Whenever I write about women, one or two people who call themselves feminists angrily message me to say that I have no right to write about women as white males of privilege, someone who should be silenced and ignored.

Without much fussing, I reject this as yet another form of ignorant bigotry disguised as sensitivity. Sexism is not a healthy response to sexism.  I think some people will never tire of telling other people what to do and what to think.

Men and women need to talk to and write about one another for the sake of both. I will not listen to anyone telling me what I can or cannot write about.

Speaking historically, men have had critical roles to play: they create new things, fix broken things, and defend us from harm. They protect their families. They also do a great deal of damage to people, peace, and the planet itself.

As the role of women changes at last – they can also do these things – men are often left confused, vilified, and angry. They need to listen to what women have to say, and I know very few men who are good listeners.

Women have had and have different roles to play. Christian mystic Richard Rohr writes that women have not historically been creators, fixers, or defenders but “rather a transformer.”

Stereotypical gender roles are changing almost faster than we can understand them, but I like how Rohr encourages us to see the inherent differences between gender roles. I find his observations fascinating and stimulating – and well worth writing about – yet I balk at some of them.

In my mind, women have always deserved to be treated as fully equal human beings, entitled to all of the things men have been given for centuries.

We focus on what women have not been given and sometimes forget the miracle that is within their bodies.

Rohr writes that women don’t need to have babies to understand their emotional uniqueness.

Women who are not mothers often learn it simply by existing in the community of women. No man can ever really grasp this by himself, including me.

Women are moving towards equality, hallelujah: but I also believe women are very different from men, and that is a wonderful thing that deserves recognition and acceptance.

Their emotional structure is different. This does not make them inferior to men, but in my mind, distinctly superior and far more evolved.

That is, of course, a generality. It’s what I have observed in my life, the only life I can speak for

One of the biggest differences is that women give birth to all of us, and men don’t.

That is transformative.

“Once a woman has carried her baby inside of her body for nine months,” writes Rohr, “and brought it forth into the world through the pain of childbirth, she knows the mystery of transformation at a cellular level. She knows it intuitively, yet she usually cannot verbalize it, nor does she need to.

She holds it at a deeper level of consciousness. I accept that.

“She knows something about mystery, miracles, and transformation that men will never know.” I accept that also, but I wonder if Rohr is speaking in a religious sense, not just a secular one.

Men urgently need to understand this idea about childbirth, not as a threat but as a reality. This is why it is so important that men and women write openly and safely about one another and talk to each other on the deepest and most open way.

Rohr sees the feminine body as a “cauldron of transformation.” Her body turns things into other things.” I don’t know if this is true of every woman, but the idea makes sense to me.

In her book Maternal, Thinking: Towards A Politics Of Peace, Sara Ruddick writes about the attentive love of the mother, something else few men understand about women.

“Women must keep watching this new life,” she writes, “they must keep listening and adjusting to the child’s needs. If the mother cannot transform herself into manifesting attentive love, she simply cannot be a mother.”

The good mother has to learn early on that life is about change, not standing her ground, which will not help their child.

And without doing those things, she says,  it’s difficult to raise a healthy child.

I need to pause here and say I can’t accept the idea that all women are the way Rohr or Ruddick describe them. They both describe what a good mother needs to be, but that is not necessarily what all mothers are.

For one thing, he makes no effort to back up the claim that giving birth is something of a holy experience all its own.  It is, without much question, a miracle in any case.

I greatly respect Rohr, a deep thinker and a good one. It seems quite true to me that having a child is a transformative experience that few if any, men can understand.

But women are different from each other as well as men.

My mother gave birth to three children and never understood one thing about any of them or grasped the need to listen or adjust to any of her children’s needs. We all three have agreed that she never knew any of us or tried. Maria might make the same point.

But one can teach and learn in many different ways. Maria and I  both responded to this by showing attentive love to one another.

We do everything to each other that Ruddick writes about: we listen, change and adjust to one another all the time. I guess the point is that our mothers taught us this without knowing what it was, just by offering us examples of what not to do.

We value it because we didn’t receive it.

These are important things for many reasons, one being that they are not lessons men have learned or are taught. They need to be talked about.

Look at the news and see how much trouble and suffering men have brought into the world by thinking that it is noble always to stand their ground at any cost and fight change by any means.

Men can learn this flexibility and attentive love from women. Their fathers and brothers, and uncles can’t teach this to them.

The women who message me telling me I have no right to think about women or write about them are sad and misguided. They do men and women great harm, and their own cause no good.