Soft Power on the Second Battlefield
Conservative “feminism,” Evie Magazine, SS25 runways, and fighting the culture war from home
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This confession would strike shock and disgust into the heart of my 17-year-old self, but it must be said: I should probably spend less time online. In fact, I wish I knew how to log off completely, because it feels like everyone on the internet is suddenly being very weird about three things I have many opinions about: sex, femininity, and fashion. Despite the outpouring of post-election takes about how America’s conservative turn was obviously foreshadowed by recents trends (it was, but where were the smug commenters when writers were predicting this years ago?), I am seeing a steady resurgence of aspirational “trophy wife,” “beauty as power,” and “skinny girl routine” content. Such videos frequently frame marrying a rich man, staying home, and embracing “natural” femininity – centuries-old expectations placed upon women – as cutting-edge hacks, revelatory lifelines etched into our palms by god, previously unknowable but rendered divinely legible through one Chosen Influencer’s quest to decode them.
We have been here before. It seems like we have moved through this discourse every few months for years, with new actors unearthing buried disputes with stakes and torches in hand. Merely pointing out this repetition, however, feels increasingly futile when actively working against a conservative movement fraught with gleeful contradiction. “This is nothing new” can be a useful antidote to nostalgia-induced, conservative complaint-fantasies framed as bold, subversive, or innovative challenges to the status quo (a position that the left should continue to fight), but I worry that dismissal alone may be insufficient: we can strip some of the rhetorical power in these movements by revealing how they have persisted throughout time, but exposure alone only takes us so far when there is a void to fill.
Gen Z’s “I’m-just-a-girl-so-I-should-stay-home-and-look-pretty” content clearly – and often explicitly – speaks to disillusionment with liberal feminism, with its creators frequently citing frustrations with “girlboss” messaging and its focus on corporate success within a cutthroat, draining, and exploitative capitalist system. In response to these realizations, these women rethink what they have been sold, turning instead to the home as a place of refuge from the dismal job market and economy. Conservative creators jump in, affirm their disillusionment and choice to stay home, and proceed to sell them milkmaid dresses, egg aprons, and all other cosplay needs for the newly-initiated. The crowd claps, the lights fade, and the curtains close. The end.
With its current focus on individual empowerment within the crumbling neoliberal order, liberal, bourgeois feminism has clearly been failing people for some time. While traditionally left theoretical traditions such as Marxist feminism, transfeminism, and Black socialist feminism offer overlapping approaches to some of these failures, conservative voices are frustratingly some of the loudest. As I explored earlier this year in “Shopping for Sheep’s Clothing,” anti-capitalist and feminist rhetoric is increasingly being appropriated by the right in response to issues abandoned by the liberal establishment. In addition to the many reactionaries rationalizing their social conservatism through disingenuous adoption of feminist language, however, another group is advancing. In the months directly preceding and following the U.S. election, I have been troubled by the heightened visibility of a distinctly conservative “feminism,”1 one that grounds its political and social arguments for conservative policy in an attempt to wrest the feminist mantle away from a faltering liberalism. As disillusionment with liberal feminism grows on both the left and right, the left needs to reckon with this growing conservative feminist movement – whether we consider it truly feminist or not.
While it might be tempting to dismiss conservative feminism as an oxymoron, MAGA does not seem to care about contradiction – in fact, their affinity for contradiction seems to make them more alluring. I am also convinced by theorists like Serena Bassi and Greta LaFleur2 who argue that a successful anti-fascist feminist movement must honestly acknowledge and reckon with versions of feminism, historical and contemporary, which we must oppose. Many historical first wave feminists were also eugenicists, and some became open fascists. Imperial feminism, trans-exclusionary feminism, white feminism, and various other forms of feminism mixed with conservative positions have and do lay claim to the feminist label. The complicated origins of feminism and its continued political heterogeneity make it impossible to articulate some true, “pure” feminism uncontaminated by reactionary thought. None of this is to disavow feminism or to suggest the term is no longer useful: quite the opposite, as intersectional feminist opposition to gender essentialism, wealth inequality, pro-life natalism, white supremacy, and police apologism seem more important than ever. But rather than endlessly and pointlessly arguing about the semantics of what “counts” as feminism, I want to draw attention to and unpack a movement that appears to take itself seriously, clearly has mounting support, and yet has enough plausible deniability to avoid courting widespread controversy.
