Reader, prepare to be shocked, for a woman has done something truly jaw-dropping: she announced she is pregnant. Aged 31. While married to a man.
If you’re wondering what the big deal is, well, me too. But the woman is Alex Cooper, host of Call Her Daddy, one of the most popular podcasts in the world. Now supposedly “pro-family” conservatives are melting down. In a now-deleted tweet, Brad Wilcox, a well known conservative commentator and author of the book Get Married, accused Cooper of selling a libertine lifestyle and then “quietly” getting married and having a baby (despite the fact that Cooper’s 2024 wedding was featured in Vogue, and she announced her pregnancy on Instagram to her 7.3 million followers). Another argued that by having a baby, Cooper had demonstrably “sold her audience of young women a total lie”. Yet another conservative commentator claimed that Cooper is a “fraud” because “she tells her audience to be promiscuous and have sex with strangers. Meanwhile, she’s living the white-picket-fence dream with a traditional family.”
This is all profoundly silly. It’s also totally disconnected from reality. Most women from Cooper’s college-educated cohort see their lives sequenced more or less like hers: graduate, work, date, get married, have babies. These women are more likely to marry than their less-educated peers. They are more likely to have children within a marriage. They are less likely to divorce. They are much less likely to raise their children in poverty. By just about any measure, these women are doing just fine. You might even think that this would be a unifier between the feminists who made higher education and work possible for women and the pro-family folks who claim to want stable, child-producing marriages.
Except in an era of right-wing freak-outs about changing gender roles and declining birth rates, Cooper represents something terrifying: a woman who chose a path forged by feminists and not only wasn’t punished for it, but is clearly thriving. The resentment directed towards Cooper isn’t because she sold one version of womanhood while living another; it’s because she lived the kind of autonomous life feminists fought for, and it’s going great.
Her critics are angry because they say that Cooper’s podcast promotes promiscuity. It is true that she talks frankly about sex and doesn’t push the idea that women must marry and procreate as young as possible. But Call Her Daddy isn’t exactly a feminist rallying cry: a major premise of the podcast was that many young women were looking for partnership but finding dating difficult and often absurd. Yet to hear her critics tell it, Cooper spent years hoodwinking her audience by selling them on feminism (which apparently meant forgoing babies and having casual sex forever until one’s inevitable death as patient zero in an STD outbreak in the nursing home), all while she herself went full tradwife.
But Cooper is not, in fact, trading in her stilettos for a prairie dress or quitting her podcast to go make her own bread. She’s just pregnant. This reality, though – that the good-time girls and the good mothers can in fact be the same women – doesn’t fit the virgin-whore dichotomy long promoted by the right.
It is particularly ironic to see that the vitriol directed at Cooper comes largely from pro-family conservatives. Cooper is living out the “success sequence” that so many of these traditionalist advocates have pushed for years: she finished school, and was gainfully employed and married before she had children. But it turns out the traditionalists no longer want a success sequence so much as an ultraconservative success sprint: women who abstain from sex entirely, marry as young as possible and then have as many babies as soon as possible. This means fewer women will attend college, work for pay or plan their families – a lifestyle some conservatives have openly promoted.
This new sequence, edited to strike out any inkling of female autonomy – marry whoever you can find soon after high school, depend financially on a young husband, have as many children as God gives, stay home to raise them – has not been the norm in most Western societies for many decades. And most women are fine with that.
This is the fundamental disconnect. Traditionalist conservatives think just about everyone should live one way (heterosexual lifelong marriage, many children), and they believe that law, policy and culture should push the public in that direction. Feminists, meanwhile, don’t have a single prescription for a good life; they’ve pressed for women to have more opportunities, but never said any particular woman has to take them. Go to college or don’t, marry or don’t, have a baby or many or none at all – the point is autonomy as a corrective to obligation. But, apparently struggling to understand an ideology that holds that women are the best arbiters of their lives, conservatives heard the call for more options and took it as a demand that women reject marriage and family wholesale.
Alex Cooper is not a feminist standard-bearer. She’s also not a newfound tradwife. She is extraordinary in many ways – rich, successful and beautiful. But when it comes to her marriage and pregnancy, the only thing worth remarking on is how her choices are utterly unremarkable.
[Further reading: Everyone is a conspiracy theorist now]
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