I set for myself a task: I was going to read all three books written by Sophie Lewis, the youngest acolyte of Donna Haraway, mother of “cyborg feminism,” and a devotee also of Shulamith Firestone, the enfant terrible of second wave feminism. After all, Lewis had been making a small splash in feminist circles simply through her books’ titles: Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (2019), Abolish the Family (2022), and Enemy Feminisms (2025). I felt it important to understand Lewis’ standpoint. However, I must admit up front that by the time I got to the final volume, I had to literally force myself to keep going.
But I did finish, and can now say I read them all, which allows me to assert that the following critique of Lewis’ work is not based in ignorance or taken from second-hand reports.
First off, a bit of background on Sophie Lewis. Her natal family was apparently deeply affected by the open misogyny expressed by her father towards her mother, and then towards her. “In other words, I know the family not to be a benign ‘default’ situation,’” Lewis writes. “I’ve always known.” (Source) Her path in life has been has been a response to these origins; traditional forms are suspect to Lewis and new ways must be found. For example, she obtained a Ph.D. in geography, but has pursued writing as a career instead of a more traditional academic path. Lewis’ partner is a trans-identified male, Vicky (aka Willie) Osterweil, who is best known for penning the book, In Defense of Looting, with their relationship characterized as trans-femme lesbian. Instead of marriage vows, they took “disavowals.” Her third book suggests Lewis has added a boyfriend Thom to the mix with Vicky; a polycule, apparently. There are also cats.
This is a soul apparently deeply wounded by the traditional family in which she grew up, so wounded that she wishes to abolish the institution, not only for herself—as she apparently has—but also for all of us, that we too might be free from those ancient fetters at last. But the fundamental issue for Lewis is that she really is not (yet?) qualified to declaim upon these matters: she is not a mother. And until she is, she is a naif. She does not know the truths that mothers know.
Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family
Lewis’ first book [1], Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family, is not really about surrogacy itself. Lewis uses the notion of surrogacy—that a woman who elects to be a surrogate is paid for her time and trouble in bringing a child into the world—to ask why most women who give birth see their efforts completely unvalued. That is, the labor of a gestational surrogate has value in our society, but the labor of a natural mother does not. If the book were about that problematization, I’d have no issue with it. Capitalism and feminism, I would assert, are natural enemies.
But that’s not where we’re going in this book. Lewis first intends for us to feel that gestational labor is carnage-producing enslavement. We are told in the first few pages of the book that pregnancy and childbirth are like having cancer (FS 2), that thousands die and nearly die from it every year in the US, that it is a “destructive,” “ghastly fluke,” a “biological bloodbath,” where the placenta “digests its way into the host’s arteries” (FS 2). Lewis concludes, “No wonder philosophers have asked whether gestators are persons. It seems impossible that a society would let such grisly things happen on a regular basis to entities endowed with legal standing” (FS 2-3). No wonder, says Lewis, that abortion “generates feelings of relief and cared-for-ness” (FS 3). After all, “the unborn routinely employ all manner of ‘manipulation, blackmail, and violence’ in their contribution to being made” (FS 137).
Thus Lewis is attempting to assert that natural gestation is horrific in order that she can therefore conclude that everything about gestation that we take for “natural” should exert no hold on us. Nature doesn’t care if we live or die as a result of pregnancy and childbirth, and therefore we in turn should not care if our pregnancies and births look anything at all like what Nature would offer us. According to Lewis, if you put any sentimental or moral stock in the processes of pregnancy and childbirth, well, then, you are simply a fool. Free yourself from Nature, from the carnage and bloodbath that is biological female reproduction, Lewis exhorts.
And part of that liberatory exercise, according to Lewis, is to stop valuing the so-called mother-child bond. In this, surrogacy may provide what Lewis would see as a salutary template, for surrogates are routinely told they must refuse to bond with the child they are carrying. Lewis feels this would be a good model for all “gestators” to follow:
“Clearly, if I am gestating a fetus, I my feel that I am in relationship with that (fetal) part of my body. That “relationship” may even ground the sociality that emerges around me and the infant if and when it is born, assuming that we continue to cohabit. But I may also conceptualize the work in a completely different way—grounding an alternate social world. I may never so much as see (or wish to see) my living product . . . regardless of the “ground” the gestational relationship provides, the fabric of the social is something we ultimately weave by taking up where gestation left off, encountering one another as the strangers we always are, adopting one another skin-to-skin, forming loving and abusive attachments, and striving at comradeship. To say otherwise is to naturalize and thus, ironically, to devalue that ideological shibboleth “the mother-fetus bond.” What if we reimagine pregnancy, and not just its prescribed aftermath, as work under capitalism—that is, as something to be struggled in and against toward a utopian horizon free of work and free of value?” (FS 9).
