Sophocles is reported to have said that the male libido was like being chained to a lunatic.

I can honestly say, being a woman in 21st-century America, that I have him beat cold. I have somehow been chained to over a hundred and fifty million lunatics.

Okay, not every woman is a lunatic. I even have women friends. But making friends with women is like making friends in the science fiction field. I start by assuming they will be part of a strange form of Marxist victim-group and I look for signs they might, just might, be safe.

Then there’s a whole dance as you reveal yourself to the other as not-a-standard-woman.

At first, I thought American women had a chip on their shoulder, but I didn’t realize it was nearly this bad.

First, so you can understand where I’m coming from – because I have been told the reason I’m not hot for “feminism” is that women won the fight for me. The country I grew up in gave women the vote in the ’70s. Further, when I was a child, getting a private passport for a married woman was difficult, and my mom had a “family passport,” which meant dad had to affidavit her every time she wanted to go to Spain to shop. Married women needed to have permission from their husbands to get a job. (Which meant many women worked under the table.) When I was in fifth and sixth grade, both of which were in mixed classes, it was assumed as a matter of course that girls couldn’t outperform boys, and when I did – routinely – the teachers acted like a wondrous thing had happened.

There were a lot of other restrictions, like the fact that no sane woman would go out after dark because there was a very high chance you’d be confused with a prostitute.

But here’s the thing: I don’t remember ever attributing any actual reverses in my life to being a woman. I managed to enter college. Heck, my cousin, who is 14 years older than me, is a chemical engineer. I don’t think she ever attributed any reversals in her life to being a woman either.

My mother ran her own business and out-earned my father for most of her marriage.

Sure, men discriminated against women. But women could still manage to be successful. And they didn’t waste their time attributing their failures or their issues to men’s plotting.

Sure, as a young woman I snapped off a lot of noses — and hands and… never mind. At fourteen grandma gave me a hat pin with which to discourage men rubbing against me in the bus. It worked too. And sure, I wished I could have more freedom and that people didn’t assume I was an idiot because I was a woman. But very few of them assumed I was an idiot after I had a chance to open my mouth.

And it truly never occurred to me to think that men were sabotaging me. Once you proved yourself, most men treated you fine.

I didn’t hear the phrase “he’s afraid of a strong woman” until I came to the States.

This was the eighties. To me, the U.S. was a wonderful place. No one acted like I was obviously less smart than boys. And no one treated me like I was a child.

And yet, I soon found that women about ten years older than me attributed all my issues or problems to “men are afraid of strong women.”

I’ve had bad bosses of both sexes, with a slight lead for women, mostly because I’ve had more female bosses. But none of those older women ever said, “Your female boss is afraid of strong women,” even though in my experience females are more likely to be afraid of women who are supposed to be their subordinates and whom they can neither intimidate nor control.

In fact, it was always a mystery to me how these male bosses were supposed to know that I was a “strong woman,” since in my twenties I was shy to the point of incoherence and polite to the point of self-effacement.

After a while that started annoying me, but even then, I don’t think I could possibly have guessed how crazy things were going to go.

Nowadays it seems to be an actual crime to be male. From schools to colleges, we are doing our best to make every boy behave like a girl and every man become just like a woman.

And even then, until this year I couldn’t have imagined the spectacle the Kavanaugh hearings turned into.

How is it possible that Christina Blasey Ford was asked to testify before the most august body in the land on a ridiculous, unproven and unprovable charge, which – should it ever prove true – amounts to the fact that a seventeen-year-old boy might have been uncouth and somewhat ridiculous at a drunken party, something that is neither a crime nor, to be fair, unusual.

This is treated seriously, and as though it should be applied to all of our society. Even though if we’re punishing adolescents for being uncouth, there won’t be anyone on the planet left unpunished, or anyone who can occupy any office at all, and yes, I’m including girls as well as boys. Women’s sexual behavior is different from boys’ behavior, but it’s not particularly better. Let her who never wore inappropriate clothing or flirted with someone they shouldn’t have flirted with throw the first stone.

Seriously? We’re now going to punish men for being men? We’re going to make being born with a penis a liability?

This nonsense should bring a shiver to every mother, every wife, every daughter, every woman who has a brother she loves.

Instead, Facebook is filled with women yelling and screaming that they believe a hysterical university professor who has no proof for her claims and who, were she a male with similar complaints of a female nominee, would have been ignored or maybe sued for harassment.

Oh, and they also like repeating the nonsensical “Believe all women,” which, despite the fact that they are themselves women, must mean they never met one. Women, being human, are as capable of lying as any man after all, and only aliens who never met a woman would think otherwise.

Look, I will let you guys tell me that men are afraid of strong women. I’m even willing to let you rant about pico-aggressions, like a woman did once on a panel.

But can you please go on anti-psychotics and stop trying to make being male a crime?

I love my father, I love my brother, and I love the other brothers I’ve adopted along the way. I love my sons (and the number of grown men who have decided to call me “mom” or “auntie”). They are decent, strong men who love women and who deserve to be treated with respect by the society they live in.

I’m ragingly furious at the way American women have let themselves be manipulated into behaving like a victim class, always on the lookout for more victimhood and using their insanity to tyrannize men.

I can’t spend the rest of my life chained to a hundred and fifty million lunatics. And having total strangers mistake me for one of you is worse than any sexism I experienced growing up in Portugal.

This is the best and freest country on Earth. Can you stop trying to make it so only for women?

I’d rather people assumed I’m dumber than men than they assume I’m a lunatic who thinks every man is guilty until proven innocent, and that women are sub-humans incapable of lying. Because the end of this ride you guys are taking us on isn’t freedom or equality. It isn’t men cowering and trying to appease you. This ends in men deciding that giving women any rights at all is a bad idea. And allowing women a voice in governance is suicidal.

And that’s not what I want for my younger female friends or my granddaughters.