Most likely because we don't all know his individual lady friend, but we definitely know people who are 'women in the bay area'. If a person makes a broad sweeping statement then qualifying it with an individual exception is no more significant than some tiny disclaimer int he corner of a billboard.
White men as a group have high social and economic status, so a broad-spectrum put-down isn't likely to impact them very much. Women have spent a long time trying to overcome exclusionary social mores, and have correspondingly less social and economic capital, so it's in their interest to cooperate against overt sexists.
I've seen a lot of white homeless men around the Bay Area. In fact, the ratio of homeless white men to homeless women of any race is quite high.
Do these homeless white men have high social and economic status? I'm curious to know when it is appropriate to generalize based on group membership, and when it is not.
EDIT: More curiosity from me: Has anyone demonstrated that any women were actually impacted by his statement (again, a few lines taken out of context from, well, a book-length book) in any real way?
The assumption seems to be that now he's irrevocably tainted as sexist, like some sort of charged particle inducing sexist discrimination on any nearby woman according to some inverse square law. I have yet to understand how a flippant (and joking) sentence or two in a book somehow causes anyone any real harm.
I just looked up the suicide rates, and holy cow.[0] How many additional white men have taken their own lives because they are assumed to be able to "handle put-downs?"
Do not put your words in my mouth, please. You got a good faith reply, which you are misrepresenting. It was you that switched the context to 'white men in the bay area' in the first place.
I really don't see how your comment does not imply the meaning I took from it. You said that white men (due to their "high social and economic status" as a group) would not be impacted much by a negative generalization. In other words, as I put it, "they can take it".
Now, if I've misunderstood something substantive about your argument I am open to correction. With regard to how I phrased your argument, the whole point was to make it clear why I don't find your argument convincing.
Why didn't you do that?