I have been lurking through this sub for quite a while, and in a broad sense i am in your camp too.

Women today have definately lost their way. I would not want to return to the situation from over a century ago, which seemed safer cause women were simply more dependant on men the way society was structured. But i also do not like todays model where woman believe they are totallly independant and even superiour to men, while their behaviour, manipulation and motivations prove just the opposite.

But... and here comes my controversial point... i think the current evolution was partially caused by men. Not the men like you and i, but a select number of sinister characters that saw women as a new untapped market that could boost their profits. Men that knew that a womans psychological shadow could more easily be tricked through marketing and propaganda techniques, since they are by nature more irrational creatures.

So at the beginning of last century they started to create commercials that used this insight, that triggered the female shadow in order to sell products.

Women started to smoke sigarettes cause they were advertised as a sign of female independance and their superiority amidst other females. Can you see the irony in that? Getting addicted to nicotine does not sound much like independance to me ... but it worked.

If you look at the commercials targetted at women and their evolution over the past decades, and how that message is now amplified further through social media, you can see that advertising lead them on every step of the way.

In short: in trying to make woman into equal or bigger consumers than men, they were lured in with irrational images that confirmed all the toxic female beliefs, and brought out the worst in them.

They now believe they are all princesses and at the center of the universe, because some marketing geniuses figured out that that was the most efficient way to make a woman buy stuff.