WTF do you actually think has been going on for the last 50 years??!! Honestly, this is an absurd thing to say. Women HAVE been loudly fighting for and demanding equality and lots and lots of women are bloody and bruised from the fight. It's completely insulting to act like that hasn't been happening and that it hasn't cost lots of women A TON to do that. I was reading something just the other day about the extreme levels of misogyny and hate that the one and only female prime minister of Australia dealt with on a daily basis. Some women don't want power; some women are uncomfortable with other women in power AND a lot of women aren't and don't fit that profile at all. Pretending like there aren't women advocating every day to be taken seriously, to be given equal respect, etc., is absolutely insulting to the great numbers of women who are constantly getting the shit beat out of them for trying to do exactly that!

Also, conflating all women with the ones who voted for Trump is absurd. I will agree that too many white women vote for the interests of white men, and not for their own and that is something that could absolutely improve. And, when I was a child, women had hundreds fewer rights by law than men did, and I'm only 59 years old. This is still very strongly in the collective conscious, particularly in conservative enclaves. The propaganda for it comes from parents, from pulpits, from immediate culture - and the more deeply you are embedded in that, the more risky it is to challenge that culture. A friend of mine told me the other day that her coworker told her she voted for Trump because that's just what people like her and around her do. She had no ideological inclination - it was just going with the tide. I think that is pretty common. You don't think men in power can change but you expect women who believe their role and protection comes from being power-adjacent are supposed to. They are protecting their dominance hierarchy positions as well.

What makes a whole lot more sense than focusing on trying to get conservative women to deprogram themselves and to go against everything they have ever been taught is for liberal and progressive men to band together and actually put their money where their mouth is. A lot of stuff in this culture happens because of bystander-ism. Men - good men - turn a blind eye to a lot of bad stuff. They still bond around denigration and objectification of women because they think they are the only one who doesn't agree with that. But, if those guys would get together and start talking about that stuff, and doing things differently, it would shift a lot of the culture - because men still do have the bulk of institutional power.

Of course, we aren't going to totally dismantle the patriarchal dominance hierarchy with this, but it would go a long, long way toward improving the culture for men, as well as everyone else if guys who say they care about equality and about women actually stepped up. And yes, women need to keep doing their part, but where is men's responsibility in this equation? Where is men's leadership and desire to improve the society? You seem to want to let them entirely off the hook and also to force women to do absolutely everything to change this dynamic. I'm sorry, I don't think that's reasonable or that it can possibly be effective.

What you are saying is naive is the history of every single social movement ever. MLK demanded that white people do better, and although there is still room for a lot of improvement on that front, the things he asked for became part of the Civil Rights Act. And, the Black Power movements going on at the same time accomplished some things, but not a fraction of what they thought they could. History is not on your side, my friend. Edit: Apartheid in South Africa wasn’t overthrown by Black folks seizing power. It was overthrown by convincing whites that they had been wrong and getting them to take responsibility for that. “In 1996, the country initiated a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in an attempt to reckon with the gross human rights violations during apartheid.”