No sympathy for dead men?
 

I was listening to a local radio reporter this morning reporting on the recent earthquake in Morocco. She said “hundreds are dead from the quake, including many women, children and elderly.” It sounded like she was expressing sympathy, but she pretty much included everyone except 20-70 year-old men. Do men deserve less sympathy when they die than the groups she mentioned? As a man myself, it doesn’t really bother me but it sounded kind of odd.

it's to pull at the collective heartstrings. Since society has deemed men == evil it's not interesting to include male statistics except maybe to gloat over a few missing from our ranks, but that would make them look bad. Nobody cares when the bad guy dies.

This has always bugged me - seems like just a way to tap into people's sympathies by mentioning "helpless" and "innocent" groups of people and playing on people's assumptions about them.

lurkette, are you implying that women are not innocent and helpless. ;)

/facetiousness

Because during an earthquake, there is no "lifeboat" to send the women and children.

I also think that its fucked up that women and children seem to be valued more when they die like this. Surely each human life is as specail as another?

If anything the elderly have lived the longest so they if anyone should be valued less it should be them. I don't however think this though.

a pull of the collective heartstrings, as holo said. it's all about ratings, and people are more inclined to be upset over death of the "innocents" than say, a 25 year old male crack dealer, or a worker in a restaurant.

This reminds of the signs that some people used to put in the cars.

'Child on board'

As if we are supposed drive more careful. Shouldn't we always be driving our most careful?

It is kind of interesting. It's basically a throwback to the days when chivalry actually meant something. Nowadays you can't hold a door open for a woman without her giving you a lecture on equal rights :P

That's not totally true, but some habits die hard, yaknow.

Since when has human life been special? There's fuckin' billions of us. Nothing special about us that I can see. We come along, assuming we run the show, consume resources vastly out of proportion with our needs (especially in the west) and then die.

In answer to the question:

I guess women are valued more for their wombs, and children are valued cos they have yet to contribute anything to society beyond scraped knees and snot. Elderly folks? I guess it's because they've lived a life supposedly full of contribution to society and they deserve a peaceful twilight. Personally, I couldn't give a shit whether the people who died were men, women, children, old, young, British, American, gay, Jewish, or already dead. They died in an earthquake. That's sad, but it's also coincidence. Nothing anybody could have done.

I think you all are overreacting - just an underpaid radio reporter trying to hurry through a drive-time newscast. Give the gal a break. :rolleyes: I don't think she was trying to make a political or personal statement regarding societal values. Pretty deep for a two-minute rundown of the latest events... I'm not giving her that much credit.

“hundreds are dead from the quake, including many women, children and elderly.”

the key word is "including..."

Some peoples heartstings are easier to pull than mine I guess. I feel bad for all the victims of a tragedy such as this, not just a subset or two.

This type of reporting is also common after tornadoes and such. You'll hear something on the news like "and five died, including a 3 year-old girl." Well, I'm sorry the girl died but I'm not so fond of the other people dying either.

WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST.

It is a possibility that when a news organization mentions that "# people died" maybe some people automatically percieve that the dead consist only of men. Thus, they say the dead incude "women, children, ect" to clarify that not just men died in whatever accident. Of course that's just one way of looking at it...

I disregard it, to me it doesn't matter.

"Why don't the newscaster's cry when they read about people who die? At least they could be decent enough to put just a tear in their eye..." - Jack Johnson

Well, i just like to think that everyone assumes men are important anyway, so there's no need to say it. Hmph!


mystmarimatt scowls indignantly