Systemic Misogyny: A Theorem Disproved

what my feminist professors lied about

image from Unsplash, credit to https://unsplash.com/@albertvincentwu

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I published this earlier this week (under a different title), and within the first two hours, I received five requests to remove the paywall so it could be shared more widely. That number had doubled by the time I went to bed — which is both humbling and deeply gratifying.

I can never seem to predict what will resonate broadly, which makes it a wonderful surprise every time.

Here it is again, this time with the paywall removed. Thank you. And yes, there will be a part two — that one will go out to paid subs two weeks before everyone else.

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I graduated college five years ago, and in that time, the thing I’ve come to understand most deeply — more than any subject I studied, more than anything I thought I already knew — is men.

Not just dating or relationships, though that’s part of it.

I mean men as friends, colleagues, mentors, brothers, classmates, strangers on the street. I’ve been surprised, over and over again, by how many good, decent, thoughtful men I’ve come to know. Some have challenged me, others have supported me, and a few have made me laugh exactly when I needed it most. And a few have called me out when I was being unfair or otherwise wrong — and they were right to do so. I didn’t expect that. In college, I was taught to expect something very different.

So in this essay, I’m going to talk about that: the gap between what I was told and what I’ve actually lived. About the worldview my feminist professors — including the ones who were men themselves — passed down to me as truth.

And about all the ways they were wrong.

About all the ways they lied, whether they understood that they were lying, or not.

What I Mean By ‘Feminist’

The word ‘feminist’ is one of those words that demands definition, instantly. Ours is a culture full of such words. Take “Christian,” for example — what does it actually mean? You’d damn well better ask if Christianity is the topic, because otherwise you’re in a situation where some people are talking about Pete Buttigieg and his husband, other people are talking about the members of the Westboro Baptist Church (the funeral-protesting, “God Hates Fags” nutjobs), and still others mean both, or neither.

Here’s what I mean.

I believe that every American citizen deserves the right to vote, to receive equal pay for equal work, and protection from housing and job discrimination — all the basic, sensible stuff — regardless of any immutable characteristic: race, sex, age, disability, national origin, sexual orientation, etc. I also believe people should be protected from discrimination based on characteristics that, while not immutable, are essential to human dignity and flourishing — things like religion, gender identity, marital status, and maybe others, depending on context.

But when I say I believe in equality, I don’t mean forced sameness. I don’t mean quotas or social engineering or rewriting the rules every time someone doesn’t like the outcome. I mean fairness. I mean the right to show up, to compete for jobs, scholarships, awards, leadership roles — whatever — and to be judged on my qualifications. On what I can actually do.

If the entire world worked this way, it would mean more men than women would pass the physical tests to become firefighters — and more women than men would pass the educational and psychological screening to become early childhood educators or pediatric nurses. It also means many more men than women would even try to become firefighters, and more women than men would try to enter those other fields. And that’s not a problem. That’s just reality.

Men and women are different — in some areas, very different — and that’s fine. That’s not oppression. It’s not injustice. It’s difference — and it’s okay.

That’s what it looks like when people are free.

Freedom means choices. It means people are allowed to move toward what they’re drawn to — whether that’s based on talent, temperament, or pure curiosity — without being shoved into some ideological mold.

It means the right to try, the right to fail, and the right to succeed, even if the outcome looks uneven on paper. Because real equality isn’t about outcomes. It’s about opportunity.

Now, my time online tells me that some of you think this makes me a feminist — and a hardcore one at that. Others are convinced I’m not a feminist at all.

Some of you think the very act of saying I am entitled to vote, live alone, make my own money, and control my own career places me squarely in feminist territory — although I must note, not one of the “Repeal the 19th” crusaders has ever, even once, suggested giving me back the confiscatory taxes I pay if they’re going to strip me of the vote.

Others can’t imagine why I’d even bother clarifying. To them, I’m clearly not a feminist. Feminists are man-hating ideologues who think all sex is rape, and who regard a law saying “no abortions after a pregnant woman’s water breaks” as proof of systemic misogynistic oppression.

