Alpha Mail: the collective is the personal

MM finds it hard to grasp why women take offense on behalf of others:

Why the hell do women get offended on BEHALF of other women? I seriously just DO NOT "get it".  If you can possibly explain this nonsense to me, I would very much appreciate it.  But I'm drawing a serious blank on my end.  It is so non-nonsensical.  I want to be enraged, but I know females typically make no sense whatsoever.  So I'm not THAT mad... just confused.

This is precisely what is meant by female solipsism.  Perhaps you've heard the song "I'm Every Woman".  To a certain extent, it genuinely represents the way women think.  It's mostly subconscious, insofar as I can tell, but most men have observed that a comment made about women in general is usually interpreted by a woman who hears it as applying to her.

For example, I once commented about the mistake that had been made in hiring a young woman who was leaving the company because she was getting married and intended to have children as soon as possible.  My comment enraged a middle-aged woman who happened to be an HR director.  The woman was furious at the thought that the single young woman should not have been hired for that job even though it was her own personal policy to not hire single young women for that very reason.  In fact, the only reason I made the comment was to observe that what had happened tended to justify her policy.

The HR director's solipsism led her to react to my comment from the perspective of being the hypothetical young woman being rejected for a job herself, not the middle-aged HR director who would be held responsible by the executives for multiple failed hires.

Basically, you have to understand that any time you make a comment about any woman, you are believed to have made a comment about the specific women in the conversation.  If you wish to avoid provoking solipsistic reactions, it is very easy, all you need to do is make sure that all of your comments which can be related to women in any way are made in precisely the same way you would talk about a child in front of its mother.

Remember that women are seldom any more interested in knowing what men actually think about anything than men are in keeping up on the latest celebrity gossip and Hollywood fashions.  They mostly just want to hear that you think all women are smart, pretty, and wonderful.  So, if your objective is to avoid triggering solipsistic responses, just tell them what they want to hear and keep your thoughts to yourself.