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What's the deal with Nietzsche and women?

In *Human, all too Human* he says contradictory passages. He mentions that there can be women of free spirit, but before that he says how incapable women are. He also mentions that women will eventually "inherit all of men's traits", but he also mentions the chaos that comes when women emancipate. And, of course, "the best woman is better than the best man".

In *The Gay Science* he mentions how dumb it is to expect women to be chaste before being wed, and then sexual demons after that.

In *Beyond Good and Evil* he suddenly starts throwing shit at them out of the left field, even saying that "profound men" should "own women" (238), but he also says that women are good at lies, manipulation and ignorance of truth (232, and this is probably a compliment in this context). In 234 he also says that women being bad at the kitchen is what has held humanity back, though I'm not sure if this a parable or not.

From reading his books, it seems undeniable that Nietzsche was sexist, though it's hard to say if he wanted women to emancipate and was warning to its difficulties, that it was a social norm that was unbreakable, or that he thought that women were intrinsically worse than men in what he was interested in, and he thought that was okay.

Also, I read in an article that he was actually in favor of women studying higher studies when he was a professor (uncommon at the time) and that he was good friends with some feminist women.

So, what's going on here? Is this guy just confused about women?
gpt
> So, what's going on here? Is this guy just confused about women?

There is a lot to say about individual passages, but with Nietzsche especially we run into a really tough problem of exegesis (we see a similar problem in reading, say, Beauvoir's *Second Sex*).  Sometimes Nietzsche is talking about women as a type - in this case he's just talking about the socio-cultural construction of women qua women.  He does this with nationalities too - like when he talks about "Germans" or "The English" or whatever.  This means it's not always immediately clear if he's actually saying something about women *qua* persons or he's just talking about women *qua* women.

So period-expected sexism + sometimes referring to all people by way of terms like "men" + sometimes doing genealogical criticism of the sexes = a very confusing situation for the reader.