Remember the ‘Fearless Girl’ sculpture that was installed last month in Manhattan’s financial district, opposite the ‘Charging Bull’ sculpture? The sculptor of ‘Charging Bull’, Arturo Di Modica, wants ‘Fearless Girl’ gone, the New York Times reports.

“She’s there attacking the bull,” Di Modica said.

Seriously?

Listen, you can make a case for ‘Fearless Girl’ being that insidious form of corporate feminism that makes us feel all warm and fuzzy without actually improving conditions for working women. Maybe you’d like to remind us that ‘Fearless Girl’ wasn’t erected to celebrate International Women’s Day, but rather as an advertisement for an index fund (NASDAQ ticker symbol SHE) comprised of gender-diverse companies with a higher percentage of women in leadership positions.

Fine, but something else is happening here.

To me, this seems like a simple case of a man getting all butt-hurt because a woman has come into this space – a space he assumed would be his alone, forever.

Di Modica and his attorneys don’t want you to get the wrong idea. According to Norman Siegal, one of Di Modica’s lawyers, “None of us here are in any way not proponents of gender equality.” If you can manage to deconstruct the double negatives in that grammar hate crime of a sentence, it holds about as much water as, “I’m not racist, but…”

As a woman and former business analyst who encountered plenty of condescension and outright hostility in corporate America, I see this face-off a little differently. The charging bull may represent a bull market, one in which share prices are rising and buying is encouraged, but it also represents an environment where women are underrepresented and still face daily challenges their male counterparts do not.

Di Modica and his lawyers contend that the ‘Fearless Girl’ sculpture undermines the bull’s message of “freedom in the world, peace, strength, power and love.” Seriously, that? Is that what you think of when you think of Wall Street? An attorney added that ‘Charging Bull’ “has been transformed into a negative force and a threat.”

I’d like to remind you that days after ‘Fearless Girl’ was in position, a man in a suit was photographed humping the sculpture. ‘Fearless Girl’ isn’t transforming anything into a threat.

The threat was already there.