Recently on Twitter, an account that claims to tweet taboo ideas decided to tweet what the user considered a frowned upon but true statement: “it’s not sexist to be anti-feminist.”

My first reaction was disgust, and I immediately replied with, “Um…yes it is.”

But then I decided to have a moment of revelation, where I sat and thought about that statement.

Can one truly be against feminism and not be considered sexist?

According to the Twitter user, “not all women are feminists and as feminists aren’t a separate gender, it can’t be sexist.”

Unfortunately, the account never tweeted me back to clarify, but I continued in my moment with this newfound perspective.

Yes, I knew women could be against feminism, but does that make sexism obsolete because women could equally be against their own kind?

And if women could be against feminism did that make it okay for men to be against feminism?

In my thought process, I remembered from a women’s studies course I took that feminism is often painted in a negative light and that is why it has become such a dirty word in our society.

And, like Carrie Bradshaw, I couldn’t help but wonder — has feminism become the new “F” word, a word so dirty that even today, I feel nervous using it around certain people?

In our course, we learned about the usual offensive stereotype that accompanies the word feminism: usually a hairy, butch lesbian who hates any man on this Earth.

We learned about Pat Robertson, who said that “feminism is a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

That’s when I realized that Robertson’s hate-filled, obviously inaccurate quote is, in the end, about fear.

Now that I have painted an inaccurate, sexist and homophobic image of feminism, I’m going to clarify what the Internet says about feminism.

According to Merriam-Webster, feminism is defined as “the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities.”

What people fail to understand about feminism is that it is meant to be a movement for equality, regardless of gender, living equally, and one group not being elevated above another.

So at the end of my moment I reached an epiphany: yes, it is sexist to be against feminism. Because it is possible for women to be against their own and against feminism, and it is still sexist.

I realized that by someone being against feminism, they were against equality between men and women. To be against that means seeing men as superior to women, which is indeed sexist, because it calls women inferior.

I tried to analyze the problem, and see the other person’s perspective, but in the end, I came up with the same conclusion that I had when I first saw the tweet: you might be trying to be taboo, but in the end, you’re just sexist.