December 31, 2025 • 45 mins
On the face of it, Evie magazine appears to be a publication aimed towards women focusing on things like relationships and pop culture. However, digging deeper reveals an extremist conservative ideology. In this classic episode, Bridget Todd joins us to break it down and discuss why it matters.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Anny and Samantha all Frome stuff, never
told your prediction by Her Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
And I'm back picking my favorite BRIDGID episode. As we
have said, there's so many to choose from, but I
feel like sometimes our episodes in Bridget's episode just sync
up so perfectly that I get really overly excited when
she brings her topics. And this one was specifically about
the publication EV Magazine, So the title is the Radical
(00:40):
Extremist Ideology of EV Magazine. And if you've listened to
our spiritual Trauma episodes or religious trauma episodes, you know
why because unfortunately they really missed up my algorithm. So
I had to bring that back as a classic as
one of my favorite BRIDGID episodes of twenty twenty five.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
So again, please enjoy this wonderful classic.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha and welcome stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
I never told your production by Heart Radio, and today
we are once again so happy to be joined by
the wonderful, the outstanding Bridget Todd.
Speaker 5 (01:27):
Welcome Bridget, thank you for having me so excited to
be back. Before we started recording, we were reminiscing about
our local malls, and now I have like Mall or
Mall Madness.
Speaker 6 (01:38):
It's like nostalgia overload.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Looks.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
We actually Annie bought me that game because it was
one of my childhood games, Mall Madness, and we've talked
about we have to play this game. I realized I
do not remember a play. When we opened it, I
was like, wait, what we have to buy things? I
know that, but how do you buy things? Sometimes you
can use cash and sometimes you get declined. I don't remember, Bridget.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
You should come down. We'll have a game night.
Speaker 6 (02:07):
Yes, I'll bring dream Phone. That was my game, so
you have dream Home.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
I have a blind date because any purchase that we
need to do that the mom. Okay, come down, sweep.
I have a Sweet Balley High game and a Babysitters game.
Speaker 6 (02:20):
Come on, I'm very much the evening of my dreams.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
Listen. I just have to brag, Bridget. I won our
dated game twice.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Yeah, we played a blind date together and I was like,
I don't know what's happening, but she ended up winning.
Speaker 5 (02:37):
Is it a game of strategy or like skill or
sort of like luck?
Speaker 4 (02:41):
Wait, Samantha, no strategy.
Speaker 7 (02:46):
No.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
I realized that this guy didn't like football, so maybe
he would be into this character.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
I think they should update it so you can have
queer characters.
Speaker 6 (02:58):
That's my I bet they.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Have an update, have we I don't know if we'd
locked by that. We talked about all of the old
games that were very gendered and the ones that we remembered,
but like us, things like mal Madness really popped up.
My brother actually really enjoyed that game too, but he
wouldn't admit it. But every time he see me pull
it out and I would play by myself, Yes I
was that kid, uh, he would ask to join me.
Speaker 7 (03:18):
Sometimes.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
There's something to be said about the games that were
coming out at that time that had like the very
specific technology that could be used for nothing else.
Speaker 6 (03:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (03:29):
Yeah, like dream phone, like the I'm going far back
into the recesses of my memory here so might not
be totally right, but it came with like a clunky
plastic phone, yes, that you would put to your ear
and it would be like he's not wearing a hat
and he would figure out like, whoo, who had a
crush on you?
Speaker 6 (03:46):
Based on like what this phone would tell you. I
think so the brand.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
Girls talk who did that?
Speaker 2 (03:54):
The date one, as well as truth or Dare like
that was their brand. They also had like magus I believe,
but yeah, they they made sure to capitalize on only
their games. Oh many a.
Speaker 6 (04:10):
Real like gendered media empire.
Speaker 7 (04:12):
Was it was.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
But so you know that is that conversation we've had repeatedly,
like all the industries that if they specifically go after
women most of the times or young girls, they know
as a moneymaker. If we talked about that as like
with games, and we actually talked about that with magazines too.
Speaker 5 (04:30):
Yeah, so that's actually a perfect segue into what I
want to talk about. And by the way, like I
didn't even connect this, but I was a voracious reader
of magazine, any kind of girl magazine in the nineties
I was getting. I got all of them. I also
loved a good catalog. I still have Delia's catalogs and
(04:50):
I thumbed through like it was a real like time
to be a girl who liked to consume media. And
something that I find really interesting is the way that
today those same like media spaces can really be used
to expose women to ideology that you might not even
like on the face, really recognize. We talked a little
(05:13):
bit about this in the episode that you and I
all did with about Candice on how she is so
good at using like a political conversations about celebrity to
really radicalize women. And in that same vein we have
to talk about this magazine called EV Magazine. I think
(05:33):
you have you all what's what's your familiarity with EV?
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Right? So when I saw this was coming to our conversations,
at first I was like, wait, why does this look familiar?
And then I realized in our ten to twenty part
episode of Religious Trauma and Women that we actually used
some of their publication and it was one of those
as I was like, because I was not familiar when
(05:57):
I first pulled up into this article. We were talking
about you know, purity culture and sexuality and women and
all of these things within Christianity, especially Western Christianity, and
it was this whole like bed. It was twisting the
narrative a little bit about like, you know, people being
too sexualized has really really gone away from us and
(06:17):
made it so over the top that is no longer
enjoyable or da da da, And at first You're like, yeah,
this could make sense, and then as I read more
and more, like wait, who is this publication?
Speaker 3 (06:27):
And it's EVY and I went through it was like,
oh oh, this is oh wow.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
They really have dug deep in this whole like relevance
culture within Christianity to bring out something that doesn't feel
like like it's preaching on you, but it has an agenda.
And I was like, wow, So we were familiar because
in that same like of course, we wanted to talk
about that conversation. So I had to give a caveat
(06:52):
to our listeners be like, hey, so this publication is
specifically very Christian oriented and it's published by very conservative
people and they don't you don't know that until much
later into reading things in here. So that's how I
was like, okay, so we used them before. They're an
interesting publication.
Speaker 5 (07:11):
Yeah, and what you just described is really part and
parcel of the experience of reading ev online.
Speaker 6 (07:19):
You know, you might be like, oh, well this is
this is a reasonable take, like oh, I agree with that,
and then.
Speaker 5 (07:24):
You're like, wait a minute, this is actually I'm not
so sure. Let's take a look at like who is
behind this publication and they're what they're about. So this
whole conversation comes off the heels of a really media
profile with the founder of ev magazine in the New
York Times. So a lot of what I'm going to
be talking about comes from that piece by Katie j
and Baker. If you've not seen ev Evie is a
(07:47):
I guess a women's media outlet. If you have seen
their content on the internet, you probably think of it
as a publication that focuses on pop culture wellness and
relationships for a female audience. But it has a distinct
conservative perspective that Samantha, as you rightly clocked, might not
be so obvious at first glance.
Speaker 6 (08:08):
And this is a problem.
Speaker 5 (08:10):
I'll get sort of more into why, I'm sure in
this conversation.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Yes, and this was something we were Smith and I
were just discussing about how there's all these like back
doors into getting radicalized, like content that you think, oh,
cyoga content, and then it's got this other thing it's
like lures you in.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
So it's important.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
To look into, Okay, what what is the agenda?
Speaker 4 (08:37):
Who is behind it?
Speaker 1 (08:39):
So can you tell us bridget a little bit more
about those things.
Speaker 6 (08:43):
Yes.
Speaker 5 (08:44):
So Evie was founded by a husband wife duo, thirty
three year old Brittany Hugo Boom with her husband Gabriel.
They describe it as a kind of anti Cosmo magazine.
They said they want to be the one stop shop
for femininity. That's from Hugo Boom, who is the public
face of the business. How the story of how EV
(09:05):
came to be in the world as a kind of
a familiar one for anybody who has ever shouted a
magazine or wanted to, you know, publish something. Brittany said
that she was a model for brands like Adidas, and
during that time she loved fashion and she loved pop
culture magazines like ll.
Speaker 6 (09:20):
This was in the twenty tens, and that was, you.
Speaker 5 (09:23):
Know, as somebody who was a voracious reader of women's media,
Like it was just a particular time for women's media,
especially online. You had sites like Jess Bell and The
Cut that were these explicitly feminist spaces that also did
a lot of coverage on like pop culture, women's health,
and politics. So like the women's media ecosystem at that
(09:44):
time really did a good job of blending feminism with
pop culture and politics. But Britney really felt overlooked by
this kind of coverage. She said that she had a
hard time finding positive coverage in this in this media
climate about things like traditional marriage and motherhood. I will
pause there and say, like, I don't want to discount
(10:06):
Britney's experience. I feel like in the twenty tens, I
read a lot of content about motherhood and marriage.
Speaker 6 (10:12):
Like I don't know if.
Speaker 5 (10:14):
We were coming up in the same media ecosystem, I
will just say, like my personal experiences that I do
think there's a lot of coverage about marriage out there.
I don't think that that's like a third rail topic
that is not being discussed in the culture. But that's
what Brittany says anyway. So thus the idea for ev
magazine was born. A stylish publication rooted in celebrating quote femininity.
Speaker 6 (10:39):
This is from the New York Times quote.
Speaker 5 (10:41):
It would be as escapist and aspirational as any other
mainstream women's magazine except Evie covers girls who would not
be politicians in power suits, but the type of women
who might compete in beauty pageants two weeks after giving
birth to their eighth child, which their most recent cover girl,
Utah influencer Hannah Nielman aka Ballerina Farm actually did.
Speaker 6 (11:03):
The magazine's name is a riff.
