For women’s-rights advocates, these sexist authoritarians pose a conundrum. Defeating them requires empowering women. Yet the more empowered women become, the more right-wing autocrats depict that empowerment as an assault on the natural political order. It’s no coincidence that Bolsonaro and Duterte are fervent critics of female former presidents, or that women were among Duterte’s and Trump’s principal opponents. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations inspired women protesters to fill the U.S. Senate. Yet images of women yelling at male senators probably helped Republicans keep the Senate in the 2018 midterm elections. Assisted by the record number of Democratic women elected this fall, Nancy Pelosi will likely become speaker of the House again this January. But Pelosi herself has long been a convenient target for Republicans made anxious by the specter of feminist power.

Over the long term, defeating the new authoritarians requires more than empowering women politically. It requires normalizing their empowerment so autocrats can’t turn women leaders and protesters into symbols of political perversity. And that requires confronting the underlying reason many men—and some women—view women’s political power as unnatural: because it subverts the hierarchy they see in the home.

“The first [gender] difference that individuals notice,” Valerie Hudson told me, “is the difference between sexes in one’s own home. That establishes the first political order, the nature of how things should be in the country.”