For decades, the mainstream women’s magazine industry has operated as a monolith. To flip through the pages of Vogue or Cosmopolitan is to enter a world where a specific brand of hyper-sexualized progressivism isn’t just an opinion—it is the only permitted reality. In the hallowed halls of Condé Nast, the woman who is skeptical of the sexual revolution’s promises or who finds beauty and power in her distinctively feminine procreative capacities simply does not exist.
It is out of this cultural chasm that “conservative” publications like Evie have sprouted. By positioning itself as the “conservative Cosmo,” Evie offers a seat at the table for women who have felt ignored for a generation or more. But politics is an incredibly narrow lens through which to view a woman’s life. When we define ourselves primarily by what we are against, we often end up trading one restrictive box for another.
The problem with the Cosmos of the world isn’t just that they have disenfranchised women with differing views of what it is to be a woman. It’s that they have damaged women’s sense of their own humanity and happiness. For years, they published doctored photos of unrealistic body shapes while simultaneously encouraging diets to achieve them. They showcased airbrushed skin while peddling skincare routines, as if a cream could achieve what Photoshop did. They promoted abortion while ignoring the voices of women who were pressured into abortions or experienced its negative effects. A fantasy of consequence-free sexual escapades was marketed as the path to empowerment, but the real women who tried to live out those scripts rarely experienced the “happily ever after” the magazines promised.
Evie made headlines in The Cut, Vanity Fair, and The Wall Street Journal last month after it hosted “Eros by Evie,” a New York event during Fashion Week. Evie has built a following of 349K followers on Instagram by featuring glossy images of busty, thin, and airbrushed models—in provocative poses like those found in Cosmopolitan—paired with conservative messaging that celebrates marriage and family. For some, this is a welcome shift: a long-overdue effort to present traditional values in a mainstream, visually compelling format. For others, the magazine’s popularity is an impressive feat, but not quite what conservative families would want to recommend to a daughter or young niece.
This tension points to a deeper problem. Evie’s stated mission is to help women live with more “joy” and “celebrate their femininity.” But it is not possible to help women find joy by objectifying them. No media outlet can make American culture better for women by participating in the very patterns and practices that have harmed them so gravely for the past sixty years.
A New Box, Same Old Script
I certainly understand the appeal of wanting to make countercultural views “sexy.” Nonetheless, we cannot help women by mimicking the same dehumanizing messaging that fractured their sense of self in the first place. Publishing headlines telling women they need to be skinnier and sexier, or hosting a “sex” section that literally warns readers it “contains explicit adult content”—i.e., soft-core porn—is not the way to solve the problems created by Cosmo.
Worst of all, Evie targets the very church-going women whose values have long helped them resist the Cosmos of the world. These women deserve a sense of relatability in their media, but they don’t need to be told that their looks are the priority (“Can I Look Like This by 6 pm?” one post reads, paired with video clips of Victoria Secret models) or that they should have the “effortless” sex appeal of Margot Robbie, as the magazine’s editor described the ideal “Evie girl” to the Wall Street Journal. Making people feel inadequate is the engine of materialism and consumerism, not the foundation of authentic happiness.
On its website, Evie laments that we are witnessing “a generation of women experiencing more depression than any other in modern history.” It also proclaims: “We believe in purposeful dating, committed love, and always working to improve your marriage, not letting it go stale. We’re not about hookup culture and the emotional damage it’s left behind. Women deserve better than casual sex and meaningless encounters.” These are real problems and worthy goals. Yet, while the publication is quick to blame the mainstream media for women’s mental-health crisis, it remains blind to its own reflection. Evie relies on the same objectifying scripts and insecurity-driven narratives that fueled the fire that it claims to fight.
Indeed, the famous 2004 Dove study revealed that women felt worse about themselves after just three minutes of flipping through a typical women’s magazine. The relentless pressure and unrealistic scripts these magazines peddled made women feel they were failing at everything. This lack of relatability is exactly why titles like Glamour eventually shuttered their print editions. As subscription revenue has dried up, women’s magazines have tried to stay afloat with the revenue from the ads that accompany their click-bait content—content that blatantly objectifies and demeans the demographic they claim to be serving.
Sex sells, and Evie has found a way to peddle it to a new, traditional-leaning demographic. But plastering labels of “husband and wife” on headlines selling “Steamy Secrets for Amazing Shower Sex,” “How to Give a Hypnotic Lap Dance,” or “Giving Your Husband the Best Blowjob of His Life” doesn’t sanctify pornified content. Sure, some research shows that married people have better sex than their unmarried counterparts. But happy married couples achieve greater emotional and physical intimacy by spending time together, not by reading how-to articles on erotic massage.
Evie thrives on social-media tactics that spread like wildfire, not shying from “mean-girl” posts and content designed for clicks. One post asked men to share their biggest turn-offs in women, inviting hundreds of social-media comments putting down the fairer sex. Other posts reveal “The Real Reason Masculine Men Aren’t Interested in Marrying You”; “Which Perfumes are the Most Seductive to Men”; “Men’s Favorite Types of Dresses on Women, Ranked”; and “The Shallow Girl’s Guide to Being the Envy of Your Hometown.” Followers are informed of “Ways You Could Be Unknowingly Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Efforts” and other “Weight Loss Tips and Tricks” and “Top Slim Secrets” alongside numerous depictions of women with ultra-thin bodies.
A culture of sexualizing women and scrolling through near-impossible standards of beauty leads directly to lower self-worth, depression, eating disorders, addiction, abuse, and a spiraling suicide crisis for girls. These are life-threatening realities, and publications like Evie are making them worse.
