Readers, prepare to be shocked, because one woman has done something truly fascinating: she announced that she is pregnant. 31 years old. While married to a man.
If you’re wondering what the big deal is, well, me too. But the woman is Alex Cooper, the host of Call her dadone of the most popular podcasts in the world. Now supposedly “pro-family” conservatives are melting down. In a since-deleted tweet, Brad Wilcox, a well-known conservative commentator and author of the book marryaccused Cooper of selling out a free lifestyle and then “quietly” getting married and having a baby (despite the fact that Cooper’s 2024 wedding was featured in Vogueand she announced her pregnancy on Instagram to her 7.3 million followers). Another argued that by giving birth to a child, Cooper had apparently “sold her audience of young women a complete lie”. 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 stupid. It is also completely disconnected from reality. Most of the women in Cooper’s college-educated group see their lives lined up more or less like that: graduate, work, date, marry, have children. 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 almost any measure, these women are doing well. You might even think that this would be a union between feminists who make higher education and jobs possible for women and pro-family people who claim to want stable, child-producing marriages.
Except in an era of right-wing rage about changing gender roles and declining birth rates, Cooper represents something terrifying: a woman who chose a path forged by feminists and not only went unpunished for it, but is clearly thriving. The anger directed at Cooper isn’t because she sold one version of woman while living another; because she lived the kind of autonomous life that feminists fought for, and she’s doing just fine.
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Her critics are outraged because they say Cooper’s podcast promotes lewdness. It’s true that she talks frankly about sex and doesn’t push the idea that women should get married and grow up as young as possible. But Call her dad it’s not exactly a feminist rallying cry: a major premise of the podcast was that many young women were looking for partnerships but found dating difficult and often absurd. However, to hear her critics tell it, Cooper spent years duping her audience into selling them on feminism (which apparently meant giving up babies and having casual sex forever until one’s inevitable death as patient zero in a nursing home STD outbreak), all while becoming a full-fledged doctor herself.
But Cooper, in fact, isn’t trading in her styles for a prairie dress or ditching her podcast to make a living. She’s just pregnant. However, this reality—that good-time girls and good moms can actually be the same woman—doesn’t fit the virgin-whore dichotomy long promoted by the right.
It’s especially ironic to see that the vitriol directed at Cooper comes mostly from pro-family conservatives. Cooper is living the “success sequence” that so many of these traditionalist lawyers have been pushing for years: She finished school and was gainfully employed and married before having children. But it turns out that traditionalists no longer want a sequence of success so much as an ultraconservative success sprint: women who abstain completely from sex, marry as young as possible, and then have as many children as possible as quickly as possible. That means fewer women will attend college, work for a living or plan their families — a lifestyle some conservatives have openly promoted.
This new sequence, edited to remove any idea of female autonomy—marry whoever you can find right out of high school, depend financially on a new man, have as many children as God gives, stay at 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. Traditional conservatives think that everyone should live one way (lifelong heterosexual marriage, many children), and they believe that law, politics, and culture should push the public in that direction. Meanwhile, feminists have no recipe for a good life; they have pushed for more opportunities for women, but they have never said that any particular woman should take advantage of them. Go to college or not, marry or not, have a child or many or none—the issue is autonomy as a corrective to coercion. But apparently struggling to grasp an ideology that says women are the best arbiters of their own lives, conservatives heeded the call for more options and took it as a demand that women reject marriage and family en masse.
Alex Cooper is not a feminist flag bearer. She is also not a newfound trader. She is extraordinary in many ways – rich, successful and beautiful. But when it comes to her marriage and pregnancy, the only thing worth mentioning is how completely unremarkable her choices are.
(Further reading: Everyone is now a conspiracy theorist)
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