Why am I surprised that the comments pretty much blame Lauren Southern.
“Don’t marry an arsehole”. Women don’t have telepathy.
And “he must have been depressed.” Really!
It was classic coercive control. Be kind, loving etc, propose quickly because its hard to maintain a personality that you don’t have, swiftly pregnant to close the trap, then bully, demean etc., to destroy the persons confidence, sense of self and ability to make any decision that contradicts the demands of the abuser.
This women was lucky to get away. In this type of relationship trying to leave often leads to being murdered.

Surprisingly optimistic finish to this article, which was welcome since the contents were rather depressing.
I don’t think I ever watched any of Lauren Southern’s old content beyond a film she did where she showed herself getting herself registered as transgender, and then walking out of a pharmacy with her testosterone pills, virtually no questions asked. It was my first inkling that Canada seemed to have gone off the rails.
I’m glad she’s out of her horrendous-sounding marriage. Hopefully she can go back to making successful content and she and her kid will have a happier life.

The main takeaway isn’t so much the individual circumstances that MH uses as the baseline for her essay, but the points she draws about the impact of the internet on the life experiences of first-generation Internet natives.

Not one of us can, or should, be moralising or offering trite advice. Save it. The lessons speak for themselves and these are being brought out by the most thoughtful females of their generation.

What seems obvious in retrospect is the way in which the internet stokes idealism – a lesson that’s far more valuable across many spheres, not just ‘romantic’ relationships.

How and when those lessons are learnt is vital to all our futures.

This is really a fable based on an irony. Nothing more. One could draw many different conclusions: 22-year olds should not have the vote; marriage to the wrong person can be oppressive; don’t believe what you read on the internet; don’t move to a distant country with a baby but no family of friends; don’t marry someone unless you have the support of your family and friends, even if you really, really, fancy them; and lastly (but probably least usefully) if you are a social media influencer try not to believe the rubbish you write.

“the freedoms (won by early feminists) for women to work and have interests outside the home”

Apologies that I have posted this many times before on UnHerd, but women HAVE worked for most of history, whether as peasants or prostitites, miners (banned in the UK the same time as children), mill and factory workers, weavers, brewers (“of small ale”), washerwomen, dairy maids, domestic servants, cleaners, nurses, and in the middle classes as teachers, farmers and housekeepers.

As for outside interests, this is a fairly modern phenomenon for (non-rich) men too, outside religious obligations. Pre-modern wealthy/middle class women did attend theatres and concerts, learn music and art and were sometimes literate. From the early industrial revolution onward, ordinary women joined (women’s) political groups, choirs and enjoyed popular entertainments (the latter had been open for women to attend in the form of Mystery Plays since the middle ages, but light entertainment really took off after with towns and wages).

As for “she had to do everything: “The lawns, the house, the cooking, the baby care, his university homework”, with the exception of homework, and “lawns” plural, this is what all those women in history WITH JOBS had to do as well.

Southern clearly married an ar**hole (for his controlling and obnoxious behaviour) but the tasks in hand are in fact less onerous than those of an actual traditional wife, because – shock horror – working class wives traditionally worked.

I also notice that dispatching the rabbits and chickens for food when required, along with skinning or plucking them, doesn’t feature on this list, as it would have for many of her female ancestors. So far, so modern.

It’s really hard for me to draw any conclusion from that story other than “don’t marry an asshole”. And – incidentally – I’ve heard the same kind of story while knowing the participants where the politics were more or less flipped. Assholes will use whatever tools they can grab at hand to bully and manipulate their hapless partners. Often this is some variant of their victim’s operating ideology, whatever that may be.

Obviously the main blame in situations like Lauren’s goes to the man who so messed up their marriage.

But do women bear some of the responsibility by believing in fairy tales. Lauren’s was the fairy tale of submissive domesticity. Believing in it led her astray. But it’s not the only one. This stuff belongs in chick lit, in fantasy escapism. It’s no more real than the fantasy land of porn.

