Andrea Tantaros is worried about you. Best known to an American audience for her appearances on Fox News, Tantaros is adding “author” to her résumé with the release of a book, Tied Up in Knots: How Getting What We Wanted Made Women Miserable. According to Andrea Tantaros, feminism’s quest is over: We have shattered the glass ceiling, grabbed the brass ring, and accomplished whatever other metaphorical task you want to throw into the mix. Or, as Tantaros puts it, “We won.” This view suggests, in essence, that feminism had a finite goal, and that we have reached it.

TIED UP IN KNOTS: HOW GETTING WHAT WE WANTED MADE WOMEN MISERABLE by Andrea Tantaros Broadside Books, 256 pp., $26.99

Yet, she cautions, this victory has come at a steep price. If you are a woman who came of age after women’s liberation, Tantaros claims, your understanding of love and intimacy has likely been stunted by a dangerous cabal she refers to as “the feminists.” According to Tantaros, we are in the midst of relationship crisis, and America’s youth are poorly equipped at fostering trusting and meaningful relationships with romantic partners.

The victory of “the feminists” has destroyed not just relationships, but workplaces. “Many people,” Tantaros writes, “especially early feminists, hoped that camaraderie among women would flourish in an environment that celebrated and facilitated female advancement. They hoped that more power in the workplace would lead to more mentoring, more unity, and the fostering of female growth and bonding. But more women working has made room for more malice.” By trying to emulate men, women have undermined each other’s progress.

And to an extent, Tantaros is right. One of the greatest missteps of second-wave feminism was its willingness to equate power with progress. But the most fascinating and maddening thing about Tied Up in Knots is Tantaros’s ability to point out real problems, only to arrive at simplistic explanations for them. A meaningful shift in contemporary feminism has been our growing understanding that co-opting existing power structures often merely serves to replicate old forms of oppression.

For every one of Tantaros’s claims that I disagreed with, however, I remain far more affected by the aspects of her arguments that rang true to me. I read Tied Up in Knots because I wanted to see if I—as a radical feminist, lover of queer theory, and card-carrying member of generation woke—could learn from a conservative woman’s perspectives on feminism. The fact that I was able to makes me believe that we can, and must, communicate about feminism across party lines. Andrea Tantaros and I probably disagree about almost everything, but this much is clear to us despite our opposite leanings: A revolution is bound to fail us if its sole end game is winning the enemy’s power.