The Contraceptive Tetrad

The Pill, via Marshall McLuhan

Notes from a talk given recently at Assumption College, Massachusetts

Our title here is “Did feminism take a wrong turn?”. Today I want to come at this not from the angle of “right” and “wrong”, but that of technology.

One of the easiest casual mistakes to make about the past is imagining people there were basically like us, just with less advanced technology and (for some reason) more primitive morals. It’s a kind of imperial condescension, and it misses most of what’s interesting about how cultures change.

Against this, the starting premise of Feminism Against Progress is that the women’s movement is more an effect of technology than of “progress” in an abstract moral sense. And it’s not so much that feminism took a wrong turn, as that technology is a process. That is: the revolutions it drives are ongoing. Those revolutions transform how we think as well as how we live. And in their course, every benefit comes with a trade-off, while a change which begins as net positive may reverse over time.

In that light, I want to think about the mind-altering transformations, and ongoing trajectory, impelled by one technology in particular: the Pill.

I don’t mean recent research showing the Pill is literally mind-altering, though this is also true, but how this technology has altered the way we live, and therefore the way we think. To do this, I will borrow from Marshall McLuhan’s Laws of Media.

Written in 1975, with these “laws” McLuhan isn’t just talking about communications media; for example he calls electricity a “medium”. But, he argues, a medium will effects on four axes:

• Enhancing – a new technology will make some things better

• Obsolescing – it will make some things redundant that were there before

• Retrieving – it will bring some older things back

• Reversing – it will flip into something new, when taken to its logical extreme

McLuhan calls this analytic frame the “tetrad”. So today I’ll look at the contraceptive pill through McLuhan’s tetrad.

What did the Pill enhance?

This seems clear enough: the Pill enhanced sexual freedom. The 1960s was by no means the first attempt to escape social control of sex - a great many 19th-century radicals of both sexes supported “free love”. But their ideas never found mainstream adoption, not least because pregnancy risk stayed asymmetrical and most women therefore had a robust reason to be extremely careful in who they granted sexual access to, and under what circumstances.

The Pill, flattened this asymmetry (more or less). In its wake, casual encounters exploded, simply because they could, giving the world “the swinging Sixties”. Today it’s very difficult to imagine why the pre-Pill age could have been so “uptight”, and it’s easy to imagine this was just misogyny or backwardness. But if we look at what the Pill obsolesced it becomes clearer that this is not true.

What did the Pill obsolesce?

By the same logic, the Pill obsolesced every previous social code for governing human sexuality. We talk today about how unjust the “sexual double standard” is, and casually imagine our predecessors were cruel, patriarchal, or misogynistic for having instituted them. But the reality is that their approach made sense, within the terms of available technologies. The origin of the so-called “sexual double standard” is material: sex asymmetry. Only one sex can get pregnant.

Prior to marriage, sexuality was managed asymmetrically pre-Pill. Most aspects of it landed differently depending on what sex you were: courtship codes, chaperones, expected behaviour, sex differences in amount of personal freedom and so on. It’s common today to frame this as just about property, or patriarchy, or just misogyny, and it sure looks unfair from where we are today. But was pragmatic, from a pre-Pill perspective: while such codes treat men and women unequally, this is because our bodies are not the same: only one sex gets pregnant, and unwanted babies are everyone’s problem.

Every code of this kind was rendered obsolete by the Pill.

What did the Pill retrieve?

What older social forms did this new technology allow to re-emerge? To my eye, the clear answer to this is that the Pill is retrieving pre-Christian sexual norms, and specifically Roman norms concerning sexual access and infant personhood.

Feminists are fond of denouncing patriarchy; well, Ancient Rome really was a patriarchy. The only people routinely considered “people”, with rights, were high status men. Those of you who are very online may have come across the “gigachad” meme: the lantern-jawed, ultra-muscular, ultra-masculine archetype of supreme macho self-confidence.

Well, Gigachad really did rule the roost in Rome. As Louise Perry has recently set out, under the Roman order sex was understood not in terms of male and female but active and passive - top and bottom, if you will. To be the bottom was to be low status, and being low status made you available as a bottom.

Gigachad was entitled essentially to rape at will, because he could: slaves, women, children. It’s difficult to grasp this, now, because we have lived for so long under the Christian moral order, which was revolutionary both in seeking to contain sexuality within long-term monogamous relationships, and also (albeit with mixed success) holding both sexes to the same standard of chastity.

The Pill is now well on the way to retrieving the pre-Christian order. Contracepted sex is low-consequence sex, which means that women can now say “yes” without worrying about pregnancy. The corollary, though, is that we now have no robust reason to say no.

