Neil James of the Australian Defence Association - a onetime Santamaria front group - is turning his guns on both me and Greg Sheridan - a onetime Santamaria front group - for suggesting that there may be deep-seated differences between men and women, worth bringing into the discussion on the frontline military. How we’ve all moved on. Thanks Neil, but if i want the views of military women, I’ll listen to military women. The fact that you seem willing to speak so confidently for them, suggests you’re not as unreconstructed as you may imagine.

Pru, the example of Phoolan Devi works for me not you - she was a leader of ‘untouchables’ hideously mistreated by higher castes, raped and murdered, with no legal recourse, so she organised a violent resistance. As i suggested, her violence made sense.

Your have nearly no evidence for your other assertions. A near half century after the second wave feminist explosion evidence for women’s capacity to kill wantonly and repeatedly is lacking. Most men can’t do it either - but enough can to make a pool of people who can make senseless wars happen. Look at the homicide stats, the grevious bodily harm stats, the serial killer stats, prison violence stats and half a dozen instances where we can compare male and female behaviour, and you’ll find a total disparity. When you then remove - eg from the homicide stats - women who killed men after long periods of domestic abuse and in fear of their lives, the numbers fall even further.

Even the rise in violence by girls over the last 10 years shows that while they are far more likely to get into fights, they don’t then half-murder each other, as men increasingly do.

In this respect, the Lynndie England example is instructive - she didn’t kill anyone, didn’t greviously injure them, etc. Overwhelmingly she orchestrated their humiliation, as directed by powerful men around her. She was simply transferring the behaviour of an American high school to an Iraq prison.

Yes, cultural constructs of gender are fluid and change. Doesnt mean there aren’t very deep-seated differences which are more or less untransformable en masse.

Why not just get the comments from, you know, the ‘COMMENTS’ section at the end of each article which the readers post to. Surely the people that ‘write’ in can add them there instead. They would also stimulate further debate which is half the fun.

This leads onto my next point about not being able to find the latest articles that are being commented on, but that’s another story.