This isn’t a debate about this particular instance, but there’s a news organization in my area that has a scrolling news ticker and it said that there were 300 dead inlcuding women, children, and elderely. Maybe I am analizing things too much, but I find this to be somewhat offensive. To me the implication is that it’s bad enough that there are going to be dead, but oh no, they are women, children, and the elderly. I take this to be in contrast to if it were just men that were killed as if this[men being killed] wouldn’t be as significant.
I understand the point they are getting is that the children, elderly, and apparently the defenseless women as well, were unable to protect themselves as if they were less deserving of this than men. This isn’t the first time a news organization has used phrases synonymous with “inlcuding women, elderly, and children.” Am I being anal and just looking for something or do I have a legitimate gripe? Anyone else feel this way?
I entirely agree. Children I can see. Elderly I can see. But women? Why specify them?
Basically, I think it’s a case of people considering women to be special. You see it all the time in many ways. You’re supposed to hold doors open for women. You’re supposed to never hit a girl (apparantly it’s ok to hit a boy though). Women dying is worse than men dying. When women commit a horrific crime, it’s more sensational than when men do the same thing. Mostly this seems to be based on an innate assumption that women are weaker than men, or at least deserve more protection than men.
I suppose the OP refers to the earthquake that hit the North of Morocco last night.
Your media source should have said “mainly” and not “including” women children and elderly. It also should have explained the context = explain that the wounded and dead are mostly women, children and elderly because a vast amount of the young(er) men in that particular region immigrated to EU nations for work.
It has nothing to do with being “defenceless”. It has to do with being there when your house collapses or not being there, because being in an other nation.
If all the men would have been there, they probably would have been dead/wounded equally, or do you think otherwise?
There’s a longstanding cultural tradition of holding women and children in (somewhat) reverence, because they represent the future – children for being young 'uns, and women because they are the child-bearers. I don’t think it’s a case of saying “women are less capable of defense than men” as much as it’s a case of “men are relatively interchangable anyway.”
I wasn’t talking entirely about this particular incident, just a genreal consensus of multiple tragedies such as this. This is not an isolated incident that I speak of even though an isolated event spurred me to post this.
I consider women to be special. I hold the door open for a woman when the occasion presents itself. I don’t hit women.
It has nothing to do with “considering women weaker then men” or “women deserving more protection then men”.
It has everything to do with respect and with how I was raised.
I don’t see where you want to get with your sentence “women dying is worse then men dying”.
I do see why it is brought in the media as more sensational when a women commits a really horrific crime. I guess when comparing women/men crime rates, these cases are rather an exception.
What rjung said, but also that the elderly are also considered more helpless than adult males, and the feeling is that they have earned to live out their days in peace, without bad things happening to them. So when bad things happen, it is worse if it happens to the innocent and helpless.
I’ve always found these sorts of statements weird. Maybe slightly better than “Four thousand people died, including two Americans!” but weird nonetheless.
I agree that using such language in reference to a natural disaster seems kind of odd. (Unless in that specific case it does mean something like “mainly women, children, and the elderly were killed”.) When I think of reports of so-and-so many people killed, “including women, children, and the elderly”, I tend to associate that with reports of human-caused massacres (like the recent killings in Uganda), not natural disasters; the point being that since people in those categories aren’t traditionally combatants, the event wasn’t any kind of “fair fight” where enemy fighters were killed, nor even an ugly sort of battle where one side was ambushed, or fighters were killed trying to surrender, or the wounded were butchered afterwards, but a wholesale slaughter of the entire population. This is still maybe a bit sexist, but does make some sense which doesn’t seem to apply to earthquakes and the like.
What I was refering to are cases just like the one mentioned in the OP - where the death of women is an event to be mentioned as such, where the death of a man is simply a death.
(I hope that clarifies. I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “where you want to get”.)
Essentially, it comes down to biology. If nearly all the adult men in a community die, the population will go on - as long as there are still plenty of women and children. I think this idea is hard-wired into our brains. Elderly people, have been rare in societies for most of human history, and their knowledge and survival skills are especially needed in pre-literate societies. But young men are reletively expendable.
Of course, these conditions are no longer as pressing as they were 10,000 years ago, but when “women and children first” is called for on a sinking ship, or resist the idea of drafting women into the military, we are continuing those very old patterns.
I think I explained why in this case the reporting was wrongly worded and why there are much more elderly, women and children among the dead then men.
In other cases, like a war situation, it is in fact almost the same: the young men are directly involved in the fighting and the casualties of that fighting thus only report on thme. Those who remain at home are not and thus are mentioned separated as unarmed victims of the battle.
I don’t think that is done to make the distinction like you seem to percieve it.
I can agree that in some cases some types of media play the sensation card by putting a unneeded extra emphasis on “women, children,elderly”.
I actually meant to say: I don’t understand where that idea comes from.
Salaam. A
I had to deal with this exact issue when I wrote an essay for the NYTimes lamenting NYCers’ indifference to our public memorials. In it I described the General Slocum disaster. The Slocum was a huge wooden ferry-type boat that caught fire in the East River en route to a church picnic in 1904. Over 1,000 people – yes, mostly women and children – died in the tragedy. (It was NYC’s worst loss of life until 9/11, btw.)
I wrestled with whether or not to include the qualifier “mostly women and children” in the final draft I sent to the editor. I finally decided yes, to include it. Why? Well three reasons really.
First, it was a cheap and easy way to score sympathy points with the readers. I knew that – which is one reason I debated the issue in the first place – but the whole point of the essay (not a news story, mind you) was to appeal to readers’ minds and hearts.
Second, it was an aspect of the historical record that had informational merit regardless of whether or not our society values w&c over men. I could have said the victims were mostly German immigrants or Lutherans (true in both cases) and probably not have gotten an argument from anyone. 99% of NYers have never heard of the Slocum disaster and I was merely supplying them with historical facts that they did not know.
Third, it was ultimately important to the greater Slocum story, in a very profound way. The disaster devistated the Lower East Side neighborhood where the victims had lived. Hundreds of men lost wives and children. The disaster tipped a declining neighborhood over the edge, as the rootless men moved away to other German immigrant locales that had a greater number of eligible females and fewer sad memories. In a few years the ethnic population of the neighborhood was utterly transformed. Now mind you, this was not something most readers knew, nor was it mentioned in my essay, but it was an ultimately relevant aspect to the tale, not just windowdressing.
Postscript: The editor removed my reference to “women & children,” and I did not contest his decision.
