The Alt Right Ladies' Magazine That Wants To Be The New Glamour
The Alt Right Ladies' Magazine That Wants To Be The New Glamour
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In the wide world of women’s magazines, there’s Cosmo, there’s Glamour, there’s Elle, and now - there’s Evie. Evie wants to be seen as the thinking woman’s alternative to coastal elite publications pushing agendas like female empowerment, gender equity in the workplace and the home, and of course, where to source the very best cream blush according to your complexion and skin type.
But have you ever heard of Evie? Has your sister? Has your freshmen roommate? I’m willing to bet the answer is no, and I’ve long been curious about who they’re actually targeting, and who is doing the targeting. What do they hope to achieve with articles about “Men's Favorite Types Of Dresses On Women, Ranked?” Let’s find out, shall we?
In a piece about Evie for Rolling Stone, EJ Dickson learned from Evie editor-in-chief Brittany Martinez that in 2023, the magazine reached “more than 10 million people across all social media channels, with unique page views in the millions per month.” To put these numbers in perspective, Dickson compares this to Cosmo’s readership, which reached 54 million page views in April 2023. So while Evie isn’t doing Cosmo numbers, they are doing Ballerina Farm numbers, which is wild considering that so many of us know the color [and name] of Hannah Neeleman’s stove, but most of us don’t know about the magazine heralding Melania Trump (THIS MELANIA TRUMP) as someone who “deserves status as an inspiration for women everywhere to dress themselves gracefully and tastefully.”
Evie is a pretty-in-pink mostly online magazine targeted towards women who enjoy “just asking questions,” living in divine harmony with their femininity, and pairing their MAGA hats with cozy knits and pumpkin spice lattes once the nights start getting chilly. But you needn’t take my word for it! Let’s take a closer look at a passage from Evie’s About page, which is a masterclass in evasion, dog whistles, and hidden-in-plain-sight keywords intended to make a certain type of reader feel seen and safe.
While women’s magazines have pushed agendas driven by one-sided politics, cultural anti-values, and ad-driven profits, Evie takes an entirely different approach. Our often contrarian opinions don’t tell readers what to think, but rather give them enough to think about. As for our advice, it’s delivered by writers who embody success on each subject, ultimately driven by curiosity and a devotion to finding the truth. We strive to back our editorial decisions with science and sound data, but also acknowledge that critical thinking is just as important in times of uncertainty, like in the early days of COVID-19, when Evie published many firsts that were later proven to be true, despite countless hit-pieces from mainstream “journalists.”
The use of the term “anti-values” is your first sign that this publication will be offering something special for the conservative gal about town. An astute Evie reader knows, of course, that progressives are famously money-driven heathens without any sort of moral compass, and conservatives care about the things that MATTER: white supremacist patriarchy and the nuclear family.
Words like “contrarian,” “curiosity,” and “truth” communicate Evie’s alliance with mama grizzlies, #savethechildren advocates, and freedom warriors (see here for a primer on the conservative momfluencer lexicon!) Evie is not for sheeple. Evie is for women who are comfortable relegating “science and sound data” to the backseat in favor of giving “critical thinking” a chance to drive.
Evie shows their “devotion to finding the truth” in articles denigrating birth control, celebrating traditional gender roles, blaming “toxic femininity” for men’s bad behavior, confusing political ads for pornography endorsements (?!), and propagating misleading information about vaccines. Omg and duh - golden penis syndrome. If you know what to look for, it doesn’t take longer than five minutes of targeted searches on Evie’s homepage to see that their “editorial decisions” are just as one-sided as a publication like Teen Vogue’s. They’ve simply chosen a different side.
As you’ll see if you click through any of my cursed hyperlinks, in order to read almost any Evie article, you need to submit your email address. To read the particularly “contrarian” ones, you need to submit your credit card information.
The Evie overlords have had my email address for at least a year or two, and I genuinely delight in the headlines gracing my inbox. I could easily pack this entire essay with headlines alone but I’ll restrain myself to a few favorites.
Dirty Talk: A Wife’s Guide To The Most Erotic Love Language
5 Signs You Are Mothering Your Man (And How To Stop)
Rejecting The Value Of Sex Appeal Is Only Hurting You
The Transformative Power Of Leaving Maidenhood And Embracing The Motherhood Archetype
Do Right-Wing Men Make Better Husbands And Fathers?
45 Milkmaid Dresses That Will Make Any Man Weak In The Knees
A Wife's Secrets To Making Yourself Taste Delicious
Is Sunscreen Making You Sicker?
13 Tips To Appear More Elegant
ONE OF THE TIPS IS TO SHOW OFF YOUR WRISTS. ANOTHER IS TO STOP OVER-EXPLAINING. Which I think is code for “shut up and stop sharing your thoughts and feelings.” This is peak Evie. A Cosmo Girl Who Grew Up To Be A Tradwife But Still Wants To Do Arbitrary Quizzes About Fruits and Body Shapes.
Keep it organic, ladies!
If you’re a reader who doesn’t know that “truth” in Evie’s context is synonymous with “conclusions made to uphold existing power structures,” it’s easy to be sucked into Evie’s orbit by way of aesthetics, traditional beauty and fashion content, and an authorial voice that’s familiar to any of us raised on Seventeen or Allure. Come for the articles about “how to glow from the inside out,” stay for the articles on voter conspiracy theories, “honest conversations about the biological clock,” and “classy and feminine” Halloween costumes.
To give you some context for my history with Evie (because all love affairs have a good backstory), I discovered the publication when I was reporting one of my many Ballerina Farm pieces. Prior to the infamous Times profile on Ballerina Farm, journalism focusing on BF and their impact wasn’t really widespread. But Evie has published several pieces about the Neelemans, which is unsurprising given Hannah Neeleman’s standing as queen of all things feminine and domestic and nuclear family conservative. Here’s an Evie excerpt from a piece about Neeleman’s controversial pageant appearance barely two weeks postpartum:
Hannah is certainly an anomaly when it comes to motherhood, and that’s one of the reasons why millions of people are enamored by her. She seems to experience pregnancy, birth, and postpartum fairly seamlessly. Her figure has remained slim and fit over the years. And there’s nothing wrong with pointing out that she is blessed with top-tier genetics, which help her recover beautifully from childbirth.
Lots of words doing the lord’s work in this paragraph.
But who’s behind Evie? Who’s making the editorial decisions, and who is in charge of the magazine’s ethos and mission statement? Who’s giving the green light to propaganda disguised as journalism in which anti-abortion centers are referred to as “pregnancy resource centers,” further obfuscating the truth that such centers do everything they can to convince vulnerable people looking for abortion care NOT to have abortions?!
Evie was founded by husband and wife team, Brittany Martinez and Gabriel Hugoboom.
According to her Instagram and her Evie bio, Martinez is a former model and influencer who was dissatisfied with the state of women’s media, which led her to seek funding from her father, Ronald Martinez, to help launch Evie in 2018 (or 2019 depending on who you ask) as a corrective to the “lack of values in popular women's magazines.”
I couldn’t find much about Gabriel Hugoboom other than that he was an aspiring actor and musician prior to Evie, and that his last name, is, indeed, Hugoboom. And honestly, good for him.
In her excellent Rolling Stone deep dive, EJ Dickson notes Evie’s history of publishing disinformation, citing the “stolen” 2020 election and conspiracy theories about the government lying about Covid.
Both of these stories were quietly deleted, then republished after Rolling Stone asked Martinez about them, with the latter story re-worked to include the word “opinion” in the headline. Martinez denied removing the stories for editorial reasons, stating that the editorial team “temporarily unpublished several hundred articles from 2019-2021 due to technical changes with our site, CMS, and photo requirements.”
Riiiiiight.
According to Dickson’s reporting, several of Evie’s former writers weren’t initially clear about the magazine’s conservative bent, but grew increasingly uncomfortable with the magazine’s anti-trans, anti-birth control, anti-vax, and in some cases, explicitly racist content. I think this demonstrates how easily young readers—or even readers not particularly practiced in media literacy—might be influenced by Evie’s more alt-right content, since the very writers hired to perpetuate that content weren’t entirely aware of the magazine’s conservative mission themselves.
To help me make sense of Evie’s places in the women’s media ecosystem, I spoke to BBC.com’s executive managing editor for global features, Laura Norkin. Laura has worked in various capacities for several women’s magazines, including InStyle, Glamour, and Refinery29. Prior to me reaching out, Laura had never heard of Evie, which she hypothesized might say more about what the various algorithms know about her and her search history than anything else.
