"I Expected Better From You": Decoding the Paternalistic Weaponization of Disappointment Against Women's Autonomy
- Ash A Milton
- Jan 27
- 23 min read
A Feminist Analysis from a Childless Cat Lady with a PhD
I'm a woman in my fifties. I have a career, a PhD, and I share my home with cats (a Maltese dog), not children. No man required. According to the current political discourse, this apparently makes me dangerous.
I've also noticed something particular in recent months—a phrase that keeps appearing in my social media interactions with a very specific demographic: white, conservative men, usually in their fifties or older. After I post a worldview they disagree with, they write: "I expected better from you."
This phrase is not casual disagreement. It's not even regular argument. It is a calculated tactic of social control, and it reveals far more about our current political moment than most people realize. This is about the systematic rollback of women's autonomy, and the "I expected better from you" framework is just one small weapon in a much larger arsenal aimed at putting women back in our "proper place."
The Anatomy of Paternalistic Disappointment
Let me be clear about what's happening when a man tells a woman "I expected better from you." This is not peer-to-peer disagreement. You don't say this to someone you view as your equal. This phrase establishes a hierarchical relationship—one where the speaker occupies a position of authority and the listener has somehow failed to meet the standards set by that authority.
It's the language of fathers to wayward daughters. Of bosses to junior employees who fell asleep on the night shift. Of teachers to students who turned in shoddy work. It inherently assumes that the speaker has the right to set behavioral expectations for the listener, and that the listener has an obligation to meet those expectations.
When men use this phrase with women they're making a breathtaking assumption of authority. They're claiming the right to evaluate, judge, and express disappointment in a woman's political positions, life choices, publicly stated beliefs, or behavior. The subtext is always the same:
"You should have sought my approval before speaking. You have failed to conform to the standards I expected of you. You have disappointed the authority I hold over you."
I have never—not once—seen men use this phrasing with other men in political disagreements. Men argue with other men. They insult each other. They call each other idiots, hypocrites, liars. But "I expected better from you"? That's reserved for women, children, and subordinates. It's the linguistic equivalent of a pat on the head followed by a frown of disappointment.
The phrase is particularly insidious because it masquerades as sadness rather than anger, as concern rather than control. It positions the speaker as the reasonable one, the disappointed mentor who had such high hopes. It frames the woman's autonomous thought as a personal betrayal of the speaker's expectations—as though his expectations should have been her guiding principle all along.
The Current War on Women's Autonomy: Project 2025 and the Architecture of Oppression
This individual tactic of linguistic control exists within a much broader, more systematic attack on women's freedom and autonomy. The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 provides us with a detailed blueprint of how the right wing intends to roll back decades of progress toward women's equality and self-determination.
As of late 2025, approximately 48% of Project 2025 policies have been enacted or are currently in progress under the current administration. Nearly 40% of the reproductive restrictions outlined in this roadmap have been completed or are underway. This isn't theoretical anymore. This is happening right now, in real time, as we speak.
Project 2025 explicitly seeks to impose what advocates call a "hierarchical, gendered, patriarchal vision of society." The document is particularly focused on enforcing a vision of family that relies on fixed and narrowly defined gender roles. At its core, Project 2025 aims to undermine the protections that enable women and LGBTQI+ people to thrive outside of a male-dominated, heterosexual family structure.
The document calls for the Department of Health and Human Services to adopt an official stance that families consist of a married father, mother, and children—and to redirect federal funds to support what it explicitly describes as a "biblically based" definition of family. This isn't just rhetoric. This is policy.
Let's be specific about what Project 2025 proposes for women:
Reproductive Coercion as State Policy: Project 2025 lays out multiple strategies for restricting and ultimately eliminating access to mifepristone, the medication used in the most common abortion regimen in the United States. The plan proposes resurrecting the largely dormant Comstock Act—a 19th-century law that prohibits mailing "obscene materials"—to ban abortion pills, equipment, and materials from being sent through the U.S. Postal Service.
