American women, or “Western” women, have robbed Peter to pay Paul. This is the message of Andrea Tantaros’ smart new book Tied Up in Knots. This is the same message I’ve championed for years, and I’m thrilled someone younger than I has finally addressed it.

Writes Tantaros:

My generation felt the deluge of motivational messages that encouraged us to capitalize on our newfound female power. While I’m truly thankful for this array of choices, nobody told us there would be consequences. It almost seems like we were duped, or unconsciously misled at best.

It seems as though you were duped, Ms. Tantaros, because you were.

Millions of women, and the men who love them, have been taught to believe that women cannot be fully actualized human beings without being liberated from the home. This conversation began with what was once called “women’s lib.”

From what, exactly, were we liberating women?

Certainly women wanted, and continue to want, more out of life than “just” to get married and have kids. But that doesn’t mean they do not want those things at all. The culture has settled on this bogus idea that husbands and babies are passé, but they are not passé in the least — and the “more” has become too much more.

The “more” has made women lonely. The “more” has made women sterile. The “more” has left women fraught with guilt and stress. According to a 2007 report from the National Bureau of Economic Research:

As women have gained more freedom, more education, and more power, they have become less happy.

That may sound counterintuitive, but it makes perfect sense. Women are “tied up in knots” because they’ve been conditioned to reject the very thing that makes them who they are. They were taught to chuck their femininity and to become men.

Here’s the truth: feminists don’t have a beef with men. They have a beef with women.

Feminists hate all things feminine, insisting sex differences are a “social construct.” So they encourage women to think and behave like men. Biology is bogus, they say; if society would get out of the way, we would see that men and women are the same.

Pretending biology doesn’t exist changed everything. Writes Tantaros:

This is what I call a Power Trade, and in hindsight, it was a deal with the devil.

No longer does a man have to earn a woman’s love before she’ll give him what he most desires. She freely gives something for nothing, as though she isn’t worth the investment, or as though she too is as capable of sex without strings. She’ll even live with her man with no promise of a future.

Talk about undermining your own cause.

Women also tell men they can do everything a man can do. This is a huge mistake, for a man without purpose is a drain on society. Men also don’t go where they don’t feel needed, and that’s precisely where marriage takes them.

At the end of the day, it’s simple. In the name of equality, women have renounced their femininity and are now regretting it.

Writes Tantaros:

I try to embrace being a modern female — one with money, power, and newfound privilege from the rise of feminism — with my feminine biology and my culturally traditional inclinations and values. I’m trying to balance my take-charge nature with a desire for a far more passive role in my personal relationships.

When women listened to feminists and decided to live like men, they didn’t think it through. The concept of equality may work fine in the professional realm, but in the personal realm — where love resides — it’s a spectacular failure. The concept of equality demands that men and women live identical lives. It requires them to compete with one another. It forces them to keep score.

Love is unsustainable under those conditions.

Since time immemorial, women have been the relationship navigators, the ones who steer the ship. And for the last 40 years, they’ve been steering that ship into icebergs because the feminist narrative is antithetical to love.

A woman’s true value lies in the way she was made. She doesn’t need to change anything or to prove anything in order to be worthy or happy. She only needs to embrace it.