This Popular Women’s Magazine Is A Gateway To Alt-Right Tradwife Life
Изображения пользователя Tatiana | CanvaEvery time I set foot in a clothing store lately, I notice the same fashion trends: floor-length skirts. High necklines. Full-coverage bathing suits. Enough ruffles to suffocate a 17th-century Frenchman.
I’ll admit, I love a puff sleeve more than I probably should for a woman who spends her time debating redpill trolls on the internet, but these trends aren’t rooted in style alone. They never are.
Zoom out to America at large, and everywhere you look, you’ll see a not-so-subtle push to return to “traditional life.”
Modern, stark-white interior design styles are out, and cottagecore, Victorian, and Southern Traditional styles are in. Searches for “raw milk” and “backyard chickens” are trending. Homeschooling is on the rise, and doctors report a resurgence of measles and whooping cough because parents refuse to vaccinate their children.
Netflix’s remake of Little House on the Prairie debuted with 6.4 million views in four days. Personally, I enjoyed it, though its display of 19th-century pastoral life wasn’t enough to satiate Conservative viewers. Critics claimed it was "too woke” because the storyline focused on the displacement of the Osage Native Americans from their land (historically true) and featured a Black free-born doctor (also historically true).
But that’s the thing about "traditional values." They’re a whitewashed, overly optimistic version of reality that requires people to deny key aspects of history.
One magazine is sucking girls and young women into the tradwife pipeline without them even realizing:
Evie is an online magazine that launched in 2019
Its social media accounts now have a collective 600,000 followers across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms, and at first glance, the posts are pretty relatable.
“The era when no one had the same face,” reads one of Evie’smost popular TikToks, which showcases famous 90s actresses before everyone started getting plastic surgery. Another says, “The era before everyone got veneers.”
Together, these two videos have 5.9 million likes. On the surface, Evie’s posts feel soft, nostalgic, and celebratory of natural beauty, but dig a little deeper, and the magazine’s true values take a hard right turn.
When I signed up so I could read the on-site articles, I was met with a paywalled screen that read, “Embrace your femininity. Subscribe now.”
It feels vaguely reminiscent of the magazines I grew up reading, which told me that I wasn’t a real woman unless I removed my body hair, wore the right shade of shimmer eyeshadow, and perfected my kissing technique while expecting nothing in return.
The first trending article I saw was called “I Can’t Wait To Lose My Last Name.”
Contributor Brooke Brandtjen starts off by describing a viral video in which a wedding officiant announces the bride (who opted to keep her maiden name) as “Mrs. Brandon Key," her husband’s name. The bride “shoots the officiant a death glare” until he “takes a deep, sorrowful sigh before re-announcing the couple.”
Brandtjen writes: “It’s hard not to feel bad for her. On what should be the happiest day of her life, the day when she and her husband become one, she is instead preoccupied with keeping her autonomy. In front of all of her wedding guests, she chooses to be bitter and defensive. In front of her husband, she chooses her personal autonomy instead of fully embracing her marital bond. In front of God, she is rejecting the command that a bride should submit to her husband’s authority instead of her father’s upon marriage.”
The article continues on for another 1,100 words, criticizing women who opt to keep their last names after marriage and claiming that despite radical feminists’ best attempts, “the war against marriage hasn’t entirely worked.”
The only source this “journalist” cites to validate her view of marriage? The Bible.
The intimacy content comes with a disclaimer that this advice is for married women only, and in 2024, the magazine’s cover featured tradwife Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm.
Another article (based entirely on one Reddit post) claims that late-term abortions are a fetish for some women, and instead of punishing it, our culture celebrates these “self-indulgent and hedonistic attitudes” the same way it celebrates other “harmful” ideologies, like “body positivity,” “mental illness,” and “neurodivergency.”
Other Evie articles include “Feminism Taught Women That Sacrifice Is Oppression” and “My Vibrator Almost Destroyed My Marriage.”
Who’s behind Evie magazine?
Inside Creative House | Shutterstock
Evie was founded by the husband-and-wife duo Gabriel Hugoboom and Brittany Martinez (now Hugoboom).
According to a 2019 Quillette article, Brittany Hugoboom believes that third-wave feminism is a form of “self-hatred” and that “women needed a magazine that doesn’t lie to them,” so she decided to create a “conservative Cosmopolitan” where women can go for fashion, health, and lifestyle advice.
Hugoboom calls it “classier than Cosmo, more alluring than Refinery29, and smarter than Bustle.” (For the record, I’ve written for Bustle for over a decade now, and its style guide requires that all bold claims are backed by primary sources; the Bible does not suffice.)
While Evie’s “About Page” chides other women’s magazines for pushing “agendas driven by one-sided politics,” a recent interview piece by Vanity Fair revealed that Brittany Hugoboom is “against abortion,” “voted for Trump in the last election,” and that her “own children have not been vaccinated.”
And when you follow the money, this so-called non-political magazine becomes a whole lot more political. In 2022, Evie’s founders launched the 28 app: a health app that uses menstrual cycle data to provide fitness, nutrition, and family planning advice. Ads for the app are all over the Evie site, plastered with the tagline “Women are not small men.”
This quote is a registered trademark of Dr. Stacy Sims, an exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist who studies female bodies because women have been notoriously excluded from medical research and clinical trials. Why did this happen? The patriarchy. Why did this stop happening? Feminism.
Evie doesn’t seem to recognize the irony of using this quote to market its brand, and when I contacted Dr. Sims’ support team to flag the trademark breach, they confirmed they aren't affiliated with this app.
Who's affiliated with the 28 app?
Peter Thiel, who personally invested $2 million into 28 while his firm, Thiel Capital, led its $3.2 million seed round.
Yes, that Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor and conservative activist who co-founded PayPal with Elon Musk, sells data-mining and surveillance software to government agencies like ICE, and launched the political career of Vice President JD Vance.
Peter Thiel also once said that women shouldn’t vote, and he openly supports pronatalism: the social and political belief that women need to have more children to ensure economic stability. (After all, if we stop procreating, who’s going to buy billionaires’ products or work in their factories?)
Let’s think about this for a second: A billionaire pronatalist just funded an app that’s collecting women’s biological data. An app that’s facing major criticism because it’s not a clinically valid form of contraception, so women are getting pregnant while using it as a “natural” form of birth control. An app whose founders and funders are starkly against abortion rights.
Meanwhile, the United States Senate just confirmed Todd Blanche as Attorney General. In a leaked audio from a private phone call two weeks ago, Blanche promised that he would overturn Roe v. Wade in every state, making abortion illegal nationwide.
Thiel has spent decades building technology that analyzes massive amounts of sensitive data and selling it to the government, and suddenly, he’s interested in women’s periods.
Conservative media understands the psychological tactics of every cult: Get them young. Make them feel seen. Draw them in with beauty, nostalgia, and belonging, and don’t say the quiet part out loud until they’re already subscribed.
Evie is no exception. Under the puff sleeves and pretty pastoral pictures, it’s selling something much more insidious: pronatalist propaganda, and in Trump’s America, this type of messaging isn’t harmless. In fact, it gets women killed.
Maria Cassano is a writer, editor, and journalist whose work has appeared in HuffPost, NBC, Bustle, CNN, The Daily Beast, Food & Wine, and USA Today, among others.