The document calls for dismantling abortion protections under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which currently requires emergency departments receiving Medicare funds to provide abortion care when necessary for emergency treatment—even in states where abortion is banned. Imagine a woman in a medical crisis being denied life-saving care because ideologues decided her life matters less than their interpretation of scripture.
Project 2025 also demands increased data collection on abortion, requiring all states to report all abortions that take place. States that don't comply will have federal funds withheld. This creates a surveillance state specifically targeting women's reproductive decisions—a registry of women who have exercised bodily autonomy.
Erasing Women from the Workplace: The document calls for rescinding executive orders signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s that prohibited federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sex. It proposes weakening Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex discrimination in employment.
Project 2025 directs the next president (written prior to the election) to issue an executive order exempting religious employers from laws prohibiting sex discrimination, explicitly allowing them to discriminate against employees who have abortions or who are parents in ways that don't conform to their religious ideology. For women, this means your boss's religious beliefs could determine whether you keep your job after exercising reproductive choice.
The plan also calls for weakening the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—the agency that enforces Title VII. Under Project 2025, the EEOC would lose its power to issue guidance and policy positions interpreting anti-discrimination law, and would be blocked from entering into consent decrees with employers to resolve discrimination cases. Translation: If you experience sex discrimination, you'd have to file expensive and time-consuming lawsuits to defend your rights. Most women can't afford that. Which is exactly the point.
Attacking Education and Title IX: Project 2025 recommends rescinding the Biden administration's Title IX regulations that strengthened protections against sexual harassment and assault in schools. Instead, it would reinstitute Trump administration regulations that provided extraordinary "due process" rights to those accused of harassment while requiring victims to submit to cross-examination by their accused harassers.
The document calls for ending disparate impact discrimination claims under Title IX and narrowing the definition of "sex" in Title IX to "biological sex recognized at birth." This isn't just about transgender students (though that attack is real and vicious). It's about allowing the use of gender stereotypes in education—about going back to a time when girls were tracked away from math and science, when women weren't admitted to certain programs, when separate was considered equal.
The "Biblically Based" Family as Public Policy: Throughout Project 2025, there's a consistent vision of women primarily in their roles as wives and mothers. The document suggests that the federal government should "prioritize funding for home-based childcare, not universal day care," claiming that children who spend "significant" time in day care experience "higher rates of anxiety, depression, and neglect."
This is, of course, unsupported by actual evidence—but it serves a clear purpose: keeping women at home, dependent on male partners, unable to participate fully in the workforce. When women can't work because they can't afford childcare, or because the federal government has decided that mothers who work are harming their children, women lose economic independence. When we lose economic independence, we lose the ability to leave bad marriages, abusive relationships, or simply situations that don't serve us.
Project 2025 calls for ending or severely limiting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the federal government and directs the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division to investigate and criminally prosecute state and local governments that maintain such programs. The document explicitly frames DEI as discriminatory toward white men—a stunning inversion of reality that positions the most privileged demographic as victims while attacking the programs that have allowed women and people of color to access opportunities previously denied to them.
Many might interpret some of the Project 2025 rhetoric as a defense of "biological" women, viewing it as positive. However, they overlook that 'discriminating' constitutes discrimination. Once this path is taken, it tends to escalate. Once you start sliding down this slope it snowballs.
Stripping "Professional" Status from Degrees Predominantly Held by Women
One of the most revealing attacks on women disguises itself as a policy about student loans and professional degrees. In late 2025, the Trump administration moved to exclude numerous graduate-level degrees from classification as "professional degrees." This seemingly technical reclassification has profound implications—and a very clear pattern.
Under the new classification, students in these fields are limited to $20,500 in federal loans each year, with a lifetime cap of $100,000—significantly less than the $50,000 annual limit available to students pursuing degrees that retained "professional" status, such as medicine, dentistry, and law.
