This is a fascinating article examining how extreme ideology (on both Left and Right) is not compatible with promoting or valuing women’s needs and rights.
The woman involved was a Canadian Christian influencer with very conservative views who felt feminism had no part in women’s lives and who gave online fame (and notoriety) and conservative activism up to try and put those views she espoused into practice but it didn’t work out for her.
I can’t feel schadenfreude for this woman, who wanted to prove feminism was wrong, because of how awful her experience was in this marriage. I think she, like a lot of women I know, was sold the bill of goods that women have been sold by their male-dominated societies from the beginning of time: be good, be quiet, do what you’re told and it’ll all be wonderful. Unfortunately she had to find out the hard way that female submission is not a recipe for happiness.
Excerpts:
'…purist ideologies as such map at best uneasily onto the practical realities of life as a woman – and especially as a mother. And secondly, that the simplifying, polarising incentives baked into the contemporary internet are increasingly warping the ideologies of both Left and Right into such extreme forms, that any sincere effort to apply these in real life will almost inevitably be the stuff of nightmares.'
'What, then, is amiss? In her view, it’s not that conservatism as such is fundamentally mistaken, or that complementary sex roles are unworkable. But 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.'
'It is surely true that conservative advocacy for complementary sex roles sometimes ignores questions about women’s physical vulnerability, and the scope this affords for domestic abuse. Conversely, today many self-identified liberal feminists have also forgotten that the earliest women’s movement was grounded in the sex-specific material vulnerabilities Southern experienced first-hand. The magazine pop-feminism that I internalised in Nineties Britain seemed less concerned with such gritty realities than more nebulous goods such as “empowerment”, representation, and smashing stereotypes.'
'It seems to me, I tell her, that condensing millennia of religious belief and real-world domestic praxis into viral memes has produced a Right-wing gender ideology every bit as over-simplified, dematerialised, and radically disconnected from the complexities of life as the disembodied Left-wing version. In turn, both Southern and other women I spoke to within her wider “underground railroad” of ex-trad women think that, perhaps like its Left-wing analogue, the extremely online nature of this gender ideology attracts a higher than usual proportion of individuals with existing psychological issues.'
https://unherd.com/2024/05/lauren-southern-the-tradlife-influencer-filled-with-regret/