That's men for you:John Wayne saunters into a homestead in the Wild West. There is a woman in there who is very mad at him, or perhaps just at strangers in general. She aims a rifle at him and threatens to shoot, unless he gets out and keeps going. But good ol' John Wayne just walks towards her.
I am sitting in the cinema saying "pull the trigger, please pull the trigger" - but it never happens. As always, in a cliché repeated in many Westerns, the woman lacks the mettle to shoot.
Instead, the hero gently takes the rifle from her soft, female hands and proceeds to talk sense into her. Women, poor dears, are so nurturing and peaceable that they cannot bring themselves to shoot even John Wayne. Worse, the audience knows that, by the time the movie is over, she will be wanting to have his babies.
A woman, it all implies, wouldn't be much use when tough deeds - man deeds - need doing.
She is even less useful if you are hunting bad guys, as evidenced by that other cinema cliché in which the woman tells the hero "I'm going along with you, whether you like it or not", and ends up having to be rescued by said hero when she gets herself into trouble.
And if women are not able to bring themselves to shoot at guys, then they will hardly be able to head sales teams, run corporations or lift heavy weights even with the help of a forklift truck - gosh those prongs might hurt somebody!
In other words, the image of the non-violent woman suited a society which sought to keep women in the kitchen, the typing pool, the nursery and the hospital ward. Needless to say, the work for which women were considered to be fit was poorly paid relative to some, though not all, of the work done by men.
The image of the soft, sensitive female, therefore, did not always serve women well. Although that image is gradually changing, it still has a major influence on our thinking and sometimes it does not serve men well either.
The idea of men as violent towards women is easy to accept as true. Rape, whether as an act of personal power or an act of war, provides a non-arguable example.
Yet, female suicide bombers walk into cafés and blow men, other women and children apart. On the streets of Western cities, there is growing concern about the phenomenon of violent female gangs who target other females.
And evidence of violent behaviour by women towards their partners is now frequently published. A recent US study examined the subsequent behaviour of people who had been persistently violent as teenagers. The University of Washington study found that such people were significantly more likely than others to be violent towards their partners later on. Interestingly, nearly twice as many women as men admitted being violent towards a partner in the previous year.
Here, a survey by a GP registrar, Dr Caitriona Waters, in 2005 found, according to a subsequent report in The Irish Times, that 18 per cent of male patients attending a Galway practice had experienced domestic abuse. The same was true of 39 per cent of female patients. She suggested that the figure for men might be an underestimate because men are less likely to attend a GP.
The truth is usually less comfortable than the myths with which we cover over divisions in society. And yet the truth is better because, until you know the truth, you are not dealing with reality. And the myth, as I mentioned before, also worked to the disadvantage of women by justifying their exclusion from many areas of work.
So in many ways, and paradoxical as it may seem, the growing realisation that females are violent too tears down a myth of inherent gentleness which did not always serve women well - any more than it serves men well now.
Padraig O'Morain's blog is at www.justlikeaman.blogspot.com