In the ongoing political struggle for a better future, the left must win on more than policy. It seems pressing to explore how conservatives are bringing new weapons to the culture war, wielding soft power on the countercultural terrain of the second battlefield: art, media, fashion.
This idea of “soft power” perfectly captures the political and aesthetic zeitgeist of our current fashion moment – and, indeed, the conservative feminist movement. In a recent piece for Vogue, Laird Borrelli-Persson dubbed the upcoming fashion season “strangely apolitical,” yet “especially feminine” – a curious combination, given the intensely politicized nature of women’s fashion over the last half decade. Still, Borrelli-Persson suggested that:
The 12 top trends of the spring/summer 2025 collections speak not to politics, but to the idea of soft power – of using fashion to influence, beguile, charm, seduce and bewitch. The season as a whole felt uplifting, positive and women-friendly; the overall message being, as Nicole Phelps put it: “You don’t have to renounce your strength to be feminine.”
Though Vogue contrasts soft power with politics, “soft power” carries significant political history. Political theorist Joseph Nye popularized the term in 1990, defining it as “the ability to affect others to obtain the outcomes one wants through attraction rather than coercion or payment.” In “Public Diplomacy and Soft Power” (2008), Nye writes that “the resources that produce soft power arise in large part from the values an organization or country expresses in its culture.” On a more basic level, soft power is “one source of influence,” but it is “also the ability to entice,” “seduce,” and “attract.”
It is interesting, then, that Borrelli-Persson’s description of SS25 fashion – as a tool to “influence, charm, seduce, and bewitch” – aligns almost perfectly with Nye’s politicized vision of soft power. Conservative soft power manifests both as a strategy to contest liberal cultural hegemony – to exert a social and political influence through culture, art, and design, promulgating conservative values and ideas – and also as a specific ethos tied to a fashion aesthetic, one playing on traditional signifiers of femininity, a weaponized womanhood.
I do not think Vogue is deliberately advancing a conservative argument with its trend report, nor that femininity is inherently conservative. It is telling, however, that sentiments of this kind are so apparent in the fashion space in our present moment. Soft power is contrasted with the more overt power of “politics,” tied to a naturalized and essential femininity and with it implicit gender norms. The idea that women are naturally suited to exercising power subtly, through feminine charm, rather than overtly, in the public sphere, conforms closely to conservative ideals of the gender binary and the proper place of men and women in society. Arguments precisely like this one were often levied directly against the suffragettes and others arguing for increased political representation for women. Vogue’s trend report correctly identifies a growing sentiment; though they likely did not intend a conservative message, they have their finger on the pulse of a powerful force.
Within the conservative imagination, this political-aesthetic joining plays out through the stereotypical image of leftist women as unhinged, blue-haired, unfeminine figures, in contrast with the natural, stable, classically feminine (white) woman. The former is framed as coercive, pushing her “woke” agenda on poor, tired men; the latter seduces, sharing her desire to return to a chivalrous time, a time in which women were unburdened by the masculine public sphere. Crucially, conservative femininity positions itself as countercultural, creating a confused fashion landscape.
This is familiar and deliberate framing. In 2017, American right-wing commentator Paul Joseph Watson infamously declared that “conservatism is the new counterculture” – a sentiment that many on the right still seem to share, despite the GOP’s recent House, Senate, and presidential wins. It is not just overt political control the right craves, but cultural relevance and social approval. What chafes is the sense that their values are slipping out of acceptability, and particularly that young people might abandon them altogether. In an attempt to harness the alienation so many young people experience after forty years of neoliberalism, conservatives are striving to frame their values as hostile to the status quo. Conservative femininity is currently at the centre of this struggle.