So if we strip pregnancy and childbirth of any meaning (since it is unfeeling Nature that orders these experiences of carnage), there are apparently no limits to what we can strip of meaning, including the mother-child bond. And, of course, if we can render that pinnacle of real and intimate relationship meaningless, then it is a simple afterthought to render the conventional family a meaningless, “propertarian” construct that serves only capitalism (FS 22). [2] Even more! “[T]here can be no utopian thought on reproduction that does not involve uncoupling gestation from the gender binary . . . gestation is work and, as such, has no inherent or immoveable gender” (FS 22, 24).
Summing up here, according to Lewis, there is no need to put any type of meaning into constructs such as motherhood, mothering, the biological kin-based family, or even sex. Even if those things are natural, since Nature is “an ass,” we need not pay any attention to any of these things. We can chuck it all, and liberate ourselves from this slavery and carnage.
Lewis argues we can do so by establishing “gestational communism,” or “open-source, fully collaborative gestation” (FS 21, 26). This will require the “communization of reprotech . . . to orchestrate intensive scientific inquiry into ways to tweak bodily biology to better privilege, protect, support, and empower those with uteruses who find themselves put to work by a placenta” (FS 29). There would be “worker-owned surrogacy cooperatives,” and all “gestators” would be surrogates, for there would be no assumption of any bond between the “gestator” and the resulting child. After all, there is no such thing as “maternal instinct,” Lewis stoutly proclaims, though she has no basis of experience whatsoever from which to speak (FS 115).
Lewis becomes very exercised about women who oppose surrogacy, who see in the practice a gross violation of the rights of both the mother and the child. She slams them as “femonationalists” aligned with the political right: “[t]heir playbook is lifted straight from the big multinational anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution campaigns, which is to say, they emulate the mechanisms of an institutional feminist-humanitarianism that greases the wheels of imperial wars and justifies a heavy-handed “rescue industry” (40-41). Lewis would like to see decriminalization and deregulation not only of surrogacy, but also its twin, prostitution. To Lewis, there should be “fair trade surrogacy” and fair trade prostitution. Those who see themselves as abolitionists with regard to either practice are “anti-utopian” (FS 44).
Lewis is deeply disappointed that nearly all Marxist feminists condemn surrogacy as a form of exploitative and profoundly alienating labor under capitalism, for she considers herself a true communist who sees the family as being the original exploiter of women, as did Engels. In her version of Marxist feminisms, unionized surrogacy would be a big step up in the world for all women.
Lewis urges us to “embrac[e] a left feminist ethics in which mother-child bonds can more easily be discontinued, handed over, and multiplied” (FS 47). Rather than losing a mother, in a “gestational commune,” a child is wonderfully gaining many more people to care for them. (Of course, as children of historical communes and group homes can tell you, they are also gaining many more people who do not care very deeply at all, or who even see children as delicious prey.)
Lewis waxes eloquent on the problems of the family, apparently channeling her own personal experience with it, noting the family’s “discomfort, coercion, molestation, abuse, humiliation, depression, battery, murder, mutilation, loneliness, blackmail, exhaustion, psychosis, gender-straitjacketing, racial programming, and embourgeoisie-ment. The private family is the headquarters of all of these . . . “[F]amily abolition” refers to the (necessarily post-capitalist) end of the double-edged coercion whereby the babies we gestate are ours and ours alone, to guard, invest in, and prioritize” (FS 116, 119).
In other words, we need what Lewis calls “care-surrogacy”—the idea that anyone who chooses to, can provide care for a child or cease to provide care for a child (FS 130). The idea that there is a natural desire on the part of mothers to devotedly care for their children is dismissed with anecdotes about vulnerable mothers committing infanticide. A choice to care, Lewis argues, would be much more stable for the child than a reliance on Nature to ensure care by a biological mother. (But given that Lewis argues that the choice to cease to care is also entirely valid, it’s unclear how this is stability-enhancing from the point of view of the child.) A “reproductive commune,” then, is what we should be building (FS 168). Alas, in the first book Lewis only waves vaguely at this solution. It is in her second book that she elaborates on her repro-utopian vision.
Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation
Published in 2022, this much smaller book of only 88 pages attempts to sketch out Lewis’ utopia. Since to love a person means to “struggle for their autonomy as well as for their immersion in care . . . then restricting the number of mothers (of whatever gender) to whom a child has access, on the basis that I am the “real” mother, is not necessarily a form of love worthy of the name . . . [W]hen you love someone, it simply makes no sense to endorse a social technology that isolates them, privatizes their lifeworld, arbitrarily assigns their dwelling place, class, and very identity in law, and drastically circumscribes their sphere of intimate, interdependent ties” (AF 2-3).
Indeed, asking the question, “but if not for the family, who would care?” is, according to Lewis, the same as asking what would happen to all the animals if zoos shut down (AF 5) (which is a ridiculous choice of analogy, for the sincerely analogous question would instead be what happens to all the baby animals and sick animals and elderly animals if the zoo staff and all the animal mothers suddenly vanished). She opines, “Similarly, transition out of the family will be tricky, yes, but the family is doing a bad job at care, and we all deserve better. The family is getting in the way of alternatives” (AF 5). In the family, “too much is being asked of too few,” and we can’t fail to notice that “the family is where most of the rape happens on this earth, and most of the murder” (AF 9). To Lewis, the family “is a shitty contract pretending to be a biological necessity . . . [We] can imagine something better than the lottery that drops a neonate arbitrarily among one or two or three or four individuals and keeps her there for the best part of two decades without her consent, making her wholly beholden to them for her physical survival, legal existence, and economic identity, and forcing her to be the reason they give away their lives in work” (AF 9, 18).
Rather, argue Lewis, we should let go of kinship, move beyond motherhood, and aspire to communal comradeship. Rather than privatizing care, as the traditional family does, we must make care communal. Lewis takes us on a tour of historical utopian movements which hint at what she believes would be part of a new repro-utopia: “erotic town planning, kitchenless architecture, nationalized childcare, ectogenesis, children’s political emancipation, gay liberation, post-housework pleasures, and radical welfare activism,” not to mention non-monogamy universal basic income, and polymaternalism (AF 34, 38, 43). She quotes the early Soviet family abolitionist Alexandra Kollontai approvingly, that “the obligations of parents to their children ‘shall wither away gradually until finally society assumes the full responsibility’” (49). (It is worth noting that Kollontai abandoned her son to be raised by his father when the child was only a toddler.) Lewis is hoping that “large, nongenetic households” that are run democratically will arise, which communes would answer the pressing question, “What would it mean to not need the family?” (AF 81). Of course, historically, the answer was orphanages and poor houses propped up by state funding—the Fourier-style communes Lewis admires all collapsed because the choice to leave was always just as valid as the choice to stay, and typically is far less onerous in terms of daily responsibilities.
How these self-organizing, organic, democratic communes arise and persist is still quite vague; at the end of the short volume we are told, “If we hold hands, we can certainly be brave enough to step into the abundance that will be the nothingness that comes after the family . . . I hope it is a glorious and abundant nothing” (AF 84, 88). And nothing, of course, is precisely what Lewis has given us in the conclusion.
While Lewis cannot tell us much at all about the utopia she longs for, there is much she can say about whom we need to hate, which is the topic of her third book.
Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen & Girlbosses Against Liberation
Published in 2025, Enemy Feminisms is the longest work by Sophie Lewis, clocking in at an uncharacteristic 272 pages. But that’s not what makes the book so tedious; the volume is one long screed against any women who might hold a different opinion to Lewis. The language is dripping with contempt and dismissal throughout, often because the “enemy” arguments have enough merit that Lewis must smear them instead of engaging with them. This makes the volume a very hard slog indeed. No balm of sisterhood to be found here! Indeed, the obligation to hate these enemy feminisms is, to Lewis, a sacred one.
