True enough.

In his personal account of shipwreck along the northwest coast of Africa in 1815, Captain James Riley told of being enslaved along with his crew by one of the marauding bands common to the Sahara desert during that period.

While being starved, beaten, and force marched near beyond endurance, one of his recollections was that the women in the band, though just barely above slaves themselves, treated him most viciously and lacked even the smallest measure of empathy that he occasionally enjoyed from a few of his male captors. His telling called to mind Kipling’s poem The Female of the Species but also caused me to reflect on how these women were treated by their men. I suppose women’s capacity for pitiless cruelty could be as much driven by natural selection as any cruel man’s. When overpowered, other weapons are patiently honed.

It’s not so much the capacity for cruelty that gets to me. It’s our wider western society, both men and women, seemingly blinkered to the falsehood and hypocrisy woven throughout the narrative.

We don’t even notice it anymore.