Real life is a mixed bag in which happiness comes and goes, and relationships have to be worked on, in which you really have to care for others, and not just for yourself. In which you get some of what you want, but not all of it, and you learn to understand that that’s good. Not perfect, but good. And you learn to accept that other people’s lives are like this too, in spite of the instagram veneer.

Love is blind, marriage is the spectacles.
This article says nothing about gender roles, only that she doesn’t know how to identify assholes until too late.

Thank you for the interesting article. As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle of the extremes. The internet (including traditional media fighting for clicks) and social media and the mass delusions they produce have just become such a destructive force for society.

Many people are worried that AI, bots and deepfakes will destroy social media. I, on the other hand, welcome exactly that. That the internet will get so flooded with trash and untruth, that people will stop taking it seriously and move back to talking to real people and interacting with their real world surroundings for their “content.”

> It suggests that maybe, just maybe, our current crop of internet-generated political derangements will turn out to be a temporary symptom, driven by generations who grew up without the internet and hence without much psychological defence against its many pathologies.

I’ve thought about that before, how millenials were the generation that lived through the transition from offline to online with naive enthusiasm. But looking at younger generations I feel like the opposite of what the author thinks is taking place. I pray I’ll be proven wrong.

One of the most important aspects of any marriage is how both parties are going to maintain frame, i.e. how aspects of their independent social life, work like, family life, and hobbies are going to persist after their marriage, because these are sources of happiness in people’s lives that can not be replaced by a single person. If someone tries to live in someone else’s frame, sooner or later, your ego will resurface and resentments will start bubbling to the surface. And a child, by itself, is not enough to provide a frame since is boring, alienating, and lonely for anyone to spend all day with a child that needs constant attention. This is not how women raised children in the past, when the home was also a place of production and meaningful work.

Absorbing your beliefs from the internet is a recipe for hell on earth.

And the other side of this? The misery of 2 parents at work, struggling to get by. Even if parents don’t hate each other, kids will be ignored and palmed off because of ‘weeerk’.
I feel sorry for Southern. She married a psychopath. But she was right. The ideal is for at least one parent to be rich enough so the other doesn’t have to work. The ‘trad’ life is great, as long as you update it to the modern world. The man can van stay at home, if necessary.
Southern’s husband was obviously a beta. She should have married a chad. Haha

Test

I see how her trad wife experience was terribly toxic but wasn’t that mostly because her mate was a p***k? How does that extrapolate to a generality about anything except being careful not to get tangled in a relationship with an asshole? An untraditional relationship with an asshole would also be pretty negative. So what exactly can we conclude based on this one person’s testimonial? Or is it because she, as an “influencer” needs to be harkened to like a Kardashian no matter how wild the swings in her lifestyle?

The only other question I have is whether it is more difficult to succeed at the trad wife thing today because there no longer exists a trad culture to support it. I’m not advocating for or criticizing either approach, but it seems logical to me that, back in the 1950’s e.g., a woman staying home with kids, etc, at least had a host of other women to commiserate with but not so much today.

Between these sorts of horror stories and every sitcom from the past three decades, there seems to be rather a lot of evidence suggesting that this marriage business is rather a losing proposition for one or both parties. We tend to blame the internet or cultural decay or the decline of religion but I have to wonder if we’re just kidding ourselves.

Perhaps it was always this way. Perhaps marriage was always misery for one reason or another. Traditionalists romanticize the past and try to recapture what’s been lost but they can never recreate the same conditions of technology and history that led to the organic development of that ideal past. Their recreations never match the idealized descriptions. Progressives try to fix everything but all the changes result in unintended consequences and new problems and we end up with a completely new dysfunctionality. Nobody can even decide if the new dysfunctional dynamic is better than the old one because we can’t even agree on how good or bad it was and why. Both progressives and traditionalists are most likely wrong. The past wasn’t the ideal traiditionalists imagine it was and there’s no set of ideas or social reform progressives can invent that can overcome the basic biological and genetic differences between men and women. Mary does have one thing quite right. The extremes at either end are probably the most dangerous.

