Historically, women have been barred from pursuing education, from voting, from making their own medical decisions, from holding political/academic/religious/scientific positions of power, from controlling their own finances, and from participating in the majority of careers, among many many other examples. Lack of access to these things necessarily constrains one’s autonomy. And some of these restrictions persist even today, to varying degrees in different parts of the world.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but just to touch on a few issues with this premise:
1) If men were simply trying to protect women from unpleasantness, there would be no need to ban women from additive things like education, property ownership, spiritual leadership, medical autonomy, etc.
2) Women have been performing difficult, uncomfortable work (think agriculture and factories) alongside men this whole time; the occupations women were prevented to hold tended to be the cushier ones in law, fine art, medicine, engineering, finance, etc.
3. Based on demographic voting patterns, the effects of democracy that you seem to dislike are more significantly attributed to men.
4. When men “don’t include” women in a realm in the ways you’ve described, the best case scenario is that women have no legal recourse when they’re denied entry to it (like when women were turned away from college entrance or bank account ownership). In worse scenarios, the consequence could be imprisonment.
5. To act as an autonomous, self-directed, free person is nigh impossible without access to education, property ownership, self-governance, and personal financial resources. Try to imagine how many life decisions would be unavailable to you without these basic rights.
To broaden your worldview, I would recommend picking a topic that interests you historically and digging into the history of women’s relationship to it. You might be surprised by some of the nonsensical ways in which women have been prevented from participating in the most fulfilling realms of human experience.
