I’m frequently accused of being a male chauvinist. Perhaps justly. I don’t think women should be in combat, police officers, firefighters, or Grand Prix drivers. But I don’t think that makes me sexist. I don’t think skinny little Jewish guys should be obsessed with playing one-on-one basketball, either. It’s icky. But that doesn’t make me anti-Semitic. It just makes me opinionated.

My wife, who endures my grumpy observations that there are no female Leonardos, Mozarts or Einsteins, will also affirm that my views are complicated and not one-sided. She’ll tell you I detest the Hollywood tropes on both sides. The cliche that 80 lb Asian women can routinely kick the asses of 200 lb men with military and martial arts training disturbs me because it makes women think that self defense courses can protect them when what they really need is a gun in their handbag. An average out of shape male can break a woman’s jaw with a single punch.

She’s equally fatigued with my resistance to Hollywood insistence that the best computer hackers are women, which is so patently ridiculous that even I find myself tedious on the subject. Just because a woman wears horn-rimmed glasses doesn’t mean she has the driving obsession to burrow through endless layers of machine code to execute tricky, anonymous attacks on every kind of bureaucracy. Mostly, women are the bureaucracy, which is historically, inveterately, depressingly female. It’s the ultimate definition of passive-aggression. And women never aspire to be anonymous. They just settle for it when their need for attention goes unnoticed. But their preferred weapon in that case isn’t computer code but legal documents. Or poison.

By the same token, my wife is tired of hearing me rail at the Hollywood trope that when in danger, women ALWAYS:

— Can’t start a car
— Can’t run away without falling down
— Can’t hang onto a gun they’ve fired without immediately throwing it away
— Can’t be quiet when silence is a matter of life and death
— Can’t ever, ever, EVER do what they’re told without saying, “What?,” “Why?,” Or “Huh?” Just before the machete explains.

Which is all bullshit that consigns women, more than laws or regulations, to second class status. Where they don’t belong.

I don’t dislike women. More than boys, they need and respond beautifully to a good father. When they catch fire, as they often do, more now than in the oppressive past, they are luminous, numinous, inspiring, and ineffable.

Last week, I showed you a girl who sailed around the world and wished I had a daughter like her. Today I’m giving you a raft of Netflix Girls, all of whom I admire and would be proud to claim as progeny.

Wild Eyes: The Abby Sunderland Story. Another teenage girl who had to sail around the world.

Zero to 100. A surfing prodigy. Head-snapping footage of a born natural whose mother had been advised to abort her. (See video above.)

Ballerina. Showed you this a while back. It’s a profession as demanding as the NFL, and at the moment I’m liking it better.

First Position. More ballet. Get over yourselves. Oscar Levant once called ballet “the fairies’ baseball.” Now that ESPN wants baseball and football to be the fairies’ national pastimes, you have some catching up to do.

Sarah Burke. She bulldozed the sport of freeskiing to include women. Then she died pushing the envelope.

Karina Hollekim. Base jumper. Crazy girl.

Ready to Fly. Ski jumping. Women are as fearless as men. Sometimes.

Soul Surfer. Sometimes they’re even more fearless.

This post could be longer. A lot longer. But if I hurry, I can finish the last of the chicken cacciatore before my wife gets home. Just remember. Whatever men say, they know that women can be brave and fierce and spectacularly beautiful in action. As long as they don’t catch you polishing off their chicken cacciatore. Which can get ugly fast. Don’t ever think I think otherwise.