Disclaimer: English is not my first language.

So recently this article reached the front page of reddit.

And in comment section quite good discussion about disposability of men started.

I will share with you the best comment, but pleas go there and read others.

People will give you tons of answers, but it’s really quite simple. Sources can be found at the bottom of this post.

What you’re seeing certainly isn’t accidental. The “women are wonderful”-effect is a well-documented empathetic bias towards woman across the board. More positive traits are ascribed to women than to men on the whole; traits like innocence or good intentions. Because of this, women often end up receiving the lion’s share of sympathy in a bad situation, especially in wars, even though almost every genocide in the modern history of mankind started not with the extermination of women and girls, but of men and boys. Despite all this, media will still somehow find it a priority to talk about how women suffer in wars, and how some women are raped.

A closely tied concept is the “missing white woman syndrome”:

…a phrase used by social scientists and media commentators to describe the extensive media coverage, especially in television, of missing person cases involving young, white, upper-middle-class women or girls.

If you delve into the scientific literature (specifically criminology and sociology), you’ll come to find that, on average, women are at the top of the “victim hierarchy” (the hierarchy by which we pay attention and sympathize with a victim’s experiences) , and men at the bottom. This is why the decapitation of hundreds of men is less of a response-evoking event than a story about 20 women who are sex-slaves to ISIS. I believe I saw a thread on reddit once where people actually argued that “well, the men are already dead, but the girls are alive and suffering, so they are actually worse off than the men”, which is a puritanistic Victorian notion if I’ve ever seen one. Of course, that’s not the real reason those people are arguing “in favour” of those girls; they’re nowhere to be found when it’s the odd story about countless men that have converted under the threat of death or worse, and are now forced to due gruel killings for ISIS, are forced to partake in traumatizing activities and have no way out either. There are thousands of boys that are being indoctrinated and mentally tortured by ISIS every day. And those are the “lucky” ones that didn’t get burned alive, decapitated, shot like dogs, mutilated, tortured, or simply thrown off a building for being gay. Thousands upon thousands of nameless dead men, and a disproportionate lack of both coverage and reaction to this.

They’re arguing “in favour” of those girls because deep down they know their feelings and sympathies are heavily skewed towards one gender even though they purport to be egalitarian or feminist, and so to solve this cognitive dissonance they have to resort to some serious mental gymnastics that involve making rape a worse fate than being beheaded. Ironically, in doing so they dehumanize the very women they sympathize with by not seeing them as “living human beings”, but rather as “women who have been raped/used as a sex-slave and are now better off dead because the rest of their lives are just about ruined and not worth living after these terrible things happened.”

It’s a sad state of affairs. If this thread + your post blows up, those same people are going to use that as “proof” that you’re wrong. However, you’re far from wrong, and there’s a large number of scientific publications that talk about this, and discuss victim hierarchies and the strong cultural bias towards women in this regard:

Prof. C. Greer, “News Media, Victims and Crime”, 2007.[1]

Prof. Karolina Kablukova, “Men are aggressors and women are victims - discussion using the relevant literature.”, 2013.[2]preprint-only

Prof. Cory L. Armstrong, “Media Disparity: A Gender Battleground”, 2013.[3]

Prof. Yvonne Jewkes, “Media and Crime”, 2004.[4]

Prof. Sandra Walklate, “Imagining the Victim of Crime”, 2007.[5]

Prof. James Dignan, “Understanding Victims and Restorative Justice”, 2004.[6]

Prof. Bronwyn Naylor, “Reporting Violence in the British Print Media: Gendered Stories”, The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice Volume 40, Issue 2, pages 180–194.[7]

And those are just some of the more recent publications that I’m personally familiar with, I’m quite sure there’s more. I think the 2009 work by Marsh and Melville deals with this issue as well. Either way, the bias is very real, and be wary of people who militantly oppose any honest acknowledgment of this fact.

Edit: somebody just branded this comment “men’s rights bullshit” and said the attention this comment received is a testament to the fact that we’re all wrong, and that there’s no issue here (by that same token, all activities and articles that manage to raise awareness for a societal problem are wrong as well, because they were successful in raising awareness?) I can only presume hundreds of scientists who published hundreds of studies on this topic must be wrong. Also, this person made a throwaway specifically to reply to this post. I think you can all guess the ideological affiliation that person has, and what subreddits that person is from, but I’ll leave that to the imagination.