Is femicide an unfair term?

Punder_man · 2025-11-24T22:08:46+00:00

So.. if the threshold for calling it "Femicide" is "It affects women more"
Then by their "logic" the following are all examples of Androcide:

- Workplace Fatalities
- Suicide

But of course i'm sure they would take offense at the idea of work place fatalities and suicide being gendered as something that only men face..

Edit: The problem with "Femicide" as a term is that like "Misogyny" it gets applied to everything and when it does it loses its meaning.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I highly doubt that EVERY single time a woman is killed it was BECAUSE she was a woman..

Specific_Detective41 · 2025-11-24T20:51:31+00:00

The main reasons why it's so low is because hate crimes against men are overlooked. I think it should be just regarded as homicide. A think using terms such as femicide and androcide just makes deaths related to hate crimes or other forms of violence a gendered issue, when it's not.

Low-Philosopher-2354 · 2025-11-24T21:08:41+00:00

Because feminism, honestly. They know that the suffix "cide" is most commonly associated with genocide, homicide and all those words so they created (or appropriated, as is more likely) a word with broad application that nevertheless has EXTREME connotations relating to attempted extinction of a particular group. It's meant to spark an immediate and very concerned response.

TL;DR The lax standards on what constitutes "femicide" exist because it's intended to spark outrage, and be likened to genocide purely due to its structure by those unfamiliar with their usage of the term. EDIT: And of course to push the idea that women are under genocidal attack.

bodyisT · 2025-11-25T03:32:58+00:00

Women are more likely to be killed by people they know so it’s more likely to be for personal reasons than for the mere fact they’re a woman. But when men are killed more by strangers, that’s not a coincidence. Most men who have been killed wouldn’t have been if they were women (whether they’re killed because of gang violence or drug related) People are more willing to hurt men and feel less empathy. So it makes more sense to say this is gender based. We should use the term androcide when men are killed

MidNerd · 2025-11-25T09:52:39+00:00

I understand that 77% of women vs 23% of men are killed by their intimate partner but 72%, England and Wales, and 77.7%, USA, of homicide victims were males and in the 28% of the females (England and Wales), 60% of the female deaths were intimate partner related.

It's not more prevalent because we keep using failed statistics like this.

These percentages count the amount of homicide victims who were killed by an intimate partner as a percentage of overall homicides for that gender. When you break down the total amount of homicides the amount of men and women killed by an intimate partner gets quite a bit closer. 4,970x0.34 = 1,690 women vs 17,970x0.06 = 1,078 men. 61% vs 39%.

That's before factoring in cases that are excluded from these statistics because they're inconvenient. e.g. Cause of death couldn't be confirmed as murder (poisoning) or the murder was performed by a 3rd party on behalf of an intimate partner (counts as a homicide, but not counted as intimate partner). Both categories lean heavily towards women offenders.

So why the huge difference in percentages? Men are just murdered way more than women. Note those huge differences in total amount of victims - 4,970 vs 17,970. 21.7% vs 78.3%. 4 out of every 5 murder victims are men, and we don't even talk about it. The US government is actively avoiding the topic by framing this data as "The percentage of females murdered by an intimate partner was 5 times higher than for males." This is just referring to the 34% of women vs 6% of men while completely ignoring the total amount of victims or that men have a much higher murder rate.

We can't accurately have this conversation until society at large, including our governments, are willing to be more honest about homicide.

Martijngamer · 2025-11-25T11:43:14+00:00

Asteroid destroys Earth, women most affected.

AbysmalDescent · 2025-11-25T04:36:09+00:00

The problem is that there are many things that should be recognized as androcide which are not, and many things which are being presented as femicide when they are not. A man killing his female partner is not killing her because she is a woman, he is killing her because he is mentally unwell(which could be linked to many other factors and results of systematic misandry) and heterosexual relationships are still largely the norm(which means that if that man was to murder a partner, it would most likely be a woman). That is not femicide.

