Well, I read Richardson's paper. Here are a couple of tasty quotes: “Baron-Cohen suggests that the higher prevalence in crime, sexual abuse, the use of prostit

Well, I read Richardson's paper. Here are a couple of tasty quotes: “Baron-Cohen suggests that the higher prevalence in crime, sexual abuse, the use of prostitutes and murder are disproportionately committed by men and show that men lack empathy in comparison to females [8].” “This narrative is also replayed in the production of video nasties, sexual abuse images of children in virtual reality settings [11] and the sexual and racial violence seen in some video games such as Grand Theft Auto where gamers are rewarded for killing prostitutes [12].” I don't think Richardson is jealous of prostitutes, I think she is convinced by evidence that the sex crimes discussed in this paper are predominantly committed by men. I'm convinced too, but I don't accept that it follows that men in general lack empathy. It could be the case that rapists and murderers, while predominantly male, are not representative of the modal male. I think the problem with the hypothesis that sex crimes are caused by a lack of empathy in men is that the average empathy of a gender is not sufficient to explain the behavior of all it's members. So for an example of a similar argument applied to women: Most infanticide is committed by women. Therefore, women are less empathetic on average then men. Should we ban dolls that objectify babies, or should we look for some other explanation?