A MAGA influencer tried to be a tradwife in Australia. It almost broke her

Sydney Morning Herald

a day ago

Lauren Southern, one of the most well-known right-wing influencers during Donald Trump's first term, first went viral with a 2015 video titled 'Why I Am Not a Feminist.' Then 19, beautiful and blond, Southern argued that women are advantaged in many areas of life, including child custody disputes and escaping abusive relationships. 'Feminists are unintentionally creating a world of reverse sexism that I don't want to be a part of,' she said.
But being an antifeminist, it turns out, is no shield against abusive male power. Southern's new self-published memoir, This Is Not Real Life, is the story of conservative ideology colliding with reality. It's made headlines for her claim that Andrew Tate, an unrepentant online misogynist accused of human trafficking, sexually assaulted her in Romania in 2018. (Tate has denied this.) The book is particularly revealing, though, for its depiction of Southern's painful attempts to contort herself into an archetypical tradwife, an effort that left her almost suicidal. Her story should be a cautionary tale for the young women who aspire to the domestic life she once evangelised for.
Despite the presence of a few high-profile women in Trump's administration, the right is increasingly trying to drive women out of public life. Some of this push comes from the unabashed patriarchs atop the Republican Party; last week, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth reposted a video in which leaders of his Christian denomination said that women shouldn't be allowed to vote. ('All of Christ for All of Life,' wrote Hegseth.)
But there are also female influencers who present housewifery as the ultimate in wellness, an escape from the soulless grind of the workplace. 'Less Prozac, more protein,' podcast host Alex Clark told thousands of listeners at a conservative women's conference in June. 'Less burnout, more babies, less feminism, more femininity.' (Clark is unmarried and has no children.)
This Instagram-inflected traditionalism is taking hold at a time when the workplace is becoming even less friendly to women. As The Washington Post reported last week, large numbers of mothers have left the workforce this year. Many have been driven out by return-to-office mandates and a backlash against diversity policies that's led to hostile working environments. But some, according to the Post, 'say they are giving up jobs happily, in line with MAGA culture and the rise of the traditional wife'.
Southern had more reason than most to want to retreat into the cult of domesticity. As she recounts in her memoir, her antifeminist video helped propel her to international notoriety, and soon she was travelling the world as an avatar of irreverent online reaction. She gave out flyers saying, 'Allah is a Gay God' in a Muslim neighbourhood in England, popularised the idea that there's a white genocide in South Africa and interviewed reactionary philosopher Alexander Dugin on a trip to Moscow seemingly arranged by shadowy Russian interests.
It was during this phase of her life that she said she was assaulted by Tate, who was just beginning to build his global brand. Her politics made the trauma particularly hard to process. 'It wouldn't be very helpful to 'the cause' (or my career, for that matter) for me to become exactly what I criticised,' wrote Southern. 'A victim.'
After her encounter with Tate, she wrote, her life 'unravelled.' She yearned to escape her own infamy and the need to keep shovelling more outrageous content into the internet's insatiable maw. So when she met 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'.