(Notably, both the CDC study and the earlier NIJ study show a much smaller gender gap in past-year reports of partner violence than in lifetime reports. One possible explanation for this discrepancy is that men may be more likely to let such experiences fade from memory. Maybe it’s because they are less traumatized; maybe it’s because they have less cultural support for seeing themselves as victims, particularly of violence by women.)

The claim that women’s motivations for partner violence are radically different from those of men doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, either. In a 2010 review essay in the journal Partner Abuse, Straus concludes that women’s motives for domestic violence are often similar to men’s, ranging from anger to coercive control.

Some people — not only feminists but conservatives with strong beliefs in the innate gentleness, kindness, and vulnerability of women — may find the idea of equal-opportunity partner violence self-evidently absurd, especially since violence outside the family is overwhelmingly committed by men (and, one might add, overwhelmingly toward other men). But the reality is complicated. A major recent review study of female aggression in laboratory studies and its neural and hormonal aspects found that women are no less aggressive than men when aggression can be seen as “provoked” and when there is no significant safety risk (conditions that are likely to apply to intimate violence). In a 1993 paper, Israeli criminologist Sarah Ben-David suggested that female violence is far more prevalent in the home than outside it for a variety of reasons, from perceptions of relative danger to investment in the domestic sphere.

It is worth noting that partner violence by women is not directed only at men: In the 2010 CDC survey, 44 percent of lesbians said they had been assaulted by an intimate partner at some point, compared to 35 percent of straight women. While some of the violence experienced by lesbians was from male abusers in past relationships, two thirds reported only female perpetrators. Women are also, according to most of the data, a majority of perpetrators of physical violence against children and elders. This fact no doubt reflects women’s greater involvement in caregiving roles; nonetheless, it also points to the fact that women are not a nonviolent sex.

Obviously, sex differences in size, strength, muscle, etc. matter. A man who punches a woman in the face — assuming they are both of average strength and about the same age — is far more likely to cause serious damage than a woman punching a man. A woman is extremely unlikely to choke or beat up a man with her bare hands, or physically restrain him. But that doesn’t mean female violence is harmless. Women can use weapons, including improvised ones like boiling water (or bottles and cans!). Surprise attacks, sometimes on a sleeping victim, are also a common tactic for the female batterer.

According to Straus’s 2010 review essay, various studies have found that men account for 12 to 40 percent of those injured in opposite-sex couple violence. A meta-analysis by British psychologist John Archer of the University of Central Lancashire, published in 2001, concluded that about a third of the injuries were to men. In the CDC survey, men were approximately 21 percent of those who reported injuries from domestic violence, 17 percent of those who reported seeking medical care, and about 25 percent of those reporting any kind of negative impact; it is worth noting, however, that these figures applied only to lifetime reports, where the gender gap tends to be larger (see above).

More than 20 years ago, when working on my book Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality, I interviewed an Illinois man named Dave Nevers, whose story as a domestic violence victim was well-documented in his divorce files. (He also appeared on CNN and was profiled on ABC’s 20/20.) Dave was 100 pounds heavier and 4 inches taller than his ex, but she had sent him to the emergency room four times: by kicking him in the groin and propelling him into a plate-glass window that shattered from the impact; by tripping him on the stairs and causing him to tumble down; by slamming the hot oven door on his arm when he was getting a dish out of the oven (which she later claimed was an accident); and by hitting him in the face with a picture frame and breaking his nose while they were arguing over who was going to keep a family photo. (Eventually, she had pleaded guilty to assault and received a suspended sentence.)

To some extent, physical disparities are also neutralized by strong cultural norms against men hitting or otherwise using force toward women. A woman may not be able to use size and muscle to keep a man trapped, but he is just as trapped if he’s worried that he’ll be the abuser if he pushes her aside. During my Ceasefire! research, I talked to Don, a California computer engineer who had been entangled with an abusive-live-in girlfriend. (The basic elements of his story were confirmed by two co-workers and by a female therapist whose counseling group he attended, and who had referred him to me.) As I wrote:

She scratched his face and kept him awake at night, yelling and berating him. She was no match for him physically, but when he pushed her away, scraping her elbow, he ended up in jail. When he came back, she greeted him with the words, “See what you get when you fuck with me?” and threatened to have him arrested again. “I just broke down and cried,” says Don, who had to ask his mother to stay with him for protection. He was finally able to get the woman out of his life after she was jailed for passing bad checks — and after he overcame his embarrassment and got a restraining order.

Are there reasons, overall, to treat male violence toward women as a more serious matter than female violence toward men? Of course (as Straus, the pioneer in research on partner violence by both sexes, repeatedly stressed). But that doesn’t mean female violence should be dismissed or trivialized: Even when it comes to murder by spouses or partners, men make up nearly a third of the victims, not counting cases classified as justifiable homicide (i.e., self-defense).

In the end, of course, each case must be judged on its own merits and facts. Back in 2014, Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice was cut from the NFL after a security-camera video showed him knocking out his wife Janay Rice (his fiancée Janay Palmer at the time of the assault) in an Atlantic City casino and dragging her unconscious body into an elevator. A few people claimed Rice was an equal if not bigger victim since the video showed Palmer taking several swipes at him before the punch. That was absurd: Even if she started the violence — which was unclear from the video — Rice’s response was quite obviously disproportionate. But not every man is an NFL running back. And from what we have seen so far of the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard drama, it seems that the dynamics in that violent relationship were extremely different.

Where does feminism come into all this?

You’d think that a movement which challenged stereotypes of female fragility and passivity would welcome evidence that women can be aggressors as much as victims on the home front. You’d think that a movement ostensibly championing equality would call for equal treatment for abusers and victims regardless of gender.

