I grew up with girls who would correct me whenever I called them "girls." They were "women," apparently – even at age 13. So here I am, a man who understands a liberated woman's needs: On a date, for example, the best thing to do is ignore them. It shows you respect their ability to forage for themselves.

But now comes this movie called "Kate and Leopold," and it seems to indicate that a lot of women don't want to be modern at all. They want to go back to the 19th century, those balmy, simple times when they couldn't attend professional schools, weren't allowed to vote and had to squirt out babies until their teeth shattered.

It's only too bad the filmmakers missed the reign of the Taliban. If you like the 19th century, you'd love the 12th. And now that this little film has settled things for women, perhaps Spike Lee will continue this theme and direct a sentimental tale of a high-powered black executive who longs for the simple, happy life of a slave.

In "Kate and Leopold," Kate is a high-powered female ad executive in our own era – a time when all men, apparently, are clowns, cads or con artists. Into her life drops Leopold, an English duke who has traveled in time from 1876. Naturally, I would assume she'd hate him – with his attention to social forms, his appreciation of fine food and his taste for romance. Women see right through that stuff, don't they? I mean, guys like that always end up stealing your credit card numbers.

Yet, as of this writing, "Kate and Leopold" is the eighth most popular film at the box office, and it probably got to that point with an almost entirely female audience. When I saw it, I was one of maybe three or four men in the theater, surrounded by women: women in pairs, women in groups, quiet women who were sitting all alone and yet did not find themselves strangely drawn to a rumpled, middle-aged Jewish columnist sitting in the fourth row taking notes.

Now, despite all the contrary evidence that I've thrown at you up to this point, I am not stupid. I know we're not supposed to think about this movie very much, and that it's kind of the female equivalent of "Porky's Revenge."

So I'm not going to point out the gaping holes in the plot (for example, the story hinges on a picture that could only have been taken after the photographer had left the scene), or belabor some of the less attractive aspects of 1876 that the film conveniently leaves out. (City streets smelled like sewage; black people frequently were lynched; the Native American was being wiped off the face of the plains; and many of the luxuries Leopold enjoys require an army of servants, which is why not even 1 percent of the population in 19th century America could afford Leopold's infectious appreciation of life.)

No, I'll just take the movie on its own terms: A woman finds that life in 21st century corporate America is empty – and I won't argue with that. She also thinks about how nice it would be not to have to make any moral compromises. Boy, would it ever. Therefore, it might be better to go back in time to when a woman was subservient.

Oh no you don't.

Women have struggled for a century to achieve this level of responsibility and stress, and they aren't backing out of it now. Otherwise, men would have to manage everything by ourselves. You think women are the only ones who want a respite from the responsibility, hassles and moral ambiguities of a business career? So do men.

That's why we like movies about guys going back in time to the stone age or King Arthur's court or whatever time it was when all-female luxury liners roamed the high seas and a man with pluck and determination could sneak on dressed as a Russian gym teacher.

Maybe someone could make a movie like that. Maybe someone has made movie like that. Maybe I've been watching various versions of that movie my entire life.

But nobody is going anywhere – men or women. We're all stuck here, paying the bills together and finding and losing accidental traces of romance as we slog through quick office lunches, traffic jams and unpaid bills.

Welcome to Hell, ladies.