Women are strong. But too often, modern feminism teaches us not to act like it. It makes us feel guilty for things that should actually be empowering. Let me share a couple examples.

Machete vs. Woman

The other day I was scrolling through Facebook. “He had a machete and duct tape,” an intriguing post read. “She fought back and WON!”

Clicking (of course), I found the original story at the Seattle Times. On New Year’s Day, 27-year-old Lillian Germond was walking to her apartment when a man with a machete pushed her up against her door. The daughter of a retired police officer, she’d trained for years in taekwondo. The Times reports:

She grabbed the machete’s blade, cutting her hand, and started screaming for her boyfriend, Chauncey Arkfeld. … Arkfeld jumped in and struggled with the attacker while Germond disarmed him and then hit him with a broken table leg that had been left near the stoop.

The police came and took the assailant away. At the scene, they found another knife and a roll of duct tape. Yikes!

For fighting off a machete-wielding attacker with her bare hands, Lillian Germond is my new hero. Is that okay with modern feminism? Probably not. According to modern feminists, “self-defense is not the solution to sexual assault.” Focusing on self-defense implies that it’s solely women’s responsibility to stop rape from happening, they say. 

’70s vs. Now

About the same time, popular author Caitlin Flanagan bemoaned  in The Atlantic the way many young women approach dating today. She recounts the now infamous Anziz Ansari story. A young woman called “Grace” accused the famous actor of sexual assault. Many liberals and conservatives argued he didn’t assault her. It was just a bad date. He believed she consented to sexual acts and then behaved like a jerk in turning him down. She wanted him to read her mind, her “non-verbal signals,” feeling upset and violated when he didn’t.

Flanagan writes of her adolescence in the 1970s, “In so many ways, compared with today’s young women, we were weak. … But as far as getting away from a man who was trying to pressure us into sex we didn’t want, we were strong.” She writes that young women were taught to say no, get a ride home and even slap a man if he pressured her. Not so anymore.

“Apparently there is a whole country full of young women who don’t know how to call a cab,” she adds. 

Reality vs. Shouldn’t Have Tos

Modern feminism freaks out when we suggest women learn self-defense, extricate themselves from undesirable sexual encounters when possible or even negotiate better pay. Why? There’s a simple reason: women shouldn’t have to do those things. 

And guess what? Those modern feminists are right. We women shouldn’t have to think about how we’ll defend ourselves from an attacker, or even a close acquaintance, who tries to sexually assault us. We shouldn’t have to keep our guard up on dates, pushing men away for not valuing us or our bodies. 

But we do. Because that’s the world we live in. And no matter how much society improves, it’ll still include bad men. Thanks to modern feminism, however, women won’t know how to stand up for themselves when they encounter one.

Guilt vs. Empowerment

Hear me on this: men must still be held accountable. We know that the way men view women in our culture has to change. If a man mistreats a woman, it his fault, not hers. No woman is ever “asking for it.” And it is not women’s sole responsibility to constantly keep men in check. 

But hear this also: Fellow women, you are strong. You are valuable. You deserve to treated with respect. And when you aren’t, it’s okay to stand up for yourself. It’s okay to not put up with it.

That’s not guilt. It’s not shaming anyone for the bad things that happened to her, or placing the burden on women to fix it all. It’s simply empowerment.