What Katie Miller’s new podcast explains about the womanosphere

Earlier this month, Katie Miller launched her new podcast with a selected origin fantasy. Miller, a former Trump administration official and spouse of Stephen Miller, declared that by creating a way of life podcast for conservative ladies, she was filling a gap within the media ecosystem.“For years, I’ve seen that there isn’t a spot for conservative ladies to assemble on-line,” Miller mentioned in a video posted to X. Her caption added, “As a mother of three younger children, who eats wholesome, goes to the gymnasium, works full time, I do know there isn’t a podcast for girls like myself.”This declare occurs to be deeply unfaithful. Conservative ladies have arguably by no means had extra locations to assemble on-line and discuss their life-style considerations — particularly on the subject of motherhood and wellness. This media ecosystem has not too long ago been dubbed the “womanosphere,” and it’s booming.Conservatives can go to Evie, the right-wing reply to Cosmopolitan, which has attracted plentiful mainstream media consideration. They will get their celeb gossip with a wholesome pressure of reactionary conspiracy theories from Candace Owens. They will get anti-feminist cultural commentary from YouTubers like Brett Cooper. They will get MAHA-inflected well being care recommendation from Alex Clark’s Tradition Apothecary speak present. They will hear anti-trans sports activities commentary on Riley Gaines’s Gaines for Women. They will watch the agrarian fantasies of tradwives like Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman. And so they can hearken to conservative ladies’s life-style podcasts, like Christian influencer Allie Beth Stuckey’s Relatable. Many of those ladies, by dint of their jobs as full-time content material creators and podcasters, are additionally working mothers, as they’re pleased to debate at size of their content material.Nonetheless, the sense that Miller is working from a defensive crouch, grabbing for entry to a female frivolity she feels she has been denied, suffuses her new present, The Katie Miller Podcast. “We’re gonna do one thing for all the women on the market,” Miller tells her visitor, conservative sportscaster Sage Steele, on the second episode earlier than the wonder section of their interview. “Conservative ladies by no means get requested these questions,” Miller provides. It’s onerous to know what exclusion Miller is referring to precisely (what’s Ivanka Trump’s model if not being a conservative girl with magnificence secrets and techniques?), however the concept that it may be true appears essential to Miller’s conception of her challenge.Within the womanosphere, the prizes are stranger and extra female — the hard-won proper to do a Get Prepared With Me and inform the world all concerning the magnificence properties of beef tallow.She’s not alone in that. A transgressive posture is likely one of the traits of the womanosphere: an implication that they’re saying onerous truths and asking robust questions on issues the liberal elites don’t need ladies to know, that they’re reclaiming their due from the cultural gatekeepers who didn’t need them to have it. All conservative media lately tends to function below related assumptions, however within the womanosphere, the prizes are stranger and extra female — the hard-won proper to do a Get Prepared With Me and inform the world all concerning the magnificence properties of beef tallow. (Sage Steele is a fan.)Because the womanosphere booms, it’s taken on an odd, fraught place. Republicans declare that they’re the celebration free from liberal scolds, that can let scorching women be scorching, but in addition that elites have gatekept them away from all that’s frivolous and enjoyable about girlishness. Listening to (or watching) Miller’s podcast isn’t fascinating due to the wonder secrets and techniques divulged; it’s revealing due to the glimpse it offers us into Republicans’ present vexed relationship with femininity.Conservatives and the grievance industryTo give Miller her due, it’s true that there are few areas lately for conservative ladies in conventional media, like old-school shiny magazines. Life-style media for girls has lengthy been inherently conservative-leaning, with its concentrate on weight-reduction plan and man-catching and home-building, however the post-Jezebel technology of girls’s media took on an explicitly feminist lens. The 2010s noticed an explosion of progressive so-called ladyblogs, like The Hairpin, The Lower, and Slate’s Double X, whereas magazines like Teen Vogue took on a left-wing activist perspective. Even the flagship Vogue, which usually dedicates a canopy to the sitting first girl, declined to characteristic Melania Trump throughout Donald Trump’s first time period and, up to now, his second as properly.The emergent conservative womanosphere, like its manosphere counterpart, has been largely developing outdoors the boundaries of conventional media, amongst podcasters and YouTubers and life-style influencers, the