Call Her Daddy Is Setting Women Back

A llegations abound that the “manosphere” — the content universe occupied by noxious personalities such as Andrew Tate but also relatively benign influencers such as Jordan Peterson — is turning young men into misogynistic pigs and rogue citizens incompatible with our country. But what about the female version of this world?

The uncomfortable truth is that young women are being poisoned by what they’re consuming, too. Call Her Daddy, the popular podcast for women by ex-Barstool Sports star Alexandra Cooper, is feeding college and post-grad women progressive — actually regressive — views on sex, dating, and men. Only the commentariat isn’t interested in exposing young women’s “radicalization.” They would have to admit that radical feminism is not a cultural panacea but a force of deep division between the sexes.

The podcast adopts an attitude on life that is bitter, divorced from reality, and hostile to the men that the world needs — and that its female listeners need. The show’s first and most egregious crime was to celebrate casual sex as a triumph for women rather than a calamity. Since its inception, Call Her Daddy’s primary offering has been performative vulgarity and promiscuous tales with celebrity gossip sprinkled in. In episode three in 2018, Cooper and co-host Sofia Franklyn detail an oral sex technique, “The Gluck Gluck 9000,” and advise female listeners to incorporate it in their personal lives as a surefire way to seduce and control a man.

Right from the get-go, the show focused on teaching young women how to manipulate men to gain the upper hand in hookup culture as though they had discovered some shortcut to female empowerment. The logic was similar to that of the defenders of Cardi B’s vulgar song “WAP”: Men sexualize women, so why can’t women sexualize themselves preemptively? In case you were wondering, the rest of that Call Her Daddy episode discussed men’s foot fetishes and secret sugar daddies.

One thing Call Her Daddy implicitly recognizes is that women are the natural gatekeepers of sex, which is indeed a power. But instead of preserving it, the show advocates for abusing it. The show treats sex like a zero-sum game where women have to play to win because otherwise, men take it all. It’s about strategy and maximizing advantage. Especially in the early stages, nowhere in the show was a baseline premise of respect for either sex. How could there be? Once you remove commitment as the price of sex, all bets are off. It’s simply a bodily transaction that has no emotional regard for the human who has offered up the most vulnerable, sacred part of themselves.

In terms of sheer popularity, the male equivalent to Call Her Daddy is perhaps The Joe Rogan Experience. Though it’s gone into conspiratorial territory lately, Rogan’s podcast exploded originally because of his interviews on religion, sports, comedy, science, philosophy, and politics. What does it say that the No. 1 women’s podcast on the market often delves into who is sleeping with whom, and in what depraved manner, and the No. 1 men’s podcast is hearing from tech titan Elon Musk, Medal of Honor recipient Dakota Meyer, and other newsmakers?

Of course, Joe Rogan’s episodes have veered into the extremely irreverent, off-putting, and explicit. They have their fair share of locker-room talk, as do other male-oriented podcasts. And Cooper, once in a while, hosts a guest who provides a nugget or two of constructive advice or insight. But despite Call Her Daddy’s attempted rebrand into a cozy fireside chat with Hollywood figures akin to Drew Barrymore’s show, it remains overwhelmingly about being sexually provocative, not thought-provoking. It cements a toxic view of the world in which women need to constantly be on the offensive. Contrary to what Cooper peddles on air, it’s not the patriarchy that’s sending women back; it’s her product.

In some ways, Alex Cooper is the female Andrew Tate, the big kahuna of the manosphere who has largely rejected monogamy and the institution of marriage as a net good for men. His thinking is that feminism’s entrenchment in society has fundamentally stripped men of their dignity and sense of worth, and the best recourse they have is to withdraw from the pillars of the West — higher education, marriage, the workforce — that serve women at men’s expense. There is no point in participating in marriages that women will inevitably leave, taking half of their hard-earned wealth in the process. Settling down is a trap, so young men might as well have a good time with a harem and flashy cars.

Tate and Cooper have their obvious differences — but hedonism and nihilism feature prominently in both their worldviews.

Despite the two’s similarities, the media aren’t giving equal blame to young women as agitators in this conflict of the sexes. Young men are being told they need to come back from the brink. They’re rightly being told they need to resist problematic messaging from bigots like Tate and Jew-hating Groyper leader Nick Fuentes — but they’re also hearing that they shouldn’t listen to family men like Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and Ross Douthat. Despite the hysterics, the data do not suggest that fans of Tate and Fuentes represent anything close to the majority of young men in America. Almost 90 percent of young men agree that “being a man requires a willingness to sacrifice for others,” and 85 percent believe that “manhood involves strength, responsibility, and leadership,” according to a March poll from the Institute for Family Studies. This is mature masculinity — not the fraudulent, selfish “masculinity” swirling around the manosphere.

Young women have become dramatically more progressive over the last couple of decades, while young men’s political trajectory has been mostly stable. This is why the gender partisan gap is a whopping 23 points, more than doubling in 24 years. But instead, a lot of what we’ve heard since President Trump won 56 percent of young men in the 2024 election is that they are entertaining fascism in huge numbers.

The media are not acting with integrity if they decry the manosphere but say nothing of how Call Her Daddy has promoted an upside-down worldview of threesomes, orgies, and escorts, and the merits of single parenthood from a multimillionaire guest who is in the outrageously lucky minority that can afford to bear the responsibility alone — the definition of a luxury belief. If they’re taking Call Her Daddy as gospel, many young women will naturally leap toward radical feminism that deems men at worst the enemy and at best useless accessories. They will continue to shift toward left-wing politics that fill the void of what they have been told doesn’t matter but really need deep down. The loose sexual morals espoused on Cooper’s platform do not foster harmony between young men and women; they sow seeds of discord.