Looking Hot vs. Being Well
Insecurity-inducing tactics might garner engagement, just as high school gossip spreads through hallways, but popularity is not the same as purpose. A strategy of disparagement cannot further a mission that claims to be culturally redemptive.
This counterproductive effort recently caught the attention of writer Hannah Rowan. After trying out 28 Wellness, the fertility-charting app created by Evie’s founders, Rowan reported that it attempts to motivate in-app purchases by enticing users with the promise of being sexier and more attractive to men. The app, Rowan explains in an essay at The Lamp, “presents a vision of the world where the ideal woman is a busty princess or a busty supermodel or a busty milkmaid,” just as Evie does. Yet, as Rowan rightly observes, a woman’s “desire to appear more attractive . . . is not synonymous with [her] well-being, whether physical, psychological, or spiritual. Looking hot and being well are not necessarily intertwined experiences.”
28 Wellness brands itself as a health app. Yet, as the doctors interviewed by Rowan emphasized, “grounding the pursuit of health in the quest for sex appeal is especially dangerous for young women who already are presented with unrealistic mental and physical ideals everywhere else in their lives.” These pressures, Rowan notes, can contribute not only to increased stress but worse health problems such as “eating disorders—including orthorexia, an obsession with obtaining perfect health by rigidly following wellness regimens.” A nurse and fertility-awareness educator Rowan spoke with added, “I would never recommend that to my twenty-year-old daughter. . . . For a young girl who’s trying to navigate the world and to be confident in her own body image, that’s not something that they need to be seeing.”
Encouraging women to ground their pursuit of health and “wellness” in a desire to be seen as a desirable sex object will not help them to thrive as the full human persons they are. It merely teaches women to internalize the objectification that surrounds them. Objectification—the reduction of the human person to an object—is not merely one problem among many. It is the root disorder from which many of our most damaging social ills flow, especially those that distort women’s sense of self and well-being—the very problems that Evie is supposedly meant to help solve.
Objectification is responsible for our culture’s obsession with noncommitted sex, as well as our dulled moral outrage at exploitation in pornography, exhibitionism, and sex trafficking. Objectification is the prerequisite for a culture that puts sexual pleasure over personal dignity, the same logic that underlies sexual assault, treats bodies as disposable, and sees abortion as the solution to a problematic presence. Objectification is what leads people to endlessly scrutinize their looks and seek to modify their bodies with plastic surgery or other procedures. For all of these, the root is the same: the reduction of a multifaceted, unrepeatable person to a collection of consumable, changeable parts.
Reminding Women of Their Worth
I recently attended a conference aimed at college-age students. Spending time with these young women was a sobering reminder of the real challenges they face. They are exhausted by the performance culture. They are looking for an exit ramp from a media environment that tells them their value is a moving target, dependent on the latest trend or idealized standard. Thankfully, there is a different way for women’s magazines to respond to this crisis—one that doesn’t involve trading one set of demands for another and selling the same product in a different package.
Women deserve quality journalism and relatable and insightful articles. Ads may accompany content, but profit-seeking shouldn’t eclipse the higher purpose of helping women to thrive. Today, living out that journalistic mission requires taking an active stance against some of the greatest obstacles women encounter in the media at large: objectification, manufactured standards of beauty that only airbrushed or AI models can achieve, and narrow definitions of success. It requires prioritizing a mission to add value to women’s lives rather than seeking profit without regard to the human cost. In today’s media environment, such a publication might only be possible if it is financially supported by mission-driven visionaries.
For nearly fifteen years, I have seen a truly life-giving alternative play out at Verily, where I serve as editor. Verily’s founders, Kara Bach and Janet Easter, didn’t simply seek to respond to a political imbalance. They sought to honor the fullness of women’s humanity. They created the first no-Photoshop women’s magazine with the belief that a woman is not a project to be “fixed” or a demographic to be “won.” By refusing to retouch photos and by showcasing a range of shapes, colors, and life stages, Verily adheres to a simple but powerful mission: to remind women of their inherent, unshakeable worth before they ever pick up a makeup brush or a ballot.
Over the course of its nearly 15 years, Verily has leaned into this mission, eventually becoming a non-profit organization. This shift acknowledges that lifting women up in true self-worth and confidence may not be as popular as clickbait, but its results are more powerful. When we get off the “get thin, get work done, get noticed” treadmill, we find something much more valuable: the quiet necessity to appreciate our own worth and to discern our personal vocations, whether they fit a political mold or not. True flourishing isn’t found in a better-branded box. It is found in the courage to live outside the boxes altogether.
We need more writers, content creators, and publications that encourage women to live out their vocations bravely and faithfully. Evie is unable to do so, because it remains caught in a perilous cultural limbo. By publishing explicit content that mirrors the hyper-sensationalism of Cosmo, Evie isn’t reversing the sexual revolution—it is thriving on it. It’s selling a fantasy script that treats intimacy as a commodity and the female body as an object to be optimized. In this sense, Evie feels stuck in the tall grass of the Garden—aware that something is broken, yet still reaching for the same rotten fruit that caused the fall of women’s media in the first place. This is not the path to a better world. It is simply a different way of going backward.
We have the opportunity now to move forward, past the high school hallways and the hollow fantasies, toward media that honors the whole woman. We don’t need content that merely updates the packaging of our anxieties. Today’s young women deserve media that honors our dignity and speaks to the full truth of who we are.
