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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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That's an odd, relatively unintuitive result, to me. Men are usually established to be more physically violent than women, which would suggest that relationships with men in them ought to be the most violent. It sounds like, though, male-male relationships are the least violent, and female-female the most. The gap between straight women and straight men is perhaps attributable to men being more violent, but then what's going on with lesbians?

I'd argue against this theory of men being more violent than women. They are more damaging if they are violent and they are less prone to injuries if assaulted by women, but it does not mean that women are not violent. You know, the how can she slap effect, when man using self defense is still the first one to be neutralized. You can easily show this on stats where men are not in the picture. For instance when it comes to abuse of children in their care, then mothers are far more abusive than fathers and the disparity is even larger if they are not biological parent of the child. The same goes when it comes to abuse of patients by nurses and many other cases when women can safely inflict physical abuse without risk of being confronted by men, including extreme ones like female Nazi concentration camp guards like Irma Grese, the Hyena of Auschwitz. So of course if they try the usual slapping and violent outburst shenanigans in same sex relationship, it does not fly as well especially as both of them can act as weak victims in front of the police.

In general, I think that women are actually much more callous and not at all the exemplars of fairer gender as they are portraited to be in women are wonderful reality distortion. If by any chance women could overpower men in violent confrontation, I think that they would be far, far more vicious and uncaring toward them.

Also, men who do have the most capacity to inflict damaging violence - taller, stronger, richer (easier to get away with it) - are ironically the most desired. "Short king" is still a backhanded "compliment". The evolutionary desire for superior genetics offset the fear of potential violence, I suppose.

For instance when it comes to abuse of children in their care, then mothers are far more abusive than fathers and the disparity is even larger if they are not biological parent of the child.

Those appear to be absolute figures - isn't an alternative explanation that single mothers are simply much more common than single fathers? Statista for 2024 gives us 15,720,000 single mother households versus 7,214,000 single father.

So if we have 189,635 cases of an abusive mother, and 125,493 with an abusive father, then that works out to 1.2% of single mother households being abusive, and 1.7% of single father households. That would seem to track with the stereotype of men being more violent.

I agree with you that we have to be careful of the women-are-wonderful effect here, and women have a tremendous capacity for violence and cruelty, but this particular figure doesn't seem to show that women are worse.

Where did you find information that this data is only about single parent households? In fact there is even better data in there, where women are more abusive compared to men if they are non-parent in the household by factor of almost 6.

I agree with you that we have to be careful of the women-are-wonderful effect here, and women have a tremendous capacity for violence and cruelty, but this particular figure doesn't seem to show that women are worse.

Women are way worse and my claim is that their violence is vastly underreported. We see these things only in extreme cases with violence against children and of course in same-sex relationships where there is no bias against men.