Here is the list of programs that lost professional status:
Nursing and Healthcare Fields (Female-Dominated):
Nursing at all advanced levels (Master of Science in Nursing, Doctor of Nursing Practice)
Nurse Practitioner programs
Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist programs
Physical Therapy
Occupational Therapy
Speech-Language Pathology
Audiology
Physician Assistant programs
Social Services and Mental Health (Female-Dominated):
Social Work (Master of Social Work, Doctor of Social Work, Ph.D.)
Counseling
Public Health
Education (Female-Dominated):
Teaching and Education degrees at all levels
Master's in Education
Doctoral degrees in Education
Other Fields:
Architecture
Notice a pattern? The professions stripped of "professional" status are overwhelmingly female-dominated fields. Women account for 88% of nurse practitioners, 84% of students in Master of Social Work programs, 70% of community and social service workers, and between 61% and 97% of preschool through high school teachers. These are the caring professions—the fields where women have historically found professional opportunities and where we provide essential services to our communities.
Meanwhile, fields that retained professional status—medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine, law—are historically male-dominated, though women have made significant inroads in recent decades. Theology is explicitly included in the professional degree list. Yes, you read that correctly: training to be a minister is considered more professionally legitimate than training to be a nurse practitioner who provides primary care in rural communities.
This isn't just about student loan limits. It's about status, respect, and the systematic devaluation of women's work. It's about making it harder for women to access the education necessary for advanced professional roles. It's about ensuring that women remain concentrated in lower-paid, lower-status positions while men continue to dominate the highest-paid and most prestigious professions.
The faculty makeup of nursing schools is expected to change as a result of this reclassification. With master's degrees as the minimum requirement to teach at most nursing schools, limiting access to advanced nursing degrees will worsen the shortage of nursing educators and make nursing schools more competitive. This creates a vicious cycle: fewer people can afford to get advanced nursing degrees, which means fewer nursing faculty, which means fewer students can be trained as nurses at all levels.
As of 2023, there were 1,977 faculty vacancies for individuals prepared to teach at the graduate level in nursing schools, resulting in approximately 60,000 qualified and eligible nursing students being turned away. The reclassification will exacerbate this crisis, contributing to a healthcare system already facing a deficit of approximately 295,800 registered nurses as of 2025.
This is policy violence against women, wrapped in the technical language of federal loan regulations.
Beyond Project 2025: The "Saving America by Saving the Family" Blueprint
If you thought Project 2025 was the extent of the Heritage Foundation's ambitions for controlling women's lives, think again. In January 2026, the same architects released a new 168-page policy document titled "Saving America by Saving the Family"—and it makes explicit what Project 2025 only implied: the government should have direct control over the most intimate aspects of women's lives, including when we marry, whom we marry, and how many children we produce.
This report represents what Heritage calls a "whole-of-government" approach to marriage and childbearing. They frame declining marriage and birth rates as requiring "a culture-wide Manhattan Project that marshals America's political, social and economic capital to restore the natural family."
Let that sink in for a moment: they're comparing encouraging heterosexual marriage and reproduction to the project that developed nuclear weapons.
That's the level of urgency and governmental intervention they believe is warranted to control women's reproductive choices.
Government-Funded Marriage Bootcamps: The most striking proposal is that the Department of Health and Human Services should collaborate with local nonprofits, including churches, to provide government-funded marriage "bootcamp" classes. These would target unmarried couples living together—because apparently consenting adults cohabitating is now a problem requiring federal intervention.
The report proposes HHS-funded advertising campaigns with slogans like "Give her a ring before she gives you a baby"—treating women as passive recipients of both rings and pregnancies rather than autonomous decision-makers. They explicitly cite Mayor Michael Bloomberg's 2013 teen pregnancy ads as a model—the ones that featured photos of toddlers asking "Honestly, Mom, chances are he won't stay with you. What happens to me?" This is the level of manipulation and shame they want deployed at the federal level.
