“Call Her Daddy” podcaster Alex Cooper just announced that she and her husband Matt Kaplan are expecting their first baby. Cooper arguably runs the biggest female-hosted podcast in the world, where she has built a media empire centered around modern feminism, casual sex, abortion, hookup culture, and contemporary dating.
Feminism has wreaked havoc on our culture, feeding detrimental false promises to women for years. Yet stories like this continue to reveal a deeper contradiction: many of the same voices — like Cooper’s — that spent years downplaying marriage, motherhood, and family ultimately still desire those very things themselves.
Cooper’s pregnancy announcement reinforces a fundamental truth that conservatives have long argued: career-climbing, achievements, fame, and independence are not substitutes for building a family — and they never have been. In a culture obsessed with self and a feminist movement that tells women life should revolve around “you, you, you,” most women still deeply long to become wives and mothers.
A 2025 Women’s Well-Being Survey of 3,000 American women found that married mothers were the happiest group surveyed. Nearly twice as many married mothers described themselves as “very happy” compared to single, childless women.
I lived in D.C. for most of my twenties, and although I wanted marriage and motherhood more than anything, I couldn’t control when I would meet the right person. I remember coming home night after night from the Washington grind after long days of work, praying I wouldn’t always walk into an empty house with no husband to talk to and no children to hug. No amount of accomplishment or “boss babe” success could fill that void. Now being on the other side of it, I can say with certainty that nothing compares to being a mother.
That’s why it’s infuriating to watch feminism continue selling women a false promise, only for many to later find themselves holding broken shards of glass. A woman in her late forties told me she bought a lie hook, line, and sinker. She put career above everything else and now fears she may never have anyone to come home to and can’t biologically have children even if she did meet Mr. Right.
I saw this constantly in D.C. Women would talk endlessly about wanting liberation from “traditional family life,” only to end up crying on my shoulder years later because they felt completely alone. When they discovered their careers were not the fulfilling end-all-be-all they had been promised, they found themselves longing for what they were told to hate, delay, or not want at all.
Even in a culture obsessed with self, personal branding, and chasing fulfillment through career success, women still long for marriage, children, and a home filled with people to love and do life with.
Sex has Consequences
Modern feminism helped normalize hookup culture, pornography, and casual sex — all under the banner of “empowerment.” Yet feminists criticize the emotional fallout, objectification, loneliness, declining marriage rates, and unhealthy relationship dynamics that come with the radical, twisted worldview they adhere to. Feminism promotes a sexual marketplace that ultimately harms the very women it claims to liberate.
Cooper encourages a promiscuous lifestyle to her listeners, and even recently pushed for women on a first date to use men however they want sexually, even if they never want to go on another date.
She’s openly told listeners she contracted HPV, a sexually transmitted disease, and didn’t even let one of her former partners know despite the fact that he would also contract it. In an E! News interview, Cooper explained that she lived with the STD for more than four years before undergoing an expensive procedure to try to remove it. She later admitted she feared “this mistake” of having casual sex could affect her fertility and that meeting her now-husband, Matt, was the first time she realized she truly wanted to have children.
Good for Alex Cooper that things worked out for her and she’s able to start a family, but that’s not the reality for most women. Not everyone is so fortunate. Research consistently shows that more partners do not lead to stronger marriages — instead, they increase the risks of STDs, infertility struggles, emotional baggage, and instability. In fact, compared to people who married with no previous partners, those with 1–8 prior partners have significantly higher odds of divorce.
Sex always has consequences, both good and bad. According to the Institute of Family Studies, nearly 80 percent of spouses who had only slept with their husband or wife reported the highest levels of emotional closeness, compared to just 58 percent of those with five to nine lifetime sexual partners and around 46 percent of those with 10 or more partners.
The cultural message pushed by figures like Cooper frames casual sex and immediate physical intimacy as empowerment, but in reality, it reflects a model that often leaves women with less — not more — agency, stability, or fulfillment. By encouraging women to detach emotionally and treat intimacy as transactional, this approach strips relationships of meaning, normalizes real physical and emotional risks, and ultimately lowers expectations for how women should be valued and treated.
There’s so much security and satisfaction in a loving, monogamous marriage, and we should encourage more women to pursue this instead of delaying or forgoing it altogether.
The ‘Have It All’ Feminist Myth
Like many conservatives, I genuinely celebrate Cooper getting married and starting a family, while also sounding the alarm that feminists cannot have their cake and eat it too. You cannot spend years mocking traditional values, normalizing hookup culture, and encouraging women to detach sex from commitment — only to later rediscover the very things feminism insisted women no longer needed — all while continuing to preach that same mantra to millions of young women.
Marriage is not oppressive. Motherhood is not limiting. Prioritizing family is not settling for less.
Many women are now waking up to the reality that career success and sexual “freedom” are often poor substitutes for the love, meaning, stability, and fulfillment found in marriage and children.
Cooper’s announcement reflects something many women eventually discover for themselves: motherhood is not merely a lifestyle accessory or one option among many. For countless women, it becomes one of the most meaningful, identity-shaping, and fulfilling roles of their entire lives — and it has certainly been for me.
