The story is told of a traveller who came to a remote village. He saw two young men arguing about some matter that was obviously of great importance, yet as long as he stayed to watch them, the two men never raised their voices nor came to blows. He asked a bystander why this was, and the bystander replied "those two know that whoever resorts to violence first has lost the argument, for he has proven that he has no more thoughts or words to defend his position".

The traveller thought about this for a second, then replied "so... only those with incorrect beliefs are ever overtaken by emotion?"

"Well, er... yes."

"And those with correct beliefs are always those who have the most eloquent words to express them?"

"I suppose, in theory, that intelligence would correlate to vocabulary...

"What about an argument in which there is only one chain of logic to defend? A fool may have many elaborate chains of reasoning to prove that the sky is yellow, I have only one to prove that it is blue - I would simply point up, and then immediately run out of things to say."

"Ah, well, obviously we would never argue about the colour of the sky..."

"What about an argument that is logically sound but morally reprehensible? If some tyrant were to present many well-reasoned arguments that you and your family should be killed, would you not oppose that person physically?"

"Look, mate, this is supposed to be a neat little parable about how violence is bad and talking is good and you've gone and mucked it up. See, I'm even breaking the fourth wall now! We've got no choice but to drop the narrative entirely and let the authour start talking directly."

...

*ahem* Well then.

Jamie is wrong, of course, when he says that Lily's anger here is masculine in nature. I remember skimming some study or other recently that said the sources of men's and women's anger tend to differ. Women, by and large, are more likely to become angry at feelings of powerlessness, injustice, and others' irresponsibility. I would add to that - going purely from my own anecdotal observations - that women are probably more likely than men to become angry that their contributions - particularly contributions that required great sacrifice on their part - are unappreciated.

(As a side note, yes, absolutely, someone who's in a provider relationship can still be the bad guy. Think of all the bad guys in stories who are the parents or guardians of the protagonist.)

And, to be sure, Lily is angry here, but that's all she is. She's not actually threatening her employees either financially or physically. But, of course, this is the same person who equated sending dick pics with sexual assault, so it makes sense that she equates raising her voice with violence. And, although it's safe to say her misandry was its own starting point, she frequently justifies it by pointing to statistics of violent crime, so, (in theory) her a priori principle is that aggression of all sorts is bad.

So Jamie's kicked out her rhetorical patella here, and, rightly or wrongly, at least it's brought the volume down. Let's see where she goes from here.