While scrolling on TikTok or Instagram, you might have seen a viral video about “the era before everyone got veneers” or “the era when no one had the same face.”
It’s relatable. The increased access to plastic surgery and injectables, the pressure to look a certain way — it’s something many women have come up against. It’s exhausting. No wonder the videos got millions of views and likes.
But what you might not have noticed was who was behind those videos — and what their goal was in posting them. Tucked away on the side of the viral post, you can see the small, pink logo of a magazine called “Evie.” One that, before a recent rebrand, looked suspiciously like the logo for Elle Magazine.
But unlike Elle, Evie’s content is marked by a hunger for a time before women’s magazines — to hear its founder Brittany Hugobloom tell it — became “anti-male, anti-family, and even anti-women in some ways.”
Part of this, she told the Post Millennial in a podcast, is because in the 2010s, women’s magazines “kicked out a lot of those straight white men, and I think that a lot of straight white men were some of the best writers.”
Um, okay.
Unlike those apparently man-hating screeds like Teen Vogue and Cosmo, Evie is a magazine that aims, in Hugoboom’s own words, to answer the question: “what if there were a conservative Cosmo?”
“There really wasn’t a place for women who want style tips, and want to learn more about their femininity, and who also have good, timeless values and love men to read a magazine anywhere,” she told The Post Millennial in an interview.
“So we launched Evie.”
Now, Hugobloom says, the magazine’s posts get “around 200 million views a month,”
“It’s kind of exploded the last year, especially,” she said.
She’s not wrong. Evie Magazine’s Instagram account has more than 360,000 followers, and its TikTok has cracked 100,000. Over on YouTube, they’ve got more than 50,000 suscibers.
Part of that appears to be due those viral, short form videos — ones that turn something as relatable as ever-changing beauty standards into evidence for their thesis that we might want to consider turning back the clock on women’s liberation.
People who discover Evie through those viral posts might not realize where the initial soft entry point ultimately leads.
That’s why I’m going to tell you about it — and about whose money pads its founder’s pockets.
Here’s what Evie Magazine actually publishes
Flipping through Evie’s website, you’ll find some genuinely surreal articles.
One suggests popstar Sabrina Carpenter might not have needed a restraining order against her stalker had she voted for Spencer Pratt in the LA mayoral race. Another piece asserts that “the era of pretending women didn’t want to be skinny is over.”
They’ve got an article about people who have apparently turned late-term abortions into a “vile fetish,” written entirely based on a reddit post, which the piece claims reflects “abortion acceptance” gone too far.
That article starts like this: “Our culture celebrates lots of self-indulgent and hedonistic attitudes: there’s body positivity and fat-acceptance, and the acceptance of mental illness and ‘neurodivergency.’ While that’s all harmful, the damage these acceptances cause is not as severe as that caused by the celebration of sexual “liberation,” pornography, and the de-stigmatization of any and all fetishes.”
Yeah, I’m going to need a source for all that.
The magazine’s tradwife tendencies are even more apparent in the articles it publishes about sex. Their “ultimate guide to quickies” has a revealing disclaimer right off the bat.
“Disclaimer: This article is intended for readers 18 and older. It contains explicit adult content and is intended for married women for educational purposes only. Reader discretion is advised.”
Because apparently, non-married people are not the intended audience for sex tips. The 1700s called — they want their regressive attitudes back.
Based on Evie’s publications, however, they won’t give up those attitudes easily.
Beyond boasting about how Evie “didn’t take a hard stance on COVID” and “didn’t push” the vaccine, Evie’s founder is proud to say that her magazine was “MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) before it was a thing”
Evie’s cover girl in 2024 was an influencer known as Ballerina Farm, a Juilliard-trained ballerina who gave up on dancing to live on a farm and raise her nine children, where she and her husband sold raw milk (that is, until 2025, when they switched to selling pasteurized milk “due to regulatory requirements, operational complexity, and economic considerations”).
Evie even sold a “raw milkmaid” dress, which the magazine described on social media described as made with “100 percent feminine energy” and inspired by “hardworking dairymaids of 17th-century Europe.” (I swear to God I didn’t see this until after I wrote my 1700s joke).
Anyway, you get the idea.
Dr. Carmen Celestini, a lecturer at the University of Waterloo who studies religion, extremism, conspiracy theories and politics in North America, told me Evie “glamorizes the submissive right wing ‘traditional gender roles’ and values, making them not just more mainstream, but available to those who are not online.”
“Much like the (right-wing) movement positioning young white men as victims who are oppressed by progressives, the woke, feminism etc, Evie and tradwives position young women as being victims to the same ‘oppressors,’” Celestini explained.
“Men need to become more “manly” (and) vote for a strongman politician to save manhood and the nation. Women need to vote for a strongman politician to return to their roles as pretty, vapid, baby bearers and save the nation/whiteness.”
Evie Magazine’s ties to Peter Thiel
While all of this is worrying enough, there’s one more cherry we haven’t mentioned that rests on top of this toxic tradwife pie — Peter Thiel’s wallet.
Brittany Hugoboom and her husband Gabriel also own a wellness app for tracking menstrual cycles, 28. The app, according to its website, is “on a mission to demystify and destigmatize menstrual health by enabling women to embrace their feminine nature, not fight it.” It talks about how women are “saying goodbye to hormonal birth control and discovering their cycle, often for the first time.”
“More than anything, it's a call to reclaim control of our bodies, in the most natural way possible,” it claims.
The app is backed by $3.2 million is seed funding from none other than real-life supervillain Peter Thiel’s Thiel Capital.
Yes, that’s the same Peter Thiel behind Palantir, a surveillance giant that works with ICE, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Israeli Military. Oh, and it’s gotten contracts from the Canadian government’s department of National Defence.
It’s also the same Peter Thiel who wrote in a 2009 essay that things went downhill in America after women got the right to vote.
In short, definitely the kind of guy you want have any ties to an app that tracks your menstrual cycle. Not.
Meanwhile, the people whose pockets are flush with Thiel’s cash continue to publish a magazine that regularly pushes for women to regress to a time when they couldn’t, say, learn about sex before marriage.
It’s all raising several red flags.
As for the unsuspecting women on Tiktok and Instagram, well, they’re just one scroll away from a soft entry point that’s more than happy to send them careening down that tradwife pipeline.
Hopefully this article serves as a speedbump.
