I Support Women's Rights, & Women's Wrongs

 I say “I’m just a girl” a lot. Half joke, half shield, fully sincere. I’m just a girl in the way that feels devotional and religious. And I LOVE women! The most romantic, enriching relationships in my life have been with women. And as a feminist, the idea of pinning women against each other feels not just tired, but also outdated.

How…ever!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(I think about this more than I’d like to admit.)

Some of my deepest betrayals have come from women. Which, I know, places me squarely in the chorus of millions currently dissecting what is arguably the loudest headline in media right now—the Alex Cooper/Alix Earle drama.

And it has me thinking. Oh God, the thinking.

Where exactly is the line between being a girl’s girl and being a pushover?

Because Alex Cooper’s call out of Alix Earle...whether you’re Team This or Team That (or whether you are just surprised to learn they are not the same person)—isn’t just gossip fodder. Many can relate to taking it and taking it and taking it, until one day the temperature shifts and suddenly you’re not “easygoing” anymore. You call it out and suddenly you're

• A mean girl 
• Unhinged 
• Crazy 
• ........The list goes on 

I do think I’m easygoing. I also know there are sharp and undeniable moments when I finally say, enough is enough. And I cannot be the only one?!

Now, I don’t know these women personally. But like many of us, I’ve been listening to Call Her Daddy since its inception, watching Cooper evolve from sex positive chaos (lest we forget the Gluck Gluck 3000 or whatever it was called) into a media powerhouse with a rebrand more sharp than my nipples in January. She didn’t just scale a podcast, she engineered an empire. Whether you listen or not, and admittedly there are many episodes I skip because free will baby! and not all of her content is for me- you cannot deny that Alex Cooper seems like an intelligent and somewhat of a savage business woman. She's got range, and she's been extremely successful.

And we’ve watched Alix Earle come up too in a different way. The effortless: “get ready with me” videos that felt like Facetiming a friend. Viral fame is one thing. Staying power is another—and she’s leveraged both and stayed relevant, somehow.

Which is why this feud—if we’re calling it that—is so compelling. Not because of who’s right or wrong, but because of what it reveals. And how we interpret it, as normies.

There’s a spectacle forming online, as there often is. Other creators inserting themselves. Comment sections splitting into digital war zones. Team Earle. Team Cooper. Pick a side, plant your flag. And I think many of us women are so invested because we are projecting in the comment section, probably without even realizing it. Usually when things like this happen we resonate greater with one side over the other, purely based on our own experiences and traumas.

For me, the question on loop has been: How long do you keep the peace before you realize you’ve been the only one keeping it?

THIS HERE is the part we don’t package neatly for Instagram:

Most of us aren’t navigating public feuds, but rather quiet, private fractures. A couple of years ago I "lost" (I use quotations because I don't view it as a loss at all NOW, and not for the reasons you might think!, but in any event, we will say I lost......) a few friends. I call it: A Collateral Consequence of Divorce. Call me a Victim of Circumstance; but for months I went to bed every night feeling sad and betrayed, and woke up every morning wondering how I was going to put my feet on the floor and plant a smile on my sunken in face. It was heavy, and I was constantly teetering between wanting to call it out and knowing it made more sense for me to process it on my own quietly. 

As women, we've been betrayed. Or we've experienced a friend who slowly starts taking more than she gives, bleeding you dry every which way. What about the colleague who masks competition in compliments, or is just a flat out bitch trying to make your life miserable? A subtle shift in energy you can feel but can’t quite prove in your friend group. The girl openly NOT supporting your business, or telling your secrets, or simply acting in a way that makes you go.... "okay, what the fuck?"

 There’s no podcast episode to set the record straight, no audience to validate your experience. Just you, trying to decide if you’re overreacting. Trying not to gaslight yourself.

And this is where it gets uncomfortable.

Because being a “girl’s girl” often comes with an unspoken code: be understanding, be accommodating, be the bigger person. Extend grace. Then extend it again. Until suddenly, you’re playing so nice that you’re abandoning yourself in slow motion.

