In the July 14, 1944 edition of "As I Please," a series of articles written by George Orwell between 1943 and 1947, the topic of male disposability is brought up during a discussion of the bombing of civilians in the ongoing Second World War.

The other thing that needs dealing with is the parrot cry ‘killing women and children’. I pointed out before, but evidently it needs repeating, that it is probably somewhat better to kill a cross-section of the population than to kill only the young men. If the figures published by the Germans are true, and we have really killed 1,200,000 civilians in our raids, that loss of life has probably harmed the German race somewhat less than a corresponding loss on the Russian front or in Africa and Italy.

Any nation at war will do its best to protect its children. and the number of children killed in raids probably does not correspond to their percentage of the general population. Women cannot be protected to the same extent, but the outcry against killing women, if you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality. Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man? The argument usually advanced is that in killing women you are killing the breeders, whereas men can be more easily spared. But this is a fallacy based on the notion that human beings can be bred like animals. The idea behind it is that since one man is capable of fertilizing a very large number of women, just as a prize ram fertilizes thousands of ewes, the loss of male lives is comparatively unimportant. Human beings, however, are not cattle. When the slaughter caused by a war leaves a surplus of women, the enormous majority of those women bear no children. Male lives are very nearly as important, biologically, as female ones.

In the last war the British Empire lost nearly a million men killed, of whom about three quarters came from these islands. Most of them will have been under thirty. If all those young men had had only one child each we should now have an extra 750,000 people round about the age of twenty. France, which lost much more heavily, never recovered from the slaughter of the last war, and it is doubtful whether Britain has fully recovered, either. We can’t yet calculate the casualties of the present war, but the last one killed between ten and twenty million young men. Had it been conducted, as the next one will perhaps be, with flying bombs, rockets and other long-range weapons which kill old and young, healthy and unhealthy, male and female impartially, it would probably have damaged European civilization somewhat less than it did.

"Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man?" is a question just as relevant today as it was then. Are we really going to pretend that women have more moral worth than men? Given our current discourse, it would seem that we have progressed remarkably little in this respect since Orwell's time.

I think Orwell makes some good points in addressing the idea that male disposability is biologically inevitable because of the nature of human reproduction. However, I do think he's wrong to say that humans could not be bred like animals. In theory, we could, but we don't, and that's probably a good thing. Eugenics was popular in Orwell's time, though Orwell, not being the kind of person to just go with the flow, was firmly opposed to it.

Even though a single man could in theory impregnate many women, in practice, our actually-existing social structures prevent that from occurring. Otherwise, following the First World War, countries that suffered especially devastating casualties would have legalized polygyny in order to replenish their losses. A country like France would have arguably fared much better in the Second World War had they done something like this to counteract their demographic losses. There was one supposed instance in history of post-war polygyny legalization, and that was in Paraguay following the War of the Triple Alliance. However, as I've pointed out before, this is actually a myth unsupported by evidence. Indeed, at least in monogamous societies, male lives really are about as important as female ones.

In short, I think the lesson we should draw from this is to be wary of arguments that justify the mass death of men, especially in wartime, on the basis of biology while ignoring the social and circumstantial factors. Historical reality doesn't resemble Dr. Strangelove. Societies that lost ~90% of their men couldn't just hunker down in a mineshaft with a 10:1 female-to-male ratio for a hundred years.