I’m pretty sure nobody’s gonna solve this and relations between men and women will continue to be complicated and difficult. I am nigh certain that journalists will still be writing articles lamenting the state of marriage and male/female relations centuries hence. I often wonder if gays/lesbians don’t have an advantage. Someone should study whether gay relationships are healthier and more positive and whether abuse rates are lower. I’d wager they are to some extent.

The follies of ideology versus the wisdom of folktales – a close reading of the legend of Bluebeard might have produced a necessary corrective to the overly simplistic online ‘tradwife’ notion’.

This is the problem with all ideologies, they tend to overwhelm the individual personality, but only temporarily before the innate desires, like and dislikes of the person re-assert themselves. Trad-wife-life would work fine for some, not for others, but of course young people don’t know until they try.

A lot of writing to say she made a rash choice and married a douche. I am sorry it happened to her, but the attempt to knock trad wives didn’t connect.

I am an older woman who has followed both Lauren Southern and Mary Harrington from their first appearances on the scene with admiration and lots of motherly feelings towards both. I was absolutely crushed by what happened to Lauren and am appalled at how she is being treated in these comments.

I am mystified by the supposed existence of a problem about which generalisations might be profitable when that problem arises only because a young person adopts a gadget-word identity – tradwife – as if it were an inflexible set menu of practices and beliefs. Surely, both feminism and traditional options for a woman both have social expressions which will be of value as a person exercises her independence. This problem being discussed here makes it seem as if you buy into a package deal – tradwife, or whatever is the liberal, post modern left wing version – as if you had no freedom or personal creativity. I don’t understand. These demarcations of social roles are important to mark and critique, but to speak as if they are adopted as set menus seems to refuse to acknowledge each person’s startling individuality and an innermost identity which transcends sex for all that sex might govern much of one’s outer life. Have these young people traded the possibility of having a unique culture within a great cultural tradition for having a gadget-word identity which will be recognised by a horde of followers who are just hungry to have a slot to slot themselves into. Life minus the interweb thingy is a little bit possible maybe. Use it as a tool, not as a horizon setter.

She made a bad choice in a husband. A much better man would have made the marriage happy and fruitful. She had probably a million men to choose from, given her fame. She obviously put sexual attraction ahead of everything else to the extent she ignored the red flags.

Having grown up (mostly in the 1990’s) in a home where my mother was intent on forcing a charicature of 1950 America happen, reading about Lauren’s experience is not surprising to me.

There are some great things that can come out of extremely-disciplined, somewhat regressive environments, but it can easily tend toward extreme control, repression, and self-destructiveness. At least Lauren seems to be working things out.

Thanks for the interesting article Mary. I wrote an article about Lauren Southern many moons ago when she graced our Southern shores in 2018. Not yet a Tradwife, but enthusiastically extolling the virtues of conservative gender roles, I noted the parallels with The Handmaid’s Tale’s eeriest protagonist, ‘Serena Joy’. To use one’s public platform to bash the very feminism that allowed one to have a platform (while negating the valence of said platform) is replete with absurdity, naïveté and hypocrisy. It’s sad.
I don’t think this is reducible to falling for (or creating) memes — aka ‘listicles’. Southern’s situation is the inevitable consequence of believing a lie that handing over power as a woman is, without qualification, a social or individual good. The feminists who fought for the Married Women’s Property Acts in the 19thC were liberal feminists for good reason: they were fighting for women’s *individual rights*. Precisely because of this fight, and the one’s that followed (suffrage, access to paid work, alimony), Southern was able to leave (even if only to visit her family) and set up a new life as a single mother. She was not destitute and can now begin to forge a new life for herself. This is why we need feminism, and why those promulgating conservativism should be careful about advocating new forms of (invented) tradition completely devoid of context. Me thinks.

The trad wife thing, along with Andrew Tait and the rest is a backlash against the dominance of feminism in mainstream politics and culture. It’s understandable why people are attracted to it, feminism has become toxic, destructive and excessively powerful, but you can’t build your life, or a society, on backlash ideas. They are far too extreme in the opposite direction.

Hopefully Lauren’s is a cautionary tale leading us forward, not grist to the feminist mill setting us on a backward path.