Enter Evie Magazine. If you are still keeping up with tradwife news, Evie has likely been on your radar for some time; Hannah Neeleman just graced the cover of their third print issue, “The New American Dream,” and she was originally attached to Evie’s recent “Raw Milkmaid Dress” drop.
wrote a great piece about Evie’s background and dismal journalistic standards, but for the uninitiated, the publication brands itself as the “conservative Cosmo” and routinely features beauty and lifestyle tips for your average pro-natalist, anti-woke, and traditional-yet-modern girl.3Femininity appears to be the central concern for Evie, whose mission is supposedly to “empower, educate and entertain young women with content that celebrates femininity, encourages virtue, and offers a more honest perspective than they get elsewhere.” Evie’s About page (which boasts that the publication is “the future of femininity”) states that “no matter how hard the forces that shape society advocate otherwise, women and men are inherently different,” so “the only way forward is to acknowledge and celebrate those differences by embracing our nature despite the world telling us we should hate the realities of our biology and what we are.” Evie’s primary contribution to the culture war is “protecting” and reinforcing the notion of cis womanhood, which they continually frame as being under threat. Evie positions itself against elements within the traditional right and also what it frames as the coercive gender anarchy of the left.
In “TERFs, Gender-Critical Movements, and Postfascist Feminisms,” Bassi and LaFleur warn against “a distinctively right-wing anticapitalism which casts heteronormative cis women as the ultimate losers of modernization and, therefore, the potential vanguard in the resistance against it.” As Bassi and LaFleur point out, this strand of conservative feminism is “fully stripped of the classed connotations of other kinds of mass feminist mobilization—chiefly, socialist feminism.” Indeed, they note that “feminist working-class solidarity” is continually “replaced by the idea that what should instead bring women together is a shared self-definition as biologically overdetermined and authentically gendered subjects — in other words, ‘normal women.’” This is precisely Evie’s strategy. The magazine must depict femininity itself as under attack from the left in an attempt to preserve the “natural,” conservative role they prescribe to women. Gender, for Evie, must be naturalized and essential; attempts to reveal otherwise must conversely be opposed at all costs.
When speaking directly about trans people, Evie writers tend to recycle a blend of common TERF and conservative talking points. They consistently praise and stand with J.K. Rowling, who they frame as a woman who has “come under attack” for merely “defending her views on womanhood and sex.” In another article titled “J.K. Rowling Says Male Crossdressers are ‘One of the Most Pandered-To Demographics in Existence,’” Meredith Evans writes for Evie that “womanhood is not a costume, and J.K. Rowling agrees.” As with most transphobia, such refusals almost always claim to protect “real” women and their children, drawing attention to the nuclear family.
What is more interesting about Evie, I think, is its frequent pose of apoliticism when constructing girlhood or womanhood. They are not shy about their transphobia, but they generally keep overt commentary in the News section. In their Beauty and Health sections, however, they frame their advice as innocent and universal, providing content for the girl who just wants to RETVRN to a world of 90s beauty standards, jealous strivers be damned! They criticize the body positive movement, but they draw more attention to pieces glorifying thinness. They attack trans people, but they spend more time defining the constitution of a “natural” woman. In addition to teaching the reader to seduce through a cultivated feminine charm, their goal is first to seduce you, to frame the lifestyle and body they sell as the ultimate aspiration. It’s a soft power pyramid.
In an Evie article on the divine feminine, for example, Baylee Hunt writes that “Encouraging women to embrace their nature and cultivate a softer approach to life provides the opportunity to revolutionize society and reharmonize the masculine and the feminine, repairing the damage done between them in recent years.” The words “revolutionize” and “reharmonize” sit in tension, embodying the contradictions inherent in an ostensibly feminist movement that looks both forwards and backwards.
