MENVY?

I recently experienced a backlash from an intelligent person of cis-female orientation. This person is a mother and grandmother. She holds a post-graduate degree. She has worked in a high-level job in post-graduate education for decades. 

The backlash was rather innocuous really. I apparently, as far as I can decipher her behavior, asked her too many questions about her thought process and motivation around a certain choice she had made. My questions, according to a third party, were asked inquisitively without aggression. I was actually curious about her thoughts, since we are newer acquaintances. This happened several months ago, and I am still occasionally drawn to reflect upon it. I know that recurring interest is rooted in my own development as a male.

I was raised by formidable women. My mother was the adult child of an alcoholic Polish blacksmith. Her mother, who lived with us, was five feet tall and four feet across. Born in 1893, she had been raised as a peasant farmer in Belarus. She came to America as an imported textile worker on a work visa in 1913. She overcame her illiteracy to earn U.S. citizenship in 1940. She had held her own against her husband's drunken beatings until my tall mother, just out of high school, physically evicted her father onto the street, where he became a homeless derelict. He died one winter in an unheated tenement's cellar, where he had trespassed to escape the cold. He certainly was not a victor in the battle between the sexes. 

The concept of women as powerless against male aggression is completely alien to me. It seems even more bizarre when women take offense against speech, simply based on the sex of the speaker. The popular feigned touchiness of some women to what they call "mansplaining" seems to me to be a modern revival of the old fainting couch ploy of the pre-suffrage era. (Goats actually display a defensive form of fainting when stressed, as seen in the video above.) 

It seems to me, as the product of strong female and male role models, that approaching any woman as intrinsically weak and vulnerable is an insult to her. Women deserve the same respect as men. That respect should include an assumption of a woman's strength, as well as intelligence. 

So, is the defensiveness of feminists today the fault of men? Is holding a woman accountable for her decisions and choices on the same level of accountability applied to men some bizarre form of covert oppression? I hardly think so. 

The MeToo movement is a movement without any foundation in the vast number of male-female relationships. Yet, the fanatics who have centered their hatred of men in this popular cause seem to be exploiting the age-old sado-masochism of a few male-female relationships between the rich and famous to achieve some misguided revenge against all men. This movement intentionally ignores, it seems, the gang rapes of children by Muslim men in Europe and the co-dependent exploitation of poor women here in the U.S. by "rooster" males who take money and shelter from their women without commitment or reciprocation in exchange for sex. 

As an old gay man, encountering near-raging defensiveness in my brush with this new feminism by simply showing interest in an older, financially independent woman's mind, was stunning. Being accused in not so many words of bullying a guest in my own home by having a quiet conversation seemed totally pathological. Perhaps this is an example of mental contagion by social media. 

I titled this essay "Menvy?" for a reason. There is an old Freudian concept of penis envy in psychiatry. But I think this does not really apply to modern feminists, who applaud men who castrate themselves as feminist icons. Perhaps modern feminists simply envy what men have psychologically. Men and women have different inherent aptitudes by nature. These can be changed and compensated for in development certainly. If you have ever seen a female power lifter, you'll get what I mean. But the outward representation of modern feminists certainly does not indicate their enthusiasm for making those adaptations. It seems more evident that they would prefer to eliminate maleness altogether by feminizing men, in the most stereotypical sense of passive femininity.

If envy of maleness as a characteristic lies behind feminist rage, then the confusion of modern feminists, who also pose as intercourse-averse slut warriors, is starkly apparent. This would seem to indicate to me that this is not a male problem, unless one is unfortunate enough to be the child of one of these feminists or a mate of one. Now maybe this is mansplaining. But I am OK with that. I am comfortable with my maleness and my attitudes toward females. And, if that invokes menvy in someone of the female sex, I shall take that as a compliment.