Like any other socially conscious woman, I am a firm believer in gender equality. Ending workplace discrimination, making reproductive health care affordable—I’ve championed these goals my whole life. They’re important to me, and that’s why the feminist movement frustrates me so much. I’m sorry, but I simply cannot and will not support feminism if it means murdering all men.

I understand why some people might believe the only way to advance women’s rights is to slaughter every man on the planet, but that sort of radical, explicitly homicidal position, which for all I know is a fundamental aspect of feminism, is exactly what makes me hesitate to call myself a feminist.

Do I agree with closing the pay gap, ensuring universal access to birth control, and ending the objectification of women? Absolutely, and if that’s all feminism were about, I would get on board without any hesitation. Assuming feminists start advocating that we hunt down all the world’s men and boys, load them onto trains bound for death camps, and systematically massacre them solely on the basis of their sex, then that’s where I draw the line.

Of course, I don’t deny there are some misogynists out there whose behavior needs to be stopped. But I can’t help but think there has to be a better way to nurture the cause of social justice than, conceivably, having feminists instruct women to obtain assault weapons and drive to the nearest populated area so they can begin gunning down every human male they see.

Am I alone in thinking that would be an overreaction?

Consider the men in your own life. How would you feel if they were murdered? I have a loving father, two brothers, and a wonderful fiancé, not to mention countless male friends—each of whom I know for a fact respects women. I don’t want to kill them with my bare hands! I don’t care how noble the goals of the feminist movement are; should joining that cause require me to strangle every man I care about until the life slowly drains from his body, I just don’t want to be a part of it.

And just to be perfectly clear, we’re not talking about eliminating a few specific men on a case-by-case basis; we’re talking about the annihilation of roughly half the human population, presumably! To be sure, there are probably thousands of women-haters in the world who deserve to be locked up, but what feminists may be contemplating here is a program that would condemn approximately 3.6 billion people to immediate and extremely gruesome deaths just for being male, and that, to me at least, is going too far. Even if they were to do it painlessly by gassing or poisoning all the men, in my opinion it’s all part of the same arbitrary, hypothetical man-killing agenda that I won’t support.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think all men should be exterminated! This is something I fundamentally believe, and nothing is going to convince me otherwise.

While some of my friends identify as feminists, and I respect their right to do so, I don’t have to agree with everything they say just because I too am a woman. If, for example, they were to enact a policy of eradicating the male threat at its source by mandating the forced abortion of every male fetus the moment its sex is determined, I am under no obligation to condone this practice, even if its implementation would further women’s rights.

If that’s what the word “feminist” means, I don’t want that label applied to me. Those are the kinds of things that turn me off of feminism completely.

In all honesty, there’s nothing I want more than to live in a truly equitable society, and I’m not trying to discredit those working to attain it. But think about it: If one of feminism’s guiding principles is, possibly, to end discrimination by marching each human male into a massive industrial furnace heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit to ensure his complete incineration, then is that really equality? I’m not so sure.

Maybe in centuries past, when women in our culture were treated as little more than the property of men, such a strategy made more sense. A hundred years ago, when American women still lacked the right to vote and had very limited employment opportunities, the idea of having every grandfather, father, and young son kneel on the ground while women shot them execution-style—which could, in my estimation, be central to the feminist cause—may have held more appeal. But that time has passed.

The bottom line is that I can never get on board with feminism. Its message is just too inextricably tied to the idea that all males should be violently culled from our species. Or at least that’s what I gather.