Speaker 5 (11:04):
I'm a first woman in the Bible quote Eve screwed
the world, Hugo Boom said, and this is a new
Eve who will save the world. So if you're talking
some like pretty deep religious vibes on that one, that
you would be right.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
I I am not, okay. So I figured out finally
where that where we used it, and it was actually
for our women in magazine. We were talking about that earlier,
about how how how I'd mentioned like gender things such
as women's magazines really made a lot of money and
realizing after they started like the Housewife magazine, they jumped
into young girl magazines and teaching them how to be
(11:43):
wives and partners and such. But even magazine was in
that conversation because they do they talk about the whole
level of like have we over sexualized girls so much
that we are causing young girls to have complexes in
not being sexual enough like all of these things, which
is like, you know, sometimes we do need that conversation about.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
Having balance in this. And then again, like I said,
I was like, wait, this sounds like a great idea, and.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Then you start looking at the ads and then you
start reading more into it, and the ads were like
return to femininity, and I was like, oh, oh, okay,
which sounds like the whole level of like, we're going
to correct the evils of women by making you real feminine.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
But when we say feminine we mean submissive.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
But it is something that we have to credit them
that they're making they understand what makes money.
Speaker 5 (12:32):
Oh yeah, when I read that New York Times profile,
I was really struck by how savvy they were, how
media savvy they were, how smart they were, like in
terms of business decisions, fair right on the money. I
don't happen to like or agree with the ideology they push,
but in terms of like do they have the potential
to make a lot.
Speaker 6 (12:51):
Of money, I think the answer is yes.
Speaker 5 (12:52):
And Sam, you really cock something that it's even difficult
to really parse. But I think that one of the
reasons why they found some success is that they do
speak to issues that are like they like they kind
of have a point in some ways, right, Like it
is a totally valid conversation to say, like, oh, well,
(13:14):
you know, in a climate where women are told that
it's good to be sex positive and like it's good
to like, you know, embrace your sexuality, which is all great,
What does that what does that do to like younger
women and girls is it impacting them in a negative way.
These are great questions to ask, and I'm happy that
people are asking them, and like the kind of work
(13:34):
that you all do here on Sminty's is a great
example of that. But the way that EV takes this
like reasonable conversation and then like completely goes to the
extreme with it. And that's why you should really be
getting involved in like purity culture, and that's why your
real value as a woman is about like you know,
who you give yourself to. Like, like it almost kind
(13:57):
of swings back around this incredibly rigid understanding of women
and girls, and so the way that they're able to
really occupy that space of like, well, this is a
reasonable question, but then take it so far afield that
you're like, well, that is not a reasonable conclusion.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
I think it's savvy that they did hone in on Hey,
I know, I know we can be like feminism is
bad and here's why, Like they also did that where
they're like, okay, by being feminists, what you're saying is
you're anti woman. Then it's just like a whole mind honestly.
Speaker 5 (14:43):
Yeah, some of the positions that are advocated for in
EV are just like very extreme when it comes to
women and girls, right, like, you know, things.
Speaker 6 (14:54):
Like women shouldn't it's not it's not.
Speaker 5 (14:56):
Good for women to be working things like that, things
that are like anybody would look at that and be like, well,
that is a very extreme perspective. This is what dislikes
Glossy Poppy magazine is advocating for right and it's just
like a very very conservative and traditional perspective on gender
to the point of being, in my opinion extreme. Hears
(15:17):
a little bit from the piece, they say, Evie sees
themselves as an opposition to what they've called modern feminism.
Femininity does not mean feminism, which Hugo Boom doesn't define
as equal rights, but as a self hating movement that
is anti family and anti male, one that shames women
who choose conventional roles. Despite running two companies, she's particularly
(15:39):
critical of what she calls girl boss feminism.
Speaker 6 (15:41):
Her interpretation of that.
Speaker 5 (15:42):
Term, which went from broadly celebrated to roundly dismissed in
the twenty tens, is that it encourages women to be
just like men to succeed in corporate fields. Such messaging,
she says, has made women anxious, lonely, and unfulfilled.
Speaker 6 (15:55):
Instead, she believes faith's.
Speaker 5 (15:56):
Family and love, not casual sex, careerism ideological activism supply
the greatest satisfaction.
Speaker 6 (16:04):
So exactly what you just said, Annie, Like.
Speaker 5 (16:07):
It's these attitudes that say that they are meant to
celebrate women, but then what they're actually the actual conclusion
is incredibly anti women, right Like, And notice how they
put that, you know, ideological activism. No, no, no, that's not
gonna make women happy, Like okay, so I shouldn't advocate
for things I believe and got it.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
I mean, you can just see how quickly this turns
into anti Trians narrative that fear of being erasing women,
which is a whole kind of laughable thing is like
feminism is in itself is like embracing women, like being
acknowledged as women as a person as well as trans
women are women, so they're being women.
Speaker 7 (17:00):
So how is that a rasure?
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Like there's so many like this level of like almost irony,
but that it works. And I don't know because the
few pieces, like I said, I read, they're very like
subtle about it. They don't want to come out full
force of showing that they are very very conservative because
they are trying to bring in all those leaders kind
of that same level of like when we talk about
(17:23):
yoga and crunching life turning into being conservative as well
as like the chadlife, because the initial idea is the aesthetic,
which this magazine has that esthetic totally.
Speaker 5 (17:34):
And I mean this is a little bit of a
non sequitur, but I personally have to be real careful
because like I am someone who cares a lot about nutrition, right,
Like I am right now trying to you know, up
my physical health through nutrition and exercise. I when you
are like searching Instagram or TikTok for that kind of content,
(17:58):
the way algorithms are like, oh, oh you like nutrition, huh, well,
how would you like some? And then it's just extremist rhetoric,
extremist rhetoric, extremist rhetoric. So like I have to be
really careful because like I do care about nutrition, and
it definitely these algorithms clocked it. If like that is
an interest of yours. We need to be surfacing you
(18:19):
up ever increasing extreme content and like next thing, you know,
it's like and then certainly you're anti vacts and then
certainly you're anti trans It's like whoa I'm just trying to,
you know, get more protein in my diet.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
And relax, right, I just want to like be healthy.
I don't, I don't know what would just happened.
Speaker 6 (18:37):
I don't.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
I don't need you to tell me that all these chemicals,
which are just nutrients are killing me.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
What's happening exactly. I think they really landed.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
On something with these pages, though, that they are able
to use what we kind of always have seen, Like
the magazines in general have always been about teaching girls
to be better some or that you're not good enough.
You're not if you want to hit these goals, this
is what you need to do. And EV's like that
perfect layout for that.
Speaker 6 (19:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (19:08):
And I think that especially, you know, it doesn't surprise
me that the founder of EV really sees herself as
in opposition to like the girl boss era of the
twenty tens, and I think was really serving women, women
like myself, who were looking for something and they and
(19:29):
I think this kind of girl boss feminism filled that
gap and tried to be like, well, is what you're
looking for? A corner office and lots of money, because
like here's you could have that, and I this is
where I have to say, like, I kind of agree
with what's hugo Woman a little bit. I think that
like in the twenty tens, feminism and the conversation around women,
and like our liberation really got co opted by this
(19:53):
kind of lean in Girl Boss Vibe, where wealthy white
women were really given the mic and they used that
Mica tell that like, liberation was having a corner office,
kicking butt at work, having the money to pay someone
else to watch.
Speaker 6 (20:07):
Your kids while you slay in the boardroom.
Speaker 5 (20:09):
Blah blah blah blah blah, and that was really empty.
Speaker 6 (20:12):
And I think ten.
Speaker 5 (20:13):
Years later, I would argue that we are still reeling
and feeling the fallout from how empty of a promise
of liberation that ended up being. But I think nothing
has really stepped in to fill that gap. And so
then you have media outlets like Evie responding to this
actual need in a marginalized community, a community of women,
(20:34):
saying like, Okay, well, kicking butt at work did not
really lead to liberation, so what will you know. There
is a truism about extremist content that, like they are
so good at identifying existing actual gaps that people need
filled and then filling those gaps with their ideological content.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
It's so funny that when you read and see this
level of cyclical actions, like the way you've been told
so hard, it kind of is that layer of like
us not looking at what society has done to us
in general, and telling us the only way you can
succeed is you have to give one hundred and fifty
percent of yourself to this, and if you don't, you fail.
(21:15):
Your failure is on you because you didn't try hard enough.
But you can't be called successful until you get these markers.
And these markers are the standard by society and capitalism.
So this is what it is. And if you are successful,
either you're going to be penalized in one way or another,
being told that you are greedy or over the top
or two ambitious, or you're going to be penalized because
(21:37):
we're you're going to fail in this moment and saying
that you doing these things has made you obnoxious and
impossible be around. Like it's such a context, but it's
the setup of society in that level. But at the
same time, as you were saying, like grifters and those alike,
social media have realized, hmm, we need to come back
around because people are starting to really get frustrated because
(21:58):
they can't hit that mark and they're exhausted.
Speaker 5 (22:02):
Yeah, and I in that I completely agree with everything
that you've just said. And in that climate, I can
understand why a publication like EV telling women like, listen,
aren't you exhausted? Just check out of this whole thing altogether,
Like just get married, leave your job, have kids, let
him work, let him figure it all out, and you
(22:23):
just rich reak from public life like that is ultimately,
what I think that EVE is telling an entire generation
of women is that you should only exist in the domestic.
And I don't want to discount the fact that there's
real power in the domestic for women like that, that
there is power in that, no shame in that at all.
But I think that what they're saying is like, women
(22:45):
don't belong in workplaces, women don't belong in boardrooms, women
don't belong in civic and public life.
Speaker 6 (22:50):
And that's simply not true.
Speaker 5 (22:51):
And so I think that EVE is setting up this
alternative of like, instead of all of those things that
exhaust us as women, why not embrace these soft things,
have a soft life, Like I'm sure you've seen that
kind of content all over your TikTok, right, And I
think google Boom says this pretty much explicitly in this piece.
