Feminism Critique Critique

I had trouble reading the feminist criticism of "The Dead," the problem being that I don't fully understand feminism. I understand feminism in the sense that women and men are not equal in society, because they truly aren't, and that feminists strive to lessen that inequality, but the way feminists go about it have always dumbfounded me. Honestly, I feel like feminism is sometimes just a way for women (and sometimes men) to complain about petty things. Sometimes, they make something people probably wouldn't normally deem sexist, sexist. I believe they do it just to call attention to themselves sometimes. For instance, on page 179 of "The Dead" French criticism is defined by how feminists interpret language and they continue to say that language is male dominated. Honestly though, who cares? It was a language created a long time ago by a male dominated society. Why wouldn't they make higher valued words masculine? However, by blatantly coming out and saying that they're masculine nouns and thus a masculine language that should require female language counterpart, feminists are giving them more power. It's like surrounding a celebrity who just got busted for drugs with article after article and tons of publicity. With all the attention they're getting, they're just getting more power. Without the attention, they would just pass through the wind and no one would really think of anything of it because it wouldn't matter without they hype.
Enough about that though, before this post gets annoyingly long and turns into my complete critique of feminism. On page 196, Margot Norris talks about the scene where Gabriel turns Gretta into a painting and a symbol. If I understood the paragraph correctly, Norris says that men become so in love with their perfect version of a woman that they can't stand to be with a real one. From my previous paragraph critiquing feminism you may already be able to tell why this bothered me so much: he made a real life women into a painting in his head and didn't just pull a fictional woman from thin air. Gabriel thought Gretta was so interesting on the stairs that he decided to make her a painting in his head. In my opinion that's not male over female; that's flattering. If a man told me he thought I was pretty and interesting enough to make a picture out of, I would be ecstatic. That's a great compliment, but Norris takes it as more of an insult. Even with her explaining that she compared it to the Pygmalion myth, I still don't understand it. As said earlier, Gabriel turned Gretta, a real life woman, into a picture in his head because she thought he was beautiful and interesting, but the myth was an artist just forming a sculpture from his head with no regard to real women. These are complete opposites, the latter being more an insult to women while the former is really a compliment. Therefore, I don't understand the basis of the comparison. I'm not sure if it's just because I'm half asleep or because I've gotten myself so worked up over feminism in my previous paragraph, but I just can't wrap my head around such a comparison. It just doesn't make sense to me and makes it harder for me to understand the rest of Norris' paper because my mind just won't stop jumping back to that comparison. So what do you all think? Do you think the comparison makes sense? If you do, would care to explain it to me?