There are always masters. It's just a question of who they are and what checks might stop them from going off the rails. A virtuous people enforces those virtues even if it's only in the most innocuous ways like raising their kids a certain way or treating potentially subversive outsiders with distrust.

For TheImp and many others like him, they see maximum negative freedom for themselves as the ideal. They would have an existential crisis if they admitted this was bullshit dangled in front of them to maintain this liberal system of control so they instead insist that their failure to achieve the unattainable (for all non-oligarchs) could only be the result of some "undesirables" (women in this case) getting in the way.