She says, I think more women want to soft life,
(23:13):
a beautiful life than feeling all this pressure to do
all these things.
Speaker 6 (23:17):
And I can't help but really see that as.
Speaker 5 (23:21):
In opposition to the reality that you just laid out,
Sam that like, yeah, it does. It is hard to
deal with all of these pressures to you know, be
ambitious but not too ambitious, make money but not too
much money.
Speaker 6 (23:32):
Work.
Speaker 5 (23:32):
But then it's a lot I like, I'm I really
deeply do understand why this kind of attitude and message
is very enticing, especially right now in a time of
like uncertainty and chaos and rising costs and things like that.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Oh and you actually pulled out something that I was
trying to look into for a Monday many I don't
have enough information, but the whole like the soft life
transitioning into red pill and content and what that looks like.
And I was like, oh, there it is, but I like,
there's not. We're still on the cusp of understanding it.
Like people are recognizing that as a sign like this
(24:10):
is that same like trail that happened again with the
crunchy lifestyle slash natural lifestyle slash yoga lifestyle into red
pill content. That soft life is that same level. If
you start watching who is to pulling it out and
who's talking about the most, you're like, oh, but it's
such an interesting level because it does offer you something
(24:32):
like is it the dream for me to not have
to work at all and worry about things and sit
and watch k dramas all day and maybe go out
to do some zumba and yoga. Yeah, have maybe someone
cooked for me instead of me cooking myself all the
nasty foods that I'm like, I'm just gonna snack today,
Like that level of like comfort of like this ideal
(24:53):
that used to be the way, but which is not
true at all. Because again, when we have a conversation
about like the good old days when the men weren't
and the women got to stay at home, and women
being like, yeah, I'd rather be at home too if
everything was equal, But that's not the case. And as
you said before, like people who are in the domestic life,
who are stay at home moms, it's a hard job.
Speaker 6 (25:15):
It's hard. That's not a soft life. That's like, have
you ever been.
Speaker 5 (25:19):
Around toddlers people who are raising toddlers and not getting
a break from it because they don't do any wage
earning work outside of the house.
Speaker 6 (25:26):
They're not living a soft life.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
No, in God forbid they have any kind of medical
needs or if they have like school needs. You have
to be at all these activities constantly, and you have
to show up to do like at volunteering there what
dear God.
Speaker 5 (25:42):
So this is that is exactly that is exactly my
main beef with Evy, Right, they are selling women a lie,
a fantasy where we're in retreating from public life and
just like existing in the domestic, is this soft, easy
moneyed fantasy the kind of life that women should be after.
(26:02):
But as you said, one staying at home as a
companion sometimes and it's not soft and glamorous at all,
even like the people who perform treadwife on Instagram probably
like like you never see those women cleaning toilets or
cleaning baby puke off of their shirt, which is sometimes
the reality of staying at home. But in addition to that,
(26:22):
not working, not making or managing your own money, not
participating in civic and public life is not a recipe
for safety and security. It is incredibly risky to the
people that do this. The data is incredibly clear that
when women stop working, whether they have a kid or
they're a caretaker for somebody and they leave the workforce,
when they re enter the workforce, they are.
Speaker 6 (26:44):
Going to make a lot less.
Speaker 5 (26:46):
So if and when they do go back to work,
the data is super clear they're going to be making
less right. And so if you don't work or never work,
and you just depend on your partner for everything, what
happens if your partner passes away, what happens if the
partner becomes disabled or sick and they can't work. There
are so many ways that this life is incredibly risky
(27:06):
and insecure, And the content would have you believe like, Oh,
this is going to be soft and glamorous and lovely.
I wouldn't even have a problem with this kind of content.
Speaker 6 (27:15):
So much if it told women the truth.
Speaker 5 (27:17):
If it was like, hey, don't work, but also put
away a little money for yourself, or don't work, but
make sure that you keep an eye on your finances
and understand them in case something happens. Like if they
were more realistic and honest about the life that they
are selling. I wouldn't even have a big problem with them.
But they are not doing that. They're selling a very
enticing but dangerous lie.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Yes, and as we've been mentioning throughout, they're doing it
in a way that at first you don't realize where
you're like, oh, yeah, I can relate to this. Yeah,
But then you start to think about it, like, okay, wait,
what what did I just read?
Speaker 6 (27:57):
Yeah? This is from that New York Times piece.
Speaker 5 (28:00):
At first glance, EV seems nonpartisan, publishing content about daily
topics such as award winning red carpets.
Speaker 6 (28:05):
And styling skinny genes.
Speaker 5 (28:07):
But readers who click past hot girl health trends and
Adam Brody appreciation posts we'll find articles that promote positions
that are fringed even within conservative circles, criticisms of no
falt divorce and in vitro fertilization, for example, package and
a fun and approachable format. A typical EV headline amy
from Love is Blind is right to be hesitant about
(28:28):
birth control. Also, they're like super they're super suss about
birth control. We'll talk more about that in a minute.
But yeah, and so this is actually part of a
pretty concerning trend media spaces that at first glance seem
a political are actually very political. That is becoming much
more common online media matters That an analysis that really
(28:49):
showed how right leaning spaces dominate the online ecosystem with
content that appears a political at first. The analysis was
based on three hundred and twenty online shows with a
right leaning or left leading ideological bent. They found that
right leaning shows dominate the online ecosystem with substantially larger
audiences on both politics and new shows, and supposedly non
(29:10):
political shows that they determined often platformed ideological content or guests.
Speaker 6 (29:16):
And here's the kicker.
Speaker 5 (29:17):
The analysis, which looked entirely at shows with an ideological bent,
found over a third self identify as non political, even
though seventy two percent of those shows were determined to
be right leaning. Instead, these shows describe themselves as comedy, entertainment, sports,
or put themselves in supposedly other non political categories. So basically,
(29:38):
these online spaces that are incredibly influential get to be like, oh,
we're not political, we're not political, we're just talking about celebrity,
gossip and entertainment.
Speaker 6 (29:46):
But actually they're incredibly political.
Speaker 5 (29:49):
In specifically seventy two percent of these cases right leaning
ideological bents.
Speaker 4 (29:55):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
And one of those things that really scares me about
that in this whole compversation is like evy going back
to the name being like women were wrong and are
the source of all evil. Like when I was a kid,
I heard that like Bible story and I believed it,
and so like I feel like it's it's leaning into
(30:19):
a lot of stuff many of us internalized growing up
of this is the natural way of things, right, this
is women stay home, and they're they're they're kind of
selling like the let's get back to the natural way
and it'll be easier, it'll be nicer for you. When
all this stuff was like built, it was societally made.
(30:44):
But they're selling it as like no, we're going against
the natural order and they're doing it through look at
the celebrity pop culture story.
Speaker 5 (30:56):
Yeah, and they're also that also makes sense as to
why they also sell milkmade style dresses. They also were like,
you know what traditional women might want to do, spend
two hundred dollars on a like frilly dairy dress that
The Cut describes as designed in the French countryside. It's
said to be inspired by the quote hard working dairy
(31:19):
maids of the seventeenth century Europe and as henmade with
quote luxurious organic cotton and one hundred percent feminine energy.
So it's like, yeah, it's very much like tied up
in this kind of quote natural feminine.
Speaker 6 (31:34):
Honestly, the second that I hear in any.
Speaker 5 (31:36):
Person or online place say something like oh this has
like the divigne feminine, I'm like, okay, bullshit. Like as
soon as I hear that, I'm like, oh really okay.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
From the back of my head, I'm like, so child
labor is what you're talking about. That's the little energy
where they get SI paid two cents an hour.
Speaker 7 (31:57):
Sweet.
Speaker 5 (31:57):
Nothing says luxurious feminine energy like unsavory labor practices.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
That's what I've always wanted to get that from us anyway,
So stay at home moms who don't get paid this
is like the same life.
Speaker 7 (32:09):
I guess that's the feminine energy.
Speaker 5 (32:21):
So in addition to all of this, more problematically, they
also have a fertility app. So you're always telling you
how they're really not cool with birth control.
Speaker 6 (32:31):
They have a fertility app called twenty eight.
Speaker 5 (32:33):
The app is backed by tech billionaire and like Mega
Trump thunder.
Speaker 6 (32:38):
Peter til I gotta say, like, I simply do.
Speaker 5 (32:41):
Not advocate for anyone using apps like this, just in general,
but especially not won backed by somebody like Teal. I
could do a whole episode. This is where I will
talk all day. I'll just say google him. Uh he
is like us, Like he's like if mister Burns was
a real person and also gay.
Speaker 6 (33:01):
Like that's how I would describe him. And see there's
so much to stay there.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
But yeah, less he was still better and like he
had morals. Les Luthor had morals compared to him.
Speaker 5 (33:14):
Yeah, he is not He's a not only is he
a bad dude, he's also bad in some like ways
that if I talked about them here you would be
like that sounds like something out of a comic book,
but it's real. Yeah. So he's one of the fund
the one of the funders of their fertility app. They
grew interested in the women's fertility app space because many women.
(33:35):
Hugo Boom said, uh, or that she knew we're having
trouble getting pregnant, and she said that she wanted to
develop a product that would quote empower women to understand
our bodies through some fortuitous networking. They ended up having
a meeting with Peter Teal and they asked him to
invest in a wellness app based on the typical twenty
eighth day menstruation cycle. And Teal was like, is no
(33:57):
one else doing this? And it was like, no, no
one else and he was like, Okay, well sounds like
a good idea. A spokesperson for tel confirmed that he
invested two million dollars in the app and they raised
three point two million dollars in total. The app pushes
a message that hormonal birth control is bad for you,
Goodbye toxicity. One advertisement read for the birth control detoc
(34:18):
supplements it sells through the app. I'm gonna say on
my tech podcast.
