Saturday, May 06, 2017

Lauren Southern: what every girl needs to hear

In the video below, Lauren Southern points out to young women that the "liberated" path they are often encouraged to take, namely of having many sexual partners and of delaying finding a husband, often leads to unhappiness. It squanders the advantages that a young woman has in securing her future and undermines the ability of women to successfully pair bond (she has some interesting statistics on this).




Some anecdotal support for this video. I've been reading some of the newspaper columns lately of Clem Bastow, a 34-year-old Melbourne journalist. When she turned 30 she wrote:
It’s finally here: I’m finally 30 and flirty and thriving...I don't feel any dread...I mean, who knows, I may wake up tomorrow sobbing and wondering where it all went wrong, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say I’m feeling pretty confident...I don’t have any crushing sense of existential dread about the big 3-0.

But her more recent columns show someone who is jaded and feeling the effects of hitting the wall. In one of her pieces, she confesses that she has given up on dating and has bought a single bed for herself:
When I was younger and punishing my body into an outward representation of "hotness" (read: thinness), I let my physicality do the flirting for me; now, older and having put down the fake tan can, it's harder to move in those flirty worlds. I blush, I get nervous, and I will walk away from boring small-talk rather than find a reason to justify turning a half-baked conversation into a six-month fling. You could argue that this is a good thing, but it does tend to make the spectre of "alone forever" linger.

Consequently, I find myself in a strange purgatory, where I'm pretty good at being single (and not just by circumstance; I actively enjoy it most of the time) but I would also love a partner. This is a strange position for many to grapple with; so, wait, are you lonely or not? The honest answer is "sort of".

...there seems to be an awful lot of people out there who – like me – are trying to be super-stoked on their single status but still occasionally find themselves crying from loneliness in the darker hours.

She hasn't helped her own cause. In her earlier years she seems to have gone for men solely on the basis of physical attraction:
as I get older the idea of a lasting connection being built solely on initial physical attraction is almost laughable.

Talk about not being especially interested in casual (or committed) sex and people give you the sort of expressions that will tend to inspire you to do your best impression of Meg Ryan as Sally Albright in When Harry Met Sally

I'm not suggesting physical attraction is unimportant, but if you are seriously looking for a future spouse you'll be thinking of a lot of other things as well. And note too that Clem Bastow has now reached a point of jadedness where she has lost interest in sex - hardly a promising mindset to be in if you are trying to attract a husband (pity the man who gets Clem Bastow after she has slept with so many men that she has now lost interest in a physical relationship).

She is also a feminist woman who has fallen into the "white men are the enemy" mindset. That's not exactly helpful if most of your marital prospects are white men (does she expect white men to happily "sleep with the enemy"?). Here is what she wrote when a male libertarian politician suggested that people should not be forced to participate in homosexual marriages (as photogrphers, bakers etc.):
This ongoing war against "PC culture" is little more than the slow and steady death rattle of The Age Of Straight White Men. Every bleat about "censorship" or "reverse discrimination" is another piece of macho power structure crumbling to the ground, like flakes of rust falling from a dilapidated bridge. And just as you would treat any abandoned structure as a health hazard, we must exercise caution while existing within the dying days of white male entitlement, as it's very likely to cause injury to everyone but itself.

One of the reasons that alt-right women like Lauren Southern are so refreshing is that they don't engage in this kind of white male bashing. They are promoting instead the idea that men and women have a shared interest in defending their tradition.

12 comments:

  1. Lauren Southern cannot be described as woman of the right and her video mentions nothing about the defence of tradition. In fact she does not talk of tradition at all. Her video promotes liberalism and its belief in the workings of "the market" to produce the supreme liberal value of "happiness". Interestingly what constitutes this idol is never defined.

    She opposes sexual promiscuity and promotes marriage as a means to achieve "happiness". She describes both men and women in the liberal terms of the market and promotes a market place for seeking marriage partners via a form of barter. Women selected for youth and beauty and men marketed on the basis of wealth and strength. This is simply the exchange of commodities without regard to any traditional value or context. What if the beautiful, young woman on the market is white and the wealthy, strong man is black. The available black women may not be attractive and the available white men neither wealthy or strong. However the white woman and the black man may present a "good catch" for each other, the man getting lighter coloured children and the woman getting a higher standard of living than the white men could provide. But exactly what traditions would they be defending, except the liberal right to make one's own free choices regardless of their impact on others? Indeed the marriage would destroy tradition by fundamentally and irreversibly changing society, regardless of its happiness and longevity.

