We’re moving out of the “girlboss” era and into the “girl grift” era. Throughout the 2010s, popular culture embraced liberal, Lean In-style feminism in the workplace, painting women climbing the corporate ladder as empowered and aspirational. Flash forward to today and the zeitgeist has flipped, with conservative, fundamentalist anti-feminism as a rising trend. Shrouded in hyperfeminine aesthetics, the new “girl grift” is all about tradwives, pro-natalism, and homesteading—and of course, going viral to become maximally profitable, all while advising readers to place their careers on the backburner and submit to their husbands.

Evie magazine embodies and amplifies this cultural shift. The magazine was recently the subject of a glowing Wall Street Journal profile celebrating it as the “conservative Cosmo.” And although it’s seven years old now, the magazine has ascended into the public eye with the advent of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, fulfilling a niche born out of complaints that mainstream women’s publications—such as Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Glamour—are biased toward a liberal audience. The publication has established itself as a hotbed of skepticism about science-backed public health guidance, including content questioning the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine and the birth control pill.

But they’re savvy about it: a quick glance at the Evie website hardly gives away the misinformation within. A Wired article describing the allure of Evie’s branding and content concluded that “the strength of the publication’s politics was in the pretense that it doesn’t have any.” Articles expressing right-wing views are interspersed with verticals on sex, culture, and beauty, allowing Evie to cloak its extremist worldview. For example, Salon noted this practice includes swapping terms like “Christian” or “religious” for “euphemisms like ‘traditional.’”

Importantly, Evie is just one piece of an expansive, parallel market of emerging conservative companies looking to provide right-wing alternatives for mainstream and ostensibly liberal news and entertainment media. These alternatives created the perfect conditions for Evie and other “girl grifters” to thrive, particularly under the umbrella of lifestyle and “wellness” content. You’ll know the “girl grift” when you see it: bubblegum pink, squeaky-clean aesthetics that promote so-called traditional family values. Ironically, women encouraging others to leave the workforce and serve as homemakers can be a lucrative field, with influencers—very much part of the workforce—earning thousands through content creation and brand deals, hypocritically contradicting their own trademark lifestyle advice.

While we can’t stop the endless resources the right is pouring into media like Evie and adjacent businesses, we can equip ourselves with the ability to see through the grift of camouflaging toxic rhetoric amidst articles on pop culture, fashion trends, and relationship advice.

Let’s get into it.

Spot the Girl Grift

Even though Evie’s conservative viewpoint strays from modern, mainstream women’s magazines, there is some overlap. Perhaps most notably: Diet culture and fat shaming, and all their deeply negative consequences—including on the quality of health care received by fat people, particularly women—are frequent topics. Unfortunately, even the most “mainstream” lifestyle magazines have historically promoted this stigmatizing content, too. So, while Evie’s content describing how women “owe it to their children” to be skinny and touting the alleged benefits of taking supplements in lieu of eating snacks when hungry is both disturbing and anti-woman, it’s not a clear “girl grift” red flag.

So too, while the MAHA movement has put the spotlight on conservative pseudo-science masquerading as “health,” alternative “health” enthusiasts and vaccine “skeptics” exist on both sides of the aisle. Evie’s particular faux-health façade masks additional fatphobia and concerning views about vital vaccines that closely echo MAHA leader Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has gained notoriety for both his vaccine skepticism and his willingness to bend to anti-abortion demands (further evidence that the anti-abortion and anti-vaccine movements go hand in hand).

Given MAHA’s influence on Evie’s popularity, the magazine’s concern-trolling about the flu vaccine and women’s reproductive health and fearmongering about childhood vaccines during continued measles outbreaks is a much clearer sign of the girl grift.

So, what does the mask-off stuff really look like?

Praising “Femininity,” Not Feminism

While mainstream lifestyle magazines may center women’s achievements, outlets like Evie are more likely to focus on ways women can be more “feminine,” as if that’s the highest achievement for a woman in the year 2026. Evie even questions whether it’s possible for women to be equal to men, and blames feminism for men’s bad behavior.