Laura explained that Google and other search engines have “done a lot of work trying to make sure that fake news or junk websites don't come to the top of searches.” She says that publications without a clear focus are more likely to end up buried at the bottom of search results, and thus less likely to attract new readers.
So if you're Googling ‘safe birth control methods,’ is Google going to send you to an Evie article about their app’s rhythm method? Or is it going to just send you directly to something quoting expert gynecologists talking about how to choose the birth control that's right for your body? You know, maybe Planned Parenthood or a site that's explicitly based on women's health.
When Laura references Evie’s “rhythm method app,” she’s speaking about 28, an Evie app financially backed by MAGA funder Peter Thiel, which launched in 2022. 28’s website is littered with thin women romping barefoot on the beach (read: natural), showing off their toned abs, and obviously, showering in waterfalls. In this article, Evie explicitly outlines their proprietary relationship to the app, but in other fear mongering “health” articles on the site, Evie writers promote the rhythm method without providing clear disclosure about the fact that 28 (an app selling the rhythm method) is Evie’s little app sister.
EJ Dickson notes that, “when asked whether Evie’s birth control coverage poses a conflict of interest, Martinez did not reply, saying only, ‘28 empowers women to become experts of their own bodies and gives them the tools to improve their health by naturally balancing their hormones.’” Which, you know, is COMPLETELY an answer to the question! Fun fact that will probably surprise no one by this point - 28 is also an MLM.
Magazine veteran
, in reference to the Peter Thiel of it all, expressed email rage to me that aggressively partisan publications peddling dubiously sourced content are able to keep the lights on when women’s magazines prioritizing rigorous reporting, peer-reviewed research, and a commitment to maintaining the integrity of the fourth estate, can’t find funding.Bullock, who, alongside
writes (which covers “the good, the bad, and the ugly of the women’s magazines”) notes that Evie’s strategy of wrapping conservative ideology in shell-pink listicles about how to look good in photos is nothing new.Most mainstream magazines have always been Trojan horses that package big ideas inside of smaller ones, sliding in a profile on a female politico—or what we used to call an “eat your vegetables” explainer on, say, how IUDs impact your risk of breast cancer—right beside something that no human woman can resist, like, “the one boot you need this fall.” I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing . . . But of course this is a power that can also be used for evil—it's surprisingly easy to lure women in with, say, skincare recommendations (again, who is immune?) then give them the bait-and-switch of subtle lies and more sinister ideologies. Younger or less sophisticated readers may not be able to spot the difference. Evie is a particularly pernicious example—I’m truly offended by how it’s using the innocuous, familiar visual language of the women’s publication to sell something very different, and very dark.
I personally and politically object to Evie publishing essays about HOW TO PRIORITIZE YOUR HUSBAND’S MENTAL HEALTH, but I’m far more disturbed by how good and right and normal Evie makes their often noxious claims appear. For a woman exhausted by the always-polarizing news cycle, burnt out from trying to be an adult human in a culture which has made that increasingly difficult, and sated on a social media diet of trad wives convincingly peddling a better way, I can see how Evie’s “alternative” messaging might be very appealing. It’s a perfectly pretty gateway drug to ideologies which exist to protect the privileged and further disenfranchise the marginalized.
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again; it’s much easier to sell someone on Qanon, Project 2025, and cannibalistic pop stars if you’ve first sold them a friendly aesthetic who never hurt nobody and an organic cleansing balm made with hand-foraged lavender.
Even Maggie Bullock professes to being initially hoodwinked by Evie by dint of their strategically mainstream layout and hey girl hey voice.
Evie looks and feels like a regular, tasteful lady-site. I do this for a living and even I wouldn’t think at first glance, conservative propaganda!! (That is until I clicked on a SATC story and they tried to tell me that if O.G. Carrie Bradshaw were to vote in this election cycle, she’d be voting for Trump. Fake news! Evie, cease and desist!)
If you’re a remotely adept Googler, you can get a good sense of a particular publication’s journalistic standards by Googling the people in charge. For example, Lex McMenamin is the news and politics editor at Teen Vogue. Their CV is extensive and full of credentials that most journalists would agree make them equipped to oversee the dissemination of political news for millions of readers.
