Young conservative women build an alternative to the manosphere

While many new conservative creators don’t have much of a focus on the specifics of electoral politics, others are more explicitly aligned with the Republican Party.

The Conservateur, a small digital publication, was founded in 2020 by a group of former Fox News and Republican staffers. While publishes infrequently, its political views and connections within the party have resulted in impressive access to prominent conservative women. It has run interviews with Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt about her family, spoke to Cooper about her wedding, and carried pieces on Lara Trump’s workout and fitness fashion line.

Founder Jayme Franklin told Semafor that she launched the publication as a corrective to women’s magazines that have gone too far to the left.

“I grew up with fashion magazines stacked next to my bed. And I would open these magazines after Trump got elected and it was so off-putting. Not just politically — I feel like the message that they have for women, I just really disagreed with it,” Franklin said.

But like their counterparts in the “manosphere,” many of the new conservative media personalities appealing to younger women are not explicitly partisan or involved in electoral politics or wonky policy fights.

Cooper said that she didn’t grow up with conservative media, but started discovering right-leaning influencers in her later teenage years as she became increasingly alienated from classmates in LA who expressed views far to her left. While Cooper often talks about politics on her YouTube show, she is more interested in the personalities behind politics and how it impacts culture. (The most constant thread running through her show is “cultural trends,” she said.).

That mix wasn’t dissimilar to what Kraus, a new friend of Cooper’s, tends to focus on. When Semafor spoke with Kraus last year for her first profile with a major news organization, she also emphasized that although she was increasingly covering politics, she was more interested in the social scene than the nuts and bolts of policy, and if people wanted to consume that content they should read news outlets like Politico.

“I really focus more on humanizing them in a way that interests me,” Kraus told Semafor at the time. “I don’t feel like it’s my job to cover everything, and I’m not good at that. I know my limits.”

Since the election, media critics have credited (or blamed) Donald Trump’s continued dominance to the newly-emergent “manosphere,” a loosely-affiliated network of podcasters, comedians, and thinkers who have found large, captive male audiences for anti-establishment content and views online. But as Joe Bernstein pointed out in The New York Times, that genre of men’s media has a long history. The “manosphere” that rocked the 2024 election may have featured some names that people over 40 hadn’t really heard of. But their freewheeling style and ideology would be familiar to the generation that made shock jocks like Don Imus and Howard Stern popular in the 90s.

As conservative talk radio and Fox emerged in the 1990s and 2000s, there were other conservative women in television and radio that understood that a large portion of their audience were women. Dr. Laura Schlessinger had a large radio audience among middle-aged women who she spoke to about political and cultural issues, while The View cast Elisabeth Hasselbeck to serve as the show’s conservative voice. There’s a long list of well-known conservative women who worked as political pundits and appeared on Fox and in political news magazines.

But none of those personalities reached younger women at the scale that this generation’s commentators do today. Both Cooper and Clark’s podcasts have put up numbers rivaling the biggest podcasts and YouTube shows in the country. Reed-Kraus, who writes for a slightly older audience, has had one of the most popular independent newsletters in the country for years.

Sitting in that basement near Union Square, I was struck by how many young womenwere there to see Cooper. This was a far cry from the male-dominated conservative media spaces I have spent time in, like the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, which always seemed to attract a lopsided number of younger male attendees. After Cooper’s appearance in New York, users on her very active Reddit page summarized the event, seeming more interested in the details of her personal family life and her views on celebrities and other conservative media personalities than her political positions.

While some of what stars like Cooper talk about is expressly partisan, some of the content also calls back to an older, more traditional kind of women’s media.

The generation of women’s blogs and publications that grew out of the 2000s, like Jezebel, Vice’s Broadly, and New York’s The Cut, among others, brought contemporary feminism to mainstream audiences and acted as a counterweight to legacy commercial magazines aimed at women.

“Traditional women’s media, from the 70s and 80s until riot grrrl, was culturally conservative whether or not we would call it that,” Stella Bugbee, the former Cut editor who now runs the Style Section at The New York Times, told Semafor. “Magazines that focused on how to get a man, how to lose weight — that’s Cosmo. What we experienced in the last 15 years, with The Cut and Jezebel and Bustle, to a certain extent were the aberrations.”

Indeed, the backlash to feminist values that these creators believe are reflected in mainstream media is part of their success. In some ways, their new-media content is a callback to the long-ago era that these legacy women’s publications left behind.

“The fact that these creators present themselves as having these heterodox views is, I think, what is really appealing to the young women who are consuming this content,” Janfaza said. “And when I hear young women tell me that they follow or subscribe or regularly watch or listen to any of these creators, the reasons why they say they do is because they like the fact that they’re pushing against the grain and giving them an alternative perspective that they’re not really seeing in mainstream media.”