Evie founder Brittany Martinez is adamant that Evie is not fighting the culture war, however: she writes that “Conservatives will never win if they imagine themselves as combatants atop defensive battlements, hurling abuse on the mass media.” Instead, she calls conservatives to shift the media landscape by creating pop culture themselves. Crucially, she does not frame this process as an overtly political one, instead encouraging the cultivation of conservative soft power:
That project starts by creating good content, whether in the form of books, films, TV, music or magazines. If politics is downstream from culture, and culture is largely shaped by entertainment, why are most influential conservatives ignoring the latter? We delude ourselves if we think everything we say or do has to go straight to politics.
Evie’s social media channels carry this mission out most effectively, focusing primarily on red carpet moments, “girl” culture, and celebrity drama – much of which is not framed along explicitly political lines. They even have a TikTok playlist dedicated to calling out misogyny, with their primary target being conservative manosphere commentator Hannah Pearl Davis. This move is a smart one. By disavowing right-wing misogyny, they frame themselves as running counter to mainstream conservatism, giving their followers a cause to fight for: women’s empowerment in the right-wing movement. In a piece for Quillette, Martinez writes:
Is Evie “feminist”? That depends on your definition of feminism. The reality is, modern feminism in its doctrinaire form isn’t popular. Many women realize that, at its core, progressive third-wave feminism can express itself as a form of self-hatred: a rejection of our feminine beauty, unique gifts and the natural role we play in our communities.
Martinez correctly identifies the unpopularity of liberal feminism, offering an alternative interpretation of its failures to disillusioned readers. Such comments – while more precise – echo other classic conservative flirtations with feminism.
In 2013, Amy Jo Clark and Miriam Weaver, two Tea Party activists behind Chicks on the Right, argued that conservatives were the real feminists: “the word ‘feminist’ has been hijacked by liberals, and we’re taking it back.” They accuse the Democratic Party of having “centered its messaging on a manufactured ‘War on Women,’” which they frame as “a flimsy facade for the entitlement machine that feeds women a false sense of security.” In a blog post from 2014, Clark and Weaver wrote that “Women like us aren't throwing other women under the bus” but are “fighting for things that Actually Matter – economic growth, national security interests, our standing on the world stage, proper healthcare, personal accountability.” Their 2014 book, Right for a Reason: Life, Liberty, and a Crapload of Common Sense, calls for a “makeover” of the conservative party, in an appeal to women and “minority voters.”
At the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Kellyanne Conway likewise discussed her relationship with feminism, stating that she saw herself as a product of her choice, not a victim of her circumstances. “That’s really, to me, what conservative ‘feminism,’ if you will, is all about,” she told Mercedes Schlapp. In The Sunday Times’ Ballerina Farm profile from last summer, Megan Agnew famously asked Hannah Neeleman about her own stance on feminism:
“I feel like I’m a femin-,” she said, before stopping herself. “There’s so many different ways you could take that word. I don’t even know what feminism means any more,” she continued. “We try so hard to be neutral and be ourselves and people will put a label on everything. This is just our normal life.”
Responses to the likes of Conway and Neeleman frequently focus on a dichotomous distinction between progressive feminism and conservative anti-feminism. “Are these right-wing darlings doing anything we might consider ‘feminist’?” some commenters ask. “Are their actions and comments emblematic of choice feminism, white feminism, or right-wing anti-feminism?” others question, reaching for more specific labels. Such categorizations are undeniably useful when discussing how ostensibly feminist language is used as a Trojan horse for conservative policy, such as pro-natalist positions smuggled in under the guise of helping mothers and families. If we, on the left, want to counter these ideologies, however, it seems necessary to do more than simply point out conservative talking points or try to keep the “feminist” label pure. We can close our eyes and refuse to call them feminists, but they still wield power, they are still expanding their influence, and they are still attractive to a large and growing number of young women. Evie and other conservative feminists understand this intimately.
