I love men that love women. Morgan Freeman, who I worked with on

When Helen Mirren declared, “I love men that love women. Morgan Freeman, who I worked with on ‘RED,’ was very flattering to me. But he is flattering to all women. He is a woman-charmer,” she gave voice to an ancient truth about reverence and recognition. To love women is not merely to desire them, but to honor them, to see their worth, to treat them with dignity and delight. Such men do not withhold their admiration for one alone, but scatter it like seeds, reminding each woman she is visible, valued, and radiant.

Her words shine with warmth but also with wisdom. For in every age, there have been men who diminished women, who saw them as lesser, as tools or shadows. Against them stand the rare woman-charmers, not deceivers but celebrants, those who bring ease and confidence to every woman they meet. This charm is not trickery but respect wrapped in grace. Mirren praises Morgan Freeman for this very gift: the ability to lift the spirit with words, and in doing so, reveal the beauty of equality.

The ancients knew this charm well. In the courts of chivalry, knights were bound by codes that demanded they revere women, not merely as muses but as moral equals. A knight’s flattery was not empty, but part of a larger ritual of honoring feminine strength. And long before that, poets like Sappho sang of love as recognition, seeing in women a power that deserved to be praised aloud. Mirren’s delight in Freeman’s gestures echoes this long tradition of men exalting rather than diminishing the women in their midst.

History too gives us examples. Consider how Queen Elizabeth I, though a monarch in her own right, gained strength from those around her who treated her not as a usurper of men’s power but as a sovereign worthy of loyalty and reverence. The courtiers who admired her without diminishing her authority became her allies in ruling a nation. So too, in Mirren’s story, flattery done rightly is not condescension but empowerment, a way of strengthening dignity rather than stealing it.

Thus, let this teaching be passed down: to love women truly is to honor them in word and deed, not to bind them with false praise but to free them with genuine recognition. The woman-charmer is not the deceiver who ensnares, but the man who lifts, who delights, who dignifies. Such men remind us that the power of speech is not only to command or persuade, but also to heal, to affirm, and to celebrate. And in a world where women have too often been diminished, such voices are not trifles—they are torches of respect.