Historically, women have been barred from pursuing education, from voting, from making their own medical decisions, from holding political/academic/religious/scientific positions of power, from controlling their own finances, and from participating in the majority of careers, among many many other examples. Lack of access to these things necessarily constrains one’s autonomy. And some of these restrictions persist even today, to varying degrees in different parts of the world.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but just to touch on a few issues with this premise:
1) If men were simply trying to protect women from unpleasantness, there would be no need to ban women from additive things like education, property ownership, spiritual leadership, medical autonomy, etc.
2) Women have been performing difficult, uncomfortable work (think agriculture and factories) alongside men this whole time; the occupations women were prevented to hold tended to be the cushier ones in law, fine art, medicine, engineering, finance, etc.
3. Based on demographic voting patterns, the effects of democracy that you seem to dislike are more significantly attributed to men.
4. When men “don’t include” women in a realm in the ways you’ve described, the best case scenario is that women have no legal recourse when they’re denied entry to it (like when women were turned away from college entrance or bank account ownership). In worse scenarios, the consequence could be imprisonment.
5. To act as an autonomous, self-directed, free person is nigh impossible without access to education, property ownership, self-governance, and personal financial resources. Try to imagine how many life decisions would be unavailable to you without these basic rights.
To broaden your worldview, I would recommend picking a topic that interests you historically and digging into the history of women’s relationship to it. You might be surprised by some of the nonsensical ways in which women have been prevented from participating in the most fulfilling realms of human experience.
Historically, women had much fewer options in life. Basically, marry someone they don't pick, give them babies and look after the house. Poorer women had to work super hard, wealthier women less so, but were subordinate to the husbands whims, physically if nothing else.
Where voting was a thing, they couldn't vote. They were often not in control of their finances. They were cut off from education, office, "manly" hobbies. Then a very real glass ceiling - certainly a thing in 20th century.
This is focusing on the negatives of course but it would be hard to argue they had equal rights.
You are suborning your current values to an historical assessment.
Did medieval peasants have "freedom"? Did they care?
Men had short, brutal lives historically.
Women were highly valuable.
I think part of the problem of modernity is that men have to adjust to not having short, brutal lives.
Lots get left behind.
Humans still have the cognitive machinery to assign more value to women than men. Fundamental differences in reproductive output (i.e. men are "disposable" in a reproductive sense) make this immutable, even outside of millions of years of psychological evolution.
The original comment said, "hostile" to women. What you're describing isn't being 'hostile', otherwise one would have to say society is 'hostile' to children or old people.
The goal posts have moved to 'equal rights'.
But of course by that measure nobody had equal rights. A man couldn't do things that were just for women, and vice versa.
The argument you need to make is that women had it worse overall than men at the time. (Not worse than women now, or worse than men now.)
This is not obvious, given the brutal ways men lived and died in those eras. Being disallowed from e.g. fighting in a war doesn't sound so bad when fighting in a war means getting conscripted to be stabbed to death on a muddy field. Being disallowed from industry jobs doesn't sound so bad when industry jobs means choking to death on coal dust to earn enough food to eat for yourself and family.
I think there's ample reason for 'not equal rights' to be treated as hostility. The biggest reason is direct or implied hostile opposition to obtaining equality. There was significant rejection by men for centuries of suffrage and other equal rights for women; this is hostility toward women's historical desires and wishes to be treated as equals.
Where it might be argued that individual men were only following cultural, religious, or other beliefs in denying equality to women then those cultures, religions, and other forces were hostile to women and their interests.
Historically yes, but that was quite a while ago - none of that has been the case for quite a while. The real push against men started maybe ~10 years ago? Or at least that’s when I noticed women I worked with being openly hostile to “men” online.
Said to say, they have had equal rights for a while now, but the rhetoric keeps amping up anyway.
