What do you think?....

So I had a discussion about this with a guy I know. He said women become this way because of the decisions they make, and if they wanted to be treated like those delicate little roses, they should act like delicate little roses. I argued that no one is just born that strong and independent. Women, especially, usually become strong and self reliant to the point of being unable or unwilling to let someone else provide for them because of a lifetime of being forced to be strong and self reliant, because of never really having anyone to fall back on or repeatedly falling back on someone only to be let down ...HARD. His opinion is that it is still the woman's fault for making the wrong choices. To a certain extent, I will concede that he is right. Some of us choose to marry abusive men. Some of us choose to make babies with men who can't be bothered and choose to be fierce enough to raise children on our own and things like that. BUT, there are also those who are abandoned or abused by our parents, those who live out their childhoods bouncing from one foster home to another, those who never had any kind of female role model, those who've struggled and fought their whole lives, who've been taught from birth that no one is going to look out for you, but YOU. Those whose choices have mainly been made based on survival. I mean, does a 14 year old girl who is homeless because she ran away from abuse really have the luxury and/or ability of thinking about who she wants to bein 20 years and making decisions accordingly or are her decisions driven by surviving the now? I'm not talking about anyone in particular. We all know that the world can be really cruel to girls in many different ways. This is very generalized and there are more hypothetical situations than I can count, but I would like opinions please, if anyone has any.