The standard of “feminism” changes over time, of course. Once, it just meant “women should be recognized as fully human and fully functioning moral agents in and of themselves, not the property of fathers or husbands.” That’s a definition that still applies in Afghanistan, though it no longer applies in the West — at least, not to any reasonable person.

Over time, that definition changed. My grandmother had to quit a job when she was a young woman, because the boss was demanding sex she didn’t want to have — and there was no recourse. My grandmother had parents with money to turn to, whereas a coworker — a widowed woman with a young child — did not, and ended up submitting to the boss’s demands, a situation that later led to alcoholism as she tried to deal with the emotional fallout.

Believing that the boss’s actions were immoral, and being glad when such actions were made illegal, was a feminist stance in her youth. Nowadays, it’s only the most egregiously deranged type of dysfunctional person who would disagree — of course that was immoral, and of course it should be illegal.

This is part of how we ended up here: with “feminist” used to describe beliefs that were radical in 1920 but are now basic assumptions — unless you’re operating at a fundamentalist-Muslim level of misogyny.

Which is how two people who fundamentally agree on the way the world should look with regard to women’s rights can believe they’re enemies: one of them is proud to don the “feminist” label while the other bluntly says he hates feminists.

Neither is lying, and neither is wrong.

This is just the muddied state of our language, and of our ideas.

So let me be precise. When I say my feminist professors lied to me, I’m using their definition — not mine.

They taught what’s often called intersectional feminism: the idea that all social systems are built to serve white, heterosexual, “cisgender” men — and that every woman, especially if she belongs to other “marginalized” groups, is caught in a web of overlapping oppressions. This was not just a theory presented for discussion; it was a worldview imposed as truth.

In STEM courses especially, we were told that the reason there weren’t more women in physics or computer science was because of discrimination — not because men and women, on average, have different interests. The fact that more women gravitate toward psychology, nursing, or education? That was never considered relevant. The only acceptable explanation for any sex imbalance in a technical field was patriarchy.

If you even suggested biology or personality might play a role — that disparate outcomes did not necessarily indicate discrimination was at play — there was only one explanation for your backwards beliefs.

Or, in my case, that some evil man had caused me to have internalized misogyny.

So let me—oh my God, I almost said “let me be clear” and had to stop myself before I took the day off work to, I don’t know, go for a long walk, stare at the ceiling, and try to forget that I almost sounded like a certain lunatic who ran for President last year. (I don’t drink much, but I imagine this is the moment where normal people would reach for whiskey.)

Let me put it this way instead.

I insist on my right to everything I’ve outlined here: to compete, to choose my own path, to keep the money I earn, to speak freely, and to live the kind of life I want — not the one some activist, politician, or anonymous dude on the internet thinks I should live.

And yes, that includes abortion rights. I believe in unrestricted access during the first trimester, and after that, I think the voters in each state should decide — though I personally support broader access for minors, and in cases of rape, incest, or severe fetal abnormalities. Reasonable people can disagree on the margins, but I’m not here to argue edge cases. I’m here to assert that women, like men, are moral agents capable of making difficult decisions.

Now, whatever you think that makes me — feminist, anti-feminist, independent, confused — is entirely immaterial.

By the standards of my old professors, I am absolutely, unapologetically anti-feminist. Not because I hate women or think they/we belong in the kitchen, but because I reject their worldview. Because I’m not Woke.

Their version of feminism wasn't about equality or freedom. It was about ideology — about sorting the world into rigid categories of oppressor and oppressed, and demanding total allegiance to that moral framework.

It taught young women, especially those of us in male-dominated fields, to see ourselves as victims first and individuals second. To believe that if we struggled, it wasn’t because we lacked interest or needed to improve — it was because someone, somewhere, was keeping us down.

It was a soft, insidious kind of helplessness dressed up as empowerment. And I bought into it for a while.

A lot of us did.

And because I am anti-feminist by their definition, when I say my feminist professors lied to me — that’s what I mean.

What they taught me to believe that I did, for a time, but no longer do.

Why So Many Are Ripe For Brainwashing

I’m nobody’s idea of a genius, but I’m a reasonably bright girl. I can code and do calculus. I taught myself to draw and write pretty well, and I’m both good with kids and a good teacher. If skills are measured on a 1 to 10 scale, I can feel good about having an unusually high volume of 7’s and 8’s.

