This doesn't make any sense. The comment is talking about how society treats women (and implicitly, men), not about some quality inherent to women. The analogous racial statement would be "white people get treated preferentially in a number of ways by society". This statement obviously isn't problematic under the leftist mores of "polite society", and probably isn't even that controversial all the way to the center-right.
The "halo effect" that women enjoy is well-established, in fact much, much more strongly than the racial bias in my analogue statement.
(That isn't to say that there aren't flipsides to gender roles that benefit men, obviously. The best way I've heard it put is that society entitles men to respect and women to compassion.)
I'm not asking this to be difficult, but just want to understand where the bounds here are. I don't have any interest into getting drawn into irrelevant culture-warring, but discussion of society's downplaying of female abusers seems centrally relevant to a thread entitled "Boys in Custody and the Women Who Abuse Them".
I would say what crosses the line into flamewar is when it's combined with denunciatory language. What you posted wasn't nearly as bad as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28350724, but "I'm soundly rejecting this framing; in fact, I find it utterly revolting and dehumanizing" definitely counts, and in any case it takes two to tango.
The proper thing for this entire subthread would have been to flag it at the root (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28350724 - yes I know that was posted by someone else) and move on.
You can also do this with all the negative statements made about men every day. You'll quickly get banned from HN. Women already get special treatment.
And by "ethnicity or race" I assume you mean "ethnicity or race that's not acceptable to make fun of", because people make negative statements about whites or asians/indians all the time.