GET OVER IT.

My observation of the effect of the current War of the Sexes in my Liberal Eastern Massachusetts locale tells me that older married heterosexual women are full of grudges against the men in their lives. And, when my homosexual life crosses theirs, I get just as much shade as the straight men around me. It is worse in midday, when I often do my shopping. 

Nasty looks, shaken heads and intentional obstruction of my path without eye contact are some of the obvious signs that women are reveling in victim entitlement. Some women appear to be using their huge SUV's as vehicles of anger. I can predict a race to the crosswalk if I am spotted by a turning SUV driven by a woman. I usually let them win out of pure self-preservation. But the occasional close call takes me by surprise. Recently, a gray-haired woman in a huge SUV not only shot in front of me in a crosswalk but she subsequently erected her middle finger for my benefit as she zipped along. 

Many men may simply ignore all of this. If they are accustomed to being bombarded with verbal discontent at home, these minor brushes with female rage may seem innocuous. It does seem to me that more men now bear a facial expression of anguish in public. And men in crowded public spaces, like markets, seem to be looking down at the floor more than I remember in the past. 

There are certain women who are good enough to wear warning signs. For example, a seventy-ish granny at my local market was decked out in skinny jeans and a tight top. Her hair was the color of a freshly picked carrot. It was chopped into a rather butch style. Luckily, I saw her coming as I prepared to back out of my parking space in the market lot. 

As I mentally predicted, she rushed to push her carriage within millimeters of my car, opened her passenger door wide so that it was also just millimeters from my car, and proceeded to slowly place her groceries within her massive vehicle. There was no way I could safely move my car. She did a furtive glance over her shoulder at me in the middle of this display of passive-aggression, just to ascertain that I was paying attention. Eventually she grew bored of her fussing, slammed the passenger door and sauntered to her driver door with her nose elevated. I made a quick getaway. 

I have been waiting for the inevitable wise crack from one of these frustrated women. It will probably be something about "man-splaining". I have come close. I recently answered a question asked by a middle-aged woman in Home Depot. She held up a hand and walked away halfway through my answer. I have no idea what that was about, but her attitude was far from cordial. 

The trouble with masochists is that they are also sadists-in-disguise. Self-sacrificing, diffident women who dote on obnoxious males, some of whom they themselves have brought into being, are ticking time bombs. Recent social and political events have acted as an accelerant. There is wide permission among the Liberal and bourgeois to be generally outraged. I recently saw the meme, "outrage porn", used in relation to Twitter. I think that sums it up.

I think it only fair to issue a warning to anyone, male or female or other, who wishes to dump their manufactured outrage upon me as an unsuspecting stranger. My stock response will be "Get over it." That retort has deep roots in gay male society, and its appropriateness has never been greater.