We’re taught to prioritize harmony in our relationships in general but especially with other women, sometimes at the expense of honesty. These relationships can be in business or in friendship. There are unspoken rules about softening our boundaries so we’re not seen as difficult, in all aspects of life. To swallow small discomforts and to bend until we break. Small discomforts have a way of stacking until they’re not small at all, and we combust.

And when you finally say something....when you name the behavior, draw the line, disrupt the dynamic, you risk being cast as the villain in a story.

I heard a quote once that I loved: 

"Am I talking shit about you? Or was what you did shitty, and I'm talking about it?"

There’s a particular kind of dissonance that comes with being hurt by another woman. It challenges the narrative we want to believe—that we are each other’s safest place. But we’re also human. Capable of insecurity, projection, defensiveness. Of acting out instead of speaking up. Of choosing self-preservation in ways that come at someone else’s expense. A subtle jab in an Instagram re-post, commenting something passive aggressive somewhere hoping the person that hurt you sees it and internalizes it, telling every single person BUT the person that hurt you, that they hurt you. Spinning the story to fit your own narrative, even with the best of intentions (to get it off your chest, feel seen, and be validated). 

So the question is:

Where DOES the divide exist between being supportive or even minding your own business AT BARE MINIMUM, and being a pushover?

Being a girl’s girl is about loyalty yes. But it isn’t about unconditional loyalty. Personally, I think it's about honest loyalty. The kind that includes accountability. The kind that doesn’t require self erasure to survive.

I think it looks like saying, “I love you, but this doesn’t work for me.” It could also look like "I appreciate the time we spent together doing XYZ, but it's best that we go our separate ways". 

I think that in all the ways we have been taught to be quiet, tolerate, and conform, we forgot how to be assertive. Many of us also don’t know how to accept when someone is being assertive towards us. Not every ending needs to be explosive to be justified.

And maybe that’s where we’ve lost our footing a little. In all the ways we’ve been taught to be agreeable, accommodating, and endlessly understanding, we forgot how to be assertive without feeling guilty about it. And conversely, we have forgotten how to accept assertiveness without taking it so personally. 

Which is why I understood and respected Alex Cooper’s call out of Alix Earle. 

Not because public confrontation is the gold standard—it’s not. But because it disrupts the pattern. It refuses the quiet, passive, behind the scenes narrative that so many of us are used to navigating. It said, no! actually, we are going to name this.

Us normies don’t live our lives on a stage like the Cooper Earle likenesses. Most of us aren’t addressing betrayal in front of millions of people with comment sections ready to dissect every little thing. Our versions are smaller, more private, often messier. A conversation that never happens. A boundary that gets drawn too late. A slow fade instead of a clean break.

But for people whose lives and livelihoods exist online, where speculation becomes storyline and silence becomes its own kind of statement, the public call out does make sense. It’s their version of reclaiming the narrative in a space that rarely leaves room for nuance. Especially when their brand followers expect transparency. It’s a moment of deciding  "I’m not going to quietly absorb this anymore". And I actually think that's really admirable. 

Now I may be totally out to lunch here, and I'll reiterate again that I obviously don't know either Alix or Alex. But I have spent a fair bit of time studying the nuances of human behaviour, and I'm going to tell you what I think happened between them. 

Alix Earle didn’t just rise, she launched to overnight fame. Quick, algorithm fueled fame that seems like she was shot out of a cannon. And with that kind of speed I think she was asking herself: What will I do if this disappears? How do I make it so that it doesn’t disappear? 

So it makes sense, at least from a strategic standpoint, that aligning with something like Cooper’s Unwell brand would feel like a smart move. Not just for exposure (she already had that), but for legitimacy. For infrastructure. For longevity. Cooper had already done what most creators fail to do which is translate virality into something sustainable.

What made Alix Earle compelling in the first place was the feeling that you were getting her unfiltered. Messy, funny, a little chaotic, aspirational. But once you place that into a more structured, monetized ecosystem with expectations, the content inevitably shifts. 

