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May 8, 2024 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
11:14
Tradwives

There are some things you can only learn from experience. Come and watch the podcast: @ThePodcastoftheLotusEaters

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Recently, Lauren Southern was interviewed by Mary Harrington for an article entitled Lauren Southern, How My Trad Life Turned Toxic, subtitled, The Online Ideology Doesn't Work in the Real World.
And it's quite a strange thing to read.
Tradwife is a term which denotes the modern fetishisation of the traditional 20th century gender roles in marriage, where the wife is what a normal person calls a housewife, who looks after the home and domestic affairs, and the husband goes to work to make money.
As with all things online, the lived act of being part of a married couple is analysed and dissected to death by people who have no first-hand experience of it, formulated then into an ideology, and then someone attempts to craft a real life that resembles the abstract ideal, which appears to be what Lauren did in this case.
English professor Michael Oakeshott identified this as the process by which all ideology is created.
Someone with no experience abstracts into a technical body of knowledge how they think something is done so it can be learned as a doctrine.
The alternative way of learning things is by doing, either discovering as you go or through an apprenticeship.
And the advantage to this is that you learn those subtleties through time and effort that cannot be captured in a doctrine.
For example, I could learn how to do woodworking in that I need to cut X piece of wood to Y shape, but it wouldn't tell me how to actually do it.
That I'd have to figure out on my own.
Things such as the amount of force to apply to the wood, what angle to cut at, the kind of muscle exertion that I need to put into the process to get what I want out of it.
Trad wife is exactly that, and a lot has been left out of this ideology.
I consider myself something of an expert on this, as I am actually living the life that the online singletons are idolising.
I've been married for eight years, and my wife and I have four children, and she is a full-time mum and housewife.
The first thing you learn is that your energy is limited, and often you have to take on whatever work needs doing just to give your other half a break.
Children are stressful.
They're constantly creating a mess, breaking things, hurting themselves and then crying, or just grizzling because they didn't get enough sleep last night.
The house is never properly tidy, and you are rarely rested as well as you'd like to be, but there's not much you can do about it, so you just do the best that you can.
I realise I'm not selling it here, but I'm trying to disabuse people of the fantasy life that online trad influencers craft for themselves.
Do you think that this woman's normal day is to be beautiful, have a spotless kitchen, and boundless energy to make all this food?
Of course not.
As with all things social media, everything is carefully crafted to create an illusion.
However, all of this labour and sacrifice is absolutely worth it.
I'm an articulate man and yet I don't have the words to properly describe the joy of being there while your children take their first wobbly steps and lurch uncertainly towards you, with huge dribbly grins on their year-old faces as they realise they're actually doing it.
Another time that sticks in my memory is when my oldest son was trying to ride a bike without stabilisers and I'd break my back running after him holding the seat to make sure he didn't fall off.
But then when he finally got it, his cries of daddy, I'm doing it, will stay with me forever.
What I'm saying is all the work creates a kind of magic that you just can't get in any other way.
And the bedrock of this is the teamwork between the husband and wife.
You marry because you love each other, and having to manage your lives and kids together provides a bond between you that nobody else has.
The character of the relationship is the most intimate knowledge of one another, not in a carnal way, but in a deeper and more spiritual way.
You know one another's circadian rhythms.
Your lives become predictable and secure like a heartbeat if everyone is doing their best.
You attain a kind of love that can't be had elsewhere.
There's a good reason that unmarried people online fetishize this otherwise normal and mundane life.
This is the good life for the every man and woman.
It's their victory and glory to see their kids grow up and be a success.
I've known of Lauren for many years now and I've met her a few times in real life.
She seems to be a lovely person and I don't know of anyone who has a personal problem with her, although I have to admit I don't know very much about her personal life.
I was surprised by Mary Harrington's article and I would have expected the opposite, but I think a lot of people online have taken Lauren's experience and failed to understand what the actual lesson from this is.
As Harrington puts it in the article, the online trad life ideology has distilled a version of these roles that is both rigid and wildly oversimplified and thus woefully ill-equipped for real life, in ways that pose significant risks for women in such marriages.
This is certainly correct, and to be honest with you, I don't think it's helping the men either.
It puts upon them burdens of expectations that they're probably not able to fulfil.
And I see the kind of bizarre trad wife fetishization online turn into a kind of cult of a life that simply can't exist in the pursuit of a purity that can never happen.
Put simply, marriage is about compromise.
