Amy Schumer's I Feel Pretty is the latest film in a long series of songs, books, movies, and sermons with a single and regrettable purpose: to tell women they're perfect.  We know that women aren't perfect, and that flattery exists not for the benefit of the hearer, but the benefit of the speaker.  And there's a lot of money to be made by speaking it.

...not off men, but off women.  A man's self-help book, if nothing else, starts off the only way a self-help book should: telling you you're inadequate and you need to help yourself.  A good sermon ought to leave you with your tail tucked between your legs.  We go to men who are better than us and know better than us so we can end up better than us, and the rare man who dares to tell us otherwise – say, a Joel Osteen with a God loves us no matter what and the blessings are coming if we'd only just believe it – are passed by every actual achiever and winner in life, to be picked up only by women, children, losers and halfwits.  No successful man posts success quotes unless his business is selling success quotes.  No beautiful woman, unless she has an ulterior motive, maintains that everybody is beautiful.

What Schumer won't tell you is that love is a war.  Men are a resource, like water and livestock and gold, and if you can't get men to invest in you, you're a goner.  You might make it through life by the skin of your teeth, but that's it – and even if you make it, your genes won't.

Other women's will go on.  Some women's genes will get better and brighter.  Their children will be better looking and better thinking and better connected and better fed and housed and clothed and taught.  You get the wrong man, a lower-rung man, and all of this goes down the drain.  The greatest investment you'll ever make, that into your children, will be more bitter and difficult and more likely to end in failure, and if you choose to be a career woman, you'll rarely get to see your kids.  They'll be raised largely by somebody else and bail on you the moment they get a job – so they can fight for their own genes, which you improperly fought for and then saddled them with.

As such, you know by instinct who the best men are.  You know who can provide.  You know whom you want to have sex with.  You can tell, with a little research, who's best with kids and who can solve problems and who's likely to fight off your enemies.  The problem is that the other women do, too, and the likelihood of you getting all these things in one man is slim to none.  The lower down the totem pole, the more compromises you have to make.  The more likely you are to have to deal with a deadbeat, or a drunk, or a sloth, or a sleazeball, or a mess, or an idiot, or a brute.  You fail at being attractive and you end up sharing a bed with someone you aren't attracted to.  Someone else walks the aisle with your dreamboat.  You wake up every day next to a face you don't want to wake up to.

As such, you have to fight for what you can get – the opposite of what the Schumers are telling you to do.  They say, Don't move.  You're fine where you are.  Every sermon you swallow, you get weaker against the other women, who are keeping in good shape and walking the right way and practicing their manners and studying the art of womanhood, known as femininity, on Pinterest.  Your voice is untrained.  Your posture screams unfit.  Every step you refuse to take is a step you fall behind.  Your man, the man you want, the man who has options because he himself is the best option, passes you over because someone else worked harder, looked better, spoke more beautifully – was a better fit for a better home.  He invested his genes in her not because she could bring home the bacon, but because she was worth bringing the bacon to, and beyond this getting in a fight for.  Every man needs a goddess, or his life is a shipwreck.  A snake oil saleswoman, like Schumer, says he'll take a Venus of Willendorf instead of the Venus de Milo.  What she's actually selling you, the customer, is a satyr.

The reason women buy into Schumer isn't because they're stupid.  It's because they're tired of fighting.  Tired before they even have children.  They think that denying the war is the same thing as fighting it, and that by a series of lectures, they can control the one thing they want more than anything else -- the centerpiece of the evolutionary struggle, man's sexual desire.  The Schumerite is an alchemist, and her patrons are all going broke.

Jeremy Egerer is the author of the troublesome essays on Letters to Hannah, and he welcomes followers on Twitter and Facebook.