Financial Coercion Disguised as Incentives: The report proposes massive financial incentives specifically designed to encourage young marriage and reproduction:
Investment accounts with $2,500 in seed money for couples who marry by age 30
Tax credits for married biological parents equal to the $17,670 adoption tax credit
A 25% bonus for families with three or more children
Public-private partnerships to provide monetary awards for every decade a couple remains married
Massive tax credits for families that increase with more children
Observe what's occurring here: the government plans to use your tax dollars to financially incentivize individuals to adhere to a particular family model—heterosexual marriage with several biological children—while offering no support to those who opt for different lifestyles. The same political ideology that criticizes aid for children and those facing economic difficulties aims to establish a completely new welfare system for their chosen recipients.
The report encourages couples to have an average of two children to maintain the population—as though women's bodies are national resources to be managed for demographic goals. The U.S. fertility rate dropped to a record low of 1.59 children per woman in 2024, and Heritage sees this as a crisis requiring federal intervention rather than as women making informed choices about whether, when, and how many children to have based on our own lives, resources, and desires.
Controlling Every Aspect of Life to Maximize Reproduction: The breadth of government control proposed in this report is staggering:
Work requirements and benefit caps: Strict work requirements on social benefit programs and capping alimony payments—ensuring that women who leave marriages face economic hardship
Infrastructure prioritization: The Department of Transportation should prioritize grants to cities and towns with higher marriage and birth rates—using federal funding to reward communities that produce the "right" kind of families
Social media restrictions: A 16-year-old age limit on social media and certain AI chatbots, ostensibly to promote face-to-face interaction that might lead to marriage
Discouraging online dating: The report explicitly cautions against online dating, which it claims "encourages casual dating and premarital sex"—because women having sexual autonomy and choice in partners is apparently a problem
Climate denial as pro-natalist strategy: The report argues that "climate change alarmism" demoralizes young people and dissuades them from having children—so denying climate science becomes a reproductive strategy
Religious control: Promoting a universal "day of rest" and giving churches more opportunity to collaborate with local, state, and federal governments on policy—because the separation of church and state is apparently negotiable when it comes to controlling women's reproduction
IVF skepticism: Despite Trump's campaign promises to be "the fertilization president," the report cautions against IVF, arguing it "contributes to the perspective that embryos, which they claim are human life, can be destroyed"
Executive Control Over Private Life: Perhaps most chilling, the report asks President Trump to sign executive orders requiring every federal grant, contract, and regulation to be assessed for its effect on marriage and family formation. This means every aspect of federal policy—from transportation to education to housing to healthcare—would be evaluated based on whether it encourages heterosexual marriage and reproduction.
Heritage Foundation Vice President Roger Severino, one of the report's lead authors, defended the proposals: "We surveyed domestic experts, digested the literature, and travelled to multiple countries to learn everything we could about what is holding the industrialized world back. And it always came back to having healthy families, which depends on stable, fruitful marriage."
Notice the language: "fruitful marriage." Not happy marriage. Not equal partnership. Fruitful—as in producing offspring. Women are orchards to be cultivated for harvest.
The report explicitly blames "left-wing policies, such as offering assistance to single parents" for declining marriage rates.
Translation: helping women survive outside of marriage makes them less likely to marry, and that's bad. The solution isn't to make marriage more appealing by promoting actual equality and partnership—it's to make single motherhood economically untenable so women have no choice but to marry.
This represents a sharp pivot for the Heritage Foundation away from its traditional rhetoric of small government and free-market conservatism toward an ideology that embraces massive government intervention in affairs as private as procreation. When conservatives talk about "small government," they mean small enough to fit inside your uterus and your bedroom.
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts has made clear this is just the beginning, stating this report is "the first in a series of family policy white papers." More control is coming. More intervention is planned. More aspects of women's private lives will be subjected to federal oversight and manipulation.
