Ken — you seem to have this idea that most people don’t know that there are “bad women”. Perhaps that has been your experience, but IME people know this — just as they know there are bad men. I discovered it very early when the girl I was going steady with in fifth grade dumped me because I had got my hair cut, and when I asked why, she said cruelly, “Because I hate you!” She had an evil streak, and I knew it.

Men and women are good and bad in equal numbers. I don’t hear anyone disputing that. I think you are arguing for something that is obvious to most people. Perhaps growing up with a sister I got to see the behavior of some of her friends, who were not so nice; but I also got to see the behavior of some of her boyfriends, one of whom left her on the side of a road at night to walk home; and a husband later in her life who would get drunk and hit her (she left him after a year).

If you feel that women are worse than men, I have to disagree. They might sometimes express their nature differently, but their natures have the same range of good and bad.

If you look at the statistics of who is a victim today, women are overwhelming in the majority, whether it be from forced marriages, genital mutilation, rape, and other acts of violence and aggression. (Of my three best friends in college who were women, two had been raped.) Yes, women can be unkind — just as men can be — but on the scale of the globe, women are desperately in need of assistance and advocacy.

Men also perpetrate violence against other men. Most people don’t know that because of the larger number of men in the US military, there are actually more rapes against men by other men than against women; but in those cases, men are almost universally the perpetrators. This is because men are stronger and more physical due to testosterone — not because they are less nice on average. But who was it who said, “Men are afraid that women might reject them; women are afraid that men might kill them.”