Can You Believe This Podcaster Got Pregnant Without Even Considering How That Would Make Republicans Feel?
'Call Her Daddy' host Alex Cooper is living an entirely normal life trajectory and that is just not okay with them.
Over the last few years, the American Right has desperately tried to will into existence a world that they feel sufficiently punishes women for their sins. A world pretty much entirely divorced from the reality the rest of us have been living in for the past several decades.
The story they tell themselves is this: Men are exclusively interested in marrying young, Christian, virgins and all of the women who spend their prime years having fun, doing whatever they want, doing whoever they want, and selfishly prioritizing their lives and careers over marriage and kids will be ultimately slapped in the face with that reality and find themselves alone and miserable, shaking their fists at the sky and crying “Oh sweet lord, why did I let feminism lead me down this wretched path? Why oh why did I believe their lies?!”
This narrative is meant to serve the dual functions of soothing the wounded egos of men who have felt rejected by these women and, perhaps even more importantly, scaring young women into avoiding sex and marrying young.
The problem, of course, is that these tragic figures keep refusing to exist, so this really only works on people with extremely limited social circles.
Earlier this week, Alex Cooper, the host of the wildly popular podcast Call Her Daddy, announced that she was pregnant, after having been married to her husband, film producer Matt Kaplan, for two years. You wouldn’t think this would particularly bother conservatives, given their obsession with babies and whathaveyou, but they have been losing their damn minds over it for the last few days.
Why are they upset? Because “She promoted HOOK-UP CULTURE! And told women to have and enjoy sex and do whatever they want! And now she thinks she can just go and get married and have a baby? The hypocrisy of it all!”
Yes. Woman has completely normal life trajectory of dating in her 20s and then getting married and having a kid in her 30s, news at 10.
The problem for conservatives is that this upends the narrative they’ve been working so hard to build, so now they’re all putting out these hot takes about how Cooper is “lying” to women by making them think that they can do the same thing that she and a hundred million other women have done.
From the Institute for Family Studies:
Despite more data than ever on the damage of the hook-up culture, Cooper has gotten rich promoting it. And now she has opened the trap door and escaped at least some of the consequences of her lies by doing the very thing she profits from encouraging women not to do: getting married and becoming pregnant right away. These two things are luxuries for young, beautiful, educated, and wealthy women still in their fertile years. But unfortunately for the countless women who follow her advice, when the bill comes, they will have nothing but heartache and regret.
Surely if they keep saying it, it will become true! And, over at Evie, the weird, sad, right-wing Cosmo, they have pretty much the same take.
To believe that Alex is a hypocrite is to misunderstand the ways of modern feminism, though. It may seem like she's talking about a lifestyle on Call Her Daddy that she doesn't actually believe in, let alone walk herself, but that's not quite what's happening here. Alex Cooper is actually living out the perfect feminist dream. The only problem is, that dream is not nearly as attainable for everyday women as they would like to believe.
Right-wing podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey had the same complaint, accusing Cooper of secretly wanting a traditional life for herself while hypocritically telling her audience to do what they want, even going so far as to point out that Cooper’s very own parents are still married. Huh! It’s almost like these crazy liberals just think that everyone should do whatever is best for them!
The article from the Institute of Family Studies bemoaned the fact that “liberal elites” sometimes get married and have kids, despite not demanding that everyone else do that as well — a strangely common complaint from the Right these days.
It is subversive, and it’s a part of a broader trend wherein political and social elites aggressively push anti-marriage and anti-family agendas, even as they increasingly return to these core institutions in their own lives and benefit from the stability that marriage and family life provide.
So what is the rule here now? Only conservatives can get married and have babies? Or is it some kind of categorical imperative thing in which it’s just plain unethical to get married unless you would will it for everyone else, regardless of what they want for themselves?
Weirdly enough, former Ron DeSantis spokesperson Christina Pushaw is once again the voice of reason on this one, writing on Xitter:
The reality is that most women in Alex Cooper's target audience (feminist, liberal, college-educated, upper middle-class Americans) WILL in fact follow the same path, get married at 30 or so after years of casual dating, and have 1 or 2 kids in their 30s. That's what the data says. In all likelihood, these women will not be rejected, punished in the market, or forever-alone (unless they choose to be). Because we live in a secular society, and they can marry secular/liberal men of the same socioeconomic status. This is absolutely the norm for that SES in 2026.
It may be comforting on some level for social conservatives to imagine there is such a thing as a Karma that will deliver material consequences to them, but that is not reality. That's cope. At the same time, a lot of people (men and women) who live by socially conservative morality, do end up alone through no fault of their own... it's just that's how the world works.I say this as a social conservative, who completely disagrees with the content on Cooper's show, her decisions in her younger years, and hookup culture overall. I find it degrading to women and men alike. But, as one of my mutuals pointed out, social conservative values are not some kind of life-hack to guarantee happiness in relationships or in life.
I hate to say it, but I actually could not have said it better myself. She is entirely, startlingly correct — which is impressive given how startlingly wrong she usually is. I mean, it should be obvious, given the fact that left-wing men exist and are not, as far as anyone can tell, lining up to exclusively marry 19-year-old homeschooled Republican virgins, but this seems to be beyond their ken.
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The fact is, conservatives are the only ones out here “lying” to anyone by telling them “follow our moral precepts and you will be guaranteed happiness” — largely because they can’t think of another way to sell those precepts to people who don’t believe in them. They think if they just keep telling women “You’ll be miserable unless you do what we say!” that they will get everyone to fall in line, but this only works on people who are entirely out of touch with reality and who, again, have extremely limited social circles.
These people love to talk about how men supposedly don’t want to be with women who have had previous partners, and yet it does not seem to register with them that those women very likely do not want fuck all to do with that kind of man. I do not know of a single woman, anywhere, who is going around saying “Oh boy, I really wish I didn’t have a good time in my 20s (or 30s, or 40s, and so on) so that I could have settled down with a judgmental fuck really early on!”
It should be obvious to anyone living in the world that people want all kinds of different things for their lives and that what makes one person happy isn’t going to do it for another. There may very well be men out there who only want to marry homeschooled Republican virgins, but I sure as hell don’t want to spend my life with one. Why would I? That sounds like an actual nightmare.
May I just point out, by the way, that absolutely no one has more regressive ideas about women’s sexuality than incels — who, by definition, are not doing too well in the romance department. And let’s not forget about all of the MAGA Republicans who are always complaining that no one will date them because of how much they love Donald Trump.
Quite frankly, if conservatives are going to worry about anyone being “alone and miserable,” they should worry about their own damn selves. We’re doing just fine, please and thank you.
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All of this just makes me so sad. I want these young men getting swept up into the manosphere just to get the fuck offline. Pursue some hobbies, join a running club, go to a goddamn happy hour, go to a local bar and get drunk and flirt with women. All of this shit reads like people who have never ever in their lives simply talked to other human beings, face to face. It's as though they view "women" as living in some online terrarium and they are desperate to figure out how to care and feed theirs once they bring it home from the virtual pet store. And that's not how any of this works. Goddamn it, go touch grass, you fucking weirdos.
“The article from the Institute of Family Studies bemoaned the fact that ‘liberal elites’ sometimes get married and have kids, despite not demanding that everyone else do that as well — a strangely common complaint from the Right these days.”
It’s the authoritarian, top-down, dominance-hierarchical mindset, so inculcated into these people that they can’t even conceive of breaking out of it.