The goal is transparent: to create economic and social conditions where women have no realistic choice but to marry young, have multiple children, and remain in marriages regardless of whether they serve us. This isn't about supporting families—it's about manufacturing a specific type of family structure by making all alternatives economically and socially untenable.
The Christian Nationalist Vision: Submission as Spiritual Mandate
The attacks on women's autonomy aren't happening in a vacuum. They're driven by a specific ideological framework: Christian nationalism. This movement has been increasingly explicit about its vision for women's role in society.
Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon, whose ministry has 120,000 YouTube subscribers, has openly argued for the removal of women from positions of civil leadership. He once bragged in a sermon about forbidding his wife from reading a book because he hadn't gotten a chance to review it first. "You're not going to outpace me," he said—a chilling statement of ownership and control.
Webbon has also argued that in a Christian nation, women would not have the right to vote, claiming that within fifty years, voting women would undo the country's Christian foundations. He and other Christian nationalists, including Stephen Wolfe (author of "The Case for Christian Nationalism"), advocate for repealing the 19th Amendment and implementing a "household vote" system in which men vote on behalf of their families.
Think about what this means. These aren't fringe figures shouting into the void. These are influential voices within a movement that has significant power in the current administration. They're openly calling for women to lose the right to vote—to be represented not as individuals but as dependents of male household heads.
The "Statement on Christian Nationalism & the Gospel," published on November 6, 2024, with contributors including Webbon, outlines explicit goals including repealing the 19th Amendment. James Silberman, who works for far-right Oklahoma state Senator Dusty Deevers and is one of the statement's primary authors, ominously tweeted, "We'll call this Project 2035"—indicating that current attacks on women's rights are just the beginning.
Christian nationalism restricts women's roles to ideals of obedience, domesticity, and racial "purity," weaponizing these expectations against our freedoms. The reversal of Roe v. Wade exemplifies how Christian nationalist values infringe upon reproductive rights, limiting women's access to healthcare and self-determination. This isn't about protecting life—if it were, these self-proclaimed Christians would take every measure to protect women. Instead, they excuse male sins that harm women while demanding female compliance and submission.
The Manosphere and Red Pill Ideology: When Male Entitlement Becomes Epidemic
Running parallel to—and sometimes intersecting with—Christian nationalism is the manosphere: a loose network of online communities focused on men's issues that have evolved into spaces celebrating hegemonic masculinity and attacking feminism. This includes Men's Rights Activists (MRAs), Pick-Up Artists (PUAs), Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), the Red Pill movement, and incel (involuntarily celibate) communities.
These spaces have adopted a narrative of male victimhood, claiming that men face a "loneliness epidemic" caused by feminism and women's unrealistic expectations. But let's be precise about what's actually happening: There isn't a male loneliness epidemic. There's a women's reproductive freedom and financial autonomy surge, and some men are furious about it.
The U.S. Surgeon General declared an epidemic of loneliness and isolation in 2023—but this was explicitly not gendered. Loneliness is a universal problem affecting people across demographics. The attempt to reframe this as specifically or primarily a male problem serves a clear political purpose: it positions men as uniquely victimized and women as responsible for men's emotional wellbeing.
Research has consistently shown that both men and women report feeling lonely, with no significant gender gap in being single among young adults. What has changed isn't that men are suddenly more lonely—it's that women are no longer willing to accept relationships that don't serve us. And men in the manosphere are calling this a crisis.
Historically, women relied on marriage with men to access financial security and social acceptance. It wasn't until 1974 that women could purchase property, open a bank account, or obtain a credit card without a husband. But with greater freedom to be financially independent, many women are prioritizing dating less—not because we have no options, but because for the first time in history, we actually do have options.
As one observer put it: "Women are choosing solitude, not because we have no options, but because for the first time in history, we actually do."
