Glossy Lies, Glassy Eyes

The well-funded lies selling motherhood to girls who don't know better

Steve Bannon celebrating his femininity with a copy of the Peter Thiel-funded women’s magazine Evie.

I recently received my long-awaited copy of Evie Magazine in the mail. It’s been awhile since I’ve owned a physical copy of a women’s magazine, and, at first glance, this one feels and looks like the sort of thing that I used to buy at airports to thumb through while sitting at my gate. The major difference between Evie magazine and the Cosmos and Elles and Vogues of my younger, fun and fancy-free self is that this one is right-wing propaganda. 

Evie was founded in 2019, by a husband and wife team with funding help from Peter Thiel (a Touch of Thiel® is how you know that it’ll be creepy).

My print edition– the only print edition released in 2024– features tradwife influencer Ballerina Farm (Hannah Neeleman) on the cover milking a cow, and what feels like at least a 100-page photo spread of Neeleman and her husband inside, sandwiched by articles about why skinny is back and how porn and sex toys are causing the birth rate to fall, along a dash of dog whistle racism. (I cannot emphasize enough how many photos of Hannah Neeleman there are in this magazine. There are more photos of Hannah Neeleman in the most recent issue of Evie than there are of me in my entire wedding photo book. It is a puzzlingly large number of photos.)

I subscribed to Evie for Hater Purposes, an “I’ll read it so you don’t have to” stunt with my Hysteria podcast cohost Alyssa Mastromonaco. I’m a glutton for punishment. I love to dunk on things that are stupid and wrong, especially bullshit that’s fed to young women. And the Theil-money-tells-women-how-to-be mag is stupid– incredibly so, as one might expect from a gay billionaire weirdo who often seems to kind of hate women when he’s not railing about them not breeding enough. 

Like most conservative propaganda aimed at young people– especially tradwife-adjacent content created with the intent of persuading women to willingly leave public life and subjugate themselves to wifehood and motherhood– Evie attempts to pass off archaic social beliefs about gender that were discarded for good reasons after generations of harm as bold and countercultural. It presents a retreat to the patriarchy as a rational response to problems of the modern world like the frustration of online dating, sexual incompatibility, male porn addiction, and general anxiety and malaise. Wouldn’t things just be easier for young women if they simply fell backward onto the feather bed of second-class citizenship and let somebody else do all the work? (The responsibilities of homemaking and motherhood, as demanding as they are, do not count as “work.”) It’s telling that even pronatalists know that the best way to get women to have more babies— short of physically forcing them to— is to lie to them.

Evie contains tips on things like– I shit you not– the ideal body fat percentage for peak fertility and attractiveness and why it’s important for women to be skinny, horny for their husbands and their husbands only, completely bald in the pubic region in order to enhance her male partner’s “sensation.” I also counted at least a few allusions to birth control being unsafe. Birth control, you see, has side effects. Not like the side effect of not taking birth control and having plenty of hetero, procreative sex; pregnancy, as people who have failed high school biology know, is a famously pleasant experience that poses virtually no health risks. Evie is also really into raw milk:

There are like six separate ads for the “Raw Milkmaid Dress” in my copy of Evie Magazine. As somebody who is married to a man who has done quite a bit of ad copywriting— that’s some bad copy.

My podcast cohost Alyssa and I are planning on getting into some of Evie’s glossy, glassy stupidities on a future episode of the podcast (new episodes drop every Thursday, except not this Thursday because it’s a holiday week). I especially can’t wait to get into their recipe for a “simple vinaigrette” that calls for one cup of olive oil and only a quarter cup of vinegar— that’s one big, greasy salad!—but, for the purposes of this Substack, I want to hone in specifically on one insidious aim of Evie: idealizing motherhood to a vulnerable audience that doesn’t know any better. 

Everything Evie preaches is a funnel toward wifehood and motherhood, and presents motherhood as a place of relief, like taking off a bra at the end of the day. The article about how skinny is back? It’s about being attractive enough for your husband to fuck you pregnant. Or how about the one about how sexy is back now, too (with apologies to Justin Timberlake, who claimed to have brought it back twenty years ago) because it’s a better way to assure that you’re in prime shape to get and stay pregnant. Ballerina Farm is amazing because of how pregnant she usually is, and how skinny and blonde and placidly happy she is when she is dedicating herself in service of the fruits of said pregnancies. 