#MeToo shows how this loss of defence intersects with power. Predatory men exploit power differentials for sexual access, and no one cares if lower-status victims - usually women and girls - get hurt. This applies to children too: think of the underage girls trafficked to Epstein Island.

Nor is this the only way that the Pill retrieves Roman sexual norms. It’s only mostly effective; combined with the radical transformation it effected of generally-held sexual norms, this meant that even though the number of accidental pregnancies per encounter went down, the total number of casual encounters went up so much that the absolute number of accidental pregnancies went up. In turn this drove demand for legal abortion, which had until that point been censured as indistinguishable from infanticide.

Since then pro-choice advocates have campaigned to extend abortion rights all the way to birth, on the basis that the unborn baby is not a person unless or until the mother acknowledges it as such. In this the Pill has impelled a convergence of current-day norms with those of ancient Rome, in which (albeit with sexes reversed) a baby was only a person once recognised by the family patriarch, and was otherwise routinely exposed to die. Recent court battles in America over the moral status of babies born alive during an abortion retrieve very much this Roman perspective on the moral status of a baby at the edges of life and personhood.

What does the Pill reverse into?

The Pill reverses into the technologisation and commodification of sex, which is to say sexlessness or tech-mediated autosexuality. Reversal is perhaps the most abstract of McLuhan’s lenses to grasp in theory, but in the context of the Pill this is how it works in practice:

Uncoupling sex from reproduction opened the door to the privatisation of bodies. This transformation is usually framed within liberal feminism as unambiguously good: what, after all, is wrong with “bodily autonomy”? And indeed, a great many things are good about “bodily autonomy”.

But with privatisation comes “ownership”. As with the grazing commons that preceded England’s law of private land ownership, once our bodies are extracted from social governance in favour of “bodily autonomy” this implies a propertarian relationship to our own bodies. In turn this conveys the idea that our bodies are “things”, conceptually separable from our “self”, with which we can do as we please – including using our own property to make money. When we abolished the social codes governing sex, it became possible to see sexual activity as a private matter, for the first time - which, in turn, meant that sexuality became a legitimate field for commerce. It’s not a coincidence that the sexual revolution is also the birthplace of the porn industry.

This move also uncoupled sex from intimacy. For if there’s no material risk of pregnancy, women have no robust reason to refuse sex with a committed partner. This comes with a dividend of personal freedom, but also of disappointing sex: in 90% of casual encounters, the woman doesn’t orgasm.

This trajectory has produced a whole new raft of sociosexual phenomena, that extend the reach of commerce into sex while delegitimising a desire for intimacy. What started with porn and the sex industry has reached ever further into individual lives. One obvious, immediate example is hookup culture. Enabled by the de-risking of sex, and dating platforms with a commercial incentive to discourage long-term partnership, the upshot in has been a new interpersonal norm of casual sex shorn of any expectation of connection or commitment, regardless of what individual men and women might want.

This may be alienating. Its logical endpoint is an end to sex - or at least, an end to sex understood as intersubjective by definition, ie as something which requires (at least) two people or it’s not sex. The penultimate stop on that train is cybersex, and the final stop is the many emerging forms of autosexuality such as digisexuality, porn addiction (now experienced by both sexes), tech-addicted shut-ins, and - ultimately - the abandonment of intersubjective desire altogether in favour of AI relationships.

If sex is not intersubjective but private, the aim must be to find an Other who most perfectly reflects back your own desires and proclivities. This assumption lies near the root of the modern proliferation of rainbow “sexual identities”, which are, in a sense, a kind of market self-segmentation in the hope of thereby conjuring a romantic or sexual product more perfectly tailored to particular individual desires.

But no living human Other ever perfectly reflects you back; a relationship is not just about natural compatibility but growing into compatibility. By contrast, AI girlfriend/boyfriend/hentaifriend/otherkinfriend will reflect your desires back better and more completely than any individual human could. Thus the logic of sexual technologisation reverses into AI girlfriend.

Where next?

What should our takeaway be from all this? We can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. But if you take one thing from my words here, make it this: that the story of progress is too simplistic, and the reality will always be that a new technology brings benefits, but also costs.

Those costs are often asymmetrically paid by the weakest: think the women and children trafficked for pornography, or groomed for the enjoyment of billionaires. Or the millions of unwanted babies who don’t make it to birth. A feminism worthy of the name cannot just celebrate more freedom, or more material abundance.

From Wollstonecraft on, the women’s movement has always been about responding to the revolutionary impact of technology on our life in common. But that revolution is a process: as it moves on, the picture changes. Things which once seemed mostly good may come to be seen in a new light. If and when that happens, don’t allow yourself to remain stuck in the past.

Thank you.