Male expendability

Male expendability or male disposability is the idea that society can better cope with the loss of a typical man than with the loss of a typical woman. In other words, it is 'more “appropriate” to kill a man than to kill a woman' - especially during wars and other times of violent political and social uprising.

Overview

Male expendability via violence is thought by some scholars to be in part caused by the socialisation of men as "violence objects". Meaning that they are expected to both give and receive violence as part of their social role - which leads to greater numbers of male deaths. For example: the 2000 Brazilian census confirmed that there were nearly 200,000 fewer men than women in the age range 15-29 because of higher rates of mortality through accidents, homicide and suicide among young men. Estimates put it that by the year 2050, Brazil will have 6 million fewer men than women; principally because of violence.

Concept

Norwegian sociologist Øystein Gullvåg Holter argues that the male-led Russian government's belief in male expendability contributed to their delay in seeking international help during the Kursk submarine disaster, in which an all-male crew of 118 personnel was lost. He states, "If 118 women had been killed, alarm bells regarding discrimination against women would probably have gone off around the world." He states that able-bodied males were viewed as a more legitimate target during wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, Timor, Rwanda, and Chechnya.

Ivana Milojević notes that while patriarchy assigns the role of sex object to women, it assigns to men the role of violence-object, with male expendability being corollary to the sexual objectification of girls. Films such as They Were Expendable or The Expendables often are about all-male combat teams. Michael D. Clark notes that Adolf Hitler considered gay men expendable by means of Nazi concentration camps and Nazi medical experiments.

Roy Baumeister argues that it is common for cultures to thrive by exploiting males, sometimes with fatal results.

Manosphere critics of feminism have argued that poor and working-class men "are cannon fodder abroad and expendable labor at home, trapped beneath a glass floor in jobs nobody really wants—farm workers, roofers, garbage men—and injured at far higher rates than women". Walter Block argues in The Case for Discrimination that male expendability is the result of women being the bottleneck of reproductive capacity in a population. This theme was echoed in Warren Farrell's The Myth of Male Power.

Second sexism

The term “second sexism” was coined by David Benatar in two essays: The Second Sexism and The Second Sexism, A Second Time published in 2003 and later expanded in the book The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys published in 2012.

Benatar defines second sexism as gender discrimination against men. While Benatar acknowledges that sexism against women and girls, which he calls “first sexism,” is still the most severe type of gender discrimination in most parts of the world, he posits that to a lesser degree men and boys are also victims. According to Benatar, women are consistently kept away from war, while men are encouraged or pressured into military conscription via state policies and social norms. He gives an example of how news broadcasts explicitly mention if women and children suffer from a tragedy, as opposed to merely the number of people who suffered or even if men suffered.

Benatar posits that males are not only unconsidered in discussions about discrimination, but are also discouraged and neglected: sexism towards males is "[s]o unrecognized […] that the mere mention of it will appear laughable to some". He also claims that while the fact that women tend to want to switch roles with men more so than men want to switch roles with women, observing that phenomenon does not indicate that women have a more comfortable life. Benatar implies that this experience would mean just the opposite.

Criticisms

Tom Digby's essay "Male Trouble: Are Men Victims of Sexism?" is a direct counterpoint to Benatar's text. According to him, the concept of Second Sexism fails to identify the perpetrators of sexism against men, takes sexism out of its historical context, and oversimplifies the definition of sexism.

While Benatar argues that men suffer more from war because they are expected to spare women, Digby posits that most often men themselves are the ones insisting that society spare women. He support the thesis that societies tend to chose men as the disposable sex for war to spare women's ability to give birth.

Another criticism is that Benatar does not clearly identify whether individuals or society are responsible for second sexism. He also does not acknowledge the potential role of patriarchal systems in the perpetuation of second sexism.

According to Kenneth Clatterbaugh, almost all Benatar's points have already been argued for since the men's rights movements that emerged in the 1970s.

See also

• Androcide
• Misandry
• Missing white woman syndrome
• Reverse sexism
• Superfluous man
• Violence against men
• Women and children first, aka Birkenhead drill
• Women-are-wonderful effect
• Titanic

External links

• Farrell, Warren (1993). The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-671-79349-4.
• Baumeister, Roy (2010). Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-537410-0.