Alternatively, if you look at something like police shootings or police brutality, which affects men significantly more than women, at a margin that is considerably greater than any other factor(including ethnicity), no one actually looks at this as androcide. When men are dying of suicide left and right, because of systematic factors and inhuman treatment from the opposite sex, and nothing is being done because no one actually cares enough to address those issues, that is not considered androcide. When men are forced to fight for their countries, in wars that they do not wish to be a part of, because they are men, that is androcide. When men are forced to work their lives away and into an early grave, in grueling, unhealthy and dangerous jobs, that is also androcide. When someone commits any kind of lethal violence against a man that they would otherwise not do to a woman, because they consider women to be sacred or violence against women inexcusable, that is not considered androcide. When men are expected to put their lives on the line in emergency situations for a woman, that is not considered androcide. When men are abused, feared or attacked, because they are men, or offered lesser treatment in medical situations, because they are men, that is not considered androcide.

People just choose not to see it as such, because they favor women over men.

SvitlanaLeo · 2025-11-25T19:27:36+00:00

The terminology of gender studies is monstrously asymmetrical in practice. I can tell you that there's a book by a staunch intersectional feminist who provides asymmetrical definitions of "man" and "woman":

Woman - An adult human who identifies with womanhood.
Man - An adult who identifies with the cultural and social norms of masculinity and feels an affinity for manhood.

Holleb, Morgan (2019). The A-Z of Gender and Sexuality: From Ace to Ze

Don't laugh.

CeleryMan20 · 2025-11-24T21:15:46+00:00

They made “fetch” a thing! It’s like there is some female hive-mind that spreads these abuses of terminology.

AigisxLabrys · 2025-11-26T01:53:37+00:00

“Femicide,” as how it’s used now, is emotionally charged nonsense.

_not_particularly_ · 2025-11-24T21:25:30+00:00

I think androcide is a quite different term as it refers to the systematic mass extermination of males based on gender. Femicide is usually just an individual homicide against a woman, with varying degrees of evidence of sex based intent, sometimes boiling down to “why else would a woman be killed”, occasionally aggregated into a category. Femicide refers to individual killings, whereas an androcide is a mass killing campaign.

BaroloBaron · 2025-11-25T00:21:45+00:00

In any decent legal system, it should be unconstitutional to create a crime that discriminates by characteristics such as sex (except for the case where it is logically impossible to apply the definition to both sexes).

In this particular case, we could decide to punish murder as a gender-hate crime more harshly. When we decide that such a crime only applies when the victim of hate is a woman, but not when it is a man, this is sex-based discrimination through law. It cannot be accepted.

ugavini · 2025-11-25T10:01:13+00:00

I got some South African stats for you:

Total murders for the year ending 31 Mar 24 (From SAPS annual report) : 27,590

Female victims: 3,485 (12.63%)

Child victims: 1,164 (4.22%)

Male Victims: Not mentioned in the report, but we can calculate the balance there is 22,941 or 83.15%.

And for intimate partner murders: from a reply to a question from the EFF in Parliament by Police Minister Senzo Mchunu were that between 2019 and 2024, 1736 females were killed by their partners while 1507 males were killed by their partners. So females were 53.5% of the victims of Intimate Partner Murders.

And then for rape, most studies don't bother to ask males, but I found one study that was done in 2002, published in 2008 so quite dated, with a total of 269,705 learners aged 10–19 years in grades 6–11. Of these, 126,696 were male. These learners were from 1191 schools all over the country at different economic levels. It found that:

Some 9% (weighted value based on 13915/127097) of male respondents aged 11–19 years reported forced sex in the last year. Of those aged 18 years at the time of the survey, 44% (weighted value of 5385/11450) said they had been forced to have sex in their lives and 50% reported consensual sex. Perpetrators were most frequently an adult not from their own family, followed closely in frequency by other schoolchildren. Some 32% said the perpetrator was male, 41% said she was female and 27% said they had been forced to have sex by both male and female perpetrators. Male abuse of schoolboys was more common in rural areas while female perpetration was more an urban phenomenon.

