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I think it's far darker than that. They want to erase the notion that women can ever be manipulative or duplicitous from men's cognitive toolkit to make them easier abuse victims.
I remember when I first discovered the term "passive aggression" in my late teens. Somehow I had never encountered it, or any concrete definition of it, in all my childhood and teenage years under matriarchal rule at home and at school. And suddenly, when I discovered it, it made years and years of exiting every interaction with a female peer or woman with authority over me with profound negative feelings about myself make sense. "Oh, this is how they've been attacking me all these years, why didn't anyone ever tell me this was a thing?" Well, all the people guiding my intellectual development were women, so of course they never told me. And for whatever reason the men in my life were too cowed to pull me aside and explain to me the emotional weapons women have at their ready, or how to defend myself from them.
Maybe it's just me. I don't know. But it seems there is a constant conspiracy of silence about the ways women can victimize men, such that there is a perpetual effort to erase it from culture and bodies of common sense.
Possibly, in some circles even probably, but historically (I write that without solid support beyond my assumption) this type of behavior has been invisible. To be too brazen or overt (by, say, throwing a shoe, or, imagining Connie Corleone, breaking a bunch of dinner plates and sloshing the pitcher of wine over the veal) is to reveal oneself as an aggressor and thus drop the plausible deniability (if I may borrow a CIA term).
Any physically vulnerable or weaker player will necessarily develop strategies to compensate for this weakness, and passive aggression done well is like an art form. Its sisters, cattiness, backstabbing, intrigue, manipulation, these are the fey but effective weapons of the court (or dining table) as opposed to the battlefield or backyard. And to repay cattiness with a smack up the mouth is forbidden (and ineffective), just as to answer a blow to the jaw with a withering comment doesn't win fights.
This is nothing that everyone here is not already aware of (probably. Some might take issue ) I suppose my point is that this behavior gets modeled and copied, the same way swagger and volume of voice and strongarm get modeled for growing boys. Modeled without being so much overtly talked about.
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