At the same time, I can see what Alex Cooper may have been trying to do by signing her. There’s a certain nostalgia baked into the original Call Her Daddy era: sex-positive, unhinged, story driven content that built an empire on relatability and shock value in equal parts. Bringing Alix into that orbit could have felt like a return to that original form with a new younger face. Shortly after she was signed to Unwell, Alix hard launched her romantic relationship and whether fair or not, that shifted her content. The tone changed. The intrigue faded. What once felt chaotic and sexy started to feel objectively boring. And in a landscape where attention is currency, that shift matters.

At that point, I don’t think it was personal at all. It’s business.

Contracts don’t get renewed because something isn’t performing. Brands pivot. Companies make decisions based on metrics, not feelings. And from that lens, allowing her to keep her IP and the Hot Mess name actually reads less like a cold cut and more like a relatively generous exit. Goodbye, and all the best. 

But here’s where the human side inevitably creeps in.

If you go from being universally adored, constantly validated to experiencing your first real “no” on a very public stage…I can imagine that's jarring. It would be for anyone. Add in youth, pressure, visibility, and a million voices dissecting your every move, and it’s not hard to imagine how that might sting. Rejection hits differently when you’re not used to it, And I can only imagine it feels differently when millions of people are watching. 

So maybe what followed; the tension, the labeling, the “mean girl” narrative isn’t about calculated malice. Maybe it’s about perception. About two people experiencing the same set of events through completely different emotional lenses. Or rather, one emotional lens, and one business lens. 

One making a decision with their brand at the forefront. 

The other feeling personally dismissed.

By Alix claiming this victim narrative, I don't think she was looking to be malicious. I think she was seeking self preservation, support, and validation. 

When something ends especially unexpectedly, or in a way that leaves you feeling rejected, confused, or hurt, your brain goes looking for resolution. Your brain creates a version of the story that soothes the discomfort and to makes sense of why and HOW, things unfolded the way they did. And often, the easiest way to do that is to assign roles: hero, victim…villain. I don't think any of it was intentional. I think it was all very human. 

I also saw that someone said Alex Cooper made a comment to Dave Portnoy aka Forrest Gump along the lines of: "I don't care about [other person's podcast], I care about making money!" And honestly I respect that. It's not warm, it’s not particularly soft or sentimental. I respect it because it's clear. I think Alex Cooper stands on business which is a concept that Alix Earle Doesn’t understand, and for that she has a team to think for her. And that’s okay. I just perceive them to be different in those ways. 

Woman do romanticize collaboration. We seek friendships and relationships everywhere we go.  We build intimacy into professional spaces and then act surprised when expectations get tangled, when lines get crossed, when one person is operating from loyalty and the other is operating from strategy.

There’s an honesty in saying: this is business. This is transactional. This is about growth, scale, money, opportunity. It removes the ambiguity. It sets a tone. It allows everyone involved to calibrate accordingly. That could all really hurt if you thought that you were friends with someone. 

The problem is one person thinking they're building something rooted in friendship, only to realize the other person is making decisions rooted in metrics. It’s assuming emotional equity where there was only ever professional exchange. 

Do I think that this was betrayal? No. Do I think that both of these ladies had very different experiences in the personal and professional relationships that intertwined their lives for a brief period? Yeah, I do think that. Am I here to see how it all unfolds because like you I’ve been waiting for Alix Earle To post her reply to the public call out? You bet your ass I’m waiting. But given what I know about Alex Cooper, I find it very hard to believe that someone with her platform and her net worth and her reputation and her range would call someone out if she knew they had dirt on her. This is why I keep receipts, Because you never know when you’ll need that text from August 10, 2014. 

At the end of the day, I wish both ladies successful and prosperous careers. This has been nothing if not distracting from the dumpster fire of our own lives, the economy, and the price of gas. And honestly, we could consider investing less time into what's going on in the lives of social media millionaires. I’m not taking that advice, but I am giving it.