I do a lot of the things my wife does just to make her day easier, and she will do things that I do if my day has also gone badly.
The key to a happy marriage is showing the other person that you love and care about them, not robotically fulfilling a formula you have downloaded from the internet.
The idea that men and women have rigid roles to stick to is just untrue.
They have general roles to fulfil.
But these are necessarily flexible, because the contingencies of reality must always come first.
In the article, Lauren says that she and her husband rushed into this marriage and she got pregnant quickly, and her husband's attitude was somewhat unpredictable and immature.
As she says, If I ever disagreed with him in any capacity, he'd just disappear for days at a time.
I remember there were nights where he'd call me worthless and pathetic, then get in his car and leave.
I can't imagine ever speaking to my wife in such a way, even when I'm angry with her.
One of the reasons that you marry the woman is that she isn't worthless.
She is the mother of your children and will help raise them well.
Another is that she isn't pathetic.
She had the dignity worthy of a woman that you would make your wife.
She continues, I had this delusional view of relationships, that only women could be the ones to make or break them, and men could do no wrong.
So she didn't spot the red flags as they grew more extreme.
He'd lock me out of the house.
I remember having to knock on the neighbour's door on rainy nights because he'd get upset and drive off without unlocking the house.
It was very strange to go from being this public figure on stage with people clapping to the girl crying and knocking on someone's door with no home to get into, being abandoned with a baby.
Now, we only have her side of the story, and so I guess we'll take this with a pinch of salt, just to be fair.
But this would of course be unacceptable, and to my mind, just bonkers.
I would never have locked any of my babies out of the house, no matter how bad the argument I'd had with my wife.
And apparently, under pressure from her husband, Lauren left her career behind in 2019 and moved abroad for her husband's career.
And she says, I believed I had a certain role in my relationship, and it was to be the more submissive one that supports my husband's dreams.
This is the kind of language I see a lot in American trad circles, and I think it's worth addressing, because it feels like a very American characterisation.
The term submissive is demeaning, and I personally would never use it towards my own wife.
I control our finances, and basically have the final say in everything, but that says usually, yes, dear, how much is it?
I don't mean to sound like a boomer dad, but that's basically what your money is for.
But I would never call my wife submissive, because it implies an unwarranted level of superiority on my part that does not respect her as the boss of her domain.
And to be clear, I rely upon her for almost everything domestic.
She keeps the house, does the clothes, administers the bills, ferries the kids to school, and ensures that family events are attended and everything else that she does.
She is completely competent, and everything does get done.
And a healthy relationship between husband and wife is not one of dominance and submission, but an equal amount of respect and dignity accorded to the two different but important spheres of life, over which each partner is their own master.
I don't really get to tell her how to run the house, and she doesn't get to tell me how to do my job.
And we're both very happy with this arrangement.
Lauren carries on to say.
She reports becoming the closest thing to a modern day slave.
With no income of her own, she had to do everything.
The lawns, the house, the cooking, the baby care, his university homework.
And I didn't know anyone.
I didn't have any support.
There was no help changing diapers.
There was no help waking up in the night with the baby.
I'd still have to get up to make breakfast before work.
I'd be shaking and nervous for fear I'm going to get yelled at.
Then he'd berate her for spending all her time on tasks other than earning money.
I was told daily that I was worthless, pathetic, dead weight.
All you do is sit around and take care of the baby and do chores.
Needless to say, this isn't what leading is, or even being a man.
This is what being an abuser is.
Again, I would never dream of acting this way, because, I mean, ultimately, it's my job to earn the money, but being a housewife is a lot of hard work.
I'm not saying I'm a perfect husband or anything.
God knows I have my faults, such as leaving beard hair in the sink, or not tidying up the dishes when I should have done, or any number of other small domestic things that I don't do.
But being a homemaker is difficult and worthy of respect, and any man who doesn't respect the worth of it simply doesn't understand their role in life.
I won't labour the point any longer, but most of married life is not glamorous.
It's mostly mundane, and can be stressful when the kids act up, or when an unexpected bill arrives, or for any other number of reasons.
But your spouse becomes irreplaceable to you, and you can't imagine a life without them.
And if you're lucky, you'll manage to make it to the end of every day with your wits intact, and then get enough sleep to make it through the next day.
And if you do that for long enough, you'll realise your kids have grown up and succeeded in their own right, and you'll have grown old with someone who truly loves you for who you actually are, and you'll have your own story together of the battles that you've won along the way.
But none of this is revealed to you by obsessing over an online ideology.
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