So which feminists, according to Lewis, should we hate? Why, anyone she considers a “reactionary fascist feminist,” of course. Instead of sisterhood being redemptive, Lewis avers that we should “more confidently oppose people whom we understand: a cop is still my enemy when she’s my neighbor” (AF 9). After all, “certain feminisms actively wreak a great deal of evil” (AF 13). We need, we are told, a “bestiary” to name and shame these enemy feminisms (EF, 17), for clearly to Lewis these are not fully human women we are discussing here. So here’s the list:
The Bestiary of Enemy Feminisms/Enemy Feminists
--Mary Wollstonecraft, first and foremost, because she is a hypocrite (she was “boy crazy), an imperial feminist (she wanted women the world over to be educated), and a misogynist (she had contempt for femme women), and she is regarded as the mother of modern feminism even though she definitely shouldn’t be, according to Lewis.
--White supremacist colonial feminists, intellectual descendants of Wollstonecraft, who oppose the burqa or suttee or other practices; those who wish to “save brown women from brown men” (e.g., Laura Bush) (EF, 31); Islamophobic eugenic femonationalists (EF, 36). This category also includes feminist Zionists, who are genocidaires. This category also winds up overlapping quite a bit with girlboss, militarist feminists (see below).
--Josephine Butler and her descendants who want to criminalize prostitution, surrogacy, and other practices, for they are saviorist and xenophobic and conservative, and they desire to stunt the sex lives of girls. At the turn of the 20th century, they “started campaigning for sobriety, suffrage, female police matrons, gender segregation in prisons, censorship of obscenity, and the prosecution and ‘reformation’ of prostitutes” (EF, 73). At the turn of the 21st century, they became ‘SWERFs’ and prostitution abolitionists, who want to “control and repress young female sex lives” (EF, 82).
--Conservative women who think they are feminists, religious women who think they are feminists, and feminists who own guns. These are “KKK feminists,” or “Blackshirt Feminists,” who all too readily accept and enable authoritarianism in order to receive crumbs from the patriarchal table.
--Carceral feminists who want to see male criminals locked up. Lewis quotes Melissa Grant saying, “We can’t arrest our way to feminist utopia,” which apparently means that locking men up for rape and femicide is anti-utopian and anti-feminist (EF, 128). Lewis adds, “the feminism of cops is a fast track to fascism.” (EF 145).
--Pornophobes like Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, and Susan Brownmiller. They don’t understand that porn can be pleasurable, and that “to be exploited is not to be thingified” (EF, 157). After all, says Lewis, penises are not to be feared, for they are “sensitive, springy, dribbly, and vulnerable” (EF 163). Indeed, “it is a horrible mistake to take seriously the notion that a muscle is somehow in and of itself dangerous. It is especially backward to do so in the name of feminism. Sex domination doesn’t flow from the penis” (EF 164). Those who have been raped would probably disagree with this analysis, but they have no voice at all in Lewis’ book.
--Girlboss feminists, militarist feminists, and femonationalists such as Sheryl Sandberg, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton, Liz Truss, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and even bell hooks! “Femonationalism, in practical terms, is how neoliberals, feminist agencies, and right-wing populists come together to bring us burqa bans, pronatalist welfare packages, civic integration schemes, and xenophobic two-tier “workfare” policies” (EF 200). This femonationalism is, according to Lewis, racist to the core: “Unless people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Alice Schwartzer are deplatformed, they will never stop telling the story of hordes of atavistic male Muslims, armed with guns and rapacious penises, outraging Western womanhood, and proving the need for a “war of civilizations” (EF 213). Lewis advises that we “defeat [femonationalism] by making common cause with its victims” (EF 214). I presume this means that we need to make common cause with the men of the Rotherham grooming gangs who preyed on vulnerable teen girls, no doubt because the girls were white and the men were brown and thus to Lewis the men were the real victims because of the respective skin colors involved.
--Prolife feminists, about which Lewis opines, “surreal as it may seem, forced-birth feminism is a thing.” (EF 215). Her named villainess here is Erika Bachiochi, who also wrongly admires Mary Wollstonecraft, so there’s two strikes against her. Interestingly, Lewis sees abortion as killing (EF 232), but then concludes that “to force a person to manufacture human life and perform gestational care against her will is a worse dereliction of our collective human duty than is a feticide.” (EF 230) In other words, Lewis is openly okay with killing, and believes the pro-choice side of the debate should simply come out and admit the same, rather than try and obscure what is being done: “Abortion is, in my opinion, and I recognize how controversial this is, a form of killing: a form of killing that we need to be able to defend. I am not interested in where a human life starts to exist.”
