There’s an article up on Vice as of a couple days ago. It’s about a particular feminist thinker Sophie Lewis and her call to eliminate the family as the social unit we embrace today. Her full argument is contained in Full Surrogacy Now, if you’re interested, but the article is not about the argument per se, but the social reactions of various groups of people to the publication of the book.
As one might imagine, it’s not an idea that skyrockets in popularity with the media attention it receives. The right is both dismissive and antagonistic, in fact the right wing appears to be dismissive of the work in order to justify not taking the time to understand it in order to make it easier to express antagonism. Some of the antagonism clearly targets ideas Lewis isn’t arguing, and if some does, well, it doesn’t seem to be as a result of intellectual rigor. Rather the explosive reaction sends antagonism in all directions, which necessitates some of it targeting Full Surrogacy Now’s argument: target everything, after all, and so long as Lewis’ book’s argument is part of everything it will eventually be criticized accurately.
But backlash is not limited to the right wing. The left also has its objections, well founded and otherwise. It is in exploring the objections of the left that Marie Solis, the author of the Vox article, goes awry:
