Feminists may be responsible for saying some of the most misogynistic things that I’ve ever had the displeasure of hearing and reading. There I said it. Typically you’d expect to hear things that are anti-woman from the people deemed as the usual suspects. But I want to make it clear that feminists and feminism may be the single greatest blow to the progress of women in the history of mankind.

You might say, “How can this be? Feminism is supposed to be a cause for equality.” Over the last three years, I found myself researching feminists and feminism, and found myself faced with this glaring paradox. A paradox which had me casting off the feminist label entirely.

While feminists say that feminism is about equality, actions speak louder than words. These actions suggest an uncomfortable truth. Feminism is not the assumption that we are equal, but the assumption that women are weak and need a leg up. It’s the idea that women are oppressed by an all-powerful patriarchy, and that we need to push men down to thrive as fully functioning independent creatures.

If a man were to suggest that women were weak and needed help doing everything from getting jobs to basic decision making, you’d say this man was sexist. If a man said that a woman could never make meaningful decisions about her life because of her weakness, you’d call for this man’s job and ask that he be fired. If he suggested that women could be easily manipulated and brainwashed into making those decisions, you’d think he was absolutely nuts.

So why do we let feminists do it? Contrary to popular belief; Feminism suggests that women are weak in body and in mind. It suggests that women were no different than slaves to their husbands in antiquity and that they were treated slightly better than beasts of burden. But this is merely historical revisionism fueled by postmodernist bullshit.

To say that for thousands of years, women never used their wits and were living mindlessly under male subjugation is to lie to yourself and everyone else. This is not something supported by the writings of women in these time periods, nor it is something supported by the mountain of evidence that suggests the contrary. If this is the case, then you must submit to the idea that women made decisions that you don’t agree with, which is far more plausible.

The narrative of modern feminism suggests that all men in the past were boorish pigs subjugating women. That these men, feeling jealous of the power women wielded, kept them out of sight and under control. Was that the case, or was there a more practical reason for keeping a woman inside the house?

The more dangerous the world is, the more men are likely to want to protect the women that live in it. So they tell the women to dress conservatively and to stay in the house where they are safe. I’m not saying that they are right or wrong for doing this, I’m merely explaining the thought process behind it. The idea that women must be protected, limits a woman’s freedom. It keeps women as fragile flowers who must be protected from the elements.

But this is precisely what were doing these days with safe spaces, and the concept of Affirmative consent. There have been several notable second wave feminists who outright said that they believed all heterosexual sex is rape, because they believe that women simply do not have the power to meaningfully consent to sex. In reality, the people removing a woman’s ability to consent to sex, are feminists.

These feminists went so far as to suggest that if a woman isn’t saying “yes” like a broken record, then a man can accidentally rape her. The people single-handedly turning women into fragile flowers that need special protections, are feminists. The people suggesting that women can not get hired or recognized as assets to a company are, you guessed it, feminists!

If you want to know why women seem to be having more problems now, more than ever before, it’s because women are not being made to do things for themselves. In the effort to protect women and help them succeed, you’ve created a generation of women who’ve never had to apply themselves as much as men. The women who actually apply themselves and work hard, get lumped in with the women who’ve never had to get their nails dirty. All of this is made possible through the power of affirmative action.

In trying to save and protect women, feminism has removed women’s agency. They talk endlessly about choice, but choice means nothing if you lack agency. Women’s choices mean nothing if you believe women to be so easily manipulated by men and our culture as a whole. To them, the women making choices they don’t agree with, must be suffering from a bizarre kind of Stockholm syndrome.

I’m not sure why more women don’t feel insulted that other women think they are far too weak and stupid to make meaningful choices. Make no mistake, there are feminists right now who think that women are far more likely to be manipulated into living a traditional lifestyle than men. Because to them, no woman in her right mind would choose family over her career.

The freedom that feminists have claimed to fight for, is not the right to be protected. The freedom that they are suggesting was won for women, is a woman’s freedom to make her own choices. That means the freedom to make choices you don’t agree with. It’s the freedom to fail, succeed, and grow.

