In a sane and balanced world, hitting a woman is never acceptable. However, we live in tumultuous times, and gender has become a nebulous concept. So I got to thinking, has it become okay to hit women because hitting men is fair game? This ponderous question, which I could not find a sane answer for, led me to question why men’s proclivity towards violence is so inherent and if it is as one-sided in regards to gender-based violence as many modern talking heads suggest.

I’ve stayed out of the argument about the nuances of gender, yet I have no conflict regarding male and female emotions: we all have the same hardware. We all get angry, and we seek revenge. We might be wired up a bit differently, and women cause as much harm as men. Ask any divorced man. For a few years now, society has been awash with the idea that men are responsible for everything wrong with the world. Yet, if you know anything about history, and if your aim is not to gravitate your sex or gender above the other, you’ve kind of got to admit that men were the leaders in the dance that was survival of the fittest. Sure, isn’t there that old saying, which every woman once proudly uttered whenever a man got credit for his achievements, “Behind every great man is a great woman.”

If we were so dissimilar; if men were so obtusely dominant over women, humankind would not have evolved to become a super species. Mankind would still be clubbing each other over the head and sitting around, drinking beer, eating meat, and trying to get laid. Everything men did throughout history was inherently driven by a need to impress and gain, today as then, a woman’s approval. It’s a huge driving force in human beings (I am one, and I know many… too well). Similarly, no woman worth her salt would suggest women were benign observers while men shaped history out of pure ego and pride. For hundreds of thousands of years, humankind carved out a crude and lawless life, and whilst women may not have done the bloody deeds, their natural protectiveness towards their families was integral to society being violent and lawless. You only have to take a cursory look at any relationship today to see how often a woman directs a man.

Women choose tact over bluntness; white lies over brutal honesty; a long game over a more direct and efficient means to results. Hence, men are geared to solve problems quickly because of epigenetics (I believe). To them, violence negates harmful emotional scars that can take much longer to heal.

I’m not condoning violence, but I am endeavoring to explore society’s understanding of it, or lack thereof.

Throughout history, women have played their part in violence. In the Germanic Barbarian tribes, pre and post-Roman Europe, women fought in battles alongside men. Women started the French Revolution when the brawny fishwives of Versailles took their knives to the bellies of the aristocracy. Women today often lash out because of the fairly new idea that men and women are equal in every way, an idea which schools are, in my opinion, recklessly proliferating. Even if modern women do not strike first, they often push the buttons of men, getting in their faces and screaming. That, to me, is violent behavior. To me, provoking violence makes you equally guilty. Which leads me to a recent case in the Irish press.

RTE’s analysis of the Natasha O’Brien v Cathal Crotty case describes how Crotty viciously assaulted O’Brien after she asked him to stop shouting homophobic slurs. Taken from that point of view, Crotty deserves jail, yet a judge gave him a fully suspended sentence. Since then, the tag ‘gender-based violence’ has been attached to the assault. Natasha O’Brien set up a GoFundMe page for herself asking for €10,000. She hopped up on a stage at a music festival to yell at revellers about hate crimes and LGBTQ rights. To me, it all seemed a bit opportunistic (and even political). At the end of the day, it was late on a weekend night, another drunken argument that got violent. I really don’t think it can be spun as gender-based violence anymore by the very same people who claim there are countless genders. Like seriously, if a man identifying as a unicorn fair godmother strikes a woman, is that no longer gender-based violence? Shooting yourselves in the foot there, me thinks! (Slap your forehead).

Elements of the attack also seem to have been omitted, if you believe Gript Media (whose integrity as a news outlet is one I consider intact, for the most part). CCTV footage does not always tell the full story. According to Gript, since getting off, Crotty’s friends have claimed they have video that broadens the story of the attack to show O’Brien verbally and physically assaulting him, which Gardai warned would affect the trial (which left me thinking, well, yeah, that’s what evidence is supposed to do).

If O’Brien did provoke Crotty, she did not deserve what she got. Crotty should have been a man and walked away. However, far too often these days, videos pop up on social media showing women provoking men to hit them or swinging punches, and in return getting hit back, often with devastating results. Is this a symptom of a generation that has grown up believing the foolishness they’ve been fed about gender and sex?

As much as I believe a man should walk away, I also believe he has a right to self-defense. I remember one rainy night in Galway where a group of people were fighting in the streets. In the drunken chaos, there was this beautiful girl slapping the head off a bloke, who took hit after hit whilst backing away. If he had hit her back, he would have prevented what happened next. I stood in shock as she took off her stiletto and drove the pointy heel of it into his face. He clutched his eye as blood streamed down his face and began screaming that she had blinded him. After she ran off, I went to help and saw he hadn’t lost an eye but had been hit just below his eye socket—a couple of millimetres higher and he’d have lost the eye. I’m not sure what happened to her, likely nothing as he seemed the type to not court trouble.