Violence is not something that disproportionately affects women in South Africa. I've got the receipts (links) if you want them.

hairman-mao · 2025-11-25T04:37:14+00:00

You may as well call it "violence against women". I would argue that calling it "femicide" is an academic term. While this does help emphasize the scale and pervasiveness of the issue, it won't be an effective way to communicate to the men who commit violence against women.

Same thing for "androcide". Specific violence against men is a non-issue when compared to deaths from war, drugs, and suicide.

Generally, we have bigger issues to talk about. While I think a focus in this manner brings issues to light, I think the ultimate solutions will come from common ground of preventing death from needless violence.

CeleryMan20 · 2025-11-24T21:18:30+00:00

[moved, this was meant to be a reply]

catsdelicacy · 2025-11-28T05:01:48+00:00

Femicide usually indicates the murder of a woman by a man, right? So wouldn't androcide be men murdered by women? Wouldn't that track logically?

Please look into the rates of murder committed by women globally. Because from my understanding, the statistics say that most murders, globally, are committed by men.

Please also look into murders of pregnant women and report back on your findings.

Please look into the murder rates in intimate violence, are the victims predominantly male or female? Do women murder their male spouses at the same rate that male spouses murder their partners?

ConsiderMeCakes · 2025-11-28T14:00:12+00:00

A femicide is when a woman is killed because she is a woman. It is obviously not as simple as "You are a woman, so I am going to kill you." but more about how women are seen/treated by their killers.

If a man kills a woman because he sees her as his property that is a femicide, because he wouldn't see his best friend in the same way or kill him over the same reason he killed his woman for (usually jealousy).

dudester3 · 2025-11-25T20:14:53+00:00

Beware the dissapearance of not only fact, but perpective as the gynocracy goes unchecked.

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Motanul_Negru · 2025-11-26T07:06:09+00:00

As far as I'm concerned, almost always yes. The only exception I have off the top of my head is if someone who is not a woman murders someone who is, and explicitly claims the victim's womanhood as a reason for killing her.

cuddlebuns287 · 2025-11-28T03:49:41+00:00

I've only ever heard the term used to describe the killing and abandonment of girl babies in countries like China (particularly during the one child policy), where sons are preferred over daughters to such a concerning degree, and this would very much be relevant to a word describing murders based on sex. I don't think it would be fair to use it for just any case where a woman is murdered, since that takes away from the cases that truly are because the victim is female.

Trick_Clue_8749 · 2025-12-02T20:09:37+00:00

Androcide is a more precise term because a more precise term is necessary. Men kill men all the time and for any number of reasons and those reasons are independent and statistically relevant. A man killed in a war is a different statistic than a man killed in the commissioning of a different crime. Most women who are killed are killed by an intimate partner/family member/friend. This kind of categorization is standard to how statistics are assembled and translated into usable data. My stats professor once put it to me like this, if you are talking to someone about the nesting patterns of ants you would need to be clear on what kind of ant you are talking about because their are so many kinds of ants and they behave very differently. If you were talking about the diet of pangolins you wouldn't need to be particularly specific about it because while pangolins may be slightly different based on their region, unless this is your specific area of study then they are all more or less the same so their differences are less relevant when it comes to usable data. Not all data is practical and valuable. Especially since are discussing the colloquial use of the term.

femicide has 6,200,000 search results because of this. Add the results for 'soldiers killed in action, gang murders, vehicular homicide....etc. ad nauseum' and you would find that the actual accrued concern for these issues surpasses femicide on the whole.

Yog_Kothag · 2025-12-21T07:09:35+00:00

When did they change the name of the subreddit from r/Conservativeassholeswithfuckedupgenderopinions? That seemed like a really straightforward explanation of the subreddit.