And instead of encouraging young women to strive for professional, educational, or personal achievements aligned with their own goals and desires, Evie urges women to worry about whether they have enough “biological markers of fertility and high estrogen” to attract a man, claiming that “being a well-rounded, articulate, and successful woman” may lower their “market value.”

Yuck.

Making blanket statements denouncing IVF and birth control

Evie claims to promote a pro-family agenda, but they actually seem to want even more barriers between people and their ability to create the families that are right for them—especially for those facing infertility or for people intentionally choosing to avoid pregnancy. The magazine’s glamourization of parenthood and family growth is in direct contradiction to its constant undermining of success rates of IVF treatments, guidance toward unscientific and less effective methods of fertility treatment, and stigmatization of people who wait until their late 30s or early 40s to become pregnant.

Birth control is also a primary target for Evie, which publishes articles questioning the safety of the pill and IUDs despite medical consensus confirming the safety and efficacy of both methods. Ironically, in a 2026 interview, Evie cofounder Gabriel Hugoboom claimed, “We’re not advocating for things to be taken away,” as if its extensive archive of anti-contraception content is in any way neutral. But telling readers not to believe their own eyes is part of their sleight-of-hand show.

Enforcing Anti-Trans Gender Essentialism

Across its site, Evie pushes men and women toward predetermined, traditional gender roles, espousing rhetoric often used to justify attacks on trans people, non-binary people, and other gender non-conforming people. Evie is an active hub for churning out anti-trans rhetoric, with articles suggesting that being trans is a “trend” and nefarious “social contagion” that threatens a traditional way of life. This insistence that only two genders exist and that those genders are fundamentally different is not only toxic for trans people but also the very audience Evie contends its magazine is written for. Instead of empowering its readers, Evie’s extreme adherence to gender essentialism seemingly serves to limit the autonomy of women and how they choose to live their lives.

Platforming Anti-Abortion Content and Actors

Despite the anti-abortion movement’s efforts to frame their ideology as popular on both sides of the aisle, the reality is that anti-abortion politics are both unpopular, and distinctly conservative. Evie’s pro-woman, pro-science façade vaporizes under their promotion of anti-abortion actors and claims.

It’s hard to believe that Evie strives to “back [their] editorial decisions with science and sound data” when they uplift an anti-abortion doctor who walked backed her own testimony on the alleged dangers of abortion for being inaccurate and overstated. It’s also hard to believe that Evie thinks women “deserve better from women’s media” when we consider:

• Evie’s promotion of anti-abortion pregnancy centers. These outfits, which are touted as “essential” by Evie, use taxpayer money to promote anti-abortion disinformation. On top of that, one of the largest anti-abortion pregnancy center chains recently allowed a group that promotes criminal penalties for abortion patients to table at their conference. There’s nothing “better” about that.
• Evie’s fearmongering about abortion pills. Evie’s disinformation about the alleged harms of abortion pills—including their claim that approving mifepristone is one of the biggest mistakes the FDA has ever made—goes against good science. Real science shows abortion pills are safe and effective, full stop.
• Evie’s promotion of pro-criminalization proponents. This pro-natalist puff piece demanding women have as many children as possible was authored by an anti-abortion activist who supports criminal penalties for abortion patients. It’s pretty hard to view such demands as pro-woman.

In 2021, Evie managing editor Erica Jimenez told the Daily Wire that the magazine publishes “content that people can enjoy without having radicalism shoved down their throat and appreciating women for how beautiful we are instead of trying to change us into something else.” An agenda-free women’s magazine that embraces its audience for who they are sounds like a great idea, but to describe Evie in this light is deeply misleading, considering their record of peddling conspiracy theories and offering advice on how to become the perfect wife and mother. Evie has a clear mission to push a conservative political agenda on its target audience, despite or perhaps because of that agenda’s unpopularity. For example: Recent polling shows that 60% of Americans support access to abortion, with women and young people—Evie’s key demographics—showing even higher levels of support.

Since women are, as Evie put it earlier this spring, “far smarter than the agendas being pushed on them,” we feel confident this guide will be more than enough to help them steer clear of the right-wing girl grift.