He’s speaking about something else, but Matthew Yglesias addresses in general terms the fallacy behind standard MRA “but women abuse men too” thread hijacks.
[I]t’s really not clear to me what allegations of the form “but he didn’t write about X!” would prove even if they were true. If credible accusations are leveled, an obligation exists to investigate them independently of whether or not accusations leveled against the other side are being investigated.
Women in fact do abuse men, and they do in fact do so in numbers higher than are generally written about. The issue, though, is that “but you didn’t talk about X” is too often used not to expand the conversation but to stop it. Which is actually sort of a shame. On the whole gendered abuses are different enough to warrant almost completely different initiatives to combat them — which makes either kind of “but what about the…” objections in one conversation are almost completely irrelevant in the context of another. But to the extent abuse is gendered a non-stopped conversation between the sexes could be pretty productive.
