That does sound like an impression you could get of the book after a brief skim. Arthur is thuggish, but that's because it's a story about how people don't live up to the stories told about them, and Arthur has the most to not live up to. I don't believe it's a gendered thing; there are good men and bad women (and bad men and good women) and none of them is the "real heroine" or "real hero", because this isn't the kind of story that has heroes, except when people are sitting around a fire telling stories about a simpler and more idealised world than the one they live in.