[Things I Have Read]
Feb. 26th, 2025 12:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annwfynSo, today I'm reading Sophie Lewis, who is...
....I'm not sure who she is. She's some kind of philosopher and academic? She was raised in the UK but now lives in America and describes herself as a radical and I think sometimes as a Marxist and I think anyone who knows anything about her quit Facebook months ago. But she writes books which are both sincere, as far as I can tell, and also sometimes read a bit like a parody of far left radicalism as quoted by angry Tories on X/Twitter.
Her most recent book is 'Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation' which I shall read in due course. I have not yet because the reviews for it reminded me of the existence of her earlier books on family abolition, which I read while still working at the family therapy place, and which I detested at the time. And I decided to go back and try and re-read and figure out whether I was just having a knee jerk negative reaction, and feeling threatened and not thinking or something.
Anyway, I re-read the family abolition stuff, including 'full surrogacy now' and...I dunno. I increasingly think it is very good for me to read very thoroughly thought through posts/essays/books by people I don't agree with, because it makes me properly dissect my own views, and get away from my gut emotional response to a topic and figure out what I am actually thinking. I think Sophie Lewis (much like Karl Marx, in fact) has a lot of really smart observations to make about the inequalities and cruelties inherent in the familial structure and talks a lot about the unpaid labour that the system relies on. So, 8/10 for noticing stuff, Sophie.
Unfortunately, a little like Karl Marx, her solutions range from the optimistic to the dystopian. She doesn't really come up with a single unified solution, which is a tendency of far left radicals that keeps irritating me. Like...sure...I get that you think the family is bad but what do you want me to *do*? Or even what do you want me to *think* about? 'Re imagine a world in which we can all mother each other' isn't a suggestion. It's an inspirational sticker. She also tends to state as 'fact' things that are just objectively *not* facts, and are, in instead, optimistic opinions. She determinedly declares that there is no evidence of children being attached to the gestating person at *all* and it's all right wing TERF-y white supremacist nonsense to say they are, which I am pretty sure is just not true.
There is, on the contrary, a huge body of evidence talking about attachment and separation disorders, and has been for years. It feels a little bit like Sophie Lewis mostly doesn't want to talk about it, because she is uncomfortable with a lot of the child centered arguments against surrogacy and wants to move on rapidly, and I'm not convinced you can.
(I, as a note, feel about surrogacy much the same way I feel about international adoption. I am sure there are ethical ways of this happening, but I think it's far easier for it to not, and the system as a whole seems to bend almost inexorably towards the unethical and exploitative.)
Sophie Lewis also seems to have a proper Soviet style faith in *big* and institutional systems and I find myself even more wildly uncomfortable with that. As far as I can tell, what she kind of wants instead of families (which she thinks provide an unequal and inconsistent support structure, benefitting some kids more than others, and particularly likely to be harmful to trans and queer kids), we'd all just sort of...look after each other? I don't know if this would mean children would be raised in creches or other institutions? There's lots of evidence that being raised by a changing collection of paid caregivers with no motivation to form an intense and long lasting relationship with one's charges is insanely damaging to children. Would they just be...I don't know....handed out and raised by a group of adults? Would that not just be a different form of 'family' if it's a small tight knit group of people who all love each other? Maybe not - Sophie Lewis is very keen on love meaning 'support for someone else's autonomy' and is very opposed to anyone being pinned into relationships of obligation, which potentially makes sense for healthy 20-somethings but seems to me to leave a giant hole when we're talking about 'who will put up with a screaming shit covered one year old'. Or, honestly, 'who will be there for the dementia diagnosis' at the other end of life.
“To love a person is to struggle for their autonomy as well as for immersion in care, insofar such abundance is possible in a world choked by capital.”
Yeah, Sophie. That sounds great. But isn't society all *about* abandoning a little bit of our autonomy in return for security?
She then talks a lot about solidarity and I find myself thinking (as I often do) 'but I don't think humans are actually capable of feeling genuine love for the entirety of their fellow man. You're asking people to care about *everyone* and I just don't think anyone does'.
And it sort of leads me to my final thought about a lot of Utopian thinking. I think humans don't necessarily work in the way one would theoretically like them to work. I don't think they are creatures shaped by higher ideals. I think 99.99% of humans are, on a day to day basis, shallow and selfish, and muddy and complicated. I don't think we are capable of caring about all of humanity in the same way. I think we are designed to find *our* people and *our* space and to guard that fiercely. I don't think we are that way because of social structures telling us about 'mother' and 'father' and 'friend' and 'church' and 'community'. I think we invent those social structures to support and justify that emotional urge.
And coming up with ideas that work against that, just seems to me to put us all on a hiding to nothing.