But with a few exceptions such as former National Organization for Women president Karen DeCrow, feminists have been intensely hostile to almost any recognition of female violence or male victimization. Feminist literature on the subject, with a few exceptions, has focused on denying, minimizing, or excusing female violence. (My favorite argument is that even women who admit using violence toward never-violent men are probably just fighting back against the overt or subtle threat of male assault. To quote from Mel Brooks’ History of World Part I: “Um … no. But that’s very creative.”)

Researchers writing on the subject have been subjected not only to pressure to back away from it but to harassment, intimidation and slander, as Straus detailed in his 2010 essay. Both in academic feminist literature and in the popular media, discussion of this taboo topic have often been equated with anti-feminist backlash. To be sure, some “men’s rights activists” have used the issue of domestic assault by women as an excuse for misogyny. But groups and sites that present accurate data on female aggression as a factor in intimate violence without trafficking in woman-hating rhetoric — such as Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE) and Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting (RADAR) — have also been attacked as misogynistic, not only by feminist journalists but by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In 2005, when I criticized the push for (de facto) male-only arrests in cases of mutual violence in my Boston Globe column, feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte responded with a volley of snark (in a post now gone but quoted on my blog):

Won’t someone have sympathy for the wife-beaters? My god, do you know how hard it is to bruise your knuckles on someone’s face and then see that person being treated like a victim or something by those man-hating cops and EMS workers? And some victims actually fight back, which is class A man-hating behavior. So, women, if someone starts hitting you, don’t flail or scratch and bite to try to get him off you. Just take it and hope that he doesn’t kill you or else you’re just as guilty as he is.

More recently, in a 2014 Slate piece commenting on the Ray Rice/Janay Rice incident, Marcotte conceded that “no one should hit anyone” but insisted that there’s a “massive difference between a smaller, weaker person pushing a bigger, stronger person during an argument and the systemic campaign of abuse and control that so often marks male violence against women.” As noted above, I agree that the notion of equal victimhood was ludicrous in that particular case; but it’s equally preposterous to generalize from it to all violent male/female couples. And, ironically, while Marcotte invoked the CDC survey as proof that female violence is not a big deal, she did not mention the finding that the sexes are at least equal when it comes to “coercive control.”

It’s not just a matter of blogposts and columns. Especially since the passage of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, advocacy groups that embrace the feminist view of “battering as patriarchal terrorism” have had a symbiotic relationship with state and federal agencies. The spike in female domestic violence arrests (and dual arrests) as a result of VAWA-related mandatory arrest laws led to an outcry about “battered women being arrested” and clamor for “primary/dominant aggressor” policies that often amount to gender profiling of men.

In this area, feminism in its dominant form has worked to perpetuate, not challenge, sexist stereotypes: male power and brutality, female helplessness and innocence.

Those stereotypes have led to very real injustices. For instance, when Dave Nevers, the man mentioned above who suffered fairly serious injuries on several occasions because of his wife’s violence, was litigating custody of his three children, the judge refused to consider domestic violence as a factor (as required by law) because he decided that the abuse had been mutual: “The conduct of Mr. Nevers has been … equally as violent in a psychological way as Mrs. [Nevers’s] was in a physical way.” David Nevers’s “violent conduct” had consisted of such things as frequently calling to check on the children when his wife took them to visit her parents and leaving a snarky note on a note board for listing family members’ assigned chores suggesting that her role for the day was to “act crazy.” Meanwhile, Mrs. Nevers had routinely verbally abused him in front of the children, belittled him, and even spat on him — in addition to the physical violence. One can only imagine the ouctry if the roles had been reversed and a battered woman who had suffered burns and broken bones had been branded equally abusive for occasionally taunting her husband and calling too often when he had the kids.

That was about a quarter-century ago. Have things changed since then? There have certainly been some promising developments, with more domestic violence organizations willing to address the issue of abuse against men and provide services.

But the reaction to the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard story shows that the stereotypes are still strong — and, in some ways, stronger than ever because of the #BelieveWomen climate.

In the second Depp/Heard audio, the question of whether men can be taken seriously as victims of abuse comes up repeatedly:

Heard: You can please tell people that it was a fair fight, and see what the jury and judge thinks. Tell the world Johnny, tell them Johnny Depp, I Johnny Depp, a man, I’m a victim too of domestic violence. And I, you know, it’s a fair fight. And see how many people believe or side with you. Depp: It doesn’t matter; fair fight my ass. Heard: Because you’re big, you’re bigger and you’re stronger. And so when I say that I thought that you could kill me, that doesn’t mean you counter with you also lost your own finger.

Later, the conversation continues:

Depp: Do you believe you’re an abuser? Do you believe you abused me physically? Heard: Do you know I’m a 115, well not anymore, but I was a 115 lb almost 115 lb woman. … Have I ever been able to knock you off of your feet? Or knock you off balance? You’re going to get up on the stand, Johnny, and say, “She started it’’? Really? I have never been able to overpower you; that’s the difference between me and you … and that’s a difference, that’s a whole world, and there’s a jury and there’s a judge will see that there’s a very big difference between me and you.

No, we don’t know all the facts. But we do know that it’s not always as simple as “you’re bigger and stronger.”

Treating men and women as equals doesn’t mean ignoring differences in size and strength. But it certainly does mean accepting that Johnny Depp, a man, can be a victim of domestic violence. And it means that if the evidence support his claim, fair-minded people should believe him and side with him.

If feminism is about equality — not just knee-jerk solidarity with women — then believing that Johnny Depp can be a victim and Amber Heard can be an abuser is real feminism.