When I was growing up in the ’90s, the dominant feminist message delivered to teenage girls like me centered on female strength.

The magazine Sassy would arrive in my mailbox and contained a universe of strong girls doing cool things. Boys were OK — Sassy had a “Cute Boy Alert” feature, after all — but girls were super awesome. Girls were in bands, they called themselves “grrrl,” and sex was something they had or didn’t have as they pleased. Sisters, so the song went, were doing it for themselves.

What happened?

These days, women are treated as perpetual victims. In need of safe spaces at their colleges so they dare not hear alternative opinions, suspicious of all men as predators and infantilized by people in power seeking to protect them.

We’ve gotten to a point where society accepts that sex isn’t an action between two equals — we treat the man as always in control of the encounter. A drunk woman is incapable of consent while a drunk man remains responsible for all of his actions.

This is somehow seen as “pro-woman” and not as a way of turning a grown woman into a child, which is what it actually is. In the last year, feeling that this type of infantilization didn’t go far enough, there’s been a growing movement for “affirmative consent” on college campuses. Now consent must be verbally granted at every step of a sexual encounter.

Suddenly that, too, isn’t enough. In a piece for New York magazine called “The Game is Rigged,” Rebecca Traister tells the story of Reina Gattuso, a Harvard senior who wrote a column for The Crimson about a sexual experience she had. At a party, drunk, she’d slept with two men. She admits that it was entirely consensual but that she woke up “dissatisfied and confused” wondering about the power imbalance in sex.

Traister writes: “Eventually, she [Gattuso] realized that what she was grappling with was not just the night in question but also the failure of campus feminism to address those kinds of experiences. We tend to talk about consent ‘as an individual process,’ she wrote.” Instead of asking, “What kinds of power are operating in this situation?” the student complained, they only asked questions like, “Did you or did you not say yes?”

It’s not as simple as “yes” or “no,” she continued. “But ethical sex is hard. And it won’t stop being hard until we . . . minimize, as much as possible, power imbalances related to sex.”

Gattuso had, as women having consensual sex have throughout history, chosen the partners, the place, the time and the action. And yet she believes the power balance isn’t in her favor. Have we really gone so far down the rabbit hole that the obvious fact that women can have sex whenever and however they want to, while men can have sex only whenever and however women want to, isn’t obvious?

Traister notes that “young women don’t always enjoy sex” and “sex on offer to young women is not of very high quality.” Yes, young men are generally not very good at sex, film at 11. But Traister’s conclusion is that “the game is rigged” with the “game” being sex and the rigging being done by the sinister patriarchy to deprive women of sexual pleasure.

Apparently men are too self-involved and need to provide more in bed for women. The constant “men should do this for women” is the antithesis of feminism yet frequently embraced by self-described feminists.

The grrrls of the ’90s have given way to the uptight millennial women waiting on men to make them happy. But the game isn’t rigged — women need to step up and take responsibility for their own pleasure, just as men do, and not wait for men to provide it for them.

To send young men the message of total female powerlessness and then complain that they feel disempowered just proves the fact that most men aren’t even aware they’re playing a game, much less rigging it. The young women are — and they’re losing.