The manosphere sells a transactional view of relationships: women are objects or tools, sex is something men are owed, and relationships exist for women to do all the emotional and physical labor while men earn money. This ideology teaches men to view women not as people but as adversaries in a game where sex is the reward for playing correctly. Your "sexual market value"—the sum of traits you can and cannot control—determines your worth in this framework.
The result is predictable: men who internalize these beliefs find themselves unable to form genuine connections. They ignore women who might actually be interested in them while pursuing an idealized version of femininity that exists primarily in their imagination. When relationships do form, they're based on incompatible needs from the start—the man wants a submissive domestic servant and sexual partner, while the woman is expected to have no needs or interests of her own.
Some men eventually leave these communities, reporting that manosphere ideology had adverse effects on their mental health and exacerbated their loneliness. One former adherent wrote: "After all the hours of listening to their theories and eventually stopping, I started to feel weird. I feel like not me at all. I feel like my brain is melted. I feel like I can't socialize and now have no friends."
The manosphere has declared that the solution to male loneliness is for women to accept lesser treatment, to lower our standards, to become more sexually available, to stop having careers and financial independence that might make us choosy about partners. In other words, the solution to male loneliness is the removal of women's autonomy.
This is the context in which men tell me they "expected better" from me. They expected compliance. They expected me to defer to their worldview. They expected me to prioritize their comfort over my own analysis and beliefs. They expected me to be the kind of woman who doesn't challenge male authority, who stays in her lane, who understands that her role is to be decorative and compliant rather than analytical and autonomous.
The Manufactured Crisis: Male Loneliness as Justification for Female Subordination
The framing of male loneliness as an epidemic specifically caused by women's liberation is a deliberate political strategy. It takes a real and complex social problem—the breakdown of community, the isolation of modern life, the loss of traditional social structures—and reduces it to a simple cause: women having too much freedom.
This narrative serves multiple purposes. First, it positions men as victims, which is politically useful for mobilizing male resentment. Second, it identifies women—specifically, feminist women—as the cause of male suffering, which justifies attacks on women's rights as a form of self-defense. Third, it suggests that the solution to this manufactured crisis is to restrict women's autonomy, forcing us back into traditional roles where we're financially dependent on men and thus less able to refuse relationships that don't serve us.
But here's the uncomfortable truth the manosphere doesn't want to acknowledge: If your approach to relationships leaves you lonely, the problem isn't women having too much freedom. The problem is your approach.
Men who view women as full human beings, who develop genuine emotional intelligence, who can form reciprocal relationships based on mutual respect and care—these men aren't having a loneliness crisis. They're building meaningful connections with partners who choose them freely, which makes those connections more valuable and more sustainable.
The manosphere ideology actually creates the loneliness it claims to address. When you view women as adversaries to be conquered rather than people to connect with, when you approach relationships as transactions rather than partnerships, when you can't offer emotional intimacy because you've been taught that vulnerability is weakness—of course you end up lonely. But the solution isn't forcing women to accept these deficits. The solution is growing up and developing the capacity for genuine human connection.
Men in the manosphere complain that women want "alpha males"—high-status, physically attractive, financially successful men. They claim women ignore decent "beta males" who would treat them well. But this framing reveals the problem: they're still thinking in terms of hierarchy and transaction. They believe that by not being "alpha" enough, they're being unfairly excluded from access to women's bodies and domestic labor.
The truth is more straightforward: Women who seek partners desire to be seen as fully human. They want men who have engaged in their own emotional growth, who can communicate effectively, and who see childcare and household tasks as shared duties, not as favors to them. They want men who recognize that their lives, careers, and inner worlds are just as important as their own. These traits aren't divided along "alpha" and "beta" lines but rather between "emotionally mature adults" and "man-children." Women also wish to be respected for their choice to remain single.
