Here's a good comic illustration of feminine logic. Mizuki comes on to a young guy by sticking her crotch in his face. He objects to this, saying that "her sense of chastity is dead." She thinks about that for a moment, and then kicks him because she thinks he's said she'd come on to just anyone.
The next development in the saga has Ryoga become a literal wedge between Ranma and Akane, for it's revealed that Ryoga too was exposed to one of the magic springs, and when doused with water he changes into a black piglet. Ranma finds this out but Akane doesn't and she makes Ryoga her pet, naming him "P-chan." Thus whenever Ranma tries to punish Ryoga, Akane punishes him.
The advent of Ryoga, Ranma's enemy from Japanese middle-school, comes close to testing the fragile relationship of Akane and Ranma. Akane shows her true feelings by trying to save Ranma from harm during the fight, and he shows his by telling her to get lost. When Akane blows up at Ranma, Ryoga proves the unlikely means of their reconciliation, when one of his weapons slices off a huge hank of Akane's long hair. She's momentarily traumatized by this assault on one of her most feminine attributes, but she's not too paralyzed to dole out punishment to both guys-- which turns comic, since they don't really expect her to hit them so hard.
Even were I reading RANMA in the original Japanese, I doubt I would see Rumiko Takahashi explain why Ranma acts like such a jerk, when he's actually a fairly compassionate guy. Since he's a Japanese kid who's been away from his home country for many years, mostly training in Chinese martial arts, the most believable explanations are that (a) he simply hasn't been around his peers very much and has not been well socialized, particularly in relationships with the opposite gender, and (b) he's so heavily invested in martial arts that he tends to see every conflict as a challenge.
So after his knowing Akane a few days, it's evident that he likes her and is attracted to her, but he acts toward her more like a bratty ten-year-old than a sixteen-year-old high schooler. He's smart enough to see that, even though a lot of boys pursue Akane, she's still very insecure about her appearance and her tomboy pursuits. So after Akane challenges him to a match-- a match Ranma could certainly win with skill alone-- he uses the fight as an excuse to pay her a compliment and watch her get flustered.
However, as clever as this gambit is, he shows incredible stupidity by intruding on Akane via her window-- not even to peep at her, but apparently just to see if she's internalized his compliment. And because he can't resist the temptation to taunt her again, he gets a well-deserved clobbering from her.
I'm playing around with the idea that RANMA 1/2, first published in 1987, may be a trendsetter, if not THE trendsetter, for all Japanese manga that centered on what I may call the "Pay-in-Pain" Trope, to wit: "guy gains a harem of cute girls flocking around him but pays for it by suffering their constant abuse." LOVE HINA, first published in 1998, has probably eclipsed RANMA in the execution of the trope. But how greatly did RANMA pave the way?
As I did with HEAVEN'S LOST PROPERTY, I'm going to look at all or most of the moments in which Ranma, the male lead of the series and the character with the greatest proficiency in martial arts, suffers pain and/or humiliation at the hands of the girls in the harem. Said girls are usually capable of dishing out tremendous amounts of slapstick violence, for all that none of them are Ranma's martial superiors (in contrast to many later exemplars of "Pay-in-Pain," not least NISEKOI). I won't be exploring the "justified/unjustified" dichotomy as I did with HEAVEN'S, as RANMA's stories are usually less clear-cut.
In the beginning, the only member of Ranma's "harem" is Akane, like him a high-schooler, and one to whom he's informally engaged thanks to a marital agreement between their respective fathers. In the first couple of stories, Akane finds out that Ranma suffers the curse of transformation into a female version of himself when he's splashed with cold water. The two teens also see each other naked in the bathroom, setting the fractious tone for their relationship-- and leading to Ranma's first insult of Akane's looks.
The slapstick routine is swiftly repeated in the intro piece.
Though Ranma claims not to be attracted to Akane, their first day of school together attests to the fact that many, many boys besiege her every day, hoping that she'll date them if they can beat her in a bout. Of course both teens are already attracted to one another but refuse to admit it, though this incident makes it harder for the young man to claim that his "bride" isn't attractive to the male of the species.
In the world of KANOKON, not even CHIZURU's adoptive brother can get away with bringing up her age.