I see Conway’s conservative feminism as an attempt to incorporate much of the language of liberal feminism to make the Republican party more attractive to women, aligning with Chicks on the Right. Conversely, I see current conservative feminism as a wider response to liberal feminism. Evie and publications like it prey on growing disillusionment and the ongoing collapse of liberal hegemony. Of course, they want to be the only game in town. Rather than engaging seriously in a debate with left responses to liberal feminism, conservative feminism seeks to position itself as the embodiment of the true counterculture pitted against a monolithic foe.
How might we think of Evie’s feminism, given Brittany Martinez’ evasion of her own question? During my research, I noticed that Evie has a reader survey on their website, which progresses from typical questions about your age range, location, and relationship status to topics like your stances on abortion, casual sex, the ideal economic policy for the United States, feminism (and feminist self-identification), birth control, sex in media, and whether or not Evie should launch a lingerie brand. I am still not sure which of those should be considered most surprising. Out of the 60(!) questions, the 45th was most intriguing. “If Evie were to launch a publishing arm (books),” it asks, “which subject would you be the most interested in?” The three multiple choice options provided are: a) men vs. women: how to fix the relationship between men & women today; 2) the art of femininity: a bible on all things feminine; 3) a new kind of feminism: what went wrong, why modern feminism has failed women, and the sane steps we need to take to move forward for both women and men to flourish. I see these three responses as the main facets of Evie’s brand.
Ultimately, Evie is trying to reach readers with varying levels of disillusionment and skepticism towards liberal pop feminism. As this publication and others like it gauge interest in this “new kind of feminism,” we need to be precise in our terms. In most contemporary academic feminist discourse, it is a given that feminism is not a monolith. In online circles, however, I routinely see women discussing their critiques of liberal feminism with shame, worrying that their disillusionment is a sign that they are giving in to the siren call of conservatism. Conservatives (and TERFs) win when we let them frame themselves as the only alternative to liberalism, just as liberals win when they frame themselves as the only alternative to conservatism. We must fight this distinction without expecting each ally to become experts on theory. Conservative American policy-makers do not sincerely care about lowering the price of groceries, but they are filling a void left by the Democrats. They do not care about protecting women or children unless violence against them can be weaponized as parables about the dangers of queer people or immigrant men. They do not care about the cost of healthcare or the expansion of the social safety net, though they are more than willing to channel working class alienation against their chosen scapegoats.
It has become a truism that the left needs to market a vision of the future. I admit to struggle with articulating an alluring, attainable ideal when the future feels foreclosed, but if the left wants to avoid ceding further cultural and political territory to the resurgent right and the conservative feminists now fighting on an important new front, it is precisely this ideal we must attempt to imagine. What would domestic labour look like with increased paid parental leave, more generous child benefits, or universal basic income? How might working families flourish if parents no longer had to worry about the cost of college thanks to free public education?
Liberal feminism is not speaking to these questions, yet it works in tandem with conservative feminism to drown out those who do.
This year was both impossibly difficult and incredibly rewarding, so I needed one last chance to let my inner hater out as I revel in the beautiful mess that was 2024. This started out as an outgrowth of another, more fashion-focused draft, but it ended up expanding over the last several months and became an accidental follow-up to “Shopping for Sheep’s Clothing” – the original piece will be coming to you at some point in the future!
Whether this is your first time reading one of my pieces or your tenth, thank you so much for being here. If you liked this essay, consider leaving a comment or sharing it with someone else who might appreciate it. I hope you have a restful end of the year!
Also known as “reactionary feminism,” as sold by the likes of Mary Harrington
See “TERFs, Gender-Critical Movements, and Postfascist Feminisms” from vol. 9 issue 3 of Transgender Studies Quarterly.
Absolutely phenomenal piece. Your journalism is seriously astute, your style is sharp and polished, your points are refreshing. This is so well done; thank you.
You can drink all the raw milk you want but all you wind up with is diarrhea. That’s what the conservatives are selling young women- pure shit.