All About Evie
What a Christian nationalist media startup taught me about MAGA gender politics
Image credit: New Africa/Shutterstock
I admit that I did my best to avoid the alt-right Evie franchise—magazine, newsletter, podcasts, wellness app—partly because I thought it was silly, partly because I thought it was white supremacist (which it is) and partly because I dislike replacement feminisms.
Then I stumbled across this article from the Evie Substack: “I Grieved Through My Vagina and It Healed Me.” Reader, can you blame me for clicking through?
Before I tell you what it even means to grieve through your vagina, or why you would choose to do that (hint: there is penis involved), let’s review what Evie is. Founded in 2019 by Gabriel Hugaboom and Brittany Martinez, a conservative, Christian, and now married couple, Evie styled itself as an alternative to “feminist” women’s magazines like Cosmo, Vogue and Elle. I put feminist in quotes because it’s debatable whether these magazines, with their boobalicious covers and obsession with femininity, fashion, and beauty tips are feminist in any relevant sense. What I do know is that they are not “left-wing” publications that demand a conservative alternative, as the Hugabooms would have it.
But women’s magazines are popular across political lines. The Hugabooms understood that this media space, defined by its promotion of female consumer, sexual, and professional independence, is a lucrative one that had room for a cosmopolitan conservatism.
Long before feminism, women’s magazines doled out advice geared as much to women’s conflicts as their aspirations. Recall, for example that Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl came out in 1962, two years before Betty Friedan published feminism’s Ur-text, The Feminine Mystique. The book’s success boosted Brown into Cosmopolitan magazine’s executive editor role in 1965, in part because she wrote about what everyone in the publishing world knew: women in publishing and other industries were having a lot of sex, and while their ambitions often included having a husband, let’s just say that those husbands were sometimes married to other women.
The timing of Evie’s launch was also significant. 2019 was the last year of the first Trump administration, during which ideas associated with Christian nationalism had firmly established themselves in the media. But the Hugabooms vision undoubtedly benefitted from the Covid-19 pandemic, which began barely a year after Evie’s launch. The pandemic, as we know, elevated anti-vaxxer ideology, science skepticism, and a conservative obsession with female domesticity dating back to the rise of Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum. These belief systems, which tended to emphasize “feelings” as a uniquely female way of knowing the world, merged with a liberal wellness movement that emphasized self-care, environmental awareness, and tackling known and unknown hazards with creative problem-solving.
But the Biden years were also a year to launch new projects aimed at young voters, and Evie was one of them. If manosphere media projects recruited young men to conservative ideas, Evie did the same for women, weaving health and wellness advice into skepticism about “elites.” Crunchy granola hippie left, meet women who are “just asking questions,” “doing my own research,” and asserting power and control over their bodies by “reclaiming” their virginity (yes, this is a thing.)
All of this is cloaked in a well established genre: style-forward, advice-giving, experience-laden, porny women’s magazines. “At first glance, Evie seems nonpartisan, publishing content daily about topics like award season red carpets and styling skinny jeans,” Katie J.M. Baker wrote in the New York Times last year:
But readers who click past “hot girl” health trends and Adam Brody appreciation posts will find articles that promote positions that are fringe even within conservative circles—criticisms of no-fault divorce and I.V.F., for example— packaged in a fun and approachable format. (A typical Evie headline: “Amy From ‘Love Is Blind’ Is Right To Be Hesitant About Birth Control.”)
The publication assumes that the Evie reader aspires to be a wife and mother, even while it acknowledges that she has some options: She can study and work (just not at the expense of a family), she can be sexually adventurous (with her husband), and she can even delay pregnancy (by using “natural” fertility tracking methods).
Think: 28-year-old MAHA Mom Karoline Leavitt, press secretary to President Donald Trump. She is married to a man more than twice her age, and pregnant with her second child. Why does their marriage work so well? Well, probably because he’s rich, she’s ambitious, and they have a ton of household help. But this is what Leavitt told People magazine last December: “He’s built a very successful business himself so now he’s fully supportive of me building my success in my career.” In other words, she doesn’t have to worry about appearing to come first, because he already came first.
But it’s the biological essentialism—something that undergirds the war on trans people as well—that grooms women for the return of a patriarchal society. And not just any patriarchy: one drawn from bodice-ripping romance novels. Let’s start with how one grieves through one’s vagina.
The author (and the Evie Substack tends not to have subject lines—articles are just signed “Evie,” with the occasional essay co-authored by someone named Jaimee Marshall) was grieving her cousin and best friend when she was reminded of said cousin saying that her husband “really sees you. He’s going to make you a mother someday.” Then, the next night, he boinks the bejesus out of her, producing an earth-shattering orgasm that allows her to “fall apart.” What follows is a fake science lecture on why unprompted intercourse always makes you feel better.
