Jeremy Stangroom

Part of the thing here, & it's a point feminists make, generally, is to do with who is doing the doing. It's men waging war, men doing the killing. Of course, you can find exceptions - Eleanor of Aquitaine was pretty feisty - but overwhelmingly men were active, women passive.

I should say one has got to be slightly careful in terms of how one reads history, because men also wrote history (so women got airbrushed out). But nevertheless, while it's maybe true that more men were killed than women raped, it's men doing both these things. Not women.

Also, if you want to get a sense of how the ancients viewed women (and again, there will be variation, etc., so you've got be nuanced about it), take a look at what Aristotle thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle%27s_views_on_women … His views weren't eccentric or unusual.

This isn't to demonize individual men, or modern man, it's just about reporting history accurately. I tend to think of this stuff as being about structures or systems. It's not really about the morality of individual people.

If you want more examples of this sort of thing, you could take a look at a book I wrote with Ophelia Benson, "Does God Hate Women?". I think you'd be horrified at some of the things that happen to women in the name of religion.

Okay, well this is quite a difficult topic. Basically, you're absolutely right, you can't say something like men tend to behave badly, therefore Tom is bad. You can't even say, men tend to behave badly, therefore Tom is probably bad.

Why can't you make the latter claim?