Or being the driving force of the hysteria from day one?

To be fair, this is partly on men for being a bunch of wusses. "A woman made me do it" is a tale as old as time, and that well-known story in a well-known book about this is meant, in my mind, to be a call for men to not blindly follow what a woman says, and to not expect that "I was just listening to a woman" would be any excuse when the reckoning comes.