place the cash for high-performing contributors is best and the editorial oversight is decrease. Miller’s podcast suits neatly into the flourishing new ecosystem.The womanosphere isn’t the one a part of the conservator ecosystem to embrace an underdog narrative and construct a mythology across the thought of liberal oppression.A part of the worldbuilding of this universe is to say that the remainder of the universe doesn’t exist: There isn’t any womanosphere, in accordance with these influencers. There isn’t any possible approach to construct a profitable profession out of being an anti-woke girl, and failing to land a characteristic in Vogue is censorship at its most interesting.The womanosphere isn’t the one a part of the conservator ecosystem to embrace an underdog narrative and construct a mythology across the thought of liberal oppression. The tendency has been so widespread amongst Trump Republicans in his second time period that in February, the pseudonymous blogger Scarlet gave it a reputation: the “soy proper.”“The Soy Proper is being oppressed they usually need you to realize it,” she wrote. “They’re scared to take the subway, they’re offended that you simply known as them white or cis, they’re upset that you simply didn’t suppose they have been cool in highschool, they need to name the supervisor as a result of there’s much less boobies in video video games. … Whereas the appropriate is profitable cultural and political victories nonstop recently, that’s not sufficient. Additionally they want you to love them. Why don’t you want them?!”These grievances energy the worldview of Miller and her ilk, and offers them a purpose to create their podcasts and YouTube channels and magazines. They’re calling the supervisor as a result of they don’t suppose they personally have gotten sufficient credit score for being conventionally scorching, elevating children, and having high-powered careers. Creating a brand new podcast is a manner for Miller to provide herself that credit score. In the meantime, harping on the false concept that there’s a gap within the market permits her podcast to tackle a way of heightened significance. If the world have been truthful, Miller implies, another person would have requested her to explain her magnificence routine a very long time in the past.The womanosphere vs. the manosphereThis concept that Republican ladies are by no means given credit score for his or her magnificence stands uneasily subsequent to current Republican makes an attempt to say the existence of lovely ladies as a win for their very own aspect. Over the previous two years, the appropriate has variously claimed Sydney Sweeney, Hawk Tuah Lady, and sorority rush movies as cultural phenomena which are by their nature Republican-coded and certainly infuriate the left. (The left exhibits no signal of being infuriated, however that doesn’t cease the narrative.) The story goes that the left is just too woke, too PC, too ideologically hamstrung to have fun the existence of conventionally engaging white ladies, so the appropriate should step in.Within the manosphere, the obsession with scorching women shades into raunch tradition, a performative, overwhelming ocean of sleaze through which the supposed celebration of scorching women additionally runs proper alongside an angle of degradation. The nascent womanosphere, nonetheless, tends in the direction of purity tradition, an obsession with Christian advantage and righteousness that’s the mirror picture of raunch tradition.Miller makes a lot of her standing as a spouse and mom. Her fellow womanosphere podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey calls out listeners for watching films about “scorching and heavy sinful romance” quite than specializing in “the Biblical marriage that God has known as you into.” Brittany Martinez, the founding father of Evie journal, says she began her publication after watching the normal glossies “encourage informal intercourse and mislead readers about its emotional ramifications.”As I’ve mentioned extensively earlier than, whereas purity tradition and raunch tradition would possibly seem to oppose each other, they’re two sides of the identical coin, united by a shared premise that ladies’s sexuality ought to all the time exist in service to males. They’re additionally a entice: The raunchy cool women get known as sluts. The revered pure ladies get known as prudes. The one approach to play the sport and win is to in some way be each raunchy and pure on the similar time, an unattainable standing that was solely ever held, very briefly, by a younger Britney Spears earlier than the world crashed down round her.The womanosphere is animated by a way of a damaged promise: that these ladies have been advised they’d obtain consideration and credit score that by no means got here. The Katie Miller Podcast says it’s an try to rectify that damaged promise. In actuality, nonetheless, it’s only one extra entry right into a crowded conservative media panorama, powered by the identical previous warped sense of victimization.