She is a woman. He is a man. They’re both Turkish. It is the week of International Women’s Day. Romantic, no?

Are they about to share a glass of the aniseed-flavoured clear grape brandy that is Turkey’s national drink to celebrate the perfect occasion for their country to demonstrate its suitability for European Union membership? Will love bloom as they sip a raki by the banks of the Bosporus?

No. There’s a wardrobe problem. She is wearing a pink jacket. He is wearing body armour, a helmet and a full plexiglass shield and is carrying a truncheon and tear gas. He tramples her to the ground and clubs her. A passing soldier pauses to give her a good kick in the ribs.

This is how Turkey celebrated International Women’s Day.

Canada had its own special moment. A Toronto husband threw his little daughter off a bridge, while tormenting her horrified mother via cellphone. Men kill their wives and girlfriends quite frequently in this country; the police are helpful at collecting bodies, but not much good before the long-predicted killing takes place.

Such is the parade of women killed by their husbands that one wonders why women get married in the first place. One reason is that they want children. But once you have a child with a controlling or violent man, he has a beautiful hostage for the rest of his days.

I attended an instructive International Women’s Day meeting at the Law Society of Upper Canada in which lawyers working in family law and the attendant fields of immigration and criminal law discussed what they described as “an ongoing struggle against wife abuse” and what I would call “your basic nightmare.”

Judges don’t get it, the lawyers said. They still ask about a wife who has been physically and emotionally damaged and whose children are being dangled like dinner plates over a concrete floor, “Why did she stay?” The right question is “Why did he break her jaw?” Judges also ask, “Did he hit the kids?” But it has been proved that children who watch their mother being beaten are as damaged by it as if they were hit themselves.

The lawyers said they wanted an end to the phrase “domestic violence.” It omits gender and gender is the key. Men are stronger than women, even when they don’t carry truncheons. Family lawyer Carole Curtis wants it called “wife assault.” Actually, she wants it called “woman abuse,” but Neanderthal judges will never go for that, she admitted.

The president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, who said there are hardly any women in engineering because women aren’t any good at it, has given new voice to the type of men who write to tell me that women have no aptitude or creativity and are so dumb that scientific knowledge can only be inserted in their brains by spoons.

There are a number of explanations for the paucity of female engineers. There’s Marc Lépine, for one, and there’s men like Mr. Summers.

It’s not just engineering. What interests me is why women do so badly in almost every aspect of paid human work. With rare exceptions that prove the rule, they don’t run corporations, universities, city transit systems, land development, countries, planes, trains, automobiles or police forces. Any aggregate of humans concentrating on one endeavour will not have its upper levels filled with women.

This week, The Guardian asked, Where are the women? (Admittedly, I frequently ask this of The Guardian‘s list of columnists.) Their focus was women film directors, of whom there are a mere dusting. Director Mike Figgis was brave enough to say that, since films reflect our culture and there are so few women filmmakers, films represent a man’s world.

He deplores this. But he’s right. This is a man’s world. May I point out in the most courteous way possible that it is a lousy world. Hollywood movies are dreadful, much published fiction is very bad indeed, trains and planes don’t run on time, our universities often turn out illiterates, modern architecture is crap, the planet is poisoned and land developers produce a sprawl of hideous garages with houses attached. I think all these fields could be run better by women, but women have been booted and trampled for so long that they can’t even put their hands up when anyone says, “Wanna be an MP?”

We are bombarded with messages that women are stupid. I don’t just mean media, I mean my snail mail and e-mail. Bell, which is one-third of my employers (it’s complicated), sends me an ad for a device that shields kids from porn on-line. Most sensible. But it isn’t porn. It’s a ham-fisted illustration of “the female body.” The breasts and lungs are cut out with scissors, along with the abdominal section, which includes labelled ovaries and what might be Fallopian tubes.

It looks like a warning from a serial killer who takes organs for souvenirs. If it were hand-drawn in green ink, I’d be putting steel shutters on the windows and buying a crossbow.

Women complained; Bell was horrified and quickly apologized. But will anyone apologize for the new TV run of moisturizer ads featuring what appears to be a stripped cadaver rubbing lotion on its tendons? Who looks like that?

I have the odd sensation sometimes that the world talks to and treats women the way an abusive husband would. When you have a hammer, everything looks to you like a nail — and men have the hammers.

But it’s getting worse internationally, especially after the catastrophe that is the Bushlet’s re-election. Women were slowly defending themselves with hammers — jobs, self-esteem, not worrying about aging.

So the men are going out and getting power drills.

At least that’s how it looked to me this International Women’s Day.