Speaker 6 (34:23):
There are no girls on the Internet.
Speaker 5 (34:25):
I work with the producer who has a lot of
experience directly writing and reviewing privacy policies for digital health app.
So I asked him to take a look at twenty
eight's privacy policy.
Speaker 6 (34:34):
And it wasn't great. Here's a go a rundown of
what he told me.
Speaker 5 (34:38):
He said the privacy policy doesn't emphasize going out of
their way to protect users at privacy. Their section on
third party tracking basically says that third parties will have
access to your personal data, but disavows any responsibility for
what those third parties do.
Speaker 6 (34:53):
With that personal data, so doesn't fill them with confidence.
Speaker 5 (34:56):
They put a lot of responsibility on the end user,
for example, set your browser to refuse all or some
browser cookies, or alert you and cookies are being sent.
He says, if they sincerely wanted to respect users right
to privacy rather than capture the value of their data
while disavowing any risk, twenty eight would describe strong, proactive
steps that they're taking to protect users personal data. Instead,
(35:19):
this privacy policy is all about mitigating their risk by
shifting it on to unspecified third parties and by shifting
it on to the user themselves. So, especially in a
climate where people are being criminalized for information like this,
I would not recommend anybody trust any of their sensitive
intimate data to an app without a very robust privacy
(35:42):
policy in place. I especially would not recommend that anybody
give that data to somebody that's connected to Peter Teel,
who is connected to Donald Trump Like that is just
not something I would recommend.
Speaker 4 (35:54):
No signs off on that.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
So that's concerning We've got a lot of concerning things
we've gone over. But just to bring the point home,
Bridget is, what is the big deal with ev and
why is it so problematic?
Speaker 6 (36:21):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (36:21):
I mean I think it's very problematic because listen, there
is nothing wrong with like online content that speaks to
all different kinds of women, all different kinds of women's
experiences and perspectives. To me, the whole point of being
a feminist is that it allows for women to choose
paths and perspectives that.
Speaker 6 (36:38):
Work for them. Right.
Speaker 5 (36:39):
However, EV I find problematic because it is designed to
sell that lie I was talking about earlier, that lie
that makes women not being in the public and civic
sphere look glossy and glamorous, which isn't just wrong.
Speaker 6 (36:55):
It can be dangerous. It can be hurtful.
Speaker 5 (36:57):
And even though that is dangerous, it's also very enticing.
Very I can understand why that's appealing, especially in a
climate right now where everything.
Speaker 6 (37:08):
Is confusing, everything is chaotic.
Speaker 5 (37:09):
I can understand the desire for women to be like,
I just want my soft life at home. From that
piece quote. Even critics of evy acknowledged the appeal of
its messaging. It's a perfectly pretty gateway drug to ideologies
which exist to protect the privilege and further disenfranchise the marginalized.
Speaker 6 (37:26):
That's from Sarah Peterson, the author.
Speaker 5 (37:28):
Of the book Influenced, And I would say something that
makes it even more concerning to me is that when
something is happening, and it's happening in a space that
has sort of been relegated to women people, there's not
really a lot of.
Speaker 6 (37:40):
Eyes on it.
Speaker 5 (37:41):
There's an automatic assumption that it's like just a fluffy,
poppy space and what happens there doesn't really matter to
anybody or is not of any consequence to anybody.
Speaker 6 (37:50):
It's And so I think that.
Speaker 5 (37:52):
Because the kind of people who care about extremism and
media and all of that might not be looking at
a space like ev online too hard, precisely because it
speaks to women. That means that EV can advocate for
positions that even even conservatives would say are extreme and
not really have a lot of people pushing back, right,
(38:13):
and so I think it's a really really effective way
of potentially radicalizing women into a pretty extreme ideology. So
we absolutely need to be paying attention to what is
happening in these online spaces. And probably my biggest personal
beef is that.
Speaker 6 (38:30):
She's lying to us, She is lying to women.
Speaker 5 (38:32):
She has a very a very belittling attitude about women,
and that comes through so clearly in this piece.
Speaker 6 (38:40):
So the founder that I've been talking.
Speaker 5 (38:42):
About, Brittany Hugo Boom, she runs a media and tech
company that she says gets half a million eyeballs across
social media, while also saying, well, also telling you other
women that oh, you don't have we don't have the
aptitude to do exactly what it is that she is
doing successful and making money from. When asked about women
(39:02):
running businesses and the piece, she said quote, I think
when most women try to do that, they fail, then
they feel upset about it when it's not really in
their nature. This is how she feels about women. And like,
I know that to be a lie. The reason why
I know it to be a lie is because she's
doing it so like she knows it's a lie too.
She is lying to you to make a buck, and
(39:24):
that is ultimately my big beef with this publication.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
I think the conversation is always kind of funny. It's
that whole level of when marginalized communities have to compete
with each other, and so they're gonna do everything they
can to get out their competition instead of realizing that
the supremacy of men and white men are the actual competition.
And she's like, yeah, don't do this because you're not
gonna be as good as I am.
Speaker 3 (39:49):
Obviously, because I'm.
Speaker 6 (39:51):
White, I can't run a business.
Speaker 3 (39:53):
I'm white, I'm Christian, and I got a Christian husband.
Speaker 6 (39:55):
He knows well.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
Like, it's really fascinating because the again, when we had
that conversation about women in magazines, the influence of magazines
is deep, is deep, and it runs for years and
years and years and years.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
When we talk about a.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
Good housewife, we talked about Southern living like that those
are core memories for me, specifically about my mother and
then from my mother's generation that to them was the
perfect life. So kind again that cyclical point of being like,
we need to go back to the Southern living standard
of housekeeping, which means that women stay home and that
(40:32):
is their full achievement is how they maintain their home.
And it's interesting because Evie is kind of bringing that
back and understanding how to indoctrinate young women, just like
we've talked about young men and podcasts. This is one
of those forms of understanding that, Okay, in order to
radicalize young women, we're going to do this, and we're
(40:53):
going to do this in the way of like reminding
them of the good old days that they don't know
anything about. They have a fantasy of, whether it's watching
Little House on the Prairie or hearing about Little House
on the Prairie, whatever what not, and we're going to
use that to tell them they're going to fail, so
why not try it this way?
Speaker 5 (41:09):
And you could see why that would be a really
compelling story. Like again, like I have to be at
somebody who a lot of my I mean, I'm not
a tradwife, but I have a lot of tradwife interests
and hobbies. Like I like preserving things, I like cooking
from scratch, I like gardening, I like all of that.
Speaker 6 (41:28):
Like I can understand.
Speaker 5 (41:30):
I just really see the ways that, especially right now,
we are selling women this very enticing lie that if
they actually by like by that, it is incredibly dangerous.
Like there was a whole trend of like real treadwives,
women who really like left their left the working world
(41:50):
and got married and had kids and then like you know,
really relied on their their spouse for everything, talking about
how damaging it was for them and their children, Like
there are real stakes when women do this, And so
I don't think there's nothing wrong with being a stay
at home mom, a stay at home parent. Absolutely nothing
wrong with that, But we should not be glamorizing that
(42:12):
without also telling the truth about the reality of what
that looks like and the ways that that can put
you at risk and what you should be doing to
mitigate those risks.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
Right especially when we know right now lawmakers are really
trying to turn back that clock in that level of
taking rights away from women, making sure they can't vote,
taking their financial abilities as well, Like we're seeing that
is happening right now as they're trying to introduce this
intossentate to in order to go back to that in
(42:42):
order to take away rights from women.
Speaker 3 (42:44):
And when we were like okay, cool, some women obvious
like well, like they're like.
Speaker 6 (42:49):
This this could be a self life. Yeah, I mean
we have to talk about it.
Speaker 5 (42:52):
I have seen this, like threads of this attitude picking
up steam online with like younger and younger women. There's
that whole trend of like young girls wearing shirts that
are like oh too pretty to work and things like that,
Like that might seem cute, but really, like really take
a step back and think, like, what is it that
we're advocating for. Are we advocating for systems that are
(43:15):
actually going to protect like like put us at risk
or protect us? Like I think that we you know,
we we rightly talk a lot about the radicalization of
men and boys, we should also be talking about the
radicalization of women and girls through online content, because yeah,
I just think that we're setting up women, a generation
of women and girls to really put themselves at risk
(43:38):
and maybe not even realize the ways in which they're
doing that.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
Yes, absolutely, and that's something Samantha and I have been
talking about a lot lately.
Speaker 4 (43:47):
So as always, Richie, every time you come on, we're like,
we have a million other things where you have to
talk about.
Speaker 1 (43:54):
So thank you so much for taking the time and
bringing these topics to us.
Speaker 4 (44:01):
We really appreciate it. Where can the good listeners find you?
Speaker 6 (44:04):
You can listen to my podcast There are Our Girls
on the Internet.
Speaker 5 (44:07):
New season is dropping on May fourteenth, so please check
it out.
Speaker 6 (44:11):
Yeah, they can follow me on Instagram at bridget Marie
and DC.
Speaker 4 (44:14):
Yes, and can't wait to can't wait to do this again?
Speaker 1 (44:19):
Listeners, go check bridget out on the podcast Excited for
the New Season, on social media or on other episodes
of Stuff We Never Told You And Yes, if you
would like to contact us you can. You can email
us Hello a Stuffnever Told You dot com. You can
find us on Blue skyte Mom Stuff Podcast or on
Instagram and TikTok at Stuff We Never Told You for
also on YouTube. We have tepipoot store and we have
a book you can get wherever you get your books.