--TERFs, including Robin Morgan, Germaine Greer, Julie Bindel, Janice Raymond, Suzanne Moore, and others. Comments Lewis, “We don’t need to say that TERFs aren’t feminist in order to know that they must be stripped of cultural and institutional power” (EF 263). Good feminists are against “cis-ness.” Feminism, to Lewis, means supporting “the struggle for gender self-determination.” (EF 268)
True feminism, says Lewis, is not like these enemy feminisms, for it is building “an extraordinary coalition [that] is denaturalizing capitalist gender, building monstrous affinities, and seeking ways to communize care.” (EF 269). Indeed, that’s the final sentence of the book.
Thoughts on Lewis’ Work, First Two Books
Lewis writes, “It sometimes feels as though Western feminists are produced to lack self-awareness by design.” (EF, 21). Amen to that, Sophie Lewis, because these three books are a burning testament to that proposition.
In Enemy Feminisms, Lewis writes of those dreaded enemy women that, “Announcing oneself to be not like the other girls expresses a hope and even a malformed desire for freedom. By joining in the belittlement of one’s group, one gambles on the chance of being marked as an exception, and thus getting to be part of mankind” (EF, 7). Of course, this precisely describes Lewis herself, who has comprehensively belittled her own group, women, in these three books. Sophie Lewis is not your friend; she is no friend of women at all. Indeed, this is clearly seen in her pronouncement that “’The side of women’ doesn’t exist. It never existed” (EF, 17).
Though I am tempted to speculate whose side Lewis is on, then, if not that of women, and why she would consider herself a feminist if not on the side of women, I find I just don’t care. Whosesoever side she is on, she is frankly deluded--let us count the ways.
Biological kinship systems predate capitalism, and will outlive it. This is so because of the unique problem of every human society: young humans are incredibly labor-intensive to produce and to grow to pro-social adulthood. I produced six of them from my own body, and can tell you firsthand that there is no one in their right mind prepared to offer the level of engagement, labor, and vigilance required, virtually 24/7, for the better part of two decades. Humanity would have died out long ago if we recruited people in their right minds who intellectually chose to care for a season, but reserved the right to cease to care at any time. That’s an orphanage model, and invariably produces subpar results.
Subpar compared to what? Subpar compared to care by a person who is not in their right mind, who is hopped up by dreaded Nature on the most potent hormones there are, who is intimately and permanently [3] physically connected with that new human, carrying it inside her body for nine months and giving birth through blood, sweat, and tears, and nursing it at her breast. I am talking about mothers, who love their babies with a love that surpasses anything that men will ever experience, and whose devotion almost literally knows no bounds. “Comradeship” between mother and child, Sophie? You’ve got to be kidding me. You. Have. No. Clue.
You have to forgive Lewis, for she was never a mother when she penned these books. But it truly is the height of arrogance to discuss the abolition of kinship when she hasn’t really participated in it fully as a woman who has reproduced. There is deep meaning and deep emotion in motherlove that someone who has not experienced it just cannot understand. As Victoria Smith expresses it,
“[T]he bond most mothers feel for their own children is neither unhelpful nor a sign that one has been duped. What Thorne, Lewis and others seem to miss is that whilst “mother love”, in its most cloying, Hallmark card version, has been weaponised to extract labour from women, attempts to sever the genuine bond women have with their own children have long been a feature of patriarchy in its most abusive forms.
