Growing up in a Puerto Rican household, my life was filled with strong, confident women. My mom, tías, and grandmother were exceptional cooks, thoughtful maternal figures, and (for the most part) largely “traditional” in their roles as women and wives. Along with their more traditional attributes, each and every one of them is a self-identified feminist with professional careers.

I was raised with the family recipe for empanadillas, a remedy for any illness, and a treatment for any stain. I love to cook and bake, find joy in care-giving, and wouldn’t be caught dead without my eyebrows on (a personality trait I inherited from my aunts). While I learned a lot of traditionally “feminine” skills from my mom, she also made sure my sister and I were saying we’d attend Harvard University before starting primary school — a choice that likely led to my sister’s medical doctorate and my degree from Rice University. One of my (female) cousins is a practicing lawyer; another is finishing her Master’s degree in Public Health. As Puerto Rican women, my cousins and I have had conversations at length regarding the divide between two seemingly unlike things: a passion for feminism and embracing femininity.

For the sake of argument, let’s define “traditional femininity” in an old fashioned style — cerca 1950’s, a la “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”. A woman’s purpose was to raise her children and take pride in maintaining the home. Wives lived to serve their husbands, even waking up before their significant others to prevent being seen looking “unkempt”. Makeup was perfectly applied before leaving the house, nails were to be kept neat and tidy, and above all else: a woman’s biggest role was being a loving, beautiful, and complacent mother and wife.

With men being drafted at an alarming rate, women stepped up to fill traditionally masculine roles: Rosie the Riveter led the face of the women’s labor movement which brought women into factory uniforms and out of the “traditional” dresses and stockings they were expected to wear. Somewhere during the development of the modern feminist position, however, these freedoms from stereotypical gender roles became associated with hating men. Feminists were not looking to promote overall equality, they were actively attacking masculinity and what it meant to be a man. How can you call yourself a man when your wife is out working? What kind of man allows his wife to wear pants?

The (hopefully) outdated stereotype of feminist behavior is your classic bra-burning, short-haired man-hater. While there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a cropped pixie cut or setting a bonfire here or there, the stereotype of an anti-feminine feminist was the product of a last-ditch attempt to prevent women from engaging in Feminist rhetoric: the false dichotomy.

False dichotomies are defined as “a situation in which two alternative points of view are presented as the only options when others are available”. Under the threat of rising feminism, hegemonic masculinity fell to the false dichotomy to try and dissuade as many women as possible from engaging in the conversation. Rather than seeing feminism as a deliberate pursuit of a more equitable world, those who felt threatened began to impose a black-and-white divide between feminist women and non-feminist women. The threat of feminism to the existing hegemonic power structure put men into panic mode.

When criticized, the only way to defend a weak position is through logical fallacy. The false dichotomy allowed supporters of hegemonic masculinity to condemn entire groups of people by oversimplifying the issue entirely. When you begin to assert that feminists hate men or reject femininity, you convey that individuals who disagree with these concepts should not associate with these groups. The false dichotomy says feminists are angry bra-burners who hate the idea of a family. Feminists can only be women — women that are determined to destroy everyone else’s way of living. This oversimplification is the false dichotomy’s super power, encouraging individuals who may be less informed to reject a concept at face value.

At its core, no part of feminism is “anti-man” or “anti-woman”. The misinterpretation of feminism as some sort of category-enforcing symptom is the larger source of the problem. Hegemonic masculinity tends to assert strict gender roles because they are necessary to the power structure in the first place. Men must be clearly defined as “man” so we might know what makes a good man, and what makes a man better than his female counterpart. When we threaten the idea of strict gender roles and the supposed gender binary, we threaten the very existence of hegemonic masculinity itself. Even if feminism’s goal isn’t to destroy gender norms entirely, the ability to question what it means to have a gender threatens masculinity.

So we have some silly stereotypes about what it means to be a feminist, to question the boundaries of gender, or live a more tolerant life. Fear not the label a threatened argument puts on you — fear the way these false dichotomies might convince you of the way you should or should not exist.