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It is a women's failure when they do not exhibit agency in situations such as this. I don't find "but what about how terrible the man is" a valuable contribution to the conversation here. It has been made clear enough that he's terrible; the question currently discussed is not how to reform such men, but how to reform such women.
For such men, we have the justice system, which unfortunately has to require someone to report wrongdoings and the wrongdoings to be provable (usually) before a punishment is issued.
But if the men can't be reformed why should we expect that the women can unless we're saying women have higher agency?
The men are being reformed; we have plenty of coercive systems in place to punish men who behave like the man in the story. The men who keep doing it are the ones who decided that the benefits of being abusive outweigh the costs or are simply lucky enough not to get caught. If someone's benefiting from their current status, they're not going to be amenable to reformation, and that's an entirely reasonable position to take for such people (as such, we use coercion and deadly force, but, again, there always will inevitably be people who avoid detection or capture). These men have agency; they're rationally using that agency to escape our reformation attempts.
The asymmetry here is that the woman in this story clearly was, by her own judgment, not getting benefits commensurate to the costs. It'd be reasonable for someone like that to be amenable to reformation such that she doesn't choose to stay in such a situation, and an agentic woman who has unwillingness to do so would be a peculiar thing that, at least on its surface, seems unreasonable, which raises questions.
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That's a bit of a sleight of hand.
What do you mean by "the men"? 99% of men have already been reformed (usually preemptively), because 99% of men are not crazy, evil manipulators. (Same goes for women)
There will always be a tiny minority of men (and women) who are evil manipulators. I guess you can always point at the male portion of that cohort and go, "why aren't we reforming these people? Is it because men are low agency? (troll face)" -- if you choose to ignore that you're sampling the worst of one gender, because the better people have already been reformed.
... meanwhile, what's the percentage of women who experience some version of the OP, where they make self-damaging choices? 50%, maybe? I don't know, but it's definitely an order of magnitude greater than the percentage of men or women who are crazy, evil manipulators.
It's perfectly reasonable for us to go "hey, why are large numbers of women having this bad experience?" without having to go "men are the problem". But yeah, raising the slightest spectre of women possibly not being perfect is never going to go down well.
Agreed.
By analogy, if the local police distribute a flyer advising people how to secure their homes from burglaries, (generally) nobody says "hey, wait a second, why are we focusing on the victims here?"
If Grandma Jane keeps falling for tech support scammers in India, it's reasonable to ask what's wrong and how can we educate her to make her more resistant to scammers.
Yeah, I think that's the problem. It's more or less taboo to say something unflattering about women as a group. You can sometimes get away with it if you throw in some criticism of men as a group.
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I would say 80% of men, not 99%
And I feel like if such a thing as consequence free existed, 50%
What are your equivalent percentages for women?
Also: the idea that 50% of men would be crazy manipulators in the absence of social consequences invites one of two replies, depending on your gender:
If legal and social consequences to some actions disappeared today I would still have my own habits and conscience. If I was brought up in an environment where legal and social consequences to some actions did not exist, then I would have likely had different habits.
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Note that manipulators very frequently don't recognize their own behavior as manipulative, so the absence of social consequences is also an absence of social feedback.
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Two assumptions:
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