(44:39):
Thanks as always start a super producer Christina and executive
producer My and a contributor Joey. Thank you and thanks
to you for listening. Stuff on Over Told You is
production of by Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
you can check out the i heart Radio app, Apple podcast
or where you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, this is Anny and Samantha all Frome stuff, never
told your prediction by Her Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
And I'm back picking my favorite BRIDGID episode. As we
have said, there's so many to choose from, but I
feel like sometimes our episodes in Bridget's episode just sync
up so perfectly that I get really overly excited when
she brings her topics. And this one was specifically about
the publication EV Magazine, So the title is the Radical
(00:40):
Extremist Ideology of EV Magazine. And if you've listened to
our spiritual Trauma episodes or religious trauma episodes, you know
why because unfortunately they really missed up my algorithm. So
I had to bring that back as a classic as
one of my favorite BRIDGID episodes of twenty twenty five.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
So again, please enjoy this wonderful classic.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha and welcome stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
I never told your production by Heart Radio, and today
we are once again so happy to be joined by
the wonderful, the outstanding Bridget Todd.
Speaker 5 (01:27):
Welcome Bridget, thank you for having me so excited to
be back. Before we started recording, we were reminiscing about
our local malls, and now I have like Mall or
Mall Madness.
Speaker 6 (01:38):
It's like nostalgia overload.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Looks.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
We actually Annie bought me that game because it was
one of my childhood games, Mall Madness, and we've talked
about we have to play this game. I realized I
do not remember a play. When we opened it, I
was like, wait, what we have to buy things? I
know that, but how do you buy things? Sometimes you
can use cash and sometimes you get declined. I don't remember, Bridget.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
You should come down. We'll have a game night.
Speaker 6 (02:07):
Yes, I'll bring dream Phone. That was my game, so
you have dream Home.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
I have a blind date because any purchase that we
need to do that the mom. Okay, come down, sweep.
I have a Sweet Balley High game and a Babysitters game.
Speaker 6 (02:20):
Come on, I'm very much the evening of my dreams.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
Listen. I just have to brag, Bridget. I won our
dated game twice.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Yeah, we played a blind date together and I was like,
I don't know what's happening, but she ended up winning.
Speaker 5 (02:37):
Is it a game of strategy or like skill or
sort of like luck?
Speaker 4 (02:41):
Wait, Samantha, no strategy.
Speaker 7 (02:46):
No.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
I realized that this guy didn't like football, so maybe
he would be into this character.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
I think they should update it so you can have
queer characters.
Speaker 6 (02:58):
That's my I bet they.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Have an update, have we I don't know if we'd
locked by that. We talked about all of the old
games that were very gendered and the ones that we remembered,
but like us, things like mal Madness really popped up.
My brother actually really enjoyed that game too, but he
wouldn't admit it. But every time he see me pull
it out and I would play by myself, Yes I
was that kid, uh, he would ask to join me.
Speaker 7 (03:18):
Sometimes.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
There's something to be said about the games that were
coming out at that time that had like the very
specific technology that could be used for nothing else.
Speaker 6 (03:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (03:29):
Yeah, like dream phone, like the I'm going far back
into the recesses of my memory here so might not
be totally right, but it came with like a clunky
plastic phone, yes, that you would put to your ear
and it would be like he's not wearing a hat
and he would figure out like, whoo, who had a
crush on you?
Speaker 6 (03:46):
Based on like what this phone would tell you. I
think so the brand.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
Girls talk who did that?
Speaker 2 (03:54):
The date one, as well as truth or Dare like
that was their brand. They also had like magus I believe,
but yeah, they they made sure to capitalize on only
their games. Oh many a.
Speaker 6 (04:10):
Real like gendered media empire.
Speaker 7 (04:12):
Was it was.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
But so you know that is that conversation we've had repeatedly,
like all the industries that if they specifically go after
women most of the times or young girls, they know
as a moneymaker. If we talked about that as like
with games, and we actually talked about that with magazines too.
Speaker 5 (04:30):
Yeah, so that's actually a perfect segue into what I
want to talk about. And by the way, like I
didn't even connect this, but I was a voracious reader
of magazine, any kind of girl magazine in the nineties
I was getting. I got all of them. I also
loved a good catalog. I still have Delia's catalogs and
(04:50):
I thumbed through like it was a real like time
to be a girl who liked to consume media. And
something that I find really interesting is the way that
today those same like media spaces can really be used
to expose women to ideology that you might not even
like on the face, really recognize. We talked a little
(05:13):
bit about this in the episode that you and I
all did with about Candice on how she is so
good at using like a political conversations about celebrity to
really radicalize women. And in that same vein we have
to talk about this magazine called EV Magazine. I think
(05:33):
you have you all what's what's your familiarity with EV?
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Right? So when I saw this was coming to our conversations,
at first I was like, wait, why does this look familiar?
And then I realized in our ten to twenty part
episode of Religious Trauma and Women that we actually used
some of their publication and it was one of those
as I was like, because I was not familiar when
(05:57):
I first pulled up into this article. We were talking
about you know, purity culture and sexuality and women and
all of these things within Christianity, especially Western Christianity, and
it was this whole like bed. It was twisting the
narrative a little bit about like, you know, people being
too sexualized has really really gone away from us and
(06:17):
made it so over the top that is no longer
enjoyable or da da da, And at first You're like, yeah,
this could make sense, and then as I read more
and more, like wait, who is this publication?
Speaker 3 (06:27):
And it's EVY and I went through it was like,
oh oh, this is oh wow.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
They really have dug deep in this whole like relevance
culture within Christianity to bring out something that doesn't feel
like like it's preaching on you, but it has an agenda.
And I was like, wow, So we were familiar because
in that same like of course, we wanted to talk
about that conversation. So I had to give a caveat
(06:52):
to our listeners be like, hey, so this publication is
specifically very Christian oriented and it's published by very conservative
people and they don't you don't know that until much
later into reading things in here. So that's how I
was like, okay, so we used them before. They're an
interesting publication.
Speaker 5 (07:11):
Yeah, and what you just described is really part and
parcel of the experience of reading ev online.
Speaker 6 (07:19):
You know, you might be like, oh, well this is
this is a reasonable take, like oh, I agree with that,
and then.
Speaker 5 (07:24):
You're like, wait a minute, this is actually I'm not
so sure. Let's take a look at like who is
behind this publication and they're what they're about. So this
whole conversation comes off the heels of a really media
profile with the founder of ev magazine in the New
York Times. So a lot of what I'm going to
be talking about comes from that piece by Katie j
and Baker. If you've not seen ev Evie is a
(07:47):
I guess a women's media outlet. If you have seen
their content on the internet, you probably think of it
as a publication that focuses on pop culture wellness and
relationships for a female audience. But it has a distinct
conservative perspective that Samantha, as you rightly clocked, might not
be so obvious at first glance.
Speaker 6 (08:08):
And this is a problem.
Speaker 5 (08:10):
I'll get sort of more into why, I'm sure in
this conversation.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Yes, and this was something we were Smith and I
were just discussing about how there's all these like back
doors into getting radicalized, like content that you think, oh,
cyoga content, and then it's got this other thing it's
like lures you in.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
So it's important.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
To look into, Okay, what what is the agenda?
Speaker 4 (08:37):
Who is behind it?
Speaker 1 (08:39):
So can you tell us bridget a little bit more
about those things.
Speaker 6 (08:43):
Yes.
Speaker 5 (08:44):
So Evie was founded by a husband wife duo, thirty
three year old Brittany Hugo Boom with her husband Gabriel.
They describe it as a kind of anti Cosmo magazine.
They said they want to be the one stop shop
for femininity. That's from Hugo Boom, who is the public
face of the business. How the story of how EV
(09:05):
came to be in the world as a kind of
a familiar one for anybody who has ever shouted a
magazine or wanted to, you know, publish something. Brittany said
that she was a model for brands like Adidas, and
during that time she loved fashion and she loved pop
culture magazines like ll.
Speaker 6 (09:20):
This was in the twenty tens, and that was, you.
Speaker 5 (09:23):
Know, as somebody who was a voracious reader of women's media,
Like it was just a particular time for women's media,
especially online. You had sites like Jess Bell and The
Cut that were these explicitly feminist spaces that also did
a lot of coverage on like pop culture, women's health,
and politics. So like the women's media ecosystem at that
(09:44):
time really did a good job of blending feminism with
pop culture and politics. But Britney really felt overlooked by
this kind of coverage. She said that she had a
hard time finding positive coverage in this in this media
climate about things like traditional marriage and motherhood. I will
pause there and say, like, I don't want to discount
(10:06):
Britney's experience. I feel like in the twenty tens, I
read a lot of content about motherhood and marriage.
Speaker 6 (10:12):
Like I don't know if.
Speaker 5 (10:14):
We were coming up in the same media ecosystem, I
will just say, like my personal experiences that I do
think there's a lot of coverage about marriage out there.
I don't think that that's like a third rail topic
that is not being discussed in the culture. But that's
what Brittany says anyway. So thus the idea for ev
magazine was born. A stylish publication rooted in celebrating quote femininity.
Speaker 6 (10:39):
This is from the New York Times quote.
Speaker 5 (10:41):
It would be as escapist and aspirational as any other
mainstream women's magazine except Evie covers girls who would not
be politicians in power suits, but the type of women
who might compete in beauty pageants two weeks after giving
birth to their eighth child, which their most recent cover girl,
Utah influencer Hannah Nielman aka Ballerina Farm actually did.
Speaker 6 (11:03):
The magazine's name is a riff.
