Alistair

“But the weakness of these proposals isn't that they're unworkable, or even that they're 'traditional,' but that they're not traditional enough. For most of history, men and women worked together, in a productive household, and this is the model reactionary feminism should aim to retrieve. In any case, half a century into the cyborg era, there's little prospect of reviving the industrial-era housewife as the principal template for sex roles—and there's no need, because for knowledge workers at least the sharp split between 'home' and 'work' that drove the emergence of such roles is blurring again. And the blurring of that divide in turn opens up new possibilities, hinting at a way of viewing lifelong solidarity between the sexes that owes more to the 1450s than the 1950s. It does so by bringing at least some work back into the home, and in the process ramping up the kind of interdependence that can underpin long-term pragmatic solidarity.”
― Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress

“Here, the ancient English sense of journey, ‘a day’s travel’ (French journée), meant the same as the Old Persian word farsang, ‘the distance a man could travel on foot in a day’, and the territory was in effect ungovernable.”
― Rory Stewart, The Places in Between

“I’m going to look at a number of areas – beauty, the body, unpaid work, progress, sex, community, power, violence – in terms of how they are experienced by women in midlife, and how other groups exploit, scapegoat and demonise middle-aged women in order to preserve favoured narratives.”
― Victoria Dutchman-Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women

“Liberal feminism incorporates sexual disenchantment as an article of faith, insisting that it is a good thing that sex is now regarded as without inherent value in the post-sexual revolution era. But, in practice, liberal feminist women do not generally behave as if they believe in the truth of sexual disenchantment. Almost no one does.”
― Louise Perry