Feminism is sometimes presented by its proponents as something with which only an inveterate misogynist could disagree. “It’s just about fairness for women, allowing them the same freedoms to pursue their heart’s desire that we allow men,” it is claimed. “How can you be against that?!”

Some perhaps genuinely believe this. But it is nothing more than a rhetorical strategy to put critics on the defensive and to deflect attention from the radical core of virtually all contemporary feminist thought, at least of the kind one encounters among the cultural elite. The contemporary feminist worldview can be concisely summarized: men as a class oppose women as a class, and the only way to advance the cause of women in the face of collective patriarchal repression is to reduce or ignore the differences between the sexes altogether.

Where did such ideas come from? Some would have it that the basic ideas of feminism consist of the simple liberal principles articulated in the opening claim about freedom, and more radical divagations are of recent origin. Not true. You can find the extremism in the foundational sources of modern feminist thought. A consideration of Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 book, The Second Sex, which is widely acknowledged as an essential early inspiration of what would become modern feminism, proves the point.

The Second Sex is Beauvoir’s effort to explain the basis of what she saw as the systemic oppression of women throughout world history—she even uses the language of “enslavement” to describe how women have been routinely treated. The book’s moralizing tenor is not at all subtle. Beauvoir notes that decades before her writing, the Soviet Union had announced the project of freeing these slaves:

Erotic liberty was to be recognized by custom, but the sexual act was not to be considered a “service” to be paid for; woman was to be obliged to provide herself with other ways of earning a living; marriage was to be based on a free agreement that the spouses could break at will; maternity was to be voluntary, which meant that contraception and abortion were to be authorized and that, on the other hand, all mothers and their children were to have exactly the same rights, in or out of marriage; pregnancy leaves were to be paid for by the State, which would assume charge of the children, signifying not that they would be taken away from their parents, but that they would not be abandoned to them.

But that did not happen, as she acknowledges. What, then, was the cause of the Soviet failure to achieve this feminist utopia? Beauvoir offers no real answer, other than to insinuate that they did not really mean it.

The Soviets, she argues, did not pursue the single policy that would undo the sex difference in all their social and cultural manifestations—that is, they did not eliminate the differential treatment of children. Beauvoir assures readers that the only way to give women full freedom is to transform the whole social culture such that “little girl[s are] brought up from the first with the same demands and rewards, the same severity and the same freedom, as [their] brothers, taking part in the same studies, the same games, promised the same future, surrounded with women and men who seem…to her undoubted equals.” In her mind, if only we raised girls precisely as we raise boys, sex differences would disappear altogether.

In 1949, this perhaps seemed a “utopian fancy,” Beauvoir admits. But today, three-quarters of a century later, we have essentially achieved the very transformation in individual freedom across the sex divide that Beauvoir desired. In varying degrees across societies, but with significant consensus throughout the Western world, we have committed to the project that Beauvoir argued would produce true equity between the sexes. No girls in the West today are prevented from pursuing the life they desire based on their sex. “[L]aws, institutions, customs, public opinion, and the whole social context” have been fundamentally altered since Beauvoir wrote, in favor of the feminist political project.

And yet a sexual division of labor and other demonstrable differences between the sexes remain. It turns out that when men and women are free to choose career pathways, they generally do not make the same choices. Whole fields—for example, engineering, computer programming, social work, and elementary, secondary, and higher education—show profound sex skews in a culture that disdains telling girls and boys what to study, leaving it up to them to decide. Electoral politics in much of the West remains heavily dominated by men. But most Western societies now actively seek candidates of both sexes who can show the public how pliant they are before feminist ideology.

Although Beauvoir is no longer alive, students of her ideology argue that differences between men and women are not due to natural differences. It can only be that we have not yet sufficiently transformed our societies such that women are encouraged to run for office and become engineers with precisely the same frequency as men. In other words, the revolution must continue!

But already in 1949, Beauvoir saw the depth of the “problem” that feminists face.

In Second Sex, she cites a survey of female Renault factory workers that shows a clear preference for full-time homemaking over factory work. Beauvoir’s spin on this inconvenient fact is that this was due only to the harsh conditions of such labor—socialism, she freely admits, is the solution to that problem—and that women would have answered differently if asked to choose between full-time labor in either the home (which, presumably, they would have seen still more unfavorably) or the factory. The fact that now, when labor conditions in all sectors have been significantly modified to make things less physically onerous than was the case in the mid-20th century, most working women with young children still say they would prefer to be full-time homemakers is inexplicable from Beauvoir’s vision of conscious female “enslavement” to motherhood and childcare.

Why would slaves, in a world in which they are free to choose to shed their chains, be eager to keep the shackles locked securely? Perhaps because they were never slaves, and it was bizarre to ever think of their situation in that way.

Yet, in Beauvoir’s foundational feminist analysis, even the most intimately basic elements of female behavior and belief are consequences of their domination under patriarchy.

One example she discusses particularly struck me as indicative of feminism’s extreme nature. Beauvoir suggests, apparently seriously, that the manner in which girls learn to urinate, that is, while seated rather than standing, is not a natural act but rather still another part of the patriarchal conspiracy to rob them of power and self-esteem. But anyone who considers the question for a few seconds understands the reasons for the different postures. For a feminist, though, such self-evidence is insufficient, at least when it fails to correlate with feminist belief.

In rereading the above-quoted passage, I was reminded of a young woman I knew in graduate school, heavily influenced by thinkers such as Beauvoir. Once, when we were discussing the politics of sex and gender (we were both students in the same seminar at the time), she made the exact point Beauvoir makes here. Every design of every technology in our society, she asserted, was inevitably tainted with patriarchal misogyny and favoritism of men, as this ideology was pervasive throughout our social world. Look, for example, at the pumps at the gas station, she went on. Do we really believe those could not have been designed otherwise? How culturally consistent with patriarchal domination is it that our gas dispensing technology resembles an active male member aggressively inserting itself into a passive opening in the automobile?

I honestly did not know how to react. Eventually, I recovered sufficiently to ask her what other mechanisms would work as efficiently as this, and she tried to describe alternatives, none of which were at all feasible. I assure my readers that I am not inventing this exchange. This woman genuinely believed such things, and there were then—and still are—many others like her in the university world. Feminism is what gave them this bizarre worldview. I have every reason to believe that my grad school acquaintance had read Beauvoir.

The philosopher Michael Levin, in his brilliant Feminism and Freedom, aptly explores the feminist utopia by citing a writer who argues that in a truly feminist society, no one would ever pay any more attention to sex or gender in everyday interaction than they do to eye color. The production of such a world seems about as likely an accomplishment as the invention of a time machine. The sexless/genderless world of the feminists is palpably and radically out of touch with many undeniable facts of reality. Yet in our present culture, which has been profoundly affected by feminism, many avidly agree with that goal. This is not a recent radical distortion of basic feminist principles. These folks can point to the very origins of modern feminist thought in the work of writers like Simone de Beauvoir for support.