Speaker 5 (11:04):
I'm a first woman in the Bible quote Eve screwed
the world, Hugo Boom said, and this is a new
Eve who will save the world. So if you're talking
some like pretty deep religious vibes on that one, that
you would be right.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
I I am not, okay. So I figured out finally
where that where we used it, and it was actually
for our women in magazine. We were talking about that earlier,
about how how how I'd mentioned like gender things such
as women's magazines really made a lot of money and
realizing after they started like the Housewife magazine, they jumped
into young girl magazines and teaching them how to be
(11:43):
wives and partners and such. But even magazine was in
that conversation because they do they talk about the whole
level of like have we over sexualized girls so much
that we are causing young girls to have complexes in
not being sexual enough like all of these things, which
is like, you know, sometimes we do need that conversation about.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
Having balance in this. And then again, like I said,
I was like, wait, this sounds like a great idea, and.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Then you start looking at the ads and then you
start reading more into it, and the ads were like
return to femininity, and I was like, oh, oh, okay,
which sounds like the whole level of like, we're going
to correct the evils of women by making you real feminine.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
But when we say feminine we mean submissive.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
But it is something that we have to credit them
that they're making they understand what makes money.
Speaker 5 (12:32):
Oh yeah, when I read that New York Times profile,
I was really struck by how savvy they were, how
media savvy they were, how smart they were, like in
terms of business decisions, fair right on the money. I
don't happen to like or agree with the ideology they push,
but in terms of like do they have the potential
to make a lot.
Speaker 6 (12:51):
Of money, I think the answer is yes.
Speaker 5 (12:52):
And Sam, you really cock something that it's even difficult
to really parse. But I think that one of the
reasons why they found some success is that they do
speak to issues that are like they like they kind
of have a point in some ways, right, Like it
is a totally valid conversation to say, like, oh, well,
(13:14):
you know, in a climate where women are told that
it's good to be sex positive and like it's good
to like, you know, embrace your sexuality, which is all great,
What does that what does that do to like younger
women and girls is it impacting them in a negative way.
These are great questions to ask, and I'm happy that
people are asking them, and like the kind of work
(13:34):
that you all do here on Sminty's is a great
example of that. But the way that EV takes this
like reasonable conversation and then like completely goes to the
extreme with it. And that's why you should really be
getting involved in like purity culture, and that's why your
real value as a woman is about like you know,
who you give yourself to. Like, like it almost kind
(13:57):
of swings back around this incredibly rigid understanding of women
and girls, and so the way that they're able to
really occupy that space of like, well, this is a
reasonable question, but then take it so far afield that
you're like, well, that is not a reasonable conclusion.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
I think it's savvy that they did hone in on Hey,
I know, I know we can be like feminism is
bad and here's why, Like they also did that where
they're like, okay, by being feminists, what you're saying is
you're anti woman. Then it's just like a whole mind honestly.
Speaker 5 (14:43):
Yeah, some of the positions that are advocated for in
EV are just like very extreme when it comes to
women and girls, right, like, you know, things.
Speaker 6 (14:54):
Like women shouldn't it's not it's not.
Speaker 5 (14:56):
Good for women to be working things like that, things
that are like anybody would look at that and be like, well,
that is a very extreme perspective. This is what dislikes
Glossy Poppy magazine is advocating for right and it's just
like a very very conservative and traditional perspective on gender
to the point of being, in my opinion extreme. Hears
(15:17):
a little bit from the piece, they say, Evie sees
themselves as an opposition to what they've called modern feminism.
Femininity does not mean feminism, which Hugo Boom doesn't define
as equal rights, but as a self hating movement that
is anti family and anti male, one that shames women
who choose conventional roles. Despite running two companies, she's particularly
(15:39):
critical of what she calls girl boss feminism.
Speaker 6 (15:41):
Her interpretation of that.
Speaker 5 (15:42):
Term, which went from broadly celebrated to roundly dismissed in
the twenty tens, is that it encourages women to be
just like men to succeed in corporate fields. Such messaging,
she says, has made women anxious, lonely, and unfulfilled.
Speaker 6 (15:55):
Instead, she believes faith's.
Speaker 5 (15:56):
Family and love, not casual sex, careerism ideological activism supply
the greatest satisfaction.
Speaker 6 (16:04):
So exactly what you just said, Annie, Like.
Speaker 5 (16:07):
It's these attitudes that say that they are meant to
celebrate women, but then what they're actually the actual conclusion
is incredibly anti women, right Like, And notice how they
put that, you know, ideological activism. No, no, no, that's not
gonna make women happy, Like okay, so I shouldn't advocate
for things I believe and got it.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
I mean, you can just see how quickly this turns
into anti Trians narrative that fear of being erasing women,
which is a whole kind of laughable thing is like
feminism is in itself is like embracing women, like being
acknowledged as women as a person as well as trans
women are women, so they're being women.
Speaker 7 (17:00):
So how is that a rasure?
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Like there's so many like this level of like almost irony,
but that it works. And I don't know because the
few pieces, like I said, I read, they're very like
subtle about it. They don't want to come out full
force of showing that they are very very conservative because
they are trying to bring in all those leaders kind
of that same level of like when we talk about
(17:23):
yoga and crunching life turning into being conservative as well
as like the chadlife, because the initial idea is the aesthetic,
which this magazine has that esthetic totally.
Speaker 5 (17:34):
And I mean this is a little bit of a
non sequitur, but I personally have to be real careful
because like I am someone who cares a lot about nutrition, right,
Like I am right now trying to you know, up
my physical health through nutrition and exercise. I when you
are like searching Instagram or TikTok for that kind of content,
(17:58):
the way algorithms are like, oh, oh you like nutrition, huh, well,
how would you like some? And then it's just extremist rhetoric,
extremist rhetoric, extremist rhetoric. So like I have to be
really careful because like I do care about nutrition, and
it definitely these algorithms clocked it. If like that is
an interest of yours. We need to be surfacing you
(18:19):
up ever increasing extreme content and like next thing, you know,
it's like and then certainly you're anti vacts and then
certainly you're anti trans It's like whoa I'm just trying to,
you know, get more protein in my diet.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
And relax, right, I just want to like be healthy.
I don't, I don't know what would just happened.
Speaker 6 (18:37):
I don't.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
I don't need you to tell me that all these chemicals,
which are just nutrients are killing me.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
What's happening exactly. I think they really landed.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
On something with these pages, though, that they are able
to use what we kind of always have seen, Like
the magazines in general have always been about teaching girls
to be better some or that you're not good enough.
You're not if you want to hit these goals, this
is what you need to do. And EV's like that
perfect layout for that.
Speaker 6 (19:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (19:08):
And I think that especially, you know, it doesn't surprise
me that the founder of EV really sees herself as
in opposition to like the girl boss era of the
twenty tens, and I think was really serving women, women
like myself, who were looking for something and they and
(19:29):
I think this kind of girl boss feminism filled that
gap and tried to be like, well, is what you're
looking for? A corner office and lots of money, because
like here's you could have that, and I this is
where I have to say, like, I kind of agree
with what's hugo Woman a little bit. I think that
like in the twenty tens, feminism and the conversation around women,
and like our liberation really got co opted by this
(19:53):
kind of lean in Girl Boss Vibe, where wealthy white
women were really given the mic and they used that
Mica tell that like, liberation was having a corner office,
kicking butt at work, having the money to pay someone
else to watch.
Speaker 6 (20:07):
Your kids while you slay in the boardroom.
Speaker 5 (20:09):
Blah blah blah blah blah, and that was really empty.
Speaker 6 (20:12):
And I think ten.
Speaker 5 (20:13):
Years later, I would argue that we are still reeling
and feeling the fallout from how empty of a promise
of liberation that ended up being. But I think nothing
has really stepped in to fill that gap. And so
then you have media outlets like Evie responding to this
actual need in a marginalized community, a community of women,
(20:34):
saying like, Okay, well, kicking butt at work did not
really lead to liberation, so what will you know. There
is a truism about extremist content that, like they are
so good at identifying existing actual gaps that people need
filled and then filling those gaps with their ideological content.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
It's so funny that when you read and see this
level of cyclical actions, like the way you've been told
so hard, it kind of is that layer of like
us not looking at what society has done to us
in general, and telling us the only way you can
succeed is you have to give one hundred and fifty
percent of yourself to this, and if you don't, you fail.
(21:15):
Your failure is on you because you didn't try hard enough.
But you can't be called successful until you get these markers.
And these markers are the standard by society and capitalism.
So this is what it is. And if you are successful,
either you're going to be penalized in one way or another,
being told that you are greedy or over the top
or two ambitious, or you're going to be penalized because
(21:37):
we're you're going to fail in this moment and saying
that you doing these things has made you obnoxious and
impossible be around. Like it's such a context, but it's
the setup of society in that level. But at the
same time, as you were saying, like grifters and those alike,
social media have realized, hmm, we need to come back
around because people are starting to really get frustrated because
(21:58):
they can't hit that mark and they're exhausted.
Speaker 5 (22:02):
Yeah, and I in that I completely agree with everything
that you've just said. And in that climate, I can
understand why a publication like EV telling women like, listen,
aren't you exhausted? Just check out of this whole thing altogether,
Like just get married, leave your job, have kids, let
him work, let him figure it all out, and you
(22:23):
just rich reak from public life like that is ultimately,
what I think that EVE is telling an entire generation
of women is that you should only exist in the domestic.
And I don't want to discount the fact that there's
real power in the domestic for women like that, that
there is power in that, no shame in that at all.
But I think that what they're saying is like, women
(22:45):
don't belong in workplaces, women don't belong in boardrooms, women
don't belong in civic and public life.
Speaker 6 (22:50):
And that's simply not true.
Speaker 5 (22:51):
And so I think that EVE is setting up this
alternative of like, instead of all of those things that
exhaust us as women, why not embrace these soft things,
have a soft life, Like I'm sure you've seen that
kind of content all over your TikTok, right, And I
think google Boom says this pretty much explicitly in this piece.
She says, I think more women want to soft life,
(23:13):
a beautiful life than feeling all this pressure to do
all these things.