Primary_March4865 · 2025-12-23T00:36:04+00:00

guys, are we really arguing over a term??? PEOPLE ARE DYING. WOMEN, MEN, CHILDREN!!!!!!!THEY ARE DYING. BEING BRUTALIZED. BURNED. SA'ED????DUMPED ON STREETS OR CUT UP AND STUFFED IN SUITCASES?? i get your point OP, really I do, but as a female in South Africa, I know that it is more likely for me to be killed than my male partner. The scary part is that it's not only our partners we have to fear, but our own fathers, brothers, uncles, strangers. No matter where you are or who you are with, it just isn't safe. Although all murder regardless of gender is a serious issue that must be address, the number of females being killed each second in South Africa is horrifying. And I use the word female instead of woman because even baby girls as young as 3 months old are being r**ed and killed.

FullUnderstanding209 · 2026-02-03T21:13:18+00:00

If someone kills a women, for being a women thats femicide.

Every ten minutes a women is murdered because a man decided she didnt deserve the same rights as any other human because shes a women.

men who get rejected by women are killing women.

fathers who find out their daughters are dating or gay kill them.

mothers from birth have killed their daughters because of favoritism with men.

and Im not even ganna start on trans femicide... because thats the most horrible of all..

Stfu, femicide is very consistent and very real and happening every day every ten minutes.

RiverKey7220 · 2026-06-18T22:12:23+00:00

The main reason it is overlooked is because androcide is much less common than femicide. And by that I mean that women don’t kill their husbands as often as men kill their wives. When a man kills an other man is not an androcide because most of the time he doesn’t do it because of his sex but for other reasons. And I think that gay men also don’t kill their partners as much

EJArtyArts · 2025-11-28T14:22:06+00:00

Men are overwhelmingly more often than not be the killers in both scenarios. While women can kill too (both men & women) those statistics of men dying that you gave are farrrrr more likely to be by men

And the femicide definition says "particularly" so it leaves room for any reason women are killed on purpose, but it is dominantly by men.

It not good for anyone to be killed, but women are targeted, attacked, and murdered far more often, so there are more results. And yes, in other countries where women are closer to being livestock than real people, they are easily "disposable" and killed for whatever reason men believe.

It's a little insensitive to put the two against each other, but you came with a question willing to learn and that's a lot better than being some stubborn dickhead

thejoebrossuck · 2025-11-29T19:43:22+00:00

No. See this is why I tell other women they should avoid dating and fucking men these days because this the type of shit men (even in progressive spaces) are on. Men’s issues will be addressed if feminism becomes more accepted and patriarchy becomes less accepted. That’s just how it’ll work. But y’all keep fighting against feminism if that makes you feel smarter and stronger, I guess we can all suffer together. Enjoy loneliness and the knowledge that women will never return to subservience, we will continue to progress and there’s nothing any of you can do about it.

Phuxsea · 2025-11-25T05:50:40+00:00

I believe that femicide is real and that it is a problem. When women are killed for being pregnant and refusing an abortion pill or for attempting to leave their husband, that is a gender-based hate crime. That said, androcide is also real and should be noted.

TheDdken · 2025-11-25T01:43:46+00:00

I agree that the word "femicide" is appropriate. Stats show that women are more likely to be killed by their male partners (1.6 times) than the reverse scenario.

The problem I have with the word is that it's too broad. I saw an image last year of a list of victims, that included Sonya Massey. But the latter was killed because of her race (or perhaps not, but definitely not because of her gender). If you broaden the term "femicide" to include all murders of women, then suddenly, femicides aren't a big deal anymore because men are far, far more likely to be killed in general. In the end, this broad definition serves no one.

We should definitely do something about the killings of women in the household and do something about the killings of men in general. Femicides should be only about the murders of women because they are women (hate crimes).

Title	Is femicide an unfair term?
Author	Primary_March4865
Upvotes	121
Comments	162
Date	November 24, 2025 8:26 PM UTC (7 months ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/1p5s4tx/is_femicide_an_unfair_term/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/is-femicide-an-unfair-term.1567334 https://theredarchive.com/post/1567334

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