My chat with the immensely interesting and amiable Luke Dodson, of the Symbiotic Culture blog and podcast, is now online:
Category: Tech
Talk – National Conservatism conference, Orlando, 31 October
It’s often noted that the right generally has a better grasp of the left’s motives and arguments than vice versa.
The right thinks the left is mistaken, while the left thinks the right is evil.
With one exception: feminism.
I have sympathy with some critiques advanced by friends on the right, of the excesses and uncounted costs of feminism. I have made a number of those critiques myself.
But I’m often frustrated by conservatives’ refusal to engage with feminist arguments or history much beyond the ‘pop’ versions you might find in the pages of Vox. The result is, regrettably, a right-wing treatment of the women’s movement that’s often as ignorant of what it condemns as modern liberal feminists are of the conservative case against abortion.
Continue reading “Talk – National Conservatism conference, Orlando, 31 October”Love in the Marketplace (Plough)
“In the digital age, Adam Smith’s artificial separation of sympathy from the market is dissolving, along with the industrial-era divisions between the domestic and commercial. In their place we’re offered a single order of unchained and monetized desire, in which there is no outside limit to selfhood – with even our bodies increasingly seen as infinitely malleable to the demands of self. Our emotional lives are now big business, whether in the commercialization of desire via online dating or pornography, or the countless digital temptations that hook our brains to the next social-media dopamine hit. We no longer pursue our interests in a market informed by sympathy-driven moral sentiment; rather, we are consuming units in a “marketplace of sentiment” where every desire is valid providing it can be monetized.”
Reactionary Feminist 