Why Now? The Political Economy of Women's Freedom
None of these attacks on women's autonomy are accidental or isolated. They represent a coordinated response to women's increasing economic and social independence. For the first time in human history, large numbers of women in developed nations can support themselves financially, access reliable contraception, delay or decline marriage and childbearing, pursue education and careers, and generally build lives that don't center on men's needs and desires.
This represents an existential threat to traditional patriarchal structures. If women don't need men for financial security, if we can control our own reproduction, if we can achieve professional success and social status without male approval—then the implicit bargain of patriarchy breaks down. Men can no longer expect automatic access to women's domestic labor, sexual availability, and reproductive capacity simply by virtue of being men.
The response has been to try to reinstate those dependencies by force of law and social pressure. If women won't voluntarily accept subordinate roles, then make those roles legally and economically mandated. Ban abortion to force pregnancy and childbearing. Make graduate education unaffordable for female-dominated fields to limit women's professional advancement. Gut Title VII and Title IX to remove legal protections against discrimination. Eliminate childcare support to make it financially impossible for mothers to work. Frame women's autonomy as the cause of social problems from male loneliness to family breakdown.
The "I expected better from you" framework fits perfectly into this strategy. It's a way of asserting authority without appearing to do so, of demanding compliance while claiming to offer guidance, of punishing female autonomy while framing it as disappointment rather than control.
When a man says he "expected better from me" because I hold a different opinion or confronted him on his gaslighting, he's essentially expressing: "I anticipated you would remain in your place. I assumed you would defer to male authority. I expected you not to question the systems that advantage me. I thought you would be less of a threat to the hierarchies from which I benefit."
The Price of Women's Compliance: What We Lose When We Meet Their "Expectations"
Let's imagine for a moment that women did what these men expect of us. What would that world look like?
We would go back to being unable to access credit, own property, or control our own finances without male oversight. We would lose the right to refuse sex within marriage—because in 19 states, exemptions for marital rape still exist, and Project 2025 supporters would happily expand those exemptions. We would lose access to abortion and potentially to contraception, returning us to a time when pregnancy was not a choice but an inevitability, tying us to male partners through biological dependency.
We would lose professional opportunities, as discrimination in hiring, pay, and advancement would no longer be illegal. We would be pushed out of advanced education through financial barriers targeted at female-dominated fields. We would lose the right to vote, under the "household representation" model Christian nationalists advocate.
We would be expected to accept male authority in our homes, our churches, our communities, and our government. Our role would be defined primarily through our relationships to men—as daughters, wives, mothers—rather than as autonomous individuals with our own goals, interests, and internal lives.
This isn't a dystopian fantasy. In my novel, Decoding History set in 2055, you'll find a world where these ideologies have succeeded.
This is the explicit goal of movements that currently hold significant political power. Project 2025 isn't speculative—nearly half its provisions are already being implemented. Christian nationalist leaders aren't hiding their agenda—they're openly calling for women's disenfranchisement. The manosphere isn't a fringe phenomenon—its rhetoric has penetrated mainstream discourse, with phrases like "your body, my choice" surging by 4,600% in the 24 hours after the 2024 election.
The price of meeting men's expectations—of being the compliant, deferential, subordinate women they "expected better from"—is our freedom, our autonomy, our selfhood. It's being reduced from full human beings to supporting characters in men's lives.
Resistance and Resilience: The Power of Women Who Disappoint
So what do we do? How do we respond when men tell us they "expected better"?
First, we recognize the tactic for what it is. This is not feedback. This is not constructive criticism. This is not well-meaning guidance. This is an attempt to reassert control through shame and social pressure. The appropriate response is not to apologize or justify ourselves, but to reject the premise entirely.
When someone says "I expected better from you," the question isn't whether we met their expectations. The question is why we should care about their expectations at all. Why should their disappointment matter more than our own analysis? Why should their comfort take precedence over our truth-telling? Why should we modify our behavior to meet standards set by people who don't respect our autonomy?
