When I was younger and more naive, I held out some hope for the atheist movement. When all you see around you is conservatism, religious violence, and traditional male arguments for why women need to be kept down, atheism can, on the surface seem like a fresh, clean wind blowing from a freer, more rational place.

I’ve been a non-believer all my life. My somewhat moderate parents installed me in an Anglican Sunday school when I was five, but when the brainwashers started teaching me my parents were evil for consuming wine, I was pulled out immediately.

I was saved because my parents were borderline alcoholics.

There was some occasional religious sputtering in school. The Lord’s Prayer was a morning ritual in Ontario where I went to school. At some point, that stopped. I can’t exactly remember when it stopped in my particular school since it was meaningless to me. We mumbled for years without understanding. Today, all children in public schools in Canada are free from this form of brainwashing – prayer in schools is disallowed under the concept of Freedom of Conscience thanks to our rights and freedoms charter. I do recall one particularly nasty Christian fanatic teacher who forced children to take home and prepare class lectures from the picture bible she kept in her class (not part of official curriculum), but again, the exercise was so meaningless as to have no lasting effect on my intellect. The same can’t be said for the few Jewish students that that same asshole teacher punished for, you guessed it, being Jewish (although, I, like many others, would argue that children are not religious – they are just the children of parents who are religious – too bad they’re punished for their parents’ beliefs).

As a high schooler, I had friends of different denominations, and I did visit their places of worship to find out what was going on. Each time, bad things happened. At one place, we were treated to a couple of hours of terrifying and repetitive ‘going to hell’ dramatic skits, and afterwards, the adults held a friend and me captive for an hour trying to wheedle our addresses and phone numbers out of us. We managed to escape. At another place, I was taught that one of my parents was evil for practising hypnosis on their psych patients who were trying to quit smoking. Yeah, there was no convincing me of the merits or sense of religion. All I saw were lies, manipulation, and cruelty – even what I would consider law-breaking.

As an adult, I got to know of the prominent atheists – all were men, of course (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, to name a few). Women seldom are given recognition in this world for anything unless they are flashing their tits or doing something *evil*. And then it is notoriety rather than respect or recognition.

As I was becoming a militant atheist, I was also developing my radical feminist standpoint. Initially, I had felt some hope that atheism would help women, liberate them from mandatory, submissive sex roles. But I realized something. And it was a true downer.

Atheist men, including those famous nutsacks I mentioned above, hate women just as much as right-wing, religious or traditional men do. They just put a different spin on it. Some of them use sexist language and outright dismiss anything women have to say, but most of these dudes are wily. They manage to get a few women on board (aka fun-feminists) by supporting abortion and women’s ‘right’ to fuck as much as they want. But the motivation is not to support women’s true freedom. It is to maintain current privileged male access to women’s bodies. If women can have abortions, they’ll fuck more. If women fuck more, they’ll do lots of men for free. So it is more sexual power for men spun as ‘women’s liberation’. And fun-feminists gobble it up like indentured girls do a blow job in a porno – humiliated, and pretending to like it. There is an illusion of freedom and an illusion of male support. But true freedom and true power are still not accessible to women under the atheist and/or left-wing male agenda. And the easiest way to expose a male atheist for the misogynist he is is to a) refuse him sex, b) threaten to take away their porn/hookers/lap dancers, etc., or c) continue fighting for women’s real freedom in economics, politics, etc. You’ll get called every name in the book, receive rape threats, and have support rescinded.

You see, men don’t get behind women’s causes unless it benefits them in some easy-to-understand way that supports the existing power structure. Even though feminism benefits men much more than any domination-submission standpoint ever has or will, it is dependent upon men giving up violence and the power that comes from it. In a feminist world, men don’t get to rape, beat, murder, harass or otherwise dominate women. And to most men, including atheists, they don’t like that scenario.

Atheism is a good, good thing. Necessary for moral advancement. And necessary for female liberation. I stand by that. The problem is that any movement in the hands of men will continue to support the male agenda. Men can take any movement/proposal that has the power to liberate the oppressed and turn it into something that benefits themselves and the existing power structure.

So yes, be an atheist. Intellectual freedom is only possible if you let go of fairy tales. But do it on your own terms. And never go for atheism that doesn’t embrace radical feminism. Otherwise, it’s pointless.