Hit me, I'm a guy.

No, wait, don't.

Boxing classes notwithstanding, I'm a guy who doesn't particularly care to get hit, even by women.

And that's something of a problem these days.

No one need remind us what a shameful thing it is for men to use physical force against women. Even the most irreverent comics know the mere suggestion of, say, wife-beating, is radioactive. Think Ralph Kramden could get away with threatening to send Alice "to the moon" in today's enlightened climate?

Yet if the popular media is any indicator, our tolerance for female violence against men is only increasing. If it's entertaining, go for it.

Just try and get through a mainstream film, an hour of prime-time TV or any reasonable exposure to popular media without witnessing some aggrieved woman delivering a physical comeuppance to some jerky male who no doubt deserves it.

Pop interpretations of female empowerment have morphed from "equal treatment for equal ability" to "watch it or I'll flatten you."

In the aftermath of the women's liberation movement of the 1970s, TV commercials routinely presented women besting men at their own fields of play as a (lame and condescending) punch line. In recent years however, the humor has turned downright nasty.

The low point might have been an ad for Progressive Insurance that ran a couple of years ago showing a jilted woman using a virtual voodoo doll to exact revenge on her assumably asinine ex. The commercial ends with the woman dragging a scissor icon across her computer screen with the supposed intent of castrating her victim. You dumped me; I'm taking the goodies. Hilarious.

The ads may be offensive to some men, but I suspect they do more damage to women, who are made to bear the same old stereotypes of mental instability and vindictiveness. It should be noted, too, that many of these ads, films and TV shows are scripted by men, either pandering to some warped notion of their female audience or simply freshening old ideas with new female players.

Major movie studios have played off the success of Xena the Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a barrage of super-chick flicks like "Aeon Flux," "Underworld," and "Ultraviolet." Same basic dreck, but with hot babes in leather.

Hey, if women want to enjoy a few moments of vicarious woman-whupping-man violence to ease the burn of centuries of oppression, subjugation and marginalization, what reasonable guy can argue? Just don't hit me.

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com.