    The video deceives the naive by hooking them in with the appropriate condemnation of promiscuity, but the overall message is liberal; the market, competition, commodification of human beings, free choice and of course the pursuit of happiness. This is the perspective of evolutionists who reduce humans to the level of animals dancing around like monkeys on heat in a mating ritual.

    Traditional marriage is based neither on the market, competition or free choice but on the common interests of families to preserve their genetic, cultural and financial heritage for their own future generations and the social stability and common good of their societies. The video says nothing about that.

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    1. Anon, the term "sexual market value" is a good one. Humans operate at different levels: the biological, the social, the spiritual. All have to be integrated into a workable framework - an order of being. You cannot live ethereally above the biological and social. The truth is that in our teenage years we roughly place ourselves on a ladder of attractiveness to the opposite sex. The "sexual market value" concept (SMV) is just a shorthand way of referring to this. It is a concept that is often employed because men with a low SMV will find it difficult to either attract a female partner, to keep them in a marriage, or even to hold a wife's sexual interest within a marriage. So men on the internet do discuss ways that they can improve their SMV because they often have a pressing need to do so. In terms of the video, Lauren Southern is simply making the point that young women are "born into wealth" when it comes to their sexual attractiveness standing and so do not easily understand what it is like to lose this as they get older. A woman of 45 with three kids might divorce her husband thinking that she will have the same SMV standing she did at 25 and then be shocked at how the power balance between the sexes has changed by this time.

      As for her politics, Lauren Southern was once a libertarian, and may still retain aspects of this, but I have heard her describe herself as a traditionalist and she certainly wishes to maintain the existence of the Western peoples and to restore a more stable family life. At the very least, she is helping to push politics in the right direction. And that's how political change tends to happen. The general political climate will not go in one step from radical liberalism to a purist traditionalism. It's more like a tug of war in which you try to drag the centre as far toward you as you can, with each step you drag it your way a small victory.

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  2. " the "liberated" path they are often encouraged to take, namely of having many sexual partners and of delaying finding a husband, often leads to unhappiness. It squanders the advantages that a young woman has in securing her future and undermines the ability of women to successfully pair bond (she has some interesting statistics on this)"

    The bottom line is that men encourage sexual promiscuity, pre- marital sex and cohabitation. If men rejected promiscuous women, and did not indulge in sexual relationships with them, women would not be able to be promiscuous and in turn would not be damaged for marriage.

    The article pushes the intellectually incoherent position of blaming women for a behaviour which is actively encouraged by the degeneracy and weakness of the males, whilst failing to make males take responsibility for this catastrophic failure to uphold the moral order. The responsibility for the preservation of the moral and social order is primarily the responsibility of males in all societies.

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    1. But in order to preserve the moral and social order men have to be willing to hold women to account. If a woman decides to follow her instinct of responding to "initial physical attraction" over and over again, then it's no use finding some hapless man and saying "look what you've done". The woman has to know that she is acting not only self-destructively, but also to the detriment of her own community and society and that she herself won't be allowed to externalise this ("nasty men made me do it").

      Women are not pure creatures led astray by degenerate men. Women - more than men - are wayward in their behaviour (perhaps because women act more on changeable feeling than men do; or perhaps because young women have a sexual power that most young men do not and so have more of the opportunity/mindset to act with abandon). It is a major challenge of civilisation to bring women into a stable order of family life. Lauren Southern is trying to do her bit in her video, by encouraging women to think prudently and realistically about their life course.

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    2. The bottom line is that men encourage sexual promiscuity, pre- marital sex and cohabitation. If men rejected promiscuous women, and did not indulge in sexual relationships with them, women would not be able to be promiscuous and in turn would not be damaged for marriage.

      The problem with that is that it's unrealistic. If there are women who are promiscuous men will sleep with them. It's the way men are programmed. Very hard to change.

      On the other hand history shows that women can be successfully encouraged to avoid promiscuity, by a mixture of rewards (getting a good husband if you're not promiscuous) and punishments (getting slut-shamed if you are in fact a slut). It works.