“Children are not property, in need of public ownership. That the patriarchal nuclear family treats women and children as private property — that repressive societies have stolen children from poor and marginalised women, denied women custody of their own children upon divorce, and policed female sexuality in order to ensure paternity — does not mean children are property, in need of public as opposed to private ownership. The problem is not the mother-child relationship, but the way men have responded to being excluded from it. Now that women have rights within family relationships, and can construct families which exclude men entirely, new ways must be sought to stigmatise and disrupt these exclusive bonds. Family abolition is backlash politics masquerading as radicalism.” [emphasis mine]
Furthermore, there is even a deep anticapitalism and antiauthoritarianism in motherlove—something Lewis should find admirable. But because of her ignorance, she doesn’t get it. It is this antiquated biological kinship system, all revolving around the germ of motherlove, that helps humans survive all the many dehumanizing economic systems that men have devised, such as slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. While these systems may attempt to use the family for its own ends, it is also true that the family is largely the lifeboat for human beings suffering under these systems. As Rhyd Wildermuth suggests, capitalism is already trying to snuff out the family, and it is unclear why a Marxist would want to see it succeed: “Now, even relatively well-off people find it difficult even to get married, let alone buy a home, or raise children. In other words, the real work of abolishing the family is not being done by activist intellectuals like Lewis, but by capitalists and the state.”
The lifeboat metaphor is more than apt. It is primarily families that care for the “non-productive” members of society, such as the young, the sick, and the elderly. The state cannot do the whole job, and there seems to be a real dearth of self-organizing democratic communities that choose to offer free care to an incontinent 85 year old dementia patient, or an immobile 15 year old with cerebral palsy who needs his trach tube cleaned every few minutes. Motherlove, family love, is as beyond the ken of capitalism as it is beyond the ken of Sophie Lewis.
Louise Perry is not wrong when she suggests that abolishing the family might actually make things worse for women:
“When social structures fall away, the result is generally that the person left literally holding the baby is the person whose natural instincts make her most devoted to it. It is quite possible that, if Lewis’s directive to undo the “gene fetish” were ever attempted, the result would be that mothers and children were frequently abandoned in just this way. In other words, it is quite possible that feminist efforts to abolish that family could make women’s lives worse, perhaps much worse. Utopianism always carries with it this risk.”
Motherlove is also the foundation of all human freedom, and as such is profoundly antiauthoritarian. In a very real way, you are free because you were born to a mother who loved you more than she loved the state or an ideology or a social system, and who would thus fight to the death to protect you from the predations of all these. Even knowing such love can exist, even in cases where your mother has already passed on to her eternal reward, gives you the courage to resist the large and impersonal forces that would squash you. Take her away, erase her, replace her, and the individual is truly defenseless before Authority. Motherhood thus lays the foundation stone of all freedom. A human being can resist Authority because they know their mother loved them as an individual in all their uniqueness, and not as a means to an end. For their mothers, their child was the end, always. Their true destiny, imparted by their mothers, is to be an end, not a means, and that destiny rings in a child’s heart throughout their entire life.
While the state and economic powers try their hardest to undo it, the family is its own state and stands apart from any force seeking to completely control it. Rhyd Wildermuth reminds us that,
“The family is not just a factory for bourgeois subjects. It is also an independent realm of social life, distinct from the state. Looked at this way, the family is a human relationship that capitalists and the state are always trying to capture and control—through tax policy and family courts as well as marketing and media propaganda. But there is always a dimension of our relations with our kin, both unchosen and chosen, that can escape these encroachments. This is what family abolitionists seem incapable of grasping.”
While some families can certainly can be abusive, there is good reason to believe that a self-organized care community would be as, or even more, abusive. Smith wisely notes, “Family abolitionists are correct to state that most abuse takes place within the family home. They are, however, cagey about who is doing the abusing, and why such people would cease to be abusive in a more communal setting.” If, as research has shown, almost a quarter of men express some sexual interest in children, why would increasing child exposure to greater numbers of men “choosing to care” for them be prudent? After all, male child care workers—who “choose to care” for children and get paid for it—have been implicated in numerous sex offenses against their young charges. Might such men even be attracted to, and thus overrepresented in, jobs where they might “choose to care” for young children?
(Oh, wait! I forgot that we are to have sympathy for the “sensitive, springy, dribbly, and vulnerable” penises, even though they commit the overwhelming majority of sexual offences! (EF, 163) My bad!)
Indeed, it’s hard not to wonder whether the erasure of mothers by family abolitionists like Lewis is meant to erase the last, best defense of children against predators. Victoria Smith again:
“Ultimately I think family abolition appeals to those on the left who are anti-feminist, pro-porn and pro-commercial surrogacy because mothers are such an enormous inconvenience to them. They pretend we are mindless hausfraus, chained to the Aga, when we are — alongside radical feminists and lesbians — one of the greatest threats to the “progressive” arm of the current backlash against women and children’s rights.
