It’s a fact of our times that women are overtaking men. The 27-year-old woman MP Martin Helme (EKRE) demoted to the status of a faulty baby-making machine in an interview on Tuesday is more than likely to come rocketing past him sooner or later - headed for more money, more attention, and a more successful career.

Helme, his party, and their ideology are very basically operating from a position of perceived weakness. They are afraid. Any woman that goes beyond what they see as her place in society, namely that of the mother, is a threat.

Just moments after he divides men and women into fathers and mothers, Helme completely ignores the mothers and instead gives us a very nice description of what people like me - to be understood correctly, those members of society equipped with, well, members - are supposed to deliver.

While he doesn’t elaborate on the mother, the father’s task, Helme says, is to provide a feeling of security. This ranges from power structures, no surprise there, to defense, and internal security. This is what, according to Helme’s world view, is normal. Much like the statement that the man is the organizer of life, and the woman his helper and administrator - which is a Goebbels quote, by the way.

That the Estonian Conservative People’s Party won’t sign the Istanbul Convention shouldn’t come as a surprise. It plainly and simply can’t. It couldn’t, even if it wanted to. Half of its ideological base would collapse.

The core statement of the convention is that both sexes are equal. Women get to do anything men get to do. Simple as that. They can study, join feminist movements, decide not to have children, join the armed forces, defend the country. They can make their own money, they can make political careers.

And here’s where we get closer to the point. They can do anything a man can do - and recently, things have been looking a lot like they’re actually better than us at most of the things they set their minds to.

This changes things. While on the ideological level, the world of the woman, when she is fortunate, should be her family, her husband, her children, her home - a Hitler quote, by the way - on a practical level, today’s woman is a threat.

She is a threat to all those men who think that being a guy settles the matter. Never mind achievement, never mind talent, never mind intelligence. Let the father thump his fist on the table, and the world goes round again.

Beyond its obviously transparent ideological treats, what Helme expresses is a fear for position and prerogative. Since the Dark Ages - which isn’t a strange association to make, as one of Estonia’s present-day conservative ideologists, Einar Laigna, actually says that the 13th century was the pinnacle of European culture - intellectually lazy men have made it their tedious crusade to work against the emancipation of women wherever they can.

Helme is right about one thing. This discussion isn’t about violence against women. Just like he says, it is about ideologies. One that allows people to make their own choices, and rise according to their own achievements - and another, where people get to always be on top because they have an extra appendage.