In other words, I’m not stupid. I’m deeply damaged. Emotionally, I was basically a five-year-old war veteran — dead-eyed, thousand-yard stare, chain-smoking Goldfish crackers, and muttering “you weren’t there, man” under my breath at story time.

In some ways I was, and remain, naive; in others, the five-year-old me is still crouched in a metaphorical trench, clutching a Capri Sun like it’s a grenade pin and waiting for the next emotional mortar to hit. But again — not stupid.

So how did I fall for it? And why?

There’s a paradigm playing out in the Middle East that, strange as it sounds, helps explain this.

Since October 7, 2023, anyone who spends time online has seen an explosion of what can only be called Jew hatred. I’ve seen Hitler get recast as misunderstood, the Holocaust called into question. I’ve had friends get doxxed and harassed for simply being faithful Christians and following the commands of Scripture¹ to love, support, and bless Jews.

This has surprised many, including me, who wrongly assumed that anti-semitism was one of those problems that had largely faded. It turns out that it was always lurking under the surface and just waiting for an excuse to resurface — and it has.

The paradigm we’ve all seen come to life — a psychopathic hatred that was just lurking under the surface — is exactly and precisely what feminism teaches young women is the default state of men.

And enough women have experience with the worst of men to make this feel plausible. According to statistics from a 2000 report, 1 in 9 girls and 1 in 20 boys are victims of childhood sexual abuse. That number comes from law enforcement reports — meaning it severely underrepresents reality, but that selfsame underreporting is why we’ll never know the real figures. I’ve read studies that put the number as high as 1 in 3 girls and 1 in 6 boys. This doesn’t even count rape as an adult, which is another experience that’s far too common.

The majority of childhood sexual abuse is never reported, mostly because the victim fears not being believed — typically because the perpetrator is someone who looks normal, sane, and good to the rest of the world.

So a paradigm like intersectional feminism, which posits that all men are like that — that all men are just waiting for any opportunity they can get away with to hurt a woman — makes a kind of intuitive sense to many young women, based on life experience.

This is semi-reasonable. If you’ve been victimized by a man who does a good job of looking, to the rest of the world, like he isn’t a monster, then a paradigm that tells you that other men are like him — monsters in waiting — can feel disturbingly plausible.

No, it isn’t fair. Yes, it’s terrible statistics — extrapolating a sample size of one to half the human race. But it’s not crazy. It’s not delusional.

It boils down to “That thing you personally know to be true? Is much more widely true.” Not something that feels like much of a stretch.

This isn’t meant to downplay the rise of victimhood culture, Wokeness, and the other contributing factors — not at all. I’ve written about those things so much that I doubt there’s much left for me to say. It is simply one of those “more than one thing can be true at once” situations — and it helps explain why so many young women are so vulnerable to this particular kind of indoctrination.

Of course, rejecting the ideology I was taught doesn’t mean I flipped a switch and instantly saw the light.² This ideology was part of every non-mathematics course I took, from American literature to astronomy, where we dissected the “colonialist and patriarchal naming schema of the stars,” as if Orion personally owed me child support.

It’s been a slow process, driven mostly by real-world experiences — especially with men.

Not the nightmare caricatures I was warned about, but actual human beings. I started to notice a pattern: over and over, the same behaviors I’d been trained to interpret as misogynist were just... normal. Not hostile. Not sexist. Just human. Sometimes even helpful. And when I looked closer, I realized something else: the way men treated me wasn’t all that different from how they treated each other.

That was one of the first cracks in the narrative. And I’ve had a lot of those since.

Misogyny, or Just Tuesday?

Here are two real stories. One from my first semester taking a mandatory diversity course in college (one of three, of course), and one from my job, just last week.

I was in the grocery store and a cute guy was ringing me up. As I recall, we chatted for a few minutes. Nothing that strayed into obvious flirtation, but friendly enough.

A minute or two into our conversation, the guy ringing me up commented on my t-shirt. I believe it was this one, though my memory may not be perfect here, and I own a lot of mathematical t-shirts.

