But what I find more troubling is the assumption that forms the
foundation of Winkler’s thesis: the belief that men don’t really like
women, at least not enough to think and write about them with
understanding and empathy; not enough to see the value in female
friendships and feminine bonds of love and fidelity; and certainly not
enough to find strong, tough, funny, clever women believable, admirable,
and desirable. When I consider the men I know, male friends and
relatives, colleagues, fathers of my children’s classmates, Winkler’s
failure to entertain the notion that a man could have written the
compelling female characters that populate Shakespeare’s plays is more
than merely baffling, it is an insult to men, both past and present.
I have written elsewhere about how contemporary feminism needs the idea of an oppressive patriarchy in order to define women as victims of oppression, and as such it seeks to attach to men a primal stain of (toxic) masculinity so that third-wave feminism is righteously justified in all its complaints against them. Fighting “The Patriarchy” is feminism’s raison d’etre, and without this enemy the cause itself is in jeopardy (see Feminism’s Dependency Trap in Quillette). It seems as though Winkler’s take on Shakespeare is yet another iteration of feminism’s belief that men have a blind spot for women’s humanity. The irony of the current feminist orthodoxy, however, is that it is women who fail to see men’s position clearly. A further —and funnier—irony, if one has a palate for the absurd and the tragic, is that most men, for their part, are usually so chivalrous, so solicitous of women as people, that they sympathize with women’s crusade against them, and by and large assent to women’s complaints. They must really like us!