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mschuster91yesterday at 6:56 PM1 replyview on HN

> 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.


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saghmyesterday at 8:55 PM

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.