I said something like, “Yeah, I’m majoring in math. That’s why I live off these frozen dinners — homework is my life.”

He said, nodding seriously: “Math is hard.”

I didn’t say anything. I just left as fast as I could, face hot with embarrassment and quiet rage.

But I immediately interpreted this the way I was taught in class. My diversity professor — a STEM PhD, no less — was, to put it mildly, rabid about misogyny in technical fields. My therapist, who has a gift for naming things, dubbed her “Joan of Arctangent.” Using the framework she gave me, even though all he said is “Math is hard,” here’s what I understood him to mean. Something like:

“I, a man who couldn’t decipher your math t-shirt without help, am — by virtue of my penis — automatically an expert on everything, including the very subject you're studying your ass off to master. You probably didn’t know that math is hard, so allow me to descend from my testosterone-fueled pedestal to enlighten your lady-brain.”

In our next session, my therapist deadpanned, “Does Joan of Arctangent give extra credit for confusing hyperbole with hyperbolic functions?”

And, of course, he was right.

My reaction was lunacy.

Now that I’ve actually gotten to know some good men — and seen how men talk to each other — I get what the cashier was really saying. “Math is hard” wasn’t condescension. It was a plain statement of respect: he knows math is hard, and he was acknowledging that I was doing something hard.

The only subtext, if there was any at all, was a respectful nod to the fact that I was engaged in a challenging pursuit.

Last week, I was in a meeting at work. I’m on a new team that I absolutely love — challenging projects, real impact, and a seat at the table when it comes to shaping what we build. It’s not a bullshit corporate job, either. I’m learning so much that I genuinely can’t imagine what my idea journal’s going to look like in two years — probably terrifying. In a good way.

One thing about me: I plan. For big projects, I go deep. And this time, I did — thirteen pages deep, to be exact.

So there I was, forty-six minutes into a meeting, saying absolutely nothing while my direct leads and another man — all smart, well-meaning guys — raised big-picture questions that I had, quite literally, answered a week ago.

In the thirteen pages.

That they hadn’t read.

In minute forty-seven, they finally called on me — and I found just enough courage to say, “Um... yeah, actually, everything we’ve talked about is in the proposal I sent. I could maybe read it to you?”

To their credit, my two direct leads laughed their asses off. They apologized, they read the damn thing, and since then, we’ve all gotten better at flagging what needs doing before meetings to make the best use of time.

This exact scenario was something Joan of Arctangent warned us about — but with a twist. In her telling, it happens to every woman in STEM, every time, only because she’s a woman. Oh, and if the woman dares to point it out? There’s no laughter. No apology. Just a scarlet B for “bitch” and a slow, silent exile from the career ladder.

But here I am, five years out of college — and thanks to a handful of friendships with genuinely good men, I knew exactly what had happened: they didn’t read it because they didn’t read it. They got busy. Our jobs are fun-but-intense, and honestly, they’re both busier than I am.

Should they have rescheduled the meeting or at least owned up to not doing the homework? Sure. But who cares? We learned, we adapted, and now we’re better for it.

I’ve thought about this a few times since — and every time, I shiver a little.

Because the version of me who hadn’t yet met James Lindsay, Bret Weinstein,

J. Daniel Sawyer

,

Josh Slocum

, or

Dr RollerGator PhD

? She would’ve reacted very, very differently.

That version of me would’ve gone quiet. Wounded, discouraged, and convinced it was all personal. She might’ve stopped offering ideas entirely — for weeks, maybe longer. Which, ironically, would’ve been actual self-sabotage.

Men Mansplain To Each Other Too

The word mansplain, whatever it was originally meant to capture, now just means “a man explaining something in a way a woman finds arbitrarily annoying — for reasons he would need to be telepathic to understand.” It’s gone through total definitional drift. So total, in fact, that there’s only one fair comparison.

It’s exactly what happened to TERF.

That acronym used to stand for “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist,” referring to a very specific philosophical position rooted in second-wave feminism. Now, TERF just means “woman I want to call the c-word” — usually because she won’t pretend humans can change their sex.

