers and support family formation, they devote little time or space to advocating for such measures. Indeed, the only political activity that Feminism Against Progress endorses at length is the struggle against trans rights. Rather than trying to elect parties that support expansions of family-centric social welfare policies, Harrington implores reactionary feminists to focus on capturing NGOs and educational institutions so as to push back against gender-neutral restrooms and policies on the use of trans students’ correct pronouns in schools. This seems like a difficult set of priorities to justify, even if one were to accept all of Harrington’s own trans-exclusionary premises. Whatever one’s opinion on sex-segregated spaces or public schools’ pronoun policies, it seems obvious that these measures have less material impact on the welfare of cis women writ large than, say, whether the state guarantees them enough income to take maternity leave or keep their children out of poverty. Giving women control over their fertility makes it easier to care for our society’s vulnerable, not harder Harrington’s concern that mainstream feminism has grown excessively individualistic — and inadequately attuned to the interests of working-class women — is not entirely unfounded. Certainly, upper-middle-class women have dominated the feminist movement since its inception. And, at least in the United States, that movement has had greater success in dismantling barriers to women’s full participation in market commerce than in fundamentally remaking economic institutions. Nevertheless, the belief that there is a sharp trade-off between increasing women’s individual autonomy and economic agency on the one hand and meeting our society’s collective needs for caregiving on the other is mistaken. Women’s rising labor-force participation may have entailed a reduction in the number of hours that mothers spent with their own small children or older relatives. Yet the half century since the sexual revolution has also witnessed declines in poverty among both children and older adults. In material terms, the United States is taking much better care of its most vulnerable residents today than it did in the mid-20th century. We have achieved this by funding social welfare programs that transfer income from the working-age population to those who are older, younger, and poorer. And women’s full participation in the economy makes it easier to fund such programs. If our economies could not draw on the productive capacities of one-half of all adults, there would be much less income to redistribute. Of course, children need more from their caregivers than material resources. And Harrington is doubtlessly correct when she writes that many professional-class women can only escape the burdens of domesticity by “outsourcing chores” and child care to a mostly female “servant class.” She is also surely right that some nannies and child care workers would prefer to be at home with their own children if they were not economically compelled to nurture someone else’s instead. But her book leaves the upshot of this observation unclear. By email, she clarified that she would like all public child care programs to include a cash benefit for stay-at-home parents. This is a reasonable idea. But it is also one with a long pedigree in progressive feminism — left-wing feminists have been demanding “wages for housework” since the 1970s. Finally, Harrington and Perry’s notion that the push for legal abortion epitomizes mainstream feminism’s prioritization of personal freedom over obligation to others is highly tendentious. Their argument only holds if one accepts the metaphysical premise that a fetus is a person; if one rejects that notion, then getting an abortion can actually be an affirmation of one’s sense of obligation to other people. After all, the typical person having an abortion is already a parent, and parents often choose to terminate a pregnancy out of a desire to concentrate more energy and resources on their existing children. Reactionary feminism’s case against biotechnology and BDSM is rooted in superstition Harrington casts herself as a clear-eyed realist who learned to see through her progressive milieu’s unthinking dogmas. Ultimately, though, like her sympathizers on the Christian right, she tends to substitute mere intuition (if not superstition) for facts or reasoned argument. This habit is best exemplified by her indictments of BDSM and biotechnology. Harrington sees the rise of “kink” as a scourge, and one inextricable from the advent of contraception. She posits that people have gravitated toward BDSM as a way of compensating for the drab safety of protected sex, writing that eliminating the risk of pregnancy “takes much of the dark, dangerous and profoundly intimate joy out of sex” and that men and women seek to recapture that “darkness and danger” through “depraved fetishes and sexual violence.” She provides approximately zero evidence for this theory. And although I am extremely ill positioned to speak to the unconscious motivations of masochistic women on hormonal birth control, it seems doubtful to me that the majority turn to BDSM in an attempt to recapture the lost “thrill” of worrying midcoitus that a condom just broke. Meanwhile, Harrington’s hostility toward both contraception and gender-affirming medicine is rooted partly in a superstitious aversion to biotechnology. Harrington says that she felt alienated from her female body as an adolescent but came to find comfort and joy in it later in life. She is therefore understandably concerned that young women going through a similar period of pubescent angst today might be misdirected toward unnecessary medical treatments with significant side effects. But her concerns about trans-inclusive health care are scarcely confined to questions of pediatric gender medicine’s diagnostic protocols or the limitations of existing research on patient outcomes. Rather, she’s skeptical of all attempts to bring our bodies into closer alignment with our conscious needs and desires. As she put the point to me, “The significance of the contraceptive revolution, as I see it, is that it breaks with millennia of medical tradition in seeking not to fix something that’s working abnormally, in the name of health, but to break something that’s working normally (female fertility) in the name of individual freedom.” Harrington regards the latter endeavor as inherently hubristic and liable to be corrupted by amoral profit seeking. Yet her book also demonizes medical innovations aimed at preventing a patient’s imminent death. In Feminism Against Progress, she cites attempts to develop lab-grown organs — a line of research aimed at saving the lives of very ill people — as one of the nightmarish consequences of the contraceptive revolution. Her book’s only actual argument against the practice, however, is that it is “unnatural.” But nature is not our friend. Evolution didn’t shape our bodies and brains with an eye to our welfare as conscious beings or our morality as social ones. Rather, it shaped us for survival and reproduction under a set of ecological and social conditions that our species long ago outgrew. For this reason, the “normal” functioning of our bodies can be quite antithetical to our well-being. “Natural” bodily processes leave many of us susceptible to clinical depression, cancer, and gender dysphoria. For the bulk of our species’ history, meanwhile, the natural functioning of human fertility condemned many human communities to cyclical famines as population growth outpaced gains in economic productivity. Of course, we should have humility when messing with biological systems that we do not fully understand, and novel interventions that radically disrupt bodily processes should be subjected to clinical scrutiny. But the idea that contraception and gender-affirming care are inherently bad because they “break” our “natural biology” — and open the door to further enhancements of the human body — is a quasi-religious argument, not a rational one. If we should not reflexively venerate nature, the same is true of the sexual revolution. Any social transformation is liable to have some negative consequences. Reactionary feminists aren’t wrong to ask pointed questions about how well contemporary sex norms are serving women. But they’re wrong to provide regressive and misleading answers. Focusing one’s public commentary on making a contrarian case for traditional sexual morality — and against trans rights — is a sound way of carving out a niche in a crowded culture war discourse and earning the patronage of American conservatives. But it is a poor approach to actually improving women’s lives.

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