“We are a massive obstacle to anyone proposing to “liberalise” childhood and put the bodies of children up for public ownership because we’re not afraid to declare this dodgy as hell. For all family abolitionists like to pretend that families are centres of isolation, there is nothing they hate more than the communities women form via their identities as mothers. Just look at Mumsnet.”
From the point of view of the child born into society, of course, it is far, far better to have a non-abusive biological mother than any other type of caretaker. That relationship is the foundation of security and stability for the developing child. Typically, it is the child’s mother who is most devoted to his or her welfare and development on a continuing and sustained basis. Our future women, our daughters—surely a group of some import to Lewis as a feminist—deserve that level of devotion in the care they receive. They deserve more than the “nothing” that Lewis offers.
Thoughts on Lewis’ Books, Third Book
From Lewis’ bestiary, I know she would consider me an “enemy.” I click so many boxes, I must be some type of super mutant beast: I like Mary Wollstonecraft; I am all for putting rapists and domestic violence murderers in jail and even approve of the death penalty; I don’t think men can become women or have the right to identify themselves into women’s spaces and sports; I oppose prostitution, surrogacy, and porn; I am not a pacifist; I own two guns; I am religious; I believe in the universality of CEDAW and its additional recommendations (even in formerly colonized areas of the world); I am grateful to have a family and to be a mother; I believe societies have the right to ban the burqa and the niqab; and I believe in some limits (though not a ban) on abortion.
In short, according to Lewis, I am a monster.
I’m feeling pretty good about my monstrousness. Interestingly, I hold many of the stands I do because I believe a sex class analysis is a far better approach to policymaking that has ramifications for women than a neoliberal approach where anything ostensibly chosen is good for an individual woman ipso facto. This actually puts me on the side of Marxist feminists—the non-Sophie Lewis ones, the authentic ones—who also see the insidious hand of dehumanizing capitalism in practices such as prostitution and surrogacy, and descry these practices for what they do to the sex class of women.
I’m also feeling really good about putting men who hurt women in prison. Even putting them there for a very long time; even putting them to death. I don’t see these men as victims of a carceral state; I see them as perpetrators of very serious crimes who have no right to live in society with women.
I also feel quite good about understanding the material reality of sex. I have lived in a woman’s body for many decades now, and know its seasons, and its superpowers, and its irritants, and its vulnerabilities. These are not just cultural constructs; these are stubborn facts. I conclude that a feminism not based in the material reality of sex cannot claim to be a feminism at all.
Hmmmm. Is it possible that a “feminism” that promotes prostitution and surrogacy, does not want to hold men accountable for their crimes against women, assigns no meaning to motherhood, and denies the material reality of sex . . . . is not a feminism at all? That is, not even an “enemy feminism,” but just not feminist in any coherent meaning of the term?
And if not feminist, might it just be an oversized helping of dolled-up misogyny? To tweak a meme, if your feminism makes pimps and johns and rapists and MRAs and TRAs happy, you’re doing it wrong.
But I refuse to see Sophie Lewis as an enemy. She’s not currently a friend to women, and I cannot recommend her books to you [4], but she is a naif. Wildermuth expresses a hope with which I concur: “I once believed something like this, and then I realized I was wrong. Perhaps Sophie Lewis might one day have a similar change of heart.” Amen to that!
NOTES:
[1] Based on her University of Manchester Ph.D. dissertation, which was entitled “Cyborg Labour.” [Back to manuscript].
[2] This is all very ironic considering that one of Lewis’ childhood terrors was when her father intimated that mothers could be banished: “Banished? Can moms be banished? We screamed in terror” (FS 3). [Back to manuscript].
[3] Here, of course, I am referring to fetal-maternal microchimerism.
[Back to manuscript].
[4] I discussed with my husband what to do with Lewis’ three books, as I did not want to keep them for my personal library. GoodWill or landfill? He said that based on my review, it wouldn’t be “good will” to pass them on. So landfill it was . . .
[Back to manuscript].
Full Citation for this Article: Cassler, V.H. (2025) "Sophie Lewis Is Not Your Friend: A Review of Her Three Books," SquareTwo, Vol. 18 No. 3 (Fall 2025), http://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleCasslerSophieLewis.html, accessed <give access date>.
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