I posted this to another subreddit. It seemed topical for here too.

I was just in a thread where the OP asked why, when talking about casualties in war (specifically the current goings on in Gaza) the focus is solely on women and children. It's a common refrain when and wherever conflict occurs, and I think there's some unpacking to do there.

Of course we can all agree that murdering children is unequivocally wrong and especially awful.

But why do we tend to equate adult women with children where casualties are concerned?

Casualties in modern warfare are mostly caused by airstrikes and artillery, and the remainder by machine guns and small arms. While men tend to be larger and stronger than women, those advantages are irrelevant against bombs, shells, and bullets.

There's no question that Hamas is a male institution (and, for that matter, so is the IDF. While they have female soldiers and officers, like all militaries it is a male centered organization) and AFAIK the fighters involved are exclusively male (But it is noteworthy that Hamas' leadership are a bunch of old men living quite comfortably in Qatar).

But, The Gaza strip has (or had, who knows anymore) a population of 2m people. A cursory check shows an adult male population of about 400,000. Wiki has Hamas membership at 25,000. Lets be extremely generous and double that to include PIJ and various non Hamas militants.

That still leaves 87% of Palestinian military aged males who have no part in any of this. Like most war casualties, they're just normal people going about their lives who have no part or agency in the broader war thats happening to them.

And yet their deaths (and civillian male deaths in any war) are viewed as inherently less important and tragic than those of women. And just doesn't scan with me. Just sharing a gender identity with the people ordering the violence doesn't implicate someone and it doesn't make them more responsible for their own murder, but we talk and act like it does.

Both progressives and reactionaries take it as a given that men have power, agency, and some level of invulnerability. I'm a man, therefore I must be powerful and in control. I have true agency. I have nothing to fear when I'm walking home at night. A cursory look at statistical outcomes for males should, if not outright refute, at least heavily qualify these ideas of male power, agency and security. I'm not saying we have it worse, but on the numbers re: murder, suicide, incarceration, homelessness, and a host of other things it's hard to see how we have it better. Yes, those in power are overwhelmingly male, but that doesn't translate to power for the vast majority of men.

The knee jerk tendency to identify masculinity with power and security is patriarchy. The devaluation of male lives is patriarchal thinking. For all of recorded history patriarchs have sent young men to their deaths without batting an eye, and the insouciance with which modern progressives engage with male mass death is no different.

You can't tear down the masters house with the masters tools. If you share with reactionaries the insistance that men must be powerful, invulnerable, and In Control, you will only ever perpetuate the system where men need to feel powerful, invulnerable, and In Control.

/rant.