There are a few characteristics of Evie posts that are worth noting. First, Evie has is a major platform for “tradwife influencers”—a faux feminist genre that promotes traditional wifehood (a life of childbearing and domesticity) as the most fertile path for female happiness. There is no “tradhusb,” which leads me to my second point: the man in Evie stories never has a name. It is always “he” or “him,” presumably the Adam to her Evie, but his chief characteristic is that he is a cocksman of the highest order—and always knows, intuitively and without speaking, what she needs sexually and how to deliver the goods.
Finally, although at least half the posts are about sex and orgasm, before the author gets to the nitty-gritty, the story—which will shortly descend into pure porn—is interrupted with a content warning:
Disclaimer: This article is intended for readers 18 and older. It contains explicit adult content and is intended for married women for educational purposes only. Reader discretion is advised.
Not unlike physique and health magazines in the 1950s and 1960s, a genre for gay men that featured scantily clad body builders, Evie might as well put up a sign that says “Porn! Not porn!” But unlike a porn site, you don’t even have to check a box that attests you are over 18; nor is there anything that might trigger parental controls.
OK, what follows is the classic “zipless fuck,” followed by a lengthy, and utterly fake, explanation of why transcendent sex makes you forget everything else, even your grief and rage at losing your best woman friend. Because who needs women friends when the magic dick makes an appearance on schedule?
In fact, the more I read Evie, the more I think the porn is a delivery system for other things, an idea that is not new in feminism, but requires repeating anyway. For example, there is the article about sugar-waxing your genitals, a “natural” depilatory which leads to—transcendent sex! There’s the article about why men having vasectomies leads to—less transcendent sex! There’s the article about why a bride and groom both being virginal on their wedding night leads to—a lifetime of transcendent sex!
Then, here is one about how a shared faith also leads to transcendent sex, which is surely possible if not probable; yet, I think Jesus never saw this one coming. “There I was, wearing nothing but the small jeweled cross between my naked breasts;” an hour later, “I collapsed backward, gasping, my head touching the bed as the surging orgasm overtook me, the angelic voices crescendoed in harmony.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, wearing a cross. Think about it. Image credit: Joey Sussman/Shutterstock
OK, I’m sorry—but if I can’t unsee this image, why should you?
Let me just say, there’s nothing wrong with romantasy. But in Evie, shattering orgasms are a loss leader for shadier messages: that “science” is not a material thing, but an intuition; that sexual intimacy does not require knowledge, conversation, or social equality, just Christian purity and male domination; that ripping the hair out of your genital area may be painful but it will turn your husband into the lover of the century; and that the perfect life is out there for women who accept the truth that there is no satisfaction outside of heterosexual marriage.
The big question is, of course: so, what? All porn, without exception teaches us something, and the lesson is not always limited to sex (and I must stipulate that I am not one of those feminists who sees any difference between pornography and erotica—say you like it, say you don’t, but for God’s sake be honest.) And if, in fact, all porn does not steer its users towards invidious things, some of it clearly does. This is why nearly everyone, including the pornography industry, opposes child porn.
And it is why Evie is really bad too. Because it is MAGA through and through.
Let me introduce you to a third character in many of these stories: “they” or “them.” Perhaps you have met this character on political social media. “Every time I get closer, they come after me harder” (GOP Representative Nancy Mace); “They just want it to be easy to vote—not hard to cheat” (Utah Senator Mike Lee); “The Woke Reich is getting exposed for who they truly are” (MAGA influencer Laura Loomer.)
“They” are a secret cabal of elites who not only trick women into false consciousness but also deny us access to our truth so that “they” can pursue their own ends. For example, being beautiful, smart and successful will not ultimately lead to a life of lonely, husband-less despair. “In school, we’re taught” [emphasis mine] “that book smarts and motivation are the most important ingredients to success in life.
We’re all well aware that our teacher’s favorite students are those with the highest test scores, the Ivy League-bound overachievers….More than any generation before, young women today are encouraged to become hyper-career-focused businesswomen. And with far more women in the workforce, motherhood has lost much of its significance, instead being regarded as patriarchal and outdated. Of course, with our society’s strong idolization of success, it’s easy to think an accomplished woman would have her fair share of suitors lining up to date her. But it’s actually the opposite.
What I bet you didn’t know is that “our biology” makes women want to be cared for, protected, and provided for, so the more we do that for ourselves, the higher the bar is for any man who “we” might be attracted to—or who might be attracted to us. But what I want you to notice is that the only reason that women make this mistake is that they have been ideologically indoctrinated to think it is ok to be smart and accomplished.
As a not insignificant aside, it puts that mind-blowing sex out of reach. Unless you sugar-wax your pubes.
But I digress. The point here is not that Evie should not be, but what it is and does. It is funded by venture capitalists that include Peter Thiel, one of MAGA’s most prominent angels, and the man who brought us JD Vance. More importantly, it links a life of love, connection and personal fulfillment not to rights, fair pay, health care, education, and other aspects of the liberal state, but to following our feelings and the Lost Cause of patriarchy.