Mansplain has followed the same path. It no longer means “man explaining something condescendingly to a woman who clearly already knows it.” It now just means “man opens his mouth to say a thing, and I don’t like it.”

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from the good men in my life is that this kind of explaining — the kind now reflexively labeled as mansplaining — is something men do all the time. Including to each other.

And in most cases, it’s not about dominance or control. It’s joy.

Men love competence. They love understanding how things work. And many of them, maybe most, see the ability to explain something well as the highest expression of that competence. It’s not performative. It’s not aggressive.

It’s generosity. It’s delight.

An honest word for what’s really going on might be joysplaining — because more often than not, what you’re witnessing isn’t an ego trip. It’s someone lighting up with enthusiasm over something they understand, and wanting to share that light.

And that brings me to another thing no one ever told me in college — or at least, not in a way that stuck — is how much men respect effort. Not just results. Not just genius. Effort. Especially in fields where the work is hard, and failure is always a live option.

One of the best conversations I ever had about that came from a man with a PhD in math, and it’s stuck with me ever since.

The Oppressor Said: Maybe You Can’t Do It

One of the most important conversations of my life happened early in college, with James Lindsay. Jim has a PhD in mathematics, and — to my great good fortune — he still answered his own email. I wrote him for advice. We’ve since become real-life friends, but this was before that: before he had any reason to trust me, before I had anything to offer in return. He could’ve just stayed on script, said something bland and supportive, and done what men with PhDs are supposedly meant to do when nervous college girls ask them for guidance.

What stood out was that he didn’t. He went completely off-script. He wasn’t there to reassure me, or pretend success was mine for the taking just because I wanted it badly enough.

He didn’t.

He didn’t give me any “rah rah you go girl you can do it!” bullshit.

Instead, he told me the truth: mathematics is hard. Most people can’t do it at a high level. Maybe I could, maybe I couldn’t. He didn’t know, and neither did I — but I’d only find out if I tried. Really tried.

The real danger, he said, wasn’t failure — it was believing the deck was stacked against me before I even sat down to play. He was the first person I remember telling me I’d need to build an internal locus of control, because the victim narrative wasn’t going away. If I let it take root, I’d never know what I was actually capable of. The only way forward was to reject it — and try. Harder than I ever had.

“The main thing you have to decide,” he told me, “and I mean right now — is that if you fail, it’s not going to be because you didn’t try hard enough.”

That conversation changed everything. Not because it guaranteed success — but because it made failure honest. It put the responsibility in my hands, not the world’s. That wasn’t harsh. That was a gift.

And it’s one of the most masculine gifts I’ve ever received.

It was a gift that carried me to the tutoring center so often that everyone who worked there knew my name. It was a gift that had me getting up at 4am, the time of day when my brain works best, so that I could know that I knew that I knew that I had tried as hard as I could. And I did, which is why I succeeded.

The best men I know don’t sell false hope in the name of encouragement or “support.” They don’t lower the bar to make you feel good. They tell you the truth — and then they expect you to rise to it.

Not because they want to see you fail, but because they believe you just might not. And that belief, even when quiet, even when conditional, is worth more than any empty cheerleading.

That’s not oppression.

That’s honor. That’s discipline. That’s love, in a form I wasn’t taught to recognize — but I know it now.

There are at least a dozen more game-changing lessons I could write about — moments, conversations, and quiet corrections from good men that reshaped how I see the world. If people end up liking this, maybe I’ll write a part two and share more of them. But this essay’s already long enough, and there’s one last lesson I can’t leave out: the importance of not backing down.

Of standing up for myself, even when it’s uncomfortable. Especially when it is.

The Oppressors Said: Boundaries Aren’t Bitchiness

Depression beat the living hell out of me this winter.

It was bad. Much worse than I’ve described in detail, though I wrote a little here. I’m talking I-dehydrated-myself-crying bad. OCD-neat-freak-forgets-to-shower-for-a-week bad.

The kind of bad that resets your understanding of what bad can be, and mine was already calibrated for “pretty goddamn bad.”