Right. I'll shortly start on 'Enemy Feminisms' and work out if she's still skating uphill there.
....I'm not sure who she is. She's some kind of philosopher and academic? She was raised in the UK but now lives in America and describes herself as a radical and I think sometimes as a Marxist and I think anyone who knows anything about her quit Facebook months ago. But she writes books which are both sincere, as far as I can tell, and also sometimes read a bit like a parody of far left radicalism as quoted by angry Tories on X/Twitter.
Her most recent book is 'Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation' which I shall read in due course. I have not yet because the reviews for it reminded me of the existence of her earlier books on family abolition, which I read while still working at the family therapy place, and which I detested at the time. And I decided to go back and try and re-read and figure out whether I was just having a knee jerk negative reaction, and feeling threatened and not thinking or something.
Anyway, I re-read the family abolition stuff, including 'full surrogacy now' and...I dunno. I increasingly think it is very good for me to read very thoroughly thought through posts/essays/books by people I don't agree with, because it makes me properly dissect my own views, and get away from my gut emotional response to a topic and figure out what I am actually thinking. I think Sophie Lewis (much like Karl Marx, in fact) has a lot of really smart observations to make about the inequalities and cruelties inherent in the familial structure and talks a lot about the unpaid labour that the system relies on. So, 8/10 for noticing stuff, Sophie.
Unfortunately, a little like Karl Marx, her solutions range from the optimistic to the dystopian. She doesn't really come up with a single unified solution, which is a tendency of far left radicals that keeps irritating me. Like...sure...I get that you think the family is bad but what do you want me to *do*? Or even what do you want me to *think* about? 'Re imagine a world in which we can all mother each other' isn't a suggestion. It's an inspirational sticker. She also tends to state as 'fact' things that are just objectively *not* facts, and are, in instead, optimistic opinions. She determinedly declares that there is no evidence of children being attached to the gestating person at *all* and it's all right wing TERF-y white supremacist nonsense to say they are, which I am pretty sure is just not true.
There is, on the contrary, a huge body of evidence talking about attachment and separation disorders, and has been for years. It feels a little bit like Sophie Lewis mostly doesn't want to talk about it, because she is uncomfortable with a lot of the child centered arguments against surrogacy and wants to move on rapidly, and I'm not convinced you can.
(I, as a note, feel about surrogacy much the same way I feel about international adoption. I am sure there are ethical ways of this happening, but I think it's far easier for it to not, and the system as a whole seems to bend almost inexorably towards the unethical and exploitative.)
Sophie Lewis also seems to have a proper Soviet style faith in *big* and institutional systems and I find myself even more wildly uncomfortable with that. As far as I can tell, what she kind of wants instead of families (which she thinks provide an unequal and inconsistent support structure, benefitting some kids more than others, and particularly likely to be harmful to trans and queer kids), we'd all just sort of...look after each other? I don't know if this would mean children would be raised in creches or other institutions? There's lots of evidence that being raised by a changing collection of paid caregivers with no motivation to form an intense and long lasting relationship with one's charges is insanely damaging to children. Would they just be...I don't know....handed out and raised by a group of adults? Would that not just be a different form of 'family' if it's a small tight knit group of people who all love each other? Maybe not - Sophie Lewis is very keen on love meaning 'support for someone else's autonomy' and is very opposed to anyone being pinned into relationships of obligation, which potentially makes sense for healthy 20-somethings but seems to me to leave a giant hole when we're talking about 'who will put up with a screaming shit covered one year old'. Or, honestly, 'who will be there for the dementia diagnosis' at the other end of life.
“To love a person is to struggle for their autonomy as well as for immersion in care, insofar such abundance is possible in a world choked by capital.”
Yeah, Sophie. That sounds great. But isn't society all *about* abandoning a little bit of our autonomy in return for security?
She then talks a lot about solidarity and I find myself thinking (as I often do) 'but I don't think humans are actually capable of feeling genuine love for the entirety of their fellow man. You're asking people to care about *everyone* and I just don't think anyone does'.
And it sort of leads me to my final thought about a lot of Utopian thinking. I think humans don't necessarily work in the way one would theoretically like them to work. I don't think they are creatures shaped by higher ideals. I think 99.99% of humans are, on a day to day basis, shallow and selfish, and muddy and complicated. I don't think we are capable of caring about all of humanity in the same way. I think we are designed to find *our* people and *our* space and to guard that fiercely. I don't think we are that way because of social structures telling us about 'mother' and 'father' and 'friend' and 'church' and 'community'. I think we invent those social structures to support and justify that emotional urge.
And coming up with ideas that work against that, just seems to me to put us all on a hiding to nothing.
Right. I'll shortly start on 'Enemy Feminisms' and work out if she's still skating uphill there.
