Earlier this month, Katie Miller launched her new podcast with a specific origin myth. Miller, a former Trump administration official and wife of Stephen Miller, declared that by creating a lifestyle podcast for conservative women, she was filling a hole in the media ecosystem.
“For years, I’ve seen that there isn’t a place for conservative women to gather online,” Miller said in a video posted to X. Her caption added, “As a mom of three young kids, who eats healthy, goes to the gym, works full time, I know there isn’t a podcast for women like myself.”
This claim happens to be deeply untrue. Conservative women have arguably never had more places to gather online and talk about their lifestyle concerns — especially when it comes to motherhood and wellness. This media ecosystem has recently been dubbed the “womanosphere,” and it is booming.
Conservatives can go to Evie, the right-wing answer to Cosmopolitan, which has attracted plentiful mainstream media attention. They can get their celebrity gossip with a healthy strain of reactionary conspiracy theories from Candace Owens. They can get anti-feminist cultural commentary from YouTubers like Brett Cooper. They can get MAHA-inflected health care advice from Alex Clark’s Culture Apothecary talk show. They can hear anti-trans sports commentary on Riley Gaines’s Gaines for Girls. They can watch the agrarian fantasies of tradwives like Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman. And they can listen to conservative women’s lifestyle podcasts, like Christian influencer Allie Beth Stuckey’s Relatable. Many of these women, by dint of their jobs as full-time content creators and podcasters, are also working moms, as they are happy to discuss at length in their content.
Still, the sense that Miller is operating from a defensive crouch, grabbing for access to a feminine frivolity she feels she has been denied, suffuses her new show, The Katie Miller Podcast. “We’re gonna do something for all the girls out there,” Miller tells her guest, conservative sportscaster Sage Steele, on the second episode before the beauty segment of their interview. “Conservative women never get asked these questions,” Miller adds. It’s hard to know what exclusion Miller is referring to exactly (what is Ivanka Trump’s brand if not being a conservative woman with beauty secrets?), but the idea that it might be true seems necessary to Miller’s conception of her project.
In the womanosphere, the prizes are stranger and more feminine — the hard-won right to do a Get Ready With Me and tell the world all about the beauty properties of beef tallow.
She’s not alone in that. A transgressive posture is one of the characteristics of the womanosphere: an implication that they are saying hard truths and asking tough questions about things the liberal elites don’t want women to know, that they are reclaiming their due from the cultural gatekeepers who didn’t want them to have it. All conservative media these days tends to operate under similar assumptions, but in the womanosphere, the prizes are stranger and more feminine — the hard-won right to do a Get Ready With Me and tell the world all about the beauty properties of beef tallow. (Sage Steele is a fan.)
As the womanosphere booms, it’s taken on an odd, fraught position. Republicans claim that they are the party free from liberal scolds, that will let hot girls be hot, but also that elites have gatekept them away from all that is frivolous and fun about girlishness. Listening to (or watching) Miller’s podcast isn’t interesting because of the beauty secrets divulged; it’s revealing because of the glimpse it gives us into Republicans’ current vexed relationship with femininity.
Conservatives and the grievance industry
To give Miller her due, it’s true that there are few spaces these days for conservative women in traditional media, like old-school glossy magazines. Lifestyle media for women has long been inherently conservative-leaning, with its focus on dieting and man-catching and home-building, but the post-Jezebel generation of women’s media took on an explicitly feminist lens. The 2010s saw an explosion of progressive so-called ladyblogs, like The Hairpin, The Cut, and Slate’s Double X, while magazines like Teen Vogue took on a left-wing activist perspective. Even the flagship Vogue, which generally dedicates a cover to the sitting first lady, declined to feature Melania Trump during Donald Trump’s first term and, so far, his second as well.
The emergent conservative womanosphere, like its manosphere counterpart, has been largely coming up outside the boundaries of traditional media, among podcasters and YouTubers and lifestyle influencers, where the money for high-performing contributors is better and the editorial oversight is lower. Miller’s podcast fits neatly into the flourishing new ecosystem.
The womanosphere is not the only part of the conservator ecosystem to embrace an underdog narrative and build a mythology around the idea of liberal oppression.
Part of the worldbuilding of this universe is to claim that the rest of the universe does not exist: There is no womanosphere, according to these influencers. There is no feasible way to build a lucrative career out of being an anti-woke woman, and failing to land a feature in Vogue is censorship at its finest.
The womanosphere is not the only part of the conservator ecosystem to embrace an underdog narrative and build a mythology around the idea of liberal oppression. The tendency has been so widespread among Trump Republicans in his second term that in February, the pseudonymous blogger Scarlet gave it a name: the “soy right.”
“The Soy Right is being oppressed and they want you to know it,” she wrote. “They’re scared to take the subway, they’re offended that you called them white or cis, they’re upset that you didn’t think they were cool in high school, they want to call the manager because there’s less boobies in video games. … While the right is winning cultural and political victories nonstop lately, that’s not enough. They also need you to like them. Why don’t you like them?!”
These grievances power the worldview of Miller and her ilk, and gives them a reason to create their podcasts and YouTube channels and magazines. They’re calling the manager because they don’t think they personally have gotten enough credit for being conventionally hot, raising kids, and having high-powered careers. Creating a new podcast is a way for Miller to give herself that credit. Meanwhile, harping on the false idea that there’s a hole in the marketplace allows her podcast to take on a sense of heightened importance. If the world were fair, Miller implies, someone else would have asked her to describe her beauty routine a long time ago.
The womanosphere vs. the manosphere
This idea that Republican women are never given credit for their beauty stands uneasily next to recent Republican attempts to claim the existence of beautiful women as a win for their own side. Over the past two years, the right has variously claimed Sydney Sweeney, Hawk Tuah Girl, and sorority rush videos as cultural phenomena that are by their nature Republican-coded and surely infuriate the left. (The left shows no sign of being infuriated, but that doesn’t stop the narrative.) The story goes that the left is too woke, too PC, too ideologically hamstrung to celebrate the existence of conventionally attractive white women, so the right must step in.
In the manosphere, the obsession with hot girls shades into raunch culture, a performative, overwhelming ocean of sleaze in which the supposed celebration of hot girls also runs right alongside an attitude of degradation. The nascent womanosphere, however, tends towards purity culture, an obsession with Christian virtue and righteousness that is the mirror image of raunch culture.
Miller makes much of her status as a wife and mother. Her fellow womanosphere podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey calls out listeners for watching movies about “hot and heavy sinful romance” rather than focusing on “the Biblical marriage that God has called you into.” Brittany Martinez, the founder of Evie magazine, says she started her publication after watching the traditional glossies “encourage casual sex and lie to readers about its emotional ramifications.”
As I’ve discussed extensively before, while purity culture and raunch culture might appear to oppose one another, they’re two sides of the same coin, united by a shared premise that women’s sexuality should always exist in service to men. They are also a trap: The raunchy cool girls get called sluts. The respected pure women get called prudes. The only way to play the game and win is to somehow be both raunchy and pure at the same time, an impossible status that was only ever held, very briefly, by a young Britney Spears before the world crashed down around her.
The womanosphere is animated by a sense of a broken promise: that these women were told they would receive attention and credit that never came. The Katie Miller Podcast says it’s an attempt to rectify that broken promise. In reality, however, it’s just one more entry into a crowded conservative media landscape, powered by the same old warped sense of victimization.
