"Taking Care" of your Characters

I've been wondering lately if maybe there wasn't a problem in women's writing that was different from men's,  namely too much empathy.  Whether Nature or Nurture, women tend to be caretakers.  I wonder if this doesn't get in the way putting our characters through hell in order to reach transformation.

I mean, we all love our main characters, even when they're terrible human beings.  And we have a lifetime of practice helping our beloveds feel less pain.  So would it be any surprise if we didn't want to hurt them too much?  That we'd give them just enough pain to set up their growth, and no more.  Maybe that's why so many of the screenplays I read have loooonnngg set ups.  Pain avoidance.  Maybe, instead of saying "cut to the chase" we should say "cut to the pain."  And then stay there.  Make it worse.  Your whole plot should push your characters to the cliff and they should fight it kicking and screaming.  Over the cliff is not death, but rebirth. Even if the character physically dies, the whole point is this catharsis. For the audience. 

After all, the suffering you must create isn't really for the character or for you. It's for the viewer, to give them a ride that's worth taking. Most people who pay for a roller-coaster ride want to go wayyy up and wayyy down, and they want to feel their heart race along the way.  If you make it easy on your characters, you give your readers and viewers a hobby-horse ride instead.  That's fine for the little kids who get scared.  But big time rides for grown-ups, that is what most writers are aiming for.

Even if women's stories are structured differently than the Aristotelian rise to a single climax and a cigarette that may be more male, I would argue that transformation through suffering is neither male nor female but human.  And if you're the writer, you have to be the "sadist" in that you have to devise a plot that really cuts to the bone of their flaw and enjoy it. What are your thoughts about this?