The sexual dynamics of the American conservative resurgence have been fascinating over the last few years.
Evie Magazine is a conservative women’s magazine first published in 2019. Its aesthetics and content reflect the “trad life/trad wife” movement, creating a pastoral fantasy of rural, agrarian labour combined with an idealized hetero-nuclear family. At the fringier end of things, Evie’s content splices into ideologies like pronatalism, anti-vaccination, the benefits of “raw milk” and other health quackery, transphobia, anti-feminism, COVID denial, QAnon, etc.
It’s epitomized by the “tradwife” image, a (white) long-haired woman in a white or print dress, hair kerchief, and cowboy boots who has had borne and raised several children while running a country farm and baking her own bread daily, and yet somehow still looks like a fashion model. She does no paid labour outside the home, instead leaving that to her commuting (white) husband.
In December 2024, Evie released the “raw milk maid dress” for sale. According to the web site copy, this $190 USD cotton dress was “Designed in the French countryside and inspired by the hardworking dairymaids of 17th-century Europe” and has “a flirty slit above the knee”.
It also says that the model depicted, Penny, “is wearing a size 4-6 and is 5′ 11” with a 32G cup”. No indication how this would look on a woman with a more statistically average body.
The response from Evie’s readers criticized the dress for being too impractical for working on a farm, too revealing for a movement that believes in female modesty, or both.
In my opinion, the dress inadvertently gives away the fantasy that drives the tradlife/tradwife movement. It bears as much resemblance to actual woman’s workwear as the cliche French maid outfit does to actual domestic servants’ attire. It’s costume, not clothing. Evie had to confront that, though billed as a magazine for conservative women, it’s committed to a male fantasy.
Evie’s lifestyle coverage includes sexuality of course. The sexual content is a new iteration of an attempt for sexual conservatives to take the sexual high ground, by expanding the realm of acceptable sexuality to include a wider range of behavior as long as it is within the bounds of heterosexual, monogamous marriage. To apply Gayle Rubin’s “magic circle” model, they are cautiously expanding the bounds of the circle along certain axes, but contracting them along others. That’s why Evie‘s Sex department publishes informational articles with titles like:
- “The Feminine Art of Giving Your Husband A Breathtaking Lingam Massage”
- “A Wife’s Steamy Secrets for Amazing Shower Sex”
- “What to Expect the First Time You Have Sex”
- “A Wife’s Secrets to Making Yourself Taste Delicious”
To be fair to Evie, it also includes pieces with titles like:
- “How Do I Develop A Good Relationship With My Body When I Was Never Taught About Sex?”
- “What You Should’ve Been Taught About Orgasms In Sex-Ed”
- “The Destructive Lies We Tell Women About Sexual Pleasure”
I’m not qualified to say if this is good sexual advice, but at least there is some consideration of women’s sexual health and pleasure. Nonetheless, the repeated use of “husband” and “wife”, not “your man” or “a woman”, shows just how committed Evie is to heterosexual monogamous marriage.
We can see where Evie draws the line between good and bad sex in an article titled “People Who Like Kinky Sex Are Just Bad In Bed” by Jenny White.
Much like the concluding conversation of the ponyplay episode of Bones, what appears like an offensive maneuver is actually defensive. You can see it in the article’s opening, which sets up the straw-man of kinky people being sexual snobs. “If you’re a woman who enjoys vanilla sex, you’re a square. A dud. You’re super unsexy, and you’re just not cool enough if you don’t cater to modern men’s “near-universal” kinky proclivities.” Exaggerate or fabricate an aggression on yourself, and anything you do in response is justified as self-defense.
The article abruptly shifts topics to the alleged crisis of too many young virgin men.
Many speculate this downward trend into perpetual sexlessness is the result of widespread porn use among younger generations. And one could certainly ascertain that the kink crowd is modeling its behaviors towards what they see in porn.
Note the weasel words of “many speculate” and “one could certainly ascertain”, without any support. In Evie’s view, whether the problem is too much or too little sexual activity, the cause is always pornography.
Evie’s final rhetorical maneuver is to conflate BDSM with partner violence, and to completely elide the possibility of female dominant/male submissive sexuality (and anything other than heterosexual monogamy). In Evie’s view, femdom/malesub is like trying to divide by zero.
Some men can get off on sheer humiliation through performing degrading sexual acts. Just as easily as some men can compartmentalize women into being hoes vs. angels they take home to meet their mother, they can compartmentalize sex in the same manner – degrading, emotionless, humiliating sex with women they don’t care about vs. sweet, passionate, sensual lovemaking with women they actually do care about.
Strangely, this echoes the anti-BDSM writings in the feminist anthologies Against Sadomasochism and Unleashing Feminism, which try to convince their readers that vanilla lesbian sex is okay and just as exciting as kink.
People who are bad at sex are the first to glamorize (and lionize) being bad at sex by declaring it a “kink” while shaming others who have a healthy, functioning relationship with sex for not being kinky.
This same anti-kink discourse pops up in a tradwife magazine’s articles, lesbian feminist essays, and mainstream investigative procedural television. I think this indicates that BDSM presents a serious challenge to vanilla normativity (particularly with an emphasis on heterosexual reproduction), and to conventional gender roles (even for the feminists). Faced with visible violations of their self-imposed rules, they have to reinforce the border. Their insecurity that someone might cross that line makes them denigrate the other side.
The dress and the articles show that Evie is trying to have it both ways, to construct the image of an ideal woman who is sexually adventurous and passionate yet strictly monogamous and virginal until marriage, to perform agrarian and familial labor yet maintain her sex appeal and glamour, to work hard yet only within the domestic sphere. It’s a fantasy, and if that’s a fantasy that works for you, great. Just keep it separate from your politics.
