Who's worse?

Somehow, our dinner conversation tonight ranged from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to serial killers to prostitution rings to rapists to Monday Night football...Really relaxing.

I guess we'd heard too much NPR on Veterans' Day or something, but we started this lovely discussion by talking about whether the U.S. should get out of Afghanistan or troop up and "get the job done." Being a pacifist, I disapprove of the whole thing all together, but being a humanist, I'm terrified of what will happen to Afghan women if the Taliban comes back to power, so I sort of feel like we should stick it out until the Afghan government is more stable and can protect the female population from the Taliban extremists. Since it was genocide-awareness day at my husband's school (he's a teacher too), he asked, "Well what about the women all over the world who are being abused, raped, murdered, etc.? Why aren't we in those places, particularly Sudan, protecting those women?"

Hhhmmm, good question. I don't know the answer, but I did know the problem. "Men," I said. "You guys cause all the problems. You don't see women out raping and murdering and rounding huge groups of people up to exterminate. No one's ever even heard of a female serial killer!"

This led my husband to retaliate by telling the sad tale he'd heard of Eastern European madames suckering young women into prostitution rings in England, etc. This is an awful situation--despicable--but still, it's not mass murder, it's not systematic rape as a war tactic, it's not genocide. Women never do those things--we murder on the small scale, yes, and this prostitution ring sounds abominable, no doubt. Don't get me wrong: any murder, any sexual abuse is beyond horrific. But the way men abuse, rape and murder on the massive scale--that's something women have never done.

s it because we just haven't had the societal power to do so? Or is there something biologically determined about violence? Perhaps women are simply socialized out of being sociopaths? Who is to blame?

Even though I was joking when I first said it tonight, I think that in my heart, I really do blame all the world's violence on men. Not the men I know, but Men, with a capital M. Men.

Does this make me a man-hating "femi-Nazi" or just another blogger pointing out the obvious?