History Main / MenAreTheExpendableGender

A sub-trope of the [[DoubleStandard double standard]]. In media, female characters are assumed to start with audience sympathy, male characters have to earn it and usually lose it if they fail to be appropriately manly and heroic. This leads to differences in how the genders are portrayed. Justified in tribal or survival situations, where women are more reproductively valuable than men.

A sub-trope of the [[DoubleStandard double standard]]. In media, female characters are assumed to start with audience sympathy, male characters have to earn it and usually lose it if they fail to be appropriately manly and heroic. This leads to differences in how the genders are portrayed.

* Earlier on in ''{{Bleach}}'', there's a limited example of the lack of anonymous women in the Soul Society arc. At the beginning Soul Reapers are generally being used as {{Mooks}}, and all such are male, as opposed to the leading cadre which includes a handful of females. Once the named characters have been shown enough that we can start sympathetically viewing Soul Reapers as a group, we start seeing Academy flashbacks in which a reasonable proportion of the anonymous Soul Reapers are female, and proceed from there, making it clear this trope is the ''raison d'�tre''.

* {{ElfenLied}} both somewhat averts this and plays it straight. On one hand, many women die horribly. However, the characters very directly responsible for most of the death are girls, whom we are still expected to feel sympathetic for even after they slaughter dozens of people, innocent or not. And when a scientist shoots a rampaging disclonius, we are expected to see him as a heartless bastard. Also, most of the women killed off get a slow-motion sequence to go with it, while the guys get their heads torn off with brutal swiftness.
* At least in the anime adaptation of {{Baccano}}, the only female character to even get noticeably injured in the bloody events aboard the Flying Pussyfoot is Rachel -- and we never actually see her injury, only the gunshot and her subsequently bandaged leg.

* ''SonicX'' tends to avert this trope particularly in series three, where Molly and Cosmo both die. Cosmo's death is long, tragic and beautiful; Molly's not so much, perhaps because she's only in one episode while Cosmo is a character throughout the third series. Of course if you watch the 4Kids English dubs you'll walk away thinking they just [[NeverSayDie went away for a while or something]].

** Interestingly, for a time there was no gender or age restriction for dangerous work-women and children under 10 weren't banned from working in mines in Great Britain until 1842-and only because the women were taking their shirts off in the high heat in the presence of men.

Likewise, the "women and children" phrase noted above, while it would seem to render men irrelevant,
in the same broad stroke equates the self-sufficiency of women with that of children, and by extension implies that the death of men is more acceptable because they're inherently more capable of taking care of themselves. When a woman or child dies it is because someone failed to protect them; when a man dies it is because he failed to protect himself. And no one likes a [[NonActionGuy failure.]]

This trope also creates UnfortunateImplications in situations where, logically, there should be a number of anonymous women. For example, in a series which has a prominent, high ranking female military officer there should be a proportionate number of lower ranking female soldiers being killed by the BigBad. Their absence has the unfortunate effect of making said high ranking female military officer seem unrealistic as a character and slapped into the story for {{Genderflip}} purposes.

* Partial aversion: In the movie ''{{Munich}}'', the Israeli assassins kill a Dutch woman who killed one of their co-workers. Although they retain audience sympathy, or at least remain morally ambivalent, that assassination is also portrayed as more noteworthy than the assassinations of numerous male characters and the only assassination that was questioned in-movie, which is especially