From the un-bylined “ASK HIM” column in Evie Magazine.

But Evie and its sister propaganda arms don’t always dance around the point that women should aspire to be nothing more than caregivers and vessels. On Evie’s active Instagram page– which obscures the magazine’s true purpose by innocently declaring that it’s a publication to “celebrate your femininity,”-- there’s a quote from Rachel McAdams declaring that motherhood is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to her, hands down. As though one mother’s subjective experience is a tacit guarantee that you, too, can be as happy as Rachel McAdams says she is, and all you need to do is get married and have babies.

Readers, with all due respect to Rachel McAdams and the journey she’s on personally – motherhood is not the greatest thing that has happened to this mother– if by “great” we mean it in the same way that I’d refer to enjoying “great” meal at a Michelin starred restaurant or a “great” party. Motherhood is the most consequential thing that has happened to me. It’s the most important decision I’ve ever made. But would I use the word “greatest” to describe what this experience has been? No. 

Older mothers existing in large numbers is an inconvenient counterexample to everything pronatalist propaganda aimed at young women claims– which is that the only valid path to happiness as a woman is for them to run as fast as they can, in high-end cowboy boots across a gauzy Utah plain– from girlhood to a stay-at-home submissive Ballerina Farm-style motherhood. I– and most of my peers who chose to get married and have kids– waited to do so until we had done all of the things that are incompatible with marriage that we wanted to do. I waited to have children until the very last minute, sliding underneath the lowering garage door of my waning fertility like a character in Jurassic Park fleeing the raptor enclosure. I did this on purpose, because I know that motherhood is expensive and difficult— and in my late thirties, I was more financially stable, and emotionally mature than I was when I was younger. 

I’m glad things worked out the way that they did, because I wanted a family. But the truth is that I was happy before I had children, and I probably would have continued being happy if my life had carried on that way.

Once my first baby was born, my prior life was effectively over, at least temporarily. I went from being able to focus on things like work and friends and travel and exercise to centering everything around the kids. I expect my life to have this shape at least until both of them are old enough to be left alone unsupervised. Becoming a mother did not feel like relaxing into a natural state of softness; it was an escalation. Babies do not relieve stress, they introduce new, baby-shaped stresses.

Motherhood is relentless. Unless you’re so wealthy that you can afford round-the-clock paid help– and even if you can– this is the truth. And you can’t Instagram post your way out of it.

Before I had my first baby, I was ready for my old life to be over. I was ready for a new thing. But my god, even being surrounded by the most no-bullshit mom friends west of the Mississippi and doing enough homework on pregnancy and early childhood to practically write a thesis on it, I couldn’t fully wrap my head around how completely life-altering it was until I actually lived it. I do not regret the decision– clearly, as I had another baby a couple of years after the first one. But the decision made my life significantly more complicated, forever. I can’t imagine the devastation of feeling tricked into it, and feeling like there was something wrong with me when something that was sold to me as pure soft-focus bliss turned out to be hard.

I love my children. My older daughter is so smart and weird and fun to talk to… most of the time. My younger daughter is a ray of sunshine who started smiling when she was ten days old and has rarely stopped since. Being their mother is the most important thing that I’m doing right now, because I’m responsible for their two little lives. But it’s not the greatest thing I’m doing. I love my children, but being a mother is not all that fun.

My kids often drive me crazy. I’m at the office today, and people who aren’t parents keep asking me what I did over the holiday weekend. The answer is that my husband and I split taking care of the kids, like we do every holiday and every weekend. I got a few hours of “me time” that consisted of me driving around to the three grocery stores in my neighborhood in search of paper sandwich bags for the older one’s lunches, which I didn’t ultimately find. 

Jealous that I didn’t write this. / Evie Magazine web edition

This morning, the one-year-old, who teething and in an uncharacteristically grumpy mood, woke me up at 5:45, after waking me up at 4 am, and 1:30 am, and 11 pm. I tried to feed her and put her down which, if the volume of her protest cries were any indication, was the worst thing to ever happen to a human being, ever. So I brought her into bed with me, and she got some furtive sleep, tossing and turning and rabbit kicking me with the strength of a much larger person, until I foisted her off on my husband at 6:30.

