Monica Hesse in the Washington Post has a tongue-in-cheek article about men she’s talked to who are afraid to see Little Women alone: “The Little Women Men feel slightly nervous about going to see the movie without a female chaperone, for the same reason that some men have told me they are nervous about attending a yoga class solo, or assisting a lost toddler in the supermarket: because our society still — still! — gets confused by men displaying traits of nurturing or sentimentality, and these kindly men don’t want to creep anyone out.” I laughed. 

The response has been particularly and unnecessarily nasty from a few men who claim they are not afraid, merely “uninterested,” and how dare the author presume to judge them! How dare she! I believe the term “femi-Nazi” was coming along.

I am reminded of a family joke between my parents. My dad would say loudly, “Women always take things personally,” and my mother would call back from another room, “I don’t!” And then they both laughed. Men annoyed by this article about Little Women need to find a sense of humor. [Men being “not interested” is kind of the point here, not an explanation for not seeing what critics mostly have declared one of the great movies of the year.]

“Where’s your sense of humor?” Ha! Ha! People [men] used to say that to women all the time in my youth. A man would tell a filthy sexist snd sexual joke and a woman would object and be told: “Get a sense of humor!” Women sexually harassed, cat-called, raped, subjugated? It’s all very funny? Isn’t it? It was to some, not so long ago it seems. Maybe to some men even now (grab them by the…) but not to the women who are the butt of such trivializing of their pain. Not ever funny to the men I respect.

After the Anita Hill debacle (thanks so much, Mr. Biden), laws passed concerning sexual harassment. In the room where I ate lunch at that time, the men sat at one table and the women at another table. (This alone was odd if not downright disturbing—and yes, I did try to integrate the tables and was treated as if I did not exist by the men. Students who looked in the doorway were . . . confused by the segregation.) The men’s table was joking about sexual harassment, making exactly the sort of comments that made such laws necessary, and a woman (who later proudly complained that she did not relate to women’s experiences) announced that the laws were “too subjective to be enforceable.” At the time, I thought there was nothing much subjective about putting pubic hair on a soda can or demanding a blow job. How is such behavior not offensive? How is objecting to it a subjective judgement?

In the early 1900s, my grandmother worked in a shipping office and told of the time a younger woman, new in the office, was subjected to laughing comments about breast milk and her breasts. (Use your imagination.) The poor girl was not in a position to object and blushing made for even more humor. The joker was a client and male, of course, and therefore of importance. But my grandmother did object. A hundred years ago off-color jokes were not appropriate in mixed company. Such talk was unprofessional. This was understood. As a result, my grandmother, as a longtime employee, did not lose her job for speaking out. [When I came back to this post I began to doubt my version of my grandmother’s experience. I think I might have it wrong. My grandmother did not dare speak up, and though she supported the younger employee, it’s important to note that the younger woman would have lost her job had she spoken up.]

Times have changed. One thing has not changed fast enough: Some men are so fearful of their imagined “masculinity” they spin around to petty and cruel at any hint of criticism or even a joking satire in the Style section of a newspaper.

And in the mean time, most of the decent men I know are simply mystified by all this. They know who they are and are not threatened by an occasional movie centered on female characters.

Go see Little Women. It really is as good as people say.