The same is not true of Evie. I couldn’t find a masthead for Evie, but we know that Evie’s EIC does not have a journalistic background. Carmen Schober, who wrote a series of news articles for Evie (including this one about Kamala Harris’s “disastrous” appearance on Fox News) is a novelist. I couldn’t find any sort of background intel on Meredith Evans, who wrote an Evie “news” piece about who the Gilmore girls would vote for today, and I have no idea if Nicole Dominique, who wrote about Covid-19, has any background in health reporting, because this is where her paper trail ended for me. But I guess I should just trust Evie when they tell me that Nicole (Nikki) “is known for her commentaries on culture, politics, and theories.”
Laura Norkin underscores the differences of journalistic integrity between Evie and mainstream magazines like Glamour.
There’s a huge package on Glamour’s front page right now about “what’s at stake for women” in the 2024 election, right next to gift guide roundups that look exactly like what you’d find on Evie. Their ‘what’s at stake’ story is a robust multimedia feature based on a poll they conducted with YouGov of 2000 American women, a representative sample, that their data finds the economy, healthcare, and housing to be top concerns this election.
Now, Evie also has a story about what their readers care about most in the election, including a big bar graph which shows “immigration and the border” as the number one concern, a figure they arrived at by polling their own Instagram followers, and they don’t reveal how many people responded.
Not everyone is trained in or accustomed to doing the type of source analyses Laura’s talking about here. Not everyone knows what to look for when they’re assessing their news. Media literacy (and the lack thereof) is hugely integral to how people form their opinions. Even in traditional mainstream reporting, a story’s framing might highlight an inflammatory piece of information while simultaneously downplaying information more likely to be relevant to the average citizen’s life and wellbeing (See here for a relevant episode of If Books Could Kill).
And as a Washington Post piece about the rising problem of birth control misinformation being spread by outlets like Evie points out, the stakes are different for every reader. Michael Belmonte, an OB/GYN in D.C. and a family planning expert with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), told WAPO he’s seeing real impacts on real patients. “People are putting themselves out there as experts on birth control and speaking to things that the science does not bear out.”
He says women frequently come in for abortions after believing what they see on social media about the dangers of hormonal birth control and the effectiveness of tracking periods to prevent pregnancy. Many of these patients have traveled from states that have completely or partly banned abortions, he said, including Texas, Idaho, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.
I can afford to mostly laugh at Evie’s absurd headlines and roundups of feminine kitchen appliances. But I’m (likely!!) not Evie’s targeted reader, so it doesn’t really matter if I think it’s hilarious that they’re citing FABIO as an expert on immigration. Evie matters to the women for whom their headlines are not jokes. And it matters to those of us impacted by those women’s votes. And the right knows that.
Evie will tell you which haircut is best for your face shape. They’ll tell you which celeb outfits you should be “swooning over.” And they’ll also give you a blueprint for how to be a Good Woman, a flowery construction that’s based on cherry-picked science, heteronormative gender essentialist fever dreams, and a worldview in which Donald Trump is a misunderstood champion for animal rights and devoted to protecting white women from Black and brown people (when he’s not grabbing their . . . ) Evie claims to represent an alternative perspective to mainstream women’s coverage, but their alternative vision for the future is simply one in which white women can continue to fool themselves into a false sense of status-quo security by contributing to their own oppression.
Obviously, showering in waterfalls!! The simultaneous “you can be a virgin AND a whore!💅” message (Eve was an anti-values slut but li’l Evie knows how to taste great!🥰) is bending my brain. Women’s magazines are so so canonically weird and confusing, but this one takes the cake, which Evie baked but naturally did not eat. Only non-critical-thinking women eat sugar unless you’re eating to make your man weak at the knees🙏! (Swap in “unambitious” for non-critical-thinking and we’re in Cosmo, i.e. women’s magazines sigh.) Also, I wondered at first if the copy is all AI, but perhaps headlines like that take a very human twisted talent. And, my lord, the grift all over this enterprise!!!!
This quote sums up why I love your writing “The use of the term “anti-values” is your first sign that this publication will be offering something special for the conservative gal about town.” So funny 😂
Also - saving this for my tween to read later, it’s a great exploration of how to be a more discerning reader and consumer of content. Esp the discussion about the polling and research 🙌🏻