Short version: three anvils landed on me all at once — grief, severe anemia, and work stress. I can’t raise the dead, and I can’t make my blood retain iron (at least, not yet — we’re still figuring out why), but the third one? That one I could have done something about.

What needed to happen was clear in hindsight: I needed to ask for a change. Not complain, not collapse — just ask. Directly. Calmly. Clearly. But I was deep in the pit, and that kind of clarity feels like fiction when you’re there.

I talked it through with two of my closest friends,

Josh Slocum

and

J. Daniel Sawyer

, probably two dozen times. And what they said, over and over, was that I had to stand up for myself. That this wasn’t sustainable. That something needed to change, and that it was okay — necessary, even — to ask for what I needed.

They were kind, patient, unflinching. They explained it to me seventeen different ways. Each time I spiraled back into “What if I’m the problem?”, they pulled me out again.

Even my teenage house-helper, who comes from a great family, clocked it. He overheard the tail end of one of those frazzled phone calls while dropping off laundry. When I got off the phone, he looked stunned. “Who was that,” he asked, “and what did you do to make him hate you?”

Which, honestly, should have been a wake-up call.

But here’s the thing: one of my more maladaptive coping mechanisms is assuming that people who had good childhoods don’t really understand how life works. It’s a convenient way to short-circuit jealousy, but it also means I sometimes ignore when those people — people like this kid — are actually seeing something clearly that I can’t.

And I always think the problem is me. Always. That’s a feature of both childhood trauma and major depression. Suggesting it wasn’t me felt about as believable as saying the solution to traffic congestion is more clowns on unicycles.

But they kept at it. They believed I deserved better — and eventually, I started to believe it too.

When I finally found the courage to say something, I didn’t even have to make the ask. I work for a top 1% leader — the kind who understands that people who bring exceptional value often come with heavy baggage, whether it’s an innately difficult personality or, like in my case, hard-earned. He made the switch. No drama. Just a clean solution.

And things got better. Way better.

A reader in need of a data scientist offered me a job last week, which I declined because I’m completely happy where I am.

They could’ve gotten better a lot sooner, if I’d listened the first time. Or the fifth. Or the tenth. Next time — and there will be a next time, because this is life — I’m going to listen earlier. Or at least try like hell to.

Because here’s what I finally understand, with the help of my guy friends: boundaries aren’t bitchiness. Assertiveness isn’t aggression. Asking for what you need — calmly, clearly, without apology — is neither a failure of femininity nor a moral defect. It’s a skill.

And for me, it’s one I’ve had to learn entirely from men.

The best men I know don’t just fight for the people they care about. They teach you how to fight for yourself. With clarity. With strength. With dignity.

And they remind you, when you forget, that none of that makes you a bitch.

It just makes you free.

I was taught to fear men long before college. Not by theory, but by trauma.

College didn’t plant that fear; it just gave me reasons. Justifications. A framework that made my oldest wounds feel not only valid, but virtuous. And humans are incredibly good at justifying our feelings — especially the ones that damage us.

We turn pain into politics.

We turn fear into ideology.

We wrap old survival strategies in new language and convince ourselves they’re wisdom.

But over the last five years, it’s been men — real men, good men — who’ve helped me unlearn that. Who’ve challenged me, supported me, corrected me, and refused to lie to me. They didn’t coddle me. They didn’t play along. They told the truth. They expected effort. They modeled strength.

They reminded me that correction isn’t cruelty, that assertiveness isn’t aggression, and that love — real love, the masculine kind I was trained not to recognize — doesn’t always sound like comfort.

Sometimes it sounds like “try harder.”

Sometimes it sounds like “stand up.”

And sometimes it just sounds like “Maybe you can’t, but try.”

I’m better for having heard it.

And I’ll never stop being grateful that I learned to listen.

I was taught that the reason for every statistical difference, every imbalance, every struggle I, along with all other women, faced was men — their privilege, their dominance, their systems.

Turns out, the oppressors were just guys.

And the cage I thought they built?

Feminism handed me the blueprints — and I helped weld the bars.

1. Psalm 122:6, Romans 15:27, Romans 11:17-18, Genesis 12:3, and innumerable other verses.

2. This is a story of how hard I have had to work to fully uproot it.

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