'My brain was breaking': Former right-wing tradwife blasts 'abusive male power'

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

The New York Times reports antifeminist tradwife Lauren Southern has disembarked from the tradwife mythos.

“Being an antifeminist, it turns out, is no shield against abusive male power,” writes columnist Michelle Goldberg, citing Southern’s new self-published memoire “This Is Not Real Life,” which to Goldberg is a lesson of “conservative ideology colliding with reality.”

Southern’s “painful attempts to contort herself into an archetypical tradwife” left her almost suicidal, Goldberg says, according to her book. And “her story should be a cautionary tale for the young women who aspire to the domestic life she once evangelized for.”

Goldberg says the right is “increasingly trying to drive women out of public life,” with even top White House officials reposting videos of church leaders saying women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. But there are also female influencers who present housewifery as the ultimate escape from the empty grind of the workplace, with claims like “Less burnout, more babies, less feminism, more femininity.”

Southern became an international antifeminist sensation, and “soon she was traveling the world as an avatar of irreverent online reaction,” says Goldberg. She handed out fliers claiming “Allah is a Gay God” and popularized the argument of a white genocide in South Africa, despite the South African government being comprised of a coalition of races.

It was during this phase of her life that she claims she was assaulted by right-wing manosphere leader Andrew Tate, said Goldberg. And after her encounter with Tate, she writes her life “unraveled.” When she did meet a man who wanted to settle down, she jumped at the chance to give up her career and become a stay-at-home wife and mother.

“She posted photos of herself baking, and ‘selfies in the mirror showing how quickly I had bounced back to fitness and health after pregnancy.’” Goldberg writes.

But all the while, her life was “hell,” Southern writes.

“She’d moved with her husband from Canada, where she’d grown up, to his native Australia, where she lived in near-total isolation. Her husband treated her with growing contempt, which she responded to by trying to be an even better wife,” Goldberg reports.

“I threw myself tenfold into trying to be the perfect partner: cooking, cleaning, putting on dresses and high heels to welcome him home,” Southern claims her book.

Still, her husband berated her, stayed out all night and constantly threatened to divorce her if she didn’t obey him, Goldberg writes. When she defied him by traveling to Canada to visit her family, he told her the marriage was over. But Southern had turned over much of her savings to him. She and her son had to move in with her parents, and then into a small, cheap cabin in the woods. She was destitute, full of shame and intellectually adrift,” according to Goldberg.

“My brain was breaking between two worlds, because I couldn’t let go of the ideology,” she told conservative journalist Mary Harrington.

The idea of tying one’s fate to a man who is part of an internet subculture obsessed with female submission seems dangerous, Goldberg writes, but “unfortunately, the women who most need to hear this message probably won’t listen to middle-aged feminists. They’ll have to wait for it to play out in their own lives, or in the curated lives on their screens.”

Read the full New York Times report at this link.