A couple of us had a very similar discussion at work during the huge anti-Muslim sentiment after the New York attacks. We had several people insisting all Muslims were bad and others insisting only a few, and we counted it as a win when a fundamentalist Christian realized every religion has its nuts and every religion has a separation between the word and spirit thereof versus actual practice.

I am likely wrong as I have not studied a lot about this specifically, but was reading up on cultural history and it seemed to me that a lot of the laws were originally in place to *protect* the women, not subjugate them. Mix in a few people who learned to take advantage of that and work it to their own way over the centuries, and you have what you have now, in multiple cultures, not just one (there are fundamentalist Christians and Jews who do the same, and I'm willing to go out on a limb and assume it's like this across the board - see law/warp law/use law for own means).