      Yes, there's a double standard at work here. Men are just as much to blame. But women's behaviour can be modified easily and effectively while men's behaviour is more difficult to change so if you want to save society it's smart to concentrate on changing female behaviour. Slut-shaming works.

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    3. Yes women have to be the gatekeepers of this morality. It's possible and has worked in the past as well as in much of the modern non-Western world.

      In addition to shaming, removing financial incentives for having children without a husband. As long as this remains a viable option, sexual promiscuity in our women will continue.

      I don't see anyway to fix this mess that doesn't rely on widespread financial or social collapse.

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  3. Of the six types of love recognized by the Ancient Greeks, Our culture has elevated Eros (sexual attraction) above all as the main goal of life. This has really had devastating consequences if n the character of our women. As the Greeks realized, this is a form of madness that was quite dangerous.

    A small amount in a marriage that contains companionate, brotherly and charitable love as well works wonders. But our young have been taught this is the be-all end-all to marriage. When it wanes, as it inevitably does, the marriage is thought to be a bad match,

    The liberal sexual mores that feminists proscribe is all about Eros at the expense of all other pathways to lasting happiness. This necessarily leads to promiscuity & repeated heartbreak.

    Our society is in quite a sad state really.

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    1. Yes, crucial point. Nothing wrong even with a large amount of erotic love in a marriage, but why are moderns then so incapable of feeling marital love and even more than this, the kind of love that exists within a family?

      Many moderns are incapable not only of pair bonding but, worse yet, of family bonding - they just seem to be insensible of the good that exists when you have a father and a mother and their children in a happy home together - which ought to raise a love of family - but which just doesn't for so many people today.

      As you put it so accurately, if there is any waning of sexual attraction, as is likely to happen in the long run, the relationship is thought to be a bad match and the family is dissolved.

      And putting everything on eros is often self-defeating, as it leads in the end to a kind of jadedness that undermines even sexual love. People are left stunted.

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  4. We have to be wary of female entryism. All too often we see a mostly male audience fawn over any attractive woman promoting non-leftist ideas. The notorious Tomi Lahren in the US is a good example of what needs to be avoided.

    If Mme. Southern wanted to get married in six months, she would have no shortage of worthy suitors. Actions speak louder than words.

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    1. I understand why you say this, but I listened to a podcast of three alt-right women a few weeks ago (from memory Tara McCarthy, Melissa ? and Lana Lokteff) and there wasn't much to disagree with. All three recognised that things would only change for the better when Western men resumed their civilisational role.

      For a moment in time the role of these women is revolutionary. Remember, liberal orthodoxy was built in part on middle-class status signalling. Being liberal meant you were an educated, higher class, intelligent person. But this status signalling only works if the only renegades from the orthodoxy are the odd quixotic intellectual or working class people.

      The fact that young, intelligent, good looking women are speaking out against liberalism really does much to break the orthodoxy - including amongst young, university educated men.

      If the movement continues to grow and develop I am confident that a capable male leadership will emerge. I am confident too that any truly anti-liberal movement will recognise the need to restore male spaces in society.

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  5. A terrific exchange. Thank you all.

    I haven't watched the video. I read and re-read the comments.
    Again, a superb exchange of views and valuable insights.

    I would love to describe, at length, my two favorite people; my son and his special new bride. They married this past October and have moved into their first house. I just cut a doorway from their bedroon into what we now call the nursery. They've been inseparable since instantly falling in love at first sight, his freshman year at college, nine years ago.

    They give me hope. Two, somehow older and wiser souls, highly attractive, flourishing with high-energy and hard work; committed to each other as the perfect counterpart; not simply a male, but as a man who can only exist as the counterpart to a woman; not simply a female, but as a woman who can only exist as the counterpart to a man. Masculine and feminine in a harmony that shouldn't be so surprising and increasingly unique.

    Notwithstanding war and peace, disease and shifting populations; it will be the disordering and dysfunction of man and woman, the meaning and the need of masculine and feminine not in conflict, that will bring low the secular and soulless existence of human life in a foreboding alien male and female future.

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  6. My comment applies to the video link in the story on the main page. Once you click on the story and see the comments, there is a different video.

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