Speaker 6 (23:17):
And I can't help but really see that as.
Speaker 5 (23:21):
In opposition to the reality that you just laid out,
Sam that like, yeah, it does. It is hard to
deal with all of these pressures to you know, be
ambitious but not too ambitious, make money but not too
much money.
Speaker 6 (23:32):
Work.
Speaker 5 (23:32):
But then it's a lot I like, I'm I really
deeply do understand why this kind of attitude and message
is very enticing, especially right now in a time of
like uncertainty and chaos and rising costs and things like that.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Oh and you actually pulled out something that I was
trying to look into for a Monday many I don't
have enough information, but the whole like the soft life
transitioning into red pill and content and what that looks like.
And I was like, oh, there it is, but I like,
there's not. We're still on the cusp of understanding it.
Like people are recognizing that as a sign like this
(24:10):
is that same like trail that happened again with the
crunchy lifestyle slash natural lifestyle slash yoga lifestyle into red
pill content. That soft life is that same level. If
you start watching who is to pulling it out and
who's talking about the most, you're like, oh, but it's
such an interesting level because it does offer you something
(24:32):
like is it the dream for me to not have
to work at all and worry about things and sit
and watch k dramas all day and maybe go out
to do some zumba and yoga. Yeah, have maybe someone
cooked for me instead of me cooking myself all the
nasty foods that I'm like, I'm just gonna snack today,
Like that level of like comfort of like this ideal
(24:53):
that used to be the way, but which is not
true at all. Because again, when we have a conversation
about like the good old days when the men weren't
and the women got to stay at home, and women
being like, yeah, I'd rather be at home too if
everything was equal, But that's not the case. And as
you said before, like people who are in the domestic life,
who are stay at home moms, it's a hard job.
Speaker 6 (25:15):
It's hard. That's not a soft life. That's like, have
you ever been.
Speaker 5 (25:19):
Around toddlers people who are raising toddlers and not getting
a break from it because they don't do any wage
earning work outside of the house.
Speaker 6 (25:26):
They're not living a soft life.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
No, in God forbid they have any kind of medical
needs or if they have like school needs. You have
to be at all these activities constantly, and you have
to show up to do like at volunteering there what
dear God.
Speaker 5 (25:42):
So this is that is exactly that is exactly my
main beef with Evy, Right, they are selling women a lie,
a fantasy where we're in retreating from public life and
just like existing in the domestic, is this soft, easy
moneyed fantasy the kind of life that women should be after.
(26:02):
But as you said, one staying at home as a
companion sometimes and it's not soft and glamorous at all,
even like the people who perform treadwife on Instagram probably
like like you never see those women cleaning toilets or
cleaning baby puke off of their shirt, which is sometimes
the reality of staying at home. But in addition to that,
(26:22):
not working, not making or managing your own money, not
participating in civic and public life is not a recipe
for safety and security. It is incredibly risky to the
people that do this. The data is incredibly clear that
when women stop working, whether they have a kid or
they're a caretaker for somebody and they leave the workforce,
when they re enter the workforce, they are.
Speaker 6 (26:44):
Going to make a lot less.
Speaker 5 (26:46):
So if and when they do go back to work,
the data is super clear they're going to be making
less right. And so if you don't work or never work,
and you just depend on your partner for everything, what
happens if your partner passes away, what happens if the
partner becomes disabled or sick and they can't work. There
are so many ways that this life is incredibly risky
(27:06):
and insecure, And the content would have you believe like, Oh,
this is going to be soft and glamorous and lovely.
I wouldn't even have a problem with this kind of content.
Speaker 6 (27:15):
So much if it told women the truth.
Speaker 5 (27:17):
If it was like, hey, don't work, but also put
away a little money for yourself, or don't work, but
make sure that you keep an eye on your finances
and understand them in case something happens. Like if they
were more realistic and honest about the life that they
are selling. I wouldn't even have a big problem with them.
But they are not doing that. They're selling a very
enticing but dangerous lie.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Yes, and as we've been mentioning throughout, they're doing it
in a way that at first you don't realize where
you're like, oh, yeah, I can relate to this. Yeah,
But then you start to think about it, like, okay, wait,
what what did I just read?
Speaker 6 (27:57):
Yeah? This is from that New York Times piece.
Speaker 5 (28:00):
At first glance, EV seems nonpartisan, publishing content about daily
topics such as award winning red carpets.
Speaker 6 (28:05):
And styling skinny genes.
Speaker 5 (28:07):
But readers who click past hot girl health trends and
Adam Brody appreciation posts we'll find articles that promote positions
that are fringed even within conservative circles, criticisms of no
falt divorce and in vitro fertilization, for example, package and
a fun and approachable format. A typical EV headline amy
from Love is Blind is right to be hesitant about
(28:28):
birth control. Also, they're like super they're super suss about
birth control. We'll talk more about that in a minute.
But yeah, and so this is actually part of a
pretty concerning trend media spaces that at first glance seem
a political are actually very political. That is becoming much
more common online media matters That an analysis that really
(28:49):
showed how right leaning spaces dominate the online ecosystem with
content that appears a political at first. The analysis was
based on three hundred and twenty online shows with a
right leaning or left leading ideological bent. They found that
right leaning shows dominate the online ecosystem with substantially larger
audiences on both politics and new shows, and supposedly non
(29:10):
political shows that they determined often platformed ideological content or guests.
Speaker 6 (29:16):
And here's the kicker.
Speaker 5 (29:17):
The analysis, which looked entirely at shows with an ideological bent,
found over a third self identify as non political, even
though seventy two percent of those shows were determined to
be right leaning. Instead, these shows describe themselves as comedy, entertainment, sports,
or put themselves in supposedly other non political categories. So basically,
(29:38):
these online spaces that are incredibly influential get to be like, oh,
we're not political, we're not political, we're just talking about celebrity,
gossip and entertainment.
Speaker 6 (29:46):
But actually they're incredibly political.
Speaker 5 (29:49):
In specifically seventy two percent of these cases right leaning
ideological bents.
Speaker 4 (29:55):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
And one of those things that really scares me about
that in this whole compversation is like evy going back
to the name being like women were wrong and are
the source of all evil. Like when I was a kid,
I heard that like Bible story and I believed it,
and so like I feel like it's it's leaning into
(30:19):
a lot of stuff many of us internalized growing up
of this is the natural way of things, right, this
is women stay home, and they're they're they're kind of
selling like the let's get back to the natural way
and it'll be easier, it'll be nicer for you. When
all this stuff was like built, it was societally made.
(30:44):
But they're selling it as like no, we're going against
the natural order and they're doing it through look at
the celebrity pop culture story.
Speaker 5 (30:56):
Yeah, and they're also that also makes sense as to
why they also sell milkmade style dresses. They also were like,
you know what traditional women might want to do, spend
two hundred dollars on a like frilly dairy dress that
The Cut describes as designed in the French countryside. It's
said to be inspired by the quote hard working dairy
(31:19):
maids of the seventeenth century Europe and as henmade with
quote luxurious organic cotton and one hundred percent feminine energy.
So it's like, yeah, it's very much like tied up
in this kind of quote natural feminine.
Speaker 6 (31:34):
Honestly, the second that I hear in any.
Speaker 5 (31:36):
Person or online place say something like oh this has
like the divigne feminine, I'm like, okay, bullshit. Like as
soon as I hear that, I'm like, oh really okay.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
From the back of my head, I'm like, so child
labor is what you're talking about. That's the little energy
where they get SI paid two cents an hour.
Speaker 7 (31:57):
Sweet.
Speaker 5 (31:57):
Nothing says luxurious feminine energy like unsavory labor practices.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
That's what I've always wanted to get that from us anyway,
So stay at home moms who don't get paid this
is like the same life.
Speaker 7 (32:09):
I guess that's the feminine energy.
Speaker 5 (32:21):
So in addition to all of this, more problematically, they
also have a fertility app. So you're always telling you
how they're really not cool with birth control.
Speaker 6 (32:31):
They have a fertility app called twenty eight.
Speaker 5 (32:33):
The app is backed by tech billionaire and like Mega
Trump thunder.
Speaker 6 (32:38):
Peter til I gotta say, like, I simply do.
Speaker 5 (32:41):
Not advocate for anyone using apps like this, just in general,
but especially not won backed by somebody like Teal. I
could do a whole episode. This is where I will
talk all day. I'll just say google him. Uh he
is like us, Like he's like if mister Burns was
a real person and also gay.
Speaker 6 (33:01):
Like that's how I would describe him. And see there's
so much to stay there.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
But yeah, less he was still better and like he
had morals. Les Luthor had morals compared to him.
Speaker 5 (33:14):
Yeah, he is not He's a not only is he
a bad dude, he's also bad in some like ways
that if I talked about them here you would be
like that sounds like something out of a comic book,
but it's real. Yeah. So he's one of the fund
the one of the funders of their fertility app. They
grew interested in the women's fertility app space because many women.
(33:35):
Hugo Boom said, uh, or that she knew we're having
trouble getting pregnant, and she said that she wanted to
develop a product that would quote empower women to understand
our bodies through some fortuitous networking. They ended up having
a meeting with Peter Teal and they asked him to
invest in a wellness app based on the typical twenty
eighth day menstruation cycle. And Teal was like, is no
(33:57):
one else doing this? And it was like, no, no
one else and he was like, Okay, well sounds like
a good idea. A spokesperson for tel confirmed that he
invested two million dollars in the app and they raised
three point two million dollars in total. The app pushes
a message that hormonal birth control is bad for you,
Goodbye toxicity. One advertisement read for the birth control detoc
(34:18):
supplements it sells through the app. I'm gonna say on
my tech podcast.
Speaker 6 (34:23):
There are no girls on the Internet.
