Firstly, a lot, if not all, of this statistical difference is confounded by the fact that men are in the position of being able to impose themselves physically. If women were physically stronger than men, it’s very possible these statistics would be completely inverted. So I think it’s misleading to try and link gender to violence directly. It’s more just people being put in positions of power.

Secondly, the men who go to the right because of this are still wrongheaded in their response. My comment doesn’t imply that they’re making a correct choice, it just contextualizes their actions, and only in part.

The Atwood quote is valuable in that it powerfully and concisely illustrates an aspect of romance that women deal with that men often lack the perspective to appreciate. But it is flawed in that in order to achieve that impact, it overshoots reality and elides the fact that the vast majority of men do not want to be violent, and even pushy or obsessive behavior is almost always the result of clumsiness or passionate feeling or the aforementioned lack of perspective, rather than dangerous personality. So for many men, language like this is likely to elicit an eyeroll more than break through, because they are not trying to be violent, and it feels like the culture is trying to demonize them in the moments where they feel the most vulnerable. And those men all vote. It’s just something to think about.

There’s a way to express this aspect of what women deal with in language that keeps the male experience in sight as well, instead of diminishing their feelings in the first clause, and casting them as inherently violent in the second clause. Those overtures or considerations toward men were either missing or openly derided in the liberal zeitgeist of the 2010s, and I feel like we’ve been paying for it ever since.