Angel Is a Centerfold
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Spreadathoners,
You know that horror-movie thing where the girl spends 90 minutes of screen time firebombing and kickboxing one demon, only to realize that a whole other bad guy has been lurking out there, lying in wait the entire time? Yeah, we don’t either. As firmly established in this newsletter, we are not horror-movie people. (Except for, like, The Witch—Black Phillip will forever be a work of art.) But lately we get the feeling that maybe we’ve been distracted by one threat—this creepy-crawly manosphere that we and everyone else can’t stop talking about—while failing to seriously contemplate its lurking counterpart. And now that counterpart is here and, sweet jesus, it seems like it might be f*cking big. We’re talking about the conservative “womanoverse” (now accepting your ideas for a better name: ladyverse? shrewscape? femosphere? doublexstravaganza?), a sphere of influence in which the retrograde femininity of butter churning #tradwives overlaps with the insultingly named “MAHA Moms” and raw-milk swilling Goop OGs who helped get Trump elected and RFK Jr. appointed; the Gen Zers who are calling for a return to traditional values and gender roles; and a slice of womankind that for more than a decade we “media elites” naively believed had been all but wiped out: those who still believe that feminism translates as “man hater.” If this ’verse sounds confusing and sloppily affiliated, that’s because it is. If it doesn’t sound exactly new, also true. After all, just a few weeks back, wasn’t it your Spreaditors who were telling you about the rise of a conservative “womanosphere,” as covered by Semafor? And didn’t we talk to
about the launch of Peter Thiel-linked Evie magazine, a publication geared toward this very demo, way back in November? Yet somehow it wasn’t until we were enjoying our bagels and lox with Sunday’s Styles section that the possibility of the womanoverse as a real movement—a galvanizing political entity sweeping young female voters under its tent, rather than just a fringe segment in bad makeup—suddenly seemed a cause for real worry.Here was Evie mag cofounder Brittany Hugoboom, looking like a Kardashian cosplaying Ballerina Farm and talking about founding “conservative Cosmo” because, writes Katie J.M. Baker, “by the late 2010s, many women’s magazines had moved sharply to the left, influenced in part by the rising popularity of feminist online media such as Jezebel and The Cut. Mrs. Hugoboom loved pop culture and fashion, but the publications she read to learn more about, say, Taylor Swift, also featured articles about polyamory and Marxism. And nowhere, she said, could she find much positive content about marriage and motherhood.” (Funny: If you rearranged the words in these sentences, you could write the Spread mission statement!)
It’s a little like that time we stumbled into one of those pro-life coffee shops in the South—we were halfway through our sticky bun before we realized we’d just donated $7 to one of those “pregnancy care centers” that scare women out of having abortions. The womanoverse does not brandish its musculature and shout at you like Jake Paul. It sneaks up on you softly, with the glowingly lit, unbleached-linen allure of a Jenni Kayne catalog—indeed, its aesthetic may be the only thing it shares with the (wealthy, white) left. But wrapped inside that fuzzy packaging is an ideology that’s as retrograde and as bad for women as all the vitriol being spewed by its brawnier bros in the manosphere. In this alternate universe, the pill is bad for you, sex is a tool for satisfying your man, IVF is unethical, power is “unfeminine.” And, in a mirror image of the boys’ side, paranoia runs rampant. A current headline on the Evie site reads, “Is Butter Yellow Actually Cute or Are We Just Being Psyop’d to Like It?” We had to Wiki: “Psychological operations (PSYOP) are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their motives and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and large foreign powers.” Best we can tell it’s Hegseth-speak for gaslit. Yikes.
Do conservative women deserve a magazine that speaks their language and doesn’t shove a liberation they really, really don’t want down their throats? Um, sure, if that’s what they want. But do we want more undecided voters and developing minds to be lured into a mindset that would actually see women set back 10, 50, 100 years—via a girly version of the slow and steady drip-drip-drip of misinformation that allowed the manosphere to sink its fangs into the white American male over the last five years? We’ve seen where that got us. Do we really believe a female version will be any less disastrous? Also: Are print magazines back? In that case, you know where to find us! (Kidding...)
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. The votes are in! You want the Spread Calendar™, and so do we. We hear you, we’re glad you like it, and we’ll be back next time with a calendar chock-a-block with reads, watches, listens, and, gosh, who knows what all we’ll come up with for you!
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What If Michelle Williams Is Our Kink?
Move over, Bibb. There’s a new cunty little bob on the scene, specifically on the cover of New York magazine. The hairdo belongs to Michelle Williams, who’s also sporting boudoir garb—and who truly deserves a Cecil B. DeMille award for her career-spanning performance of line-toeing between “classy” and “game”—to promote her new series Dying for Sex, which the New York folks were undoubtedly first tipped-off about in last week’s Spread. (They’ll clearly be subscribing to the Spread Culture Calendar™ when its new season launches.) The story by Spreadfave Rachel Handler is less a profile of Williams than a how-this-thing-got-made piece, also leaning heavily on show co-creators Liz Meriwether and Kim Rosenstock and considering the strange emotional terrain of an extremely explicit comedy over which death looms. Like the show, the story is a genre-bender—and one that really does its job: We can’t wait to fire up this bad girl on April 4.
Read “A Death-Defying Sexcapade” here.
Live and Let Viv
In a banner day for the old-school hustle and stylish execution of the women’s mag, Teen Vogue got Vivian Wilson—the trans daughter Elon Musk has written off as “killed by the woke mob”—to sound off on her loco parent. Kudos to EIC Versha Sharma and writer Ella Yurman for their go-getter-ness and to Wilson herself for seemingly managing to emerge from that situation strong, smart, and sure of who she is. But as veteran sausage-makers, when we first saw the story, our first thought was, how’d they land that!? Apparently the New York Times wondered the same thing, and got us the goods here.
A Fête for Tinseltown’s A-List EIC
We plan to savor the new, A-list tome of publishing honcho Graydon Carter when we leave our abodes and don our spring break SPF, but first we simply must share this glitzy morsel from the scribe himself:
“At the beginning, I wanted to change the voice, which mostly meant cleansing the florid baroqueness of the language. In the Vanity Fair I inherited, a restaurant wasn’t a restaurant, it was a “boîte.” A book wasn’t a book, it was a “tome.” A party wasn’t a party, it was a “fête.” People didn’t say something funny, they “chortled” or “quipped.” I issued a list of words henceforth banned from Vanity Fair copy. Out went words like abode, opine, plethora, and passed away (for “died”). Out went glitzy, coiffed, wannabe, A-list, and even celebrity. Out went chops (for “acting abilities”), donned (as in “put on”), boasted (as in “had” or “featured”), eatery (for “restaurant”), flat (for “apartment”), flick (for “movie”), fuck (okay in a quote but not with regard to the actual sex act), also honcho, hooker, schlep (as in “to lug something somewhere”), scribe (as in “writer”), and Tinseltown. All found their way into the copyedit boneyard.”
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