Lately, I have been considering why, at a time when women have unprecedented access to opportunities and are participating in public life at ever-growing levels, screechy preachy feminists are so insistent that we are in crisis. I think I finally have an answer: it is because the crisis-mongers are the women who are least well-equipped to handle equality.

Equality, you see, means more than getting good stuff handed to you. It also means being treated as an adult, with the accompanying weight of responsibility and exposure to the challenges and difficulties of the imperfect world we all live in. This is not working out well for precious little princesses who demand influential roles under the righteous slogan that more women in leadership means better outcomes for everyone.

It seems to come as a rude shock to such women that adulthood means understanding that when you make choices, those choices have consequences that you may not always like. So to get around this, new-wave feminism pulls a remarkable sleight of hand.

No decent person would ever say that it is alright to abuse women, or that women ask to be abused. Any decent person would agree that it is utterly abhorrent to sexually harass, abuse, or otherwise violate women (or anyone), and most people would say that what can be done to prevent this, should be done.

However, by turning everything under the sun into an act of gender-based violence or abuse, feminism creates a means through which women never have to take responsibility for anything they do.

A workplace affair turned sour because he wouldn’t leave his wife? That’s his abuse of power.

Getting criticised over something ridiculous you said? That’s the patriarchy trying to intimidate you into silence.

Reasonable questions about credibility, judgment, and motive are treated as tantamount to rape victim-blaming. This allows women to make ludicrous assertions and appalling decisions while escaping any accountability whatsoever. To keep this gig rolling, it is vital to continue finding reasons why men in power have a ‘woman problem’, but the ‘problems’ increasingly look like nothing more than the rantings of entitled narcissists with a mountain of unresolved daddy issues.

If ‘women in power’ really is the panacea that we are told to believe, then I have two questions:

First, if women have to be shunted into influential positions in order for the views, needs, and experiences of ordinary women to be represented, then why have the most significant steps forward for women’s rights and equality throughout Australia’s history been made by parliaments that consisted mainly of men? Surely this tells us that men can, and do, make good decisions?

Second, if having more women in power is so crucial for social wellbeing in general, then why is it that as the proportion of Australian women in political and senior public service roles has continually grown, the quality of public debate, policymaking, and delivery of tangible outcomes is widely agreed to have continually worsened?

Correlation does not imply causation, but might this suggest that competent public administration is unrelated to feminist endorsement? Could it possibly tell us that fitness for office has nothing to do with what is between somebody’s legs, and more to do with what is between their ears and in their hearts?

It is as if, having tasted what equal treatment really means, today’s self-proclaimed feminists find it all too hard to deal with. So they have retreated, sucking their thumbs and stamping their feet, into an infantilised world where all they want to do is scream that they are being picked on and that the state needs to pay more attention to them. God help daddy if he ignores their tantrums and tells them to ‘grow up’ instead of giving them more toys.

These spoiled show ponies are systematically unwinding the hard-fought gains that took their predecessors decades to achieve. They are taking away from women the right to be viewed as capable human beings with agency – including the agency to make bad choices. They are taking away women’s intellect, deriding any woman who disagrees with them as poorly educated, lacking enlightenment, or simply a victim of the patriarchy who does not yet realise she has been victimised. They are destroying the dignity of women and reducing us to the lower status of fragile beings who need special protection, rather than free actors who can look after ourselves, be judged on merit, and take the consequences of our own decisions. And they are doing this for no other reason than to hide their shortcomings, and satisfy their petty grudges, grievances, and ambitions.

We cannot let this continue. We cannot allow self-obsessed child-women who are completely out of touch with reality, to obliterate everything that women have fought for. We have to stand up, reject this mindless frenzy, and remind the world that women are competent, responsible, thinking adults. How horrific it is that in 2022, I should have to write these words…

Lillian Andrews holds a Bachelor of Laws and has spent the past 15 years as a researcher, advocate, and volunteer in the field of domestic violence prevention.