All these choices mean nothing without consequences. To take away consequences, is to remove the weight of women’s decisions. Feminists have succeeded in doing that, by suggesting that anytime a woman makes a decision that is problematic, that she is merely being manipulated by our patriarchial culture. She can’t be held responsible for her actions, because no one pulled her aside to explain to her how she’s oppressed. If she does something morally reprehensible, she can always blame it on a man.

I wonder how many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers would have been thwarted by this nonsense. No one told my grandmother, or her mother, that they couldn’t do things. They were strong women who worked alongside men, and achieved just as much as men. They did so all without the help of feminists and feminism. These women were forged through strength and perseverance.

But women don’t need strength and perseverance anymore to succeed. Now they just need a vagina, and STEM fields will roll out the red carpet for them to avoid being seen as sexists. You don’t need to be as skilled as men anymore, because feminists have lowered the bar for you and your predecessors.

To believe that patriarchy exists in the first world, is to believe that women are absent from decision making on everything from voting, to their choice in what latte to drink. You have to believe that their weren’t female anti-suffragettes, and that their aren’t women who protest against abortion. You have to believe that there isn’t a great number of women who voted against free tampons and birth control. You have to believe that women don’t vote conservative, become housewives, or decide to wear headscarves.

On the other end, sex workers, models, and actresses would also be poor manipulated flowers that don’t know they are under male control. They would be innocent weak willed damsels tricked into living a life of submission to the male gaze. How could they possibly make the decision to be “objectified” in this manner, don’t they know they’re oppressed?

Feminists want women to have choices as long as they make the choices they agree with. When you look at the facts, you come to the uncomfortable conclusion that every woman of note, prior to the existence of women’s suffrage, accomplished everything they did without the help of feminists or feminism. When forced to acknowledge this fact, it becomes obvious that the only thing women need to be empowered in the first world, is the desire to empower themselves through self-reliance, hard work, and dedication.

You don’t need feminism. Feminism needs you and the money you are willing to throw at it. They have to convince you that there is this carefully coordinated conspiracy against women by men, to keep them down. If a culture has a deep contempt for women, they aren’t going to care that women are upset. They aren’t going to try to protect them, and they certainly aren’t going to take your protests seriously.

You could not convince a culture with deeply entrenched misogyny to give women voting rights, birth control, or abortion. You could not convince them to give women alimony, child support, or affirmative action. If there is a group with a deep contempt for women and their choices, it’s feminists and their various theories on how we’re all being manipulated by men on a conscious and unconscious level.

I as a first world woman, am not oppressed and neither are the other first world women reading this. I don’t think the men and women who will inevitably send me angry responses are stupid or manipulated. They’ve probably never been challenged on their beliefs before, and their response to that will be to double down and point to the women who don’t live in first world countries and explain to me how we need to help them.

In my previous article on #worldpatriarchyday, I explained that first world women weren’t oppressed, and people in the responses took that to mean that I think first world women never face sexism. Which simply isn’t true. Women do face sexism at times, but nothing on the part of modern feminism is doing anything to stop that.

What modern feminists are doing is telling the world that women are easily offended by these “microaggressions” and need to be protected from nearly everything. This is because feminists get offended by everything from being told to smile, to being complimented on their shoes. If anything feminists are responsible for breeding more sexism in the population than ever before.

These women are encouraging men to protect women from sexism. They might say that a woman needs a man, like a fish needs a bicycle, but they certainly need those men to make an ever growing list of laws to protect them.

You aren’t going to eradicate sexism. Discrimination based on sexism happens through natural human preferences, developed through learned experiences. If you see women acting like entitled fragile flowers, instead of strong independent women, then those men will see women as entitled fragile flowers. You aren’t going to eradicate a male preference, by merely demanding it to be so.

In trying to eradicate a preference for men, these women are breeding a contempt for women in our populace with their outrage. Mark my words, there will be a breaking point. There will come a time that men stop catering to the whims of feminists, until no one takes women seriously anymore. You will have regressed society itself. This is what you’ve done. This is the path you’ve chosen. This is the bed you are making for yourselves, and the female population will be forced to lie in it.