[mschuster91]

It's a common issue. When you got everything you could possibly want in life or have enough money to buy whatever you want... then for quite a lot of people of either gender, the illegal and illicit becomes the next thing to obtain.

For some, it's an increasingly worrisome amount (and type of) drugs, for others, it's women, and for a select few it's children.

[saghm]

> When you got everything you could possibly want in life or have enough money to buy whatever you want... then for quite a lot of people of either gender, the illegal and illicit becomes the next thing to obtain.

But with a society that empowers men more than women, and relative power disparities of all types lending themselves to behavior like this (plenty of people who don't have everything still have enough power to exploit those they have power over). In the abstract, sure, it might not be something inherent to men, but it's kind of hard to ignore the fact that in practice women are victimized by behavior like this at a system level that men are not.

To any men who are dubious about this, I'd genuinely suggest asking the women who you have close enough relationships with to be comfortable having tough discussions if they'd be willing to tell you about experiences they've had where men have behaved poorly towards them in ways that wouldn't have likely happened to a man in their circumstances; I'm guessing that pretty much all of them will have experienced far more than you'd imagine. As a man, I'm relatively certain I can't recall any instance of ever experiencing the reverse of this though, and that's my point: going out of your way to try to frame this as a gender-neutral issue basically emphasizes theoretical concerns at the expense of the actual distribution of problems that people face in real life. When things are so slanted that in practice almost everyone in one group has experienced it but relatively few from another group has had the same experience, framing it in terms of that is important.

[mschuster91]

> But with a society that empowers men more than women, and relative power disparities of all types lending themselves to behavior like this (plenty of people who don't have everything still have enough power to exploit those they have power over). In the abstract, sure, it might not be something inherent to men, but it's kind of hard to ignore the fact that in practice women are victimized by behavior like this at a system level that men are not.

A valid and important point, yes. But then there's Ghislaine Maxwell. By all accounts, she is just as guilty as he was, some say even worse because she actively recruited victims for him.

The fact that society gives less women that kind of power reduces the absolute number of women that abuse their power - but the level of depravity they can sink to those that do rise to power is just as bad as men's.

[saghm]

I feel like the existence of victims of women doesn't detract from the overall point I was making, which is that overall the distribution of people who exploit people like this is overwhelmingly tilted towards men being the dominant source. The fact that you can point to specific counterexamples as a distraction from this is exactly what I'm trying to argue against being useful. For any significant source of mistreatment of an oppressed group in history (which I won't bother calling out examples of because they will readily come to mind), there were likely some members of the oppressed group who took part or at least didn't stand up for the others, but equating that with being the overall source of the mistreatment is at best misguided and at worst actively muddying the waters.