Our stories are symmetrical in some respects: both of us embraced radical politics in our early twenties, me on the Left and Southern on the Right. Both of us embraced ideologies that felt inspiring in the free-floating world of the internet. And both of us, albeit in different ways, have course-corrected back toward reality in part via the fiercely practical experience of caring for a child.

False equivalency. While the progressives were spinning out of control, completely unhinged. Conservatives were simply trying to reassert some common sense after the progressive lunacy started seeping into mainstream culture and had been the prevailing norm amongst the establishment for several decades.

Also, clearly Lauren Southern spectacularly failed in her marriage. She comes across as a complete numpty. (As does the writer of this bad article.)

She thought, she told me, that “as long as I put on the high heels and the lipstick when my husband comes home, as long as I cook the best meal, as long as I’m always submissive, and say yes, sir, whatever you want, things will go fantastic.” And if it’s not fantastic? The listicle version of traditionalism would just say she should make more effort. It was, she says, “an embarrassing wake up call, finding myself consistently applying these rules and instructions I found on Twitter, and then never getting the results they were supposed to get, in the real realm of relationships”.

rofl

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.

You don't say.

Southern is careful to emphasise that she knows many traditionalists in happy, loving, complementary marriages. But, she says, it’s a fallen world, and her community includes many women whose husbands seem to have been drawn to listicle-style gender ideology precisely because of the power it offers over women. “Those guys want someone they feel they can definitely control, who’s never going to leave them, who they can do anything to.”

When the fantasy world meets the real world.

When she first announced her marriage, she says, she’d been lauded by friends and fans; then, when she announced the separation she was inundated with messages lamenting how her life was ruined. But in both cases the exact opposite was true: “Post-divorce, after becoming a single mother, my mental health started to improve. I started to repair all these really important friendships. And I’m living a much happier, much healthier life than I was before….Some of the most miserable people I’ve met – in fact, absolutely the most miserable people I’ve met – have been stuck in this weird, larpy trad dynamic.” The happiest people she knows, on the other hand, “are just living in reality”.

But even that cabin-in-the-woods episode sounded like a big LARP-attempt of her to guilt-trip him into coming to rescue her or to set-up her 'personal narrative' that she was going to use to return to the limelight. And lol@the ant infested cabin. We all know it was just a couple of ants that trailed through a window or something. It happens to even the best kept homes.

Southern thinks the internet’s baked-in incentives encourage this drift toward ever more caricatured viral politics. For example, she tells me that where earlier generations of “red-pill” content merely focused on exploiting women sexually, it “has become just teaching men to hate women” – simply because this is a simpler, cheaper, and more viral message and therefore easier to sell.

Or it's just a normal reaction of average day people to the batshit insanity of fourth wave feminists -- arguably a group of the most loathsome creatures on the internet guilty of the most contemptible behavior imaginable.

A pessimist might say the future looks bleak for interpersonal relationships, indeed for our public life tout court. But I think Southern’s story offers cause for optimism. 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.

Or just maybe these political derangements will keep on going due to government involvement (radical feminism is a state-held belief) and Big Tech sponsorship and manipulation.

And she keeps framing her:

Even the erstwhile queen bee of the extremely online radical Right is now a convert to “living in reality”.

Creepy writer.