The former right-wing firebrand Lauren Southern seems to be suffering under the delusion that she is a victim of trad-wife culture, based on her harrowing experience with her ex-husband. 

In my socioeconomic bracket, pretty much everyone has to work regardless of your gender, so it’s a moot point.  But put that to the side.  Southern now suggests that she was persuaded by the trad-wife worldview, that she was an advocate of it, but then was victimized by it when she tried to live her life by its tenets.  This is the gist of an article in UnHerd by Mary Harrington which Southern participated in.  

If we take Southern’s account at face value, certainly she was victimized by something, but it wasn’t by an ideology.  It was by her ex-husband. 

Essentially, the article misrepresents Southern’s actions in claiming that she “did her best to live a purist internet ideology to the letter.”  While she purports to have behaved in a “submissive” manner in her marriage; otherwise, she didn’t live it to the letter.  For one thing, as the article notes, her whole cause politically was opposing immigration. Yet her husband was reportedly a Southeast Asian from Australia.  Let’s call that ironic and leave it there.   

The takeaway from the article is as follows: 

“... the online “tradlife” ideology has distilled a version of these roles that’s both rigid and wildly over-simplified, and thus woefully ill-equipped for real life – in ways that pose significant risks for women in such marriages.”

However, Southern’s husband was not exactly an emissary from trad/ conservative circles. What little we know about him, it sounds like he is the opposite of any mate that would be suggested by the online right.  Hey, no judgment.  For myself, I don’t purport to live a trad-life; every woman I’ve dated has been fairly headstrong and stubborn, so they were not trad-wife material either.

If we are to take Southern’s account at face value, it sounds like her husband was just a prick and a weirdo.  That doesn’t have any ideological implications, despite this overwrought thinkpiece, which is the staple of female journalists over at UnHerd. 

Every time I read an article at Unherd, it has this facile quality, and purports to somehow be against the conventional wisdom, hence “Unherd.”  That’s a clever name, but apparently that’s where the cleverness ends.  

Southern describes her ex’s bizarre behavior in the Unherd article: 

“He’d lock me out of the house. I remember having to knock on the neighbour’s door on rainy nights, because he’d get upset and drive off without unlocking the house. It was very strange, to go from being this public figure on stage with people clapping, to the girl crying, knocking on someone’s door with no home to get into, being abandoned with a baby.”

But Lauren, that doesn’t mean that you’ve disproved the online right and their trad beliefs.  That means that you married a nutcase.  In other words, that’s a you problem.  No judgment, again, but you really can’t derive any deeper meaning to your experience other than your own choices, and those choices were not consistent with any far-right conception of marriage, despite this deceptive UnHerd article. 

Southern expands upon this fiction that she was living a trad-life: 

“As Southern tells it, she was trying sincerely to put into practice the ideology she’d promoted in her videos. “I believed I had a certain role in my relationship,” she told me. “And it was to be the more submissive one that supports my husband’s dreams.”

Southern claims that her husband was much sweeter to her when she was a “boss babe” traveling the world making media appearances.  Then when she became a mom,  he lost respect for her.  But again, Southern’s husband was not someone who was part of the online right, trad-life community, so if his behavior was inexplicable and inconsistent with that belief system, it doesn’t reflect on it anyway. 

In conclusion, Southern should just take the L and admit that she had a bad marriage.  No thinkpiece in UnHerd is required.  The self-indulgent and overly long article reflects the narcissism of the woman who wrote it, which is a metaphor for Southern’s own self-absorption. 

Follow Michael M Vlog on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Comment below: