Sex

Call Her Happily Married After Premarital Sex Just Like Countless Other Women

Conservative scolding of Alex Cooper, creator of the Call Her Daddy podcast, is completely out of touch with reality.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown | 5.20.2026 12:38 PM

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(Photo: @alexandracooper via Instagram)

Conservatives have been slamming Call Her Daddy podcast host Alex Cooper for getting married and embracing motherhood after creating a podcast that failed to shame women for having premarital sex. Their criticisms ring ridiculously out of touch. Many center on the supposed unlikelihood of a woman being able to snag a husband after hooking up with others in her 20s, while some simply seem angry at an openly promiscuous woman not being punished for it.

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Cooper "has some atoning to do," writes Ashley McGuire at the Institute for Family Studies, citing the podcast host's "destructive ideas" about casual sex. McGuire links to a piece about Cooper saying it's OK to kiss or even have sex on a first date and cites Cooper telling women "you do not need to be denying yourself pleasure to prove some arbitrary point."

The gist of the criticism—from McGuire and others—is that, for women, premarital sex leads to bad outcomes, so it's somehow hypocritical or irresponsible for Cooper to pretend like her path from playing the field to happily married is typical or attainable.

Enjoying casual hookups in your 20s generally leads to spinsterdom because "most men don't want to marry a thot," suggests Isabella Redjai of the Manhattan Institute. Trading in casual encounters for marriage and motherhood is something that "only works for exceptionally successful, gorgeous women with influence,"  writes author Gina Botempo, author of Fat and Unhappy: How "Body Positivity" Is Killing Us (and How to Save Yourself). Premarital sex leads to divorce, suggests University of Virginia professor and Get Married author Brad Wilcox.

I'm sorry, but what century are these folks living in? Because in the real world, Cooper—who married at the ripe old age of 29, mind you, and is now pregnant with her first child at 31—is far from an outlier or some spectacular fairy tale case.

Getting Down Before Settling Down

These days, the vast majority of young and middle-aged adults—including the vast majority of married women—have had premarital sex. According to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from 2017–19, the share of ever-married 15- to 49-year-olds who've had premarital sex stands at 89 percent for women and 93 percent for men.

In the 2000s, 14 percent of married women had 10 or more premarital sex partners and 30 percent had between four and nine partners, noted University of Utah professor Nicholas H. Wolfinger at the Institute for Family Studies in 2016. In the early 2010s, 18 percent of married women had 10 or more partners, and 32 percent had between four and nine, with just 5 percent having still been virgins when they got married.

It seems plenty of people—including plenty of women—spend some time getting down before settling down.

The data back up what I—and I'm guessing many of you, too—have observed personally: that it's not at all unusual for a woman to spend her 20s going on dates or entering........

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