Just before the break, I got my boyfriend to watch the 1994 Little Women with me. Little Women is my favorite book. My boyfriend hates Little Women. He has never read it, but only hears me talk about it. You’d think after such a glowing recommendation, he would be chopping at the bit to read this great American novel. Not true. It was only after much coercing that he agreed to even watch the movie with me. While watching the movie he kept saying things like “she likes him, doesn’t she” (referring to Jo and Laurie). I told him that he’d have to wait and see, but he was impatient and made me tell him anyway. Afterward he became very upset and kept insisting “but she looks so smitten!”  “If I were her, I’d be smitten.” He also couldn’t tell any of the girls apart, which was amazing to me as they all look and act very, very different. After the movie ended he complained for five minutes about how Jo and Laurie should have ended up together, and how he hated the Professor. I then said, “You should read the book, then maybe you’d understand more.” He responded: “no way, you know how much I hate that book.”

You cannot care that much about Jo and Laurie and “hate” Little Women.

This got me to thinking about all our talk about gender and our conversation way way back when about the male equivalent of Little Women. Why is it that men have a natural aversion to Little Women. And what does this say about the men that are actually in the book, themselves?