Later this morning, the three-and-a-half-year-old became furious with me because her new shoes are still too big for her feet and I wouldn’t let her wear them to school. We’d been doing so well up to that point– no crying, even when I braided her hair, and even when I told her we were out of the cheese I used in the grilled cheese sandwiches she likes me to pack in her lunch. 

But just as we were leaving the house, my daughter took off running in the direction of her bedroom, almost tripping over her too-large shoes. I followed her with a pair of shoes that fit, telling her that we were out of time and that I was going to put the properly fitting shoes on. She screamed at me and threw the too-big shoes at my head. Then, as we were walking out to the car, she cried “I WANT MY DADDYYY! I WANT MY DADDYYYY!!!” in a fake baby voice that I’ve literally never heard her use before, even when she was much smaller, as I hissed-yelled “Your daddy is not going to let you wear the brown shoes, either!” at her like a damn psycho. When we got in the car, I asked her if she knew what it means to “make a spectacle of yourself.” She responded that she was Batman. 

Now, would I consider that a “great” time? Bad night of sleep followed by at least one anodyne argument with a three-year-old that ends with her screaming and throwing something and me, an adult, raising my voice because I have been driven to madness by a child? No. No, it is not a great time. It’s an average morning in a life characterized by responsibility rather than pleasure. I did not milk cows in a white dress or chase geese through a field this morning, or any morning. My life looks nothing like Hannah Neeleman’s. The only mother whose life looks like that is… Hannah Neeleman. 

That’s too much dek for me. / Evie Magazine web edition

I know from experience that pronatalist propaganda is full of shit— and so would anybody who has been a parent for five minutes. But Evie isn’t after people who know better. It’s after women who don’t. The latest propaganda push on the right is targeting young women in their teens and twenties– likely frightened and sheltered little red state white girls who have no idea what the world is like beyond what their parents and pastor told them. Girls who think Mormon family influencers are models of aspirational and attainable domesticity.

The women’s magazines I used to sneak-read in high school also painted an unrealistic portrait of what it was to be a young woman moving through the world. I know now that, contrary to the suggestions of teen and ladymags, there’s no workout that will make my ass look like J Lo’s, that day-to-night outfits aren’t really a thing, and it’s actually not a huge embarrassing deal if your crush or coworkers know that you’re having your period. Cosmo airbrushed models and celebrities and gave a lot of women my age a complex about how their bodies should look, whether we should have visible pores, and how much of a woman’s brain should be devoted to man-pleasing. That generation of women’s media lied to us, too, and the harm that some of its messaging shouldn’t be downplayed. 

However! Cosmopolitan might have encouraged its readers to do questionable things like insert a finger into a man’s butthole during oral sex without getting explicit prior approval, but it did not encourage us to make irreversible decisions that would change our lives forever. It didn’t try to trick us into questioning the safety of contraception or vaccines. It didn’t harp on raw milk every 10 pages, or start every article by warning the reader that the backward and popular opinion that was about to be expressed was actually brave. It didn’t try to redirect our ambition toward sacrificing ourselves on the altar of the first mid twenty-five year old man who bought us jewelry. It didn’t try to trick us into thinking that the remedy for the stresses of modernity was to quit earning a living, depend on a man, and devote ourselves wholly to caring for children and a home for no financial compensation. 

Evie is not concerned with actually rectifying generations of medical neglect of women, of ridding the world of pollutants and war— both of which disproportionately harm women and children, or with remedying the original sin of western civilization (denigrating female life-creators and convincing them that the only way for them to access divinity was to worship a male god— obviously). Evie encourages young women to breed, because pronatalists like Peter Thiel want them to breed. Peter Thiel doesn’t want young women to breed because he wants more young women to be happy and empowered in their “femininity,” whatever that means. They want young women to breed because the wealth of the upper class depends on the the American system of capitalism not collapsing. Capitalism needs workers. Women make workers.

We should not let voices with creepy tech bro agendas finesse how serious it is to essentially deconstruct your entire sense of self and then slowly put it back together around the responsibilities of raising kids. Those of us with the life experience to know better should be standing up and telling the truth: that motherhood is a mindfuck, a physical ordeal, an emotional ordeal, a marital ordeal. It is not necessarily all of those things for every mother at the exact same time and to the same degree, but glossing over those possibilities is a straight-up lie.

To become a mother is an irreversible choice, and it is absolutely not for everyone. And it certainly shouldn’t be sold with false promises, through a soft-focus lens.