The sort of ploys where a person seeks to control others and essentially deny them their civil rights are tied pretty closely to machismo, but there's also a certain element where these same people follow and submit to others with more influence (a "feminine" element) that allows the leaders to mandate *severe* atrocities, and for the followers to essentially say they were just following orders. Individual bullies themselves are a problem, but their power is multiplied when lots of them join together and/or find peons to enforce ideas. Furthermore, while men are conditioned to exert physical aggression, women are taught to use emotional passive-aggression that can be highly abusive in its own right.
Whether you're talking about (specifically) authoritarian religious organizations (whose leaders and followers speak such terrible things and violate so many human rights) or cliques (whose groupthink and size allows them to more effectively hurt others than bullies can, and whose lack of individual accountability protects them from punishment), you're talking about coordinated abuse that incorporates bad masculine (needing to dominate) and bad feminine (mindlessly cooperating and submitting to gain "protection") attributes alike.
Sort of the bottom line is that the problem is not best addressed by choosing between using masculine attributes or feminine attributes, but to choose the best attributes regardless of gender -- sometimes this means borrowing pieces from each gender role, and sometimes you will have to choose things from outside gender roles altogether. As an example, it's a "feminine" thing to respect the civil rights of others, but it's a "masculine" thing to stand up for someone else's and one's own civil rights.