Anecdotally, I worked as a hairdresser for a couple of years in my youth, and I know how good women can be. I also know they have a dark side. There was one woman I worked with, let’s call her Michelle, who spent the greater portion of her working week belittling and degrading men. Being young myself at the time, I assume she saw me as a boy and hence immune from her vitriol. We often went for lunch, actually, because beneath that nasty side, she was funny as hell. She would often pass remarks about men like she was Dublin’s own working-class version of the Dalai Lama. Yet she was far from accurate or fair, I remember thinking. She’d go for strong men—loved to see their confidence toppled. Confident men were arrogant to her, and shy ones were weirdos and losers. She is not alone in that viewpoint.

Michelle was particularly nasty about her husband, let’s call him Mike, who to me was a complex and confident yet shy sort. One day she came into work with a black eye and split lip. All her colleagues rallied around her to call Mike every name under the sun. Yet, nobody suggested she call the Guards. In fact, afterwards there was a sense of ostracization towards Michelle, like she had finally said or done something to push Mike over the edge.

Many of those hairdressers were feminists. Strong, opinionated, and non-bullshit women. Modern feminists, as far as I can tell, don’t seem to weigh up the nuances of the relationship between men and women when it comes to those relationships spilling into domestic violence. It’s always the man’s fault, even if the woman strikes first; women are always innocent victims. I would ask modern feminists, what would you suggest a man like Mike do in that situation? He could have left Michelle, but he would have been abandoning his kids, which I know he loved more than life. He could have given Michelle a taste of her own medicine: be horrible twenty-four-seven and make a joke of it all afterwards—Michelle was an expert at destroying people’s lives and making herself seem like the victim somehow? Mike hadn’t got that type of darkly clever mind.

Lashing out during emotional, tense, claustrophobic situations may feel like the only solution to certain individuals—which I believe does not explicitly make them the bad guy. Not to excuse violence, and not to paint it as the worst crime in the world either, as emotional and mental scars don’t heal nearly as quickly.

Mike should have gotten a divorce. I would have. I’d make sure to fill up the moments with my kids. Yet, in that situation, Michelle was the higher earner, and Mike took care of their kids, and she didn’t respect him. He needed her, and she, although there’s no way in hell she would have admitted it, needed him. He made her a nicer person. Without him, she’d have been unbearable and probably unemployable and living on benefits.

I wonder what modern feminists would suggest a typical, self-confident man should do if he was stuck in an environment dominated by unhappy, nasty, vindictive women like Michelle, who derive pleasure and get energy from taking men down? I have been in that situation more than once. Women used to bicker about men; now they gang up, driven by the media. A woman’s agreeable nature is prone to a convincing argument, particularly when in a media-fed bubble, with nothing but an echo chamber to flesh out trivial concerns, making all men monsters. What you fear, you create.

If you demonize all men and make women the perpetual victims, you remove the nuance and emotion from life. Humans, particularly men, become agitated and potentially aggressive in those circumstances.

Those whose mission it is to bring attention to gender-based violence, and who see that as a symptom of inherent violence found in the XX chromosomes, need to pull back and look at the bigger societal picture. If you really want to help women, remove the idea that women can say and do what they like with impunity (as long as they’re not headbutting people). Remove the idea that men are somehow emotionally stunted. The fact is, men learn early in life to manage emotions. We learn to avoid getting too deep into them because they’re a hindrance. Lashing out is, oxymoronically, a way to prevent anger. Anger is a problem. Men prefer calm and functional environments. When you throw a woman in there, with a Hello Magazine, pseudoscience-driven sense of female emotional superiority, men don’t like that; they become frustrated.

Yes, a man must learn to manage his emotions differently around women, and the same applies to women around men. I would advise women to exercise caution and never test a man, particularly to breaking point and certainly not on a night out when alcohol is involved.

What you fear, you create.

As a strong supporter of women, I believe in full equality; in that females must understand that their behavior throughout the day may have knock-on consequences (no pun intended). Not to say women should tip-toe around men, quite the opposite, actually. Men prefer honesty but do not like constant judging, hypervigilance and triviality. Women who have those tendencies should avoid indulging their nature and learn some tact around men. Come on girls, we men have to do that for you, right?!

The truth is, most men are decent and if they saw a man hitting a woman, would deck him and ask questions later. But if we keep driving society towards the idea that women are inherently victims and men inherently cruel, it’s only going to make men more frustrated. Frustration leads to stress, and stress leads to anger, which leads to violence.

If you really want to help women, stop judging men and be more inclusive and try to understand why they do what they do. Arbitrarily judging men widens the divide and makes us enemies, which puts women in danger!

If you want to protect women, make it your mission to teach men how to handle the Michelles of this world. Women like that cause trouble every day of their lives and, for the most part, get away with it. Absolutely, it is not acceptable to hit a woman. Yet to say never; to excuse the ways that women cajole, belittle, and diminish men; to take human emotion out of the equation; to overlook how some women defer all responsibility for what happens to them would be to view life as less-than-human. And you know what’s funny about that? The less human you act, the more cold and violent society becomes. Now that’s irony for you.