The answer, of course, is that we shouldn't. Their disappointment is their problem, not ours.
Second, we build and maintain our own economic independence. Every woman who can support herself is a woman who can say no—to bad relationships, to exploitative working conditions, to demands for uncompensated emotional and domestic labor, to political positions that harm us. Financial autonomy is the foundation of all other autonomy.
This means supporting policies that enable women's economic independence: affordable childcare, pay equity enforcement, access to education, anti-discrimination protections, social safety nets that don't assume male household heads. It means supporting each other in pursuing careers, building businesses, acquiring assets, and developing financial literacy. It means creating communities of women who nurture each other. Most cultures around the world are built on extended families, not nuclear families.
Third, we protect and expand our reproductive autonomy by every means available. We support abortion funds and access networks. We learn about and share information on medication abortion. We vote for candidates who will protect reproductive rights. We organize against restrictions on contraception access. We tell our stories to counter the shame and stigma that anti-abortion advocates weaponize against us.
Fourth, we refuse to subordinate our needs and goals to male comfort. We don't soften our words to avoid hurting men's feelings. We don't dim our achievements to avoid threatening male egos. We don't shrink ourselves to fit into spaces designed for male convenience. We claim space, we speak truth, we demand respect as full human beings rather than seeking approval as good women.
Fifth, we build community with other women who refuse compliance. We support each other in staying strong when social pressure mounts. We share resources, strategies, and encouragement. We lift up younger women coming into their power and honor older women who maintained resistance when it was even harder than it is now.
Finally, we remember that every right women have today was won through the refusal of previous generations to meet expectations. The women who demanded suffrage disappointed men who expected them to stay silent. The women who demanded access to education disappointed men who expected them to stay ignorant. The women who demanded workplace equality disappointed men who expected them to stay home. The women who demanded reproductive freedom disappointed men who expected them to stay pregnant.
A shout out to Lorretta Lynn for singing about The Pill in 1975 and to Gwen Levey and The Breakdown for singing Barefoot & Pregnant now.
Progress has always required disappointing men who benefit from women's subordination. If we're disappointing them now, it means we're doing something right.
Conclusion: Toward a Future of Women's Full Humanity
The current political moment is dangerous for women's rights and autonomy. We face coordinated attacks from Christian nationalists, manosphere ideologues, and mainstream political figures who have adopted their rhetoric. These attacks aren't subtle—they're explicit about their goals of restricting women's freedom and reinstating patriarchal control.
But we also live in a moment of unprecedented women's power. More women than ever have educational credentials, economic resources, and legal protections (even as those protections are threatened). We have networks of mutual support that span communities and nations. We have platforms for speaking truth that can't be easily silenced. We have historical memory of what was won and what can be lost.
The men who tell us they "expected better" are correct that we're not meeting their expectations. We're exceeding them—not in the direction of compliance, but in the direction of full humanity. We're claiming the right to set our own expectations, to define our own lives, to exist as autonomous agents rather than supporting characters in male narratives.
They expected us to defer. We're demanding equity. They expected us to comply. We're building power. They expected us to shrink. We're expanding. They expected us to serve. We're leading. They expected us to be grateful for whatever crumbs of autonomy they saw fit to allow. We're claiming our full inheritance as human beings.
Their disappointment is not our failure. It's our success.
As a woman in my fifties, I have a career, a PhD, my own home, and amazing friends. Over the years, I've worked hard to create a life that values intellectual and financial independence. I adore my pets and my cozy slippers. I am passionate about teaching and nurturing the next generation. I also believe in raising all children to be more accepting, but that's a topic for another discussion.
When men tell me they "expected better," what they're really expressing is their discomfort with my refusal to subordinate that independence to their worldview.
Their expectations are not my problem.
Their disappointment is not my responsibility.
Their comfort is not my concern.
I didn't disappoint their expectations.
I transcended them.
And I encourage every woman reading this to do the same.
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