The Right Kind of Pregnancy |
Conservatives should have been pleased when Alex Cooper of Call Her Daddy announced her pregnancy this month. A famous blonde woman has married a man and will bear a child within the tender bonds of matrimony; isn’t that the ideal? Not quite, according to the Institute for Family Studies, a right-wing think tank. On X, IFS fellow Brad Wilcox called Cooper a “bad actor.” Another blog post on the IFS website said the podcaster “has some atoning to do” because, through podcast episodes and interviews, she has promoted “hook-up culture.” Now that she is married and pregnant, she “has opened the trap door and escaped at least some of the consequences of her lies,” a “luxury” beyond the reach of her eager young fans, the post adds. “Do not listen to Alex Cooper. For anything,” says Allie Beth Stuckey of the Blaze TV, because “your heart will be broken and your body will be used.” A piece in Evie Magazine blames the Cooper tale on “modern feminism,” which tells women they’ll face “no consequences” for slutting up their 20s. Alas, most of us aren’t “exceptionally successful, gorgeous, alluring women with influence,” so we will pay a heavier price for promiscuity.
As a veteran of the aughts culture wars, I find this amusing, if bleak. The right spent decades and millions of dollars urging young people to avoid sex and cohabitation until marriage, which didn’t work. By late 2006, 95 percent of all Americans had sex before marriage. Instead of giving up, conservatives are inventing new ways to insult women specifically: Hello, poor ugly female, please settle early and have kids with whatever you marry or you will be unhappy. By placing the burden of marriage and childrearing primarily on young women, they’re issuing a threat, too. Men don’t want tainted women, so if a girl wants love and children, she should stop listening to sirens like Alex Cooper. Hook-up culture invites “STIs, unplanned........