MAGA's sad effort to make "trad" sexy

[marmar]

I read the right-wing women’s magazine sex issue so you don’t have to
Evie magazine, conservatism's answer to Cosmo, tried to make "trad" sexy. It failed

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published May 8, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) "Body count? One. Orgasms? Countless,” reads the caption over a photograph of a woman’s crotch, which is bare except for some strategically-placed flower petals. Another illustration shows a woman’s hand resting on a man’s naked back. The awkwardly-worded motto reads “Make him hard, not his life.”

No, this isn’t your mother’s conservative Christianity. But in many ways, Evie Magazine is selling something worse.

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Evie Magazine is the latest iteration of these long-standing efforts to sell fundamentalism to young people with “hip” packaging. The young women’s magazine has admittedly been more successful than its predecessors, mostly due to what seems like a large infusion of cash that allows both its website and print edition to ape the expensive look of its worldly competitors, like Teen Vogue or Cosmopolitan. In its seven years of existence, Evie has strived to escape the cringeworthy reputation of evangelical youth culture by featuring scantily-clad models and even risqué content — which is supposed to be for married women only.

But even by these standards, their newly released “Sex” issue is surprising. At first blush, it’s hard to even believe it’s meant to push traditional gender roles on women. The cover features a bride in wedding-night lingerie, and the contents are positively NC-17: illustrations of naked couples copulating, how-to manuals for performing oral sex, bodice ripper-style descriptions of sexual intercourse and full-page photographs of models in suggestive poses, like eating cherries or drinking open-mouthed from a hose. Old-school religious conservatives would be appalled, and in fact, many complained on Evie’s Instagram page that the magazine, which is published by Gabriel Hugoboom and Brittany Martinez, a husband and wife team, had gone too far.

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Evie’s “Sex” issue is not a useful guide on the art of, well, sex. Instead, it’s propaganda, meant to sell a young, inexperienced audience on the idea that being a submissive wife in a traditional marriage is an erotically-charged and sexually-fulfilling lifestyle. The magazine is clever about concealing its agenda. The words “Christian” or “religious” are carefully avoided in favor of euphemisms like “traditional.” Instead of scolding the reader about the alleged evils of premarital sex, abstaining until marriage is simply (and falsely) presented as the cultural norm. The use of terms like “men” and “women” is scant; the magazine mostly refers to “husbands” and “wives,” as if sexual contact outside of heterosexual matrimony is so rare as to barely rate a mention. In 21st-century America, it’s exceedingly rare for women to be virgins on their wedding day. But inside the “Sex” issue, it’s just assumed that a woman’s wedding night will be her sexual initiation. ................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/05/08/i-read-the-right-wing-womens-magazine-sex-issue-so-you-dont-have-to/