Speaker 5 (34:25):
I work with the producer who has a lot of
experience directly writing and reviewing privacy policies for digital health app.
So I asked him to take a look at twenty
eight's privacy policy.
Speaker 6 (34:34):
And it wasn't great. Here's a go a rundown of
what he told me.
Speaker 5 (34:38):
He said the privacy policy doesn't emphasize going out of
their way to protect users at privacy. Their section on
third party tracking basically says that third parties will have
access to your personal data, but disavows any responsibility for
what those third parties do.
Speaker 6 (34:53):
With that personal data, so doesn't fill them with confidence.
Speaker 5 (34:56):
They put a lot of responsibility on the end user,
for example, set your browser to refuse all or some
browser cookies, or alert you and cookies are being sent.
He says, if they sincerely wanted to respect users right
to privacy rather than capture the value of their data
while disavowing any risk, twenty eight would describe strong, proactive
steps that they're taking to protect users personal data. Instead,
(35:19):
this privacy policy is all about mitigating their risk by
shifting it on to unspecified third parties and by shifting
it on to the user themselves. So, especially in a
climate where people are being criminalized for information like this,
I would not recommend anybody trust any of their sensitive
intimate data to an app without a very robust privacy
(35:42):
policy in place. I especially would not recommend that anybody
give that data to somebody that's connected to Peter Teel,
who is connected to Donald Trump Like that is just
not something I would recommend.
Speaker 4 (35:54):
No signs off on that.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
So that's concerning We've got a lot of concerning things
we've gone over. But just to bring the point home,
Bridget is, what is the big deal with ev and
why is it so problematic?
Speaker 6 (36:21):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (36:21):
I mean I think it's very problematic because listen, there
is nothing wrong with like online content that speaks to
all different kinds of women, all different kinds of women's
experiences and perspectives. To me, the whole point of being
a feminist is that it allows for women to choose
paths and perspectives that.
Speaker 6 (36:38):
Work for them. Right.
Speaker 5 (36:39):
However, EV I find problematic because it is designed to
sell that lie I was talking about earlier, that lie
that makes women not being in the public and civic
sphere look glossy and glamorous, which isn't just wrong.
Speaker 6 (36:55):
It can be dangerous. It can be hurtful.
Speaker 5 (36:57):
And even though that is dangerous, it's also very enticing.
Very I can understand why that's appealing, especially in a
climate right now where everything.
Speaker 6 (37:08):
Is confusing, everything is chaotic.
Speaker 5 (37:09):
I can understand the desire for women to be like,
I just want my soft life at home. From that
piece quote. Even critics of evy acknowledged the appeal of
its messaging. It's a perfectly pretty gateway drug to ideologies
which exist to protect the privilege and further disenfranchise the marginalized.
Speaker 6 (37:26):
That's from Sarah Peterson, the author.
Speaker 5 (37:28):
Of the book Influenced, And I would say something that
makes it even more concerning to me is that when
something is happening, and it's happening in a space that
has sort of been relegated to women people, there's not
really a lot of.
Speaker 6 (37:40):
Eyes on it.
Speaker 5 (37:41):
There's an automatic assumption that it's like just a fluffy,
poppy space and what happens there doesn't really matter to
anybody or is not of any consequence to anybody.
Speaker 6 (37:50):
It's And so I think that.
Speaker 5 (37:52):
Because the kind of people who care about extremism and
media and all of that might not be looking at
a space like ev online too hard, precisely because it
speaks to women. That means that EV can advocate for
positions that even even conservatives would say are extreme and
not really have a lot of people pushing back, right,
(38:13):
and so I think it's a really really effective way
of potentially radicalizing women into a pretty extreme ideology. So
we absolutely need to be paying attention to what is
happening in these online spaces. And probably my biggest personal
beef is that.
Speaker 6 (38:30):
She's lying to us, She is lying to women.
Speaker 5 (38:32):
She has a very a very belittling attitude about women,
and that comes through so clearly in this piece.
Speaker 6 (38:40):
So the founder that I've been talking.
Speaker 5 (38:42):
About, Brittany Hugo Boom, she runs a media and tech
company that she says gets half a million eyeballs across
social media, while also saying, well, also telling you other
women that oh, you don't have we don't have the
aptitude to do exactly what it is that she is
doing successful and making money from. When asked about women
(39:02):
running businesses and the piece, she said quote, I think
when most women try to do that, they fail, then
they feel upset about it when it's not really in
their nature. This is how she feels about women. And like,
I know that to be a lie. The reason why
I know it to be a lie is because she's
doing it so like she knows it's a lie too.
She is lying to you to make a buck, and
(39:24):
that is ultimately my big beef with this publication.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
I think the conversation is always kind of funny. It's
that whole level of when marginalized communities have to compete
with each other, and so they're gonna do everything they
can to get out their competition instead of realizing that
the supremacy of men and white men are the actual competition.
And she's like, yeah, don't do this because you're not
gonna be as good as I am.
Speaker 3 (39:49):
Obviously, because I'm.
Speaker 6 (39:51):
White, I can't run a business.
Speaker 3 (39:53):
I'm white, I'm Christian, and I got a Christian husband.
Speaker 6 (39:55):
He knows well.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
Like, it's really fascinating because the again, when we had
that conversation about women in magazines, the influence of magazines
is deep, is deep, and it runs for years and
years and years and years.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
When we talk about a.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
Good housewife, we talked about Southern living like that those
are core memories for me, specifically about my mother and
then from my mother's generation that to them was the
perfect life. So kind again that cyclical point of being like,
we need to go back to the Southern living standard
of housekeeping, which means that women stay home and that
(40:32):
is their full achievement is how they maintain their home.
And it's interesting because Evie is kind of bringing that
back and understanding how to indoctrinate young women, just like
we've talked about young men and podcasts. This is one
of those forms of understanding that, Okay, in order to
radicalize young women, we're going to do this, and we're
(40:53):
going to do this in the way of like reminding
them of the good old days that they don't know
anything about. They have a fantasy of, whether it's watching
Little House on the Prairie or hearing about Little House
on the Prairie, whatever what not, and we're going to
use that to tell them they're going to fail, so
why not try it this way?
Speaker 5 (41:09):
And you could see why that would be a really
compelling story. Like again, like I have to be at
somebody who a lot of my I mean, I'm not
a tradwife, but I have a lot of tradwife interests
and hobbies. Like I like preserving things, I like cooking
from scratch, I like gardening, I like all of that.
Speaker 6 (41:28):
Like I can understand.
Speaker 5 (41:30):
I just really see the ways that, especially right now,
we are selling women this very enticing lie that if
they actually by like by that, it is incredibly dangerous.
Like there was a whole trend of like real treadwives,
women who really like left their left the working world
(41:50):
and got married and had kids and then like you know,
really relied on their their spouse for everything, talking about
how damaging it was for them and their children, Like
there are real stakes when women do this, And so
I don't think there's nothing wrong with being a stay
at home mom, a stay at home parent. Absolutely nothing
wrong with that, But we should not be glamorizing that
(42:12):
without also telling the truth about the reality of what
that looks like and the ways that that can put
you at risk and what you should be doing to
mitigate those risks.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
Right especially when we know right now lawmakers are really
trying to turn back that clock in that level of
taking rights away from women, making sure they can't vote,
taking their financial abilities as well, Like we're seeing that
is happening right now as they're trying to introduce this
intossentate to in order to go back to that in
(42:42):
order to take away rights from women.
Speaker 3 (42:44):
And when we were like okay, cool, some women obvious
like well, like they're like.
Speaker 6 (42:49):
This this could be a self life. Yeah, I mean
we have to talk about it.
Speaker 5 (42:52):
I have seen this, like threads of this attitude picking
up steam online with like younger and younger women. There's
that whole trend of like young girls wearing shirts that
are like oh too pretty to work and things like that,
Like that might seem cute, but really, like really take
a step back and think, like, what is it that
we're advocating for. Are we advocating for systems that are
(43:15):
actually going to protect like like put us at risk
or protect us? Like I think that we you know,
we we rightly talk a lot about the radicalization of
men and boys, we should also be talking about the
radicalization of women and girls through online content, because yeah,
I just think that we're setting up women, a generation
of women and girls to really put themselves at risk
(43:38):
and maybe not even realize the ways in which they're
doing that.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
Yes, absolutely, and that's something Samantha and I have been
talking about a lot lately.
Speaker 4 (43:47):
So as always, Richie, every time you come on, we're like,
we have a million other things where you have to
talk about.
Speaker 1 (43:54):
So thank you so much for taking the time and
bringing these topics to us.
Speaker 4 (44:01):
We really appreciate it. Where can the good listeners find you?
Speaker 6 (44:04):
You can listen to my podcast There are Our Girls
on the Internet.
Speaker 5 (44:07):
New season is dropping on May fourteenth, so please check
it out.
Speaker 6 (44:11):
Yeah, they can follow me on Instagram at bridget Marie
and DC.
Speaker 4 (44:14):
Yes, and can't wait to can't wait to do this again?
Speaker 1 (44:19):
Listeners, go check bridget out on the podcast Excited for
the New Season, on social media or on other episodes
of Stuff We Never Told You And Yes, if you
would like to contact us you can. You can email
us Hello a Stuffnever Told You dot com. You can
find us on Blue skyte Mom Stuff Podcast or on
Instagram and TikTok at Stuff We Never Told You for
also on YouTube. We have tepipoot store and we have
a book you can get wherever you get your books.
(44:39):
Thanks as always start a super producer Christina and executive
producer My and a contributor Joey. Thank you and thanks
to you for listening. Stuff on Over Told You is
production of by Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
you can check out the i heart Radio app, Apple podcast
or where you listen to your favorite shows.
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Anney Reese
Samantha McVey
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