In laying siege to liberal feminism, the Evie empire represents the next phase of a longstanding battle waged on women from the right, one in which women live their most satisfying lives by giving pleasure to everyone else first. Evie frames the “fact” that men should naturally be in charge as the real women’s liberation; promotes the staggeringly unreliable rhythm method as better than commercial birth control with the myth that pharmaceutical products injure women’s health.
In other words, what Evie does is provide the scaffolding for MAGA politics: a promise that there is a better life over the horizon, one that “they” don’t want you to have, and the state can never provide. But it is attainable.
If only you will submit. To him.
What I’m watching when you aren’t looking (ok, more bodice-ripping):
Season Four of Bridgerton, widely criticized for its meandering plot line. I agree: the eight new episodes are a narrative mosaic that lack the skillful plotting we have come to associate with this Shonda Rimes series. Well-known characters check in and out, interrupting our focus on the romance between renegade son Benedict Bridgerton and Sophie, a Cinderella-derived housemaid. While Episode 4’s discussion of reaching the pinnacle is a classic, it’s hard to know how anyone who had not seen earlier seasons would not be puzzled by most of season’s subplots—even (especially?) the retirement of Lady Whistledown.
Bridgerton relies on a delightful conceit that Georgian England was a racially integrated society, faced a crossroads, although—unlike prior franchises—Rimes remains very hands-on. The cross-class romance (which sort of isn’t, because Sophie, raised as a lady, is the illegitimate daughter of a lord) comes a-cropper on the age of Epstein. Benedict Bridgerton’s relentless pursuit of Sophie ignores how prevalent the sexual abuse of female domestic workers was in the 19th century, and how little of that was about love. Housemaids had no leverage to refuse the sexual advances of upper-class men, and were believed to be at fault when these sexual assaults were discovered.
One critic noted that this season simply does not fulfill what we have come to expect, either from the series, or from Rimes. However, there is a history here with Rimes franchises. They successfully raid established TV genres to create something new and incredibly creative in their first few seasons, putting actors of color in shows that are not inherently “about race” but about being human. But in an era when most profits are made through residual streaming, they hang around too long. How to Get Away with Murder (2014-2020) completely jumped the shark after season 3; Grey’s Anatomy, 20 years after its debut, is unwatchable and seems to be written by AI; and Private Practice (2007-2013), a Grey’s Anatomy spin-off, was a crashing bore from the get-go.
At least for me, the Sophie-Benedict plot does not evade history’s reality, which makes me wonder why it is so easy for audiences to buy the conceit that an English upper-class that had established itself financially on 18th century racial slavery, and would perpetuate itself until 1914 on colonialism.
What I’m reading:
Anjet Daanje’s The Remembered Soldier (New Vessel Press, 2025), translated from Dutch by David McKay, is an astonishing novel about trauma, loss, and love in the aftermath of World War I—with a masterful plot twist at the end. This is why Daanje’s novel is Booker long-listed, but also why—even though it comes in at a whopping 567 pages—you will be unable to put it down.
Short takes:
It’s hard to say what is the weirdest aspect of working in the Trump White House, but having the President ask your shoe size and then—for no apparent reason—send you a pair of dress shoes may be among them. “Trump has fallen in love with Florsheim, the American brand that’s been pairing comfort and style for more than a century,” Alex Leary reports at The Wall Street Journal. “They’re also affordable: many cost $145.” That’s affordable, all right! “Recipients have taken to wearing their Florsheims around Trump, some apparently begrudgingly,” Leary continues. “One cabinet secretary has grumbled that he had to shelve his Louis Vuittons, according to people who heard the complaint.” Ingrates. (March 9, 2026)
The Department of Justice is in its worst crisis since Watergate, legal scholar Michele Goodwin writes at The Nation, and “the most troubling aspect of this state of affairs is how we got here.” The corruption of the nation’s top prosecutors became fully apparent when, after the murder of Renée Good by ICE agents, the DOJ failed to investigate the shooting and instead launched a probe of the victim and her wife instead. “Yet it is not the DOJ’s response to ICE’s lawless conduct in Minnesota alone that raises serious alarm,” Goodwin continues. “The department has been severely tarnished by unlawful appointments and the politically motivated prosecutions of officials who have criticized Donald Trump.” (March 9, 2026)
A classified report (the leaking of which suggest career folks at the Pentagon and CIA are freaking out about a boots on the ground scenario) says regime change in Iran is not in the cards. “The prospect of Iran’s fragmented opposition taking control of the country was described as ‘unlikely,’” John Hudson
and Warren P. Strobel report at The Washington Post. “Current and former U.S. officials say they see little sign, at least so far, of a mass popular uprising in Iran or of significant fissures within the government or security forces that will result in a new regime.” (March 7, 2026)
I loved this, Claire. So clever and funny. I would love to know how many subscribers Evie has.