There are two ways to destroy a woman. One is to oppress her. The other is to convince her that liberation means becoming a man.
The twentieth century saw both in action. And the twenty-first still hasn’t found the way out.
The Old Oppression
Machismo needs little introduction. It’s the story of millennia: women treated as property, excluded from education, subjected to domestic violence that society tolerated or ignored, relegated to a silence mistaken for virtue.
The facts are not in dispute. Generations of women suffered physical and psychological abuse. They were denied a voice in decisions affecting their lives. They were taught their worth depended on their usefulness to men. In many cultures, it’s still this way.
This wasn’t tradition. It was injustice dressed up as natural order.
It had to be corrected. But the correction that came took a wrong turn.
The Revolution That Ate Itself
Feminism arose as a response to machismo. And in its origins, it had legitimate demands: that women could vote, study, work, not be beaten with impunity by their husbands.
But the movement didn’t stop there. It evolved into something different—an ideology no longer seeking to protect women from abuse, but to eliminate all difference between men and women.
Contemporary feminism holds that the solution to female suffering is access to positions of power traditionally held by men. That men and women are interchangeable. That traditional roles are oppression. That liberation means women doing exactly what men do.
This ideology has conquered universities, corporations, governments, and media. It has become the official dogma of the West, aggressively exported to the rest of the world.
And yet, something isn’t working.
The Frustration Beneath the Rhetoric
Let’s be honest about what really drives much of this agenda.
Contemporary feminist demands aren’t purely a search for justice—they’re political. And many are born from frustration. Born from the desire to imitate men, to occupy the seats they occupy, to hold the titles they hold. It’s the mindset of competition and ambition disguised as a struggle for equality.
A woman frustrated because she isn’t CEO, because she doesn’t earn the same salary as her male colleague, because she doesn’t have a seat on the board—is she manifesting legitimate aspiration or manifesting envy? The question deserves consideration.
Because envy isn’t cured by giving the envious person what she desires. It’s cured with wisdom—understanding what truly has value.
And here’s the problem: feminism accepts without question the value scale of the male world. It assumes that corporate, political, and institutional power is what matters. That success is measured in positions, salaries, and public recognition.
What if that value scale was wrong from the start?
The Secret Feminism Won’t Admit
Here’s feminism’s deepest irony: by demanding that women occupy “male” positions of external leadership, it devalues precisely the power women already have.
Because there’s a secret feminism doesn’t want to admit: real power isn’t in visible positions of authority. It’s in what feeds and sustains everything else.
Who shapes children’s character in their early years—those years that determine the rest of their lives? Who creates the home where a human being can take refuge from the world and renew their strength? Who maintains the family bonds that give meaning and stability to existence? Who transmits values, culture, love?
Historically, women.
This isn’t a lesser power. It’s the fundamental power. Without it, there is no society. Men can sit in executive offices and parliaments and make decisions that appear in newspapers—but if there are no well-raised children, no stable homes, no transmission of values, everything collapses.
The feminine is what sustains civilization. Not from the throne, but from the very heart of things.
The Same Error, Two Masks
Machismo’s problem was that it despised this power. It treated it as inferior, as servile, as less important than men’s public activities. It treated women as servants instead of recognizing them as the foundation of everything.
Feminism’s problem is that it accepts that same premise. It also believes that raising children is less important than running a company. It also devalues motherhood—treats it as an obstacle to a woman’s “fulfillment.” It also measures worth by external positions and public achievements.
Both ideologies share the same error: they don’t recognize where real power lies.
Machismo said: “A woman’s place is in the home”—and said it with contempt.
Feminism responds: “A woman’s place is wherever she wants”—and implies that staying home means choosing defeat.
Neither understands that the home isn’t a prison or a refuge for those who “couldn’t make it” outside. It’s where the future is formed. And whoever sustains it holds immense power in her hands.
The Evidence Is Everywhere
Look around you. The societies that have most embraced feminism are also those with collapsing birth rates, epidemics of loneliness, children raised by screens because both parents work full-time, divorce rates exceeding 50%, mental health crises among the young.
Is this liberation?
Today’s women have more university degrees than ever, more presence in the workforce than ever, more “independence” than ever. And surveys show they’re unhappier than their mothers and grandmothers.
Something was lost along the way. And that something has to do with having abandoned a role that wasn’t oppression but vocation.
Recovering What Was Lost
This isn’t about going back to machismo. It’s not about locking women up or tolerating abuse or denying them education and opportunities.
It’s about something subtler and harder: recovering the dignity of the feminine without falling into the trap of imitating the masculine.
It’s about recognizing that a woman’s role, though different from a man’s, is not inferior. It’s the foundation on which everything else is built.
It’s about understanding that motherhood isn’t an obstacle but a power. That the home isn’t a prison but a kingdom. That raising conscious, loving children with values is a contribution to humanity that no corporate position can match.
It’s about stopping measuring women by the yardstick of male achievement—and starting to recognize they have their own yardstick, and it measures things that matter more.
What Real Empowerment Looks Like
True female empowerment doesn’t look like a woman imitating a man. It doesn’t look like an exhausted executive who sacrificed her fertility for her career and now at 45 desperately seeks to freeze her eggs. It doesn’t look like a furious activist who sees oppression in every difference between the sexes.
It looks like a woman who understands her true power—and exercises it without frustration, without envy of what men have, without need for external validation.
It looks like a mother raising children with love and wisdom, knowing this work shapes the future more than any law or public policy. Like a wife creating a home where life flourishes. Like a woman whose presence nurtures and sustains those around her.
This power doesn’t need recognition in newspapers. It doesn’t need gender quotas. It doesn’t need anyone to validate it with a title or position.
It’s the power that feeds and sustains everything else. And it has always belonged to women.
The Path Forward
New generations of women need clarity. They need to know there’s another path—one that doesn’t require becoming an activist, that doesn’t measure success by positions conquered, that isn’t born from frustration or envy, that doesn’t ask permission from foreign ideologies to exist.
A path that is neither submission to machismo nor imitation of the masculine.
A path that recognizes the immense power of the feminine and exercises it with dignity—not despite being different from masculine power, but precisely because it’s different.
The world desperately needs this power. Broken families need it. Children abandoned to screens need it. Lost men who no longer know what it means to be men need it. A crumbling civilization needs it.
We don’t need more women imitating men. We need women who remember what the world forgot.
Neither oppression nor imitation. Neither machismo nor feminism.
Only the truth of what has always sustained the world—even if the world doesn’t see it.