A black woman I know said, “you don’t know what Rihanna did to provoke Chris Brown’s reaction”. That tells me that “beat downs of women” must be culturally acceptable to some people.
Did you perchance ask her what exactly an example of something she could have done to justify that?
There has been a tremendous spike in violence against women here in the US the last quarter century. Many domestic violence experts will say it's only due to more women having the courage to come forward and to confront their abusers in court. Perhaps that has some merit.
But, I hypothesize that it was the "sexual revolution" of the 60's and 70's that did nothing more than objectify women and paint them as objects of men's desire and pleasure. And, in our culture, if something stops being pleasurable, you just throw it away.
Back in the day, not only would a man (a gentleman anyway) never strike a woman, there would be topics or words that would never be discussed in front of the the fairer sex. We've lost that (I believe) well-intentioned, if also slightly sexist, chivalry to the detriment of civil societal interaction between men and women. Another in the the long list of unintended consequences of leftist social engineering.
And then there’s this alternative:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/04/women_can_be_brutal_too.html (evil bitch alert)