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You can turn it into a women’s issue, but here’s my five-word response to that: Hildegaard of Bingen. Emily Dickinson.
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I do understand what you mean, Andrew F.--truly I do--but the fact remains that a poem with a male narrator doing things in a stereotypically male sphere is often automatically deemed to be about Man, capital M, and addressing Big Questions of Relevance to All Humanity; sometimes this is phrased as The Voice of the Tribe, deemed of relevance to everyone. But change to an obviously feminine viewpoint (which, BTW, Emily Dickinson hardly ever has), and many male readers seem unwilling or unable to identify with the protagonist or situation. It's just a chick writing a chick poem for chicks, and therefore couldn't possibly be about anything important.
Even in this discussion, men are tossing around the term Man when they mean "all humanity." Women are automatically expected to assume that they are included in that term...but when women talk about their own experience, male readers tend to stand outside of it and refuse to see themselves as included.
It drives me nuts when I write about rape and some male readers say I'm attacking them. No I'm not, I'm attacking the rapist. What is WRONG with some guys, that in such a scenario they can more easily identify with an antisocial person who happens to be male, rather than with a decent human being who happens to be female? But I digress.
So, yeah. Gender issues. They're a thing sometimes.