Anya Lacey is aware of the oxymoron that comes with being an OnlyFans creator while aspiring to be a trad wife.
When the 19-year-old Florida-based creator decided to get serious about dating this year, she ran into a wall. Either a lot of conservative men are “immediately turned off by what I do,” she says of being an OnlyFans creator, or the men she met on dating apps weren’t all that serious about commitment. “It’s a video game to them.”
Those experiences led Lacey to create dateanya.com, a website with two clear objectives. The first was to find Lacey a husband (users can fill out a “Date Me” application). The second—and this very much seems to be its larger aim—was for the site to serve as a kind of relationship roadmap for conservative singles serious about finding love. Billed as “America-First Dating,” the site provides suggestions for “non-negotiables” (“secure borders, secure families”) as well as dating tips for women (“let him drive the date; you drive the conversation”) and men (“exclusivity before intimacy”).
“Conservatism is really associated with men and masculine energy, and that’s who was leading the industry,” Lacey says. “But now you have a lot of women coming out of the woodwork.”
Lacey is part of an expanding network of women influencers, creators, and media personalities who represent different factions of the conservative movement—spanning faith and flag moderates to MAGA fanatics—jockeying for a larger stake in the dating zeitgeist. Some are using their platform to reclaim the narrative around traditional relationships, one they say has been poisoned by feminist brainwashing and an age of endless swipes. Just as the manosphere has shaped the outlook of young conservative men through chat-casts, rallying a generation around alternative science and hypermasculinity, the rise of female-led rightwing media creators—sometimes called the “womanosphere”—are helping to shape the opinions of young conservative women everywhere.