Nobody Hates Women More Than Feminist Men

Nine years ago, I was an advocate for girls and women who thought outside of the box. I had grown tired of the relentless cultural narrative that painted girls as perpetual victims: less than, held back, oppressed by some invisible force. That story wasn’t empowering; it was self-fulfilling. So I did something about it. I wrote a children’s book designed to help girls reject the victimhood mentality and embrace their own strength and agency. To my surprise, it found an audience. It caught the attention of people in D.C. and even a few in Hollywood who were looking for fresh voices.

At the time, I was beginning to shift my focus toward the challenges facing boys and men. A mutual friend suggested I send my books to Justin Baldoni, the actor who had become a public champion for girls and women. The idea appealed to me: a man standing up for girls, a woman standing up for boys. It felt like the kind of cross-gender collaboration the culture desperately needed. I mailed him the books. He responded enthusiastically and promoted them on his Instagram. I was grateful. At that moment, I believed Justin Baldoni was exactly what he appeared to be: a good man genuinely committed to equality.

Fast-forward to the past couple years and the very public controversy between Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively. Like millions of others, I've followed the allegations of sexual harassment and a toxic on-set environment. My first instinct was disbelief. I had experienced only professionalism and kindness from him. But emotional intelligence requires us to understand that one person’s positive experience doesn’t invalidate another’s negative one. I began to wonder whether I had been taken in by the disingenuous “male feminist”—the man who wears his support for women like a badge, only to use it as cover for something darker.

The man I once saw as an ally now looked, at least in part, like the embodiment of the warning I later came to write about: beware the feminist man. He, like others, may be a specific type of misogynist.

As someone who now spends most of my professional life advocating for boys and men, I work across the political and ideological spectrum. I don’t need perfect agreement on every issue before I’ll collaborate with someone. What matters is the shared recognition that boys and men are in crisis—educationally, emotionally, economically—and that ignoring their struggles helps no one. Yet I keep encountering a particular type of man in these circles: the self-described feminist economist or thought leader who will say, “Of course we still have so much work to do for women to reach economic parity with men,” before pivoting to the boys-and-men conversation.

They measure female worth by how closely it mirrors the male career trajectory.

Every time I hear that phrase—“economic parity”—I cringe. Not because I want women to earn less or chain them to a stove. I want women to thrive in their choices. But the framing reveals something deeper and more insidious. The reason we don’t have economic parity is because of motherhood. These men, who believe they’re warriors for women, are actually devaluing womanhood itself. They measure female worth by how closely it mirrors the male career trajectory. Motherhood, the unique biological and emotional capacity that women alone possess, gets treated as an inconvenient interruption to be minimized, outsourced, or delayed indefinitely in the name of closing the wage gap. In their worldview, a woman’s highest value is achieved by acting like a man: competing on male terms, in male timelines, with male priorities. They never stop to ask whether the trade-off is worth it, or whether society might be richer if we valued women precisely for the things men can’t do.

I've had these conversations directly with these men. They grow defensive. They insist they’re being progressive. They don’t seem to hear me when I say that true gender equality isn't about pretending the sexes are identical. It’s about valuing the sexes equally in their beautiful, complementary differences. I believe that the war on womanhood and motherhood these men help perpetuate fuels the boys-and-men crisis they claim to fight. It’s one of its primary drivers. When motherhood is systematically devalued, boys and girls are pitted against each other, and boys and men’s issues are put on the back burner to help girls and women flourish academically and professionally. Boys grow up without a clear vision of what respected masculinity and femininity looks like. Girls grow up believing their bodies and their deepest desires are obstacles to success. Everyone loses.

Online, the pattern is even clearer. I've kept my DMs open since the beginning of my public work. Men—regular, everyday men—have never sent me disrespectful or inappropriate messages. Not once. I believe that’s because I show men basic respect, and respect is almost always returned. Imagine how different our culture would be if we all treated men with respect.

There’s one group that reliably fills my inbox with venom: feminist men.

But there’s one group that reliably fills my inbox with venom: feminist men. The messages are often vicious, sometimes even sexually degrading. They call me a “sock puppet”—a crude way of implying I’m merely a mouthpiece for male interests (some even suggesting a sock over male anatomy), as if a woman can’t think for herself unless she parrots feminist dogma. They label me a “pick-me,” suggesting that any opinion I hold that diverges from theirs must be a desperate bid for male approval. The irony is staggering. These men, who pat themselves on the back for being “enlightened allies,” reveal themselves to be the most disturbing misogynists I encounter. They can’t tolerate a woman who refuses to let them define what her interests should be. In their minds, a woman who values motherhood, who warns other women about the very real costs of delaying family formation, who dares to say that boys and men matter too, must be silenced or shamed.

Just this month, I published a deeply personal essay for the Institute for Family Studies. It was a continuation of themes I've explored in my Evie pieces: a candid warning to young women from someone who waited too long to have children. I’m not telling anyone how to live. I’m simply offering my experience. Love, marriage, and children were part of my dream, but it was too late. Society fed me the lie that forty is the new thirty, that career must come first, that fertility is optional and endlessly postponable. I shared my story not to scold, but to spare others the grief of discovering too late that some doors close.

Almost immediately, journalist Matt Yglesias wrote a piece titled “Yelling at ambitious young women won't boost marriage.” He mentioned my essay, framing it as yet another example of shaming, and suggested it’s men we need to shame for the lack of marriages today. He wrote that “Lisa Britton offers herself as an example of a 'cautionary tale of what happens when you put family on the back burner for too long,' leaving her childless and unmarried in her late 30s.” The article positioned my vulnerable testimony not in a positive light but as part of a chorus of scolds. I had described my experience in respectful and honest terms. He turned it into a woman “yelling” because he didn’t like my message.

They can’t tolerate a woman who refuses to let them define what her interests should be.

Here was a man casting himself as the protector of ambitious young women—protecting them, ironically, from the uncomfortable truth—while valuing economic output over the lived experience of a woman speaking honestly about womanhood and motherhood. He was jumping on the bandwagon, again suggesting to women that their ambition is noble if it follows the male script, and that any voice, including a woman’s who is speaking from experience, urging them to consider the risks and the trade-offs, is the enemy.

For decades, feminist ideology has claimed to speak for women while systematically devaluing the very things that make us women. By insisting our value lies in how closely we can emulate men—our earning power, our career ladders, our emotional detachment from family—feminism has practiced a peculiar form of misogyny. The feminist man who parrots that script is not our ally. He is its most eager foot soldier bashing womanhood.

True equality doesn’t require us to erase sex differences. It requires us to stop punishing women for being women. It requires us to value motherhood not as a regrettable detour but as one of the most profound contributions a human being can make to society. It requires us to tell young women the whole truth: you can have a career and a family, but biology is not optional, and time is not infinite. And it requires us to stop letting men—whether they call themselves feminists or not—define what female flourishing looks like.

I have empathy for the well-meaning feminist man. Many of them genuinely want to do right by girls and women. But good intentions aren’t enough when the ideology they champion has spent fifty years telling women that their bodies, their desires, and their deepest callings are problems to be solved rather than gifts to be treasured.

The man who tells you that your highest purpose is to become more like him may be the one who truly hates what we are the most.

The feminist man may wear the right slogans and post the right memes. He may cry the right tears on camera. But if he can’t look at a woman who chooses motherhood and see her as fully equal—if he measures her worth by a spreadsheet of lifetime earnings—he isn’t fighting misogyny. He’s practicing it, often more effectively than the crude chauvinists ever could.

Women deserve better. We deserve men and women who respect us as women, not as defective men. We deserve a culture that celebrates the extraordinary power of female biology and the unique strength it requires rather than demanding we suppress it for the sake of “parity.” And we deserve to call out the wolf in ally’s clothing, no matter how many Instagram posts he makes about female empowerment.

Because in the end, the man who tells you that your highest purpose is to become more like him may be the one who truly hates what we are the most.