I read the right-wing women’s magazine sex issue so you don’t have to

“Body count? One. Orgasms? Countless,” reads the caption over a photograph of a woman’s crotch, which is bare except for some strategically-placed flower petals. Another illustration shows a woman’s hand resting on a man’s naked back. The awkwardly-worded motto reads “Make him hard, not his life.”

No, this isn’t your mother’s conservative Christianity. But in many ways, Evie Magazine is selling something worse.

Every few years or so, the Christian right takes another pass at the impossible task of making fundamentalism look sexy or cool. These efforts tend to end in failure: Dorky youth ministers wearing clothes that are 10 years out of date while assuring their young charges that sex is better if you wait for marriage. Christian rock concerts full of sheltered teenagers. Glossy youth magazines with fashion and dating advice that falls short of its secular counterparts.

Evie Magazine is the latest iteration of these long-standing efforts to sell fundamentalism to young people with “hip” packaging. The young women’s magazine has admittedly been more successful than its predecessors, mostly due to what seems like a large infusion of cash that allows both its website and print edition to ape the expensive look of its worldly competitors, like Teen Vogue or Cosmopolitan. In its seven years of existence, Evie has strived to escape the cringeworthy reputation of evangelical youth culture by featuring scantily-clad models and even risqué content — which is supposed to be for married women only.

But even by these standards, their newly released “Sex” issue is surprising. At first blush, it’s hard to even believe it’s meant to push traditional gender roles on women. The cover features a bride in wedding-night lingerie, and the contents are positively NC-17: illustrations of naked couples copulating, how-to manuals for performing oral sex, bodice ripper-style descriptions of sexual intercourse and full-page photographs of models in suggestive poses, like eating cherries or drinking open-mouthed from a hose. Old-school religious conservatives would be appalled, and in fact, many complained on Evie’s Instagram page that the magazine, which is published by Gabriel Hugoboom and Brittany Martinez, a husband and wife team, had gone too far.

Make no mistake: Despite the lurid illustrations and eye-popping $49 cover price, the intended audience for the “Sex” issue, which is only available in print, is virgins — and likely teenage virgins. They would be the only people naive enough to buy the fantasy in issue’s pages, of waiting until marriage to have sex and then immediately descending into a lifetime of erotic bliss with Prince Charming. My copy arrived early this week, and after my initial astonishment at how graphic the language was, I quickly realized that the magazine’s ideas about sex and relationships nonetheless resemble the “True Love Waits” nonsense from the 90s and early aughts rather than anything recognizable to a sexually active adult.

Evie’s “Sex” issue is not a useful guide on the art of, well, sex. Instead, it’s propaganda, meant to sell a young, inexperienced audience on the idea that being a submissive wife in a traditional marriage is an erotically-charged and sexually-fulfilling lifestyle. The magazine is clever about concealing its agenda. The words “Christian” or “religious” are carefully avoided in favor of euphemisms like “traditional.” Instead of scolding the reader about the alleged evils of premarital sex, abstaining until marriage is simply (and falsely) presented as the cultural norm. The use of terms like “men” and “women” is scant; the magazine mostly refers to “husbands” and “wives,” as if sexual contact outside of heterosexual matrimony is so rare as to barely rate a mention. In 21st-century America, it’s exceedingly rare for women to be virgins on their wedding day. But inside the “Sex” issue, it’s just assumed that a woman’s wedding night will be her sexual initiation.

As is standard in anti-feminist tracts, Evie desperately wants the reader to believe there is nothing unjust or irregular about a male-led marriage. This model of sexuality is presented time and again as the standard. “It is how we worship each other and honor our vows,” writes Elizabeth Lovelace in an article titled “Why Sex Matters.”

But it’s hard to believe Lovelace’s claim when most of the issue rests upon the assumption that sex is a service women perform for men out of duty — and to protect their status as wives. “Having sex with your husband simply to prevent him from cheating can make it feel like another household chore,” she says.

In an article titled “How to Be a Great Lover,” Ivy Lipton claims that “sex is the most important skill you can develop as a wife.” She notes that you can hire a housekeeper and accountant to tend to other domestic duties, but sex “cannot be delegated, automated, or handed off.”

Not that the writers don’t want the reader to enjoy sex. If anything, Evie treats learning to like sex as another duty in the long checklist of items required to meet the basic minimum standards of traditional wifehood. After all, a husband “wants to feel genuinely desired,” a point which is made over and over until the reader fully understands that it’s not enough to perform sex. Women are also required to perform enjoyment of it.

This message is frustrating because liking sex is of course an important part of having sex, and wanting to please your partner is good and normal. But that’s how right-wing ideologies hijack and distort normal human desires. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to have fun and be good in bed, but what makes it toxic is how those concerns are weaponized against the reader, used by the writers and publishers to turn normal human instincts into obligations — and to make the reader feel like she’s failing if, for instance, she isn’t always in the mood.

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The ugliness of it all hit home for me in Lola Noelle’s article “How to Sexify Yourself.” The writer bashes imaginary feminists who supposedly tell women that caring about appearance is “some kind of intellectual failure.” (Not according to this feminist’s Sephora account.) Then she advises readers that the purpose of exercise is to achieve an optimal “waist-to-hip” ratio supposedly preferred by men. In practice, this means “exercises that build your butt while minimizing growth in the quads, hamstrings and thighs.” Noelle also implies — falsely — that cardio exercise can “throw your hormones off” and should be minimized, or even avoided.

This is pseudo-scientific nonsense, but it’s also dangerous. Exercising some muscles while ignoring others is a common cause of injury, and any trainer worth their salt will advise fitness enthusiasts to balance their routine. But this omission is a sign that, at least in Evie’s world, exercise isn’t about health at all and, in fact, health should be sacrificed for the goal of achieving their particular ideal of femininity. These damaging notions are doubly alarming when one remembers that the target audience for this publication is so young.

Reading the “Sex” issue was exhausting. One article after another counted down a seemingly endless list of tasks a woman (sorry, a wife) must execute to please a man sexually. We’re told to fix our voice and our walk, to learn how to communicate wordlessly in bed (because using your newly-corrected voice to say what you want is apparently a turn-off), to provide our husbands with lengthy erotic massages, to learn “lingam” massage to be administered once a month. And always to make sure to flirt with our husbands all day long to keep their interest.

If the reader starts to feel pangs of resentment about this laundry list of expectations — well, we’re reminded that marriage is hard for a man too. “[M]ost men don’t want to lead,” argues an anonymous “married man” in the one article from a male perspective. “They’ll do it because it’s their duty, not because they enjoy it.” The heart truly breaks for such selflessness.

There’s little mention of pregnancy or childbirth in the “Sex” issue, which is telling, since a reader who takes their advice seriously is in serious danger of an unwanted pregnancy. The reader is routinely encouraged to avoid hormonal contraception in favor of tracking fertility. Even if done correctly, this is a notoriously ineffective method to prevent pregnancy. But it’s impossible to reconcile with the repeated admonishments in the magazine to have sex with your husband frequently, since fertility tracking only works if one abstains for huge chunks of the month. Abortion is of course not mentioned at all, although realistically, many women who attempt to use the rhythm method may end up calling an abortion provider at some point.

This is where Evie’s manipulative tactics are most discernible. The magazine has a long, ugly history of employing misinformation to scare women out of using contraception, mostly by failing to mention the incredibly high risks of pregnancy that accompany having regular sex without birth control. Reading the “Sex” issue leaves the strong impression that this is part of a larger agenda to lure gullible readers into unintended pregnancy. Even though the magazine takes a positive stance on oral sex, at every turn there’s pressure to end every encounter with the man ejaculating inside the woman’s vagina. Oral sex, we’re told, should be a precursor to vaginal intercourse. Anal sex is never mentioned, a telling oversight in a magazine that pretends that no sexual adventure is off-limits, as long as it’s between married straight people. Women who find penetration painful are instructed to use dilators until they have trained themselves to have vaginal intercourse.

Evie’s “Sex” issue was strange and laughable, at least to an actual adult who knows that this isn’t really how sex works. But it’s also alarming. It’s easy to see how this magazine could suck in teenage girls, especially since its lewd language and art are legitimately titillating. Whatever Evie’s goals, it’s unlikely the issue will lead its readers to actually abstain until marriage. Those vows are easy to adopt in adolescence, but they tend to be discarded by one’s late teens or early twenties.

Evie’s ode to assuming the cowgirl position in bed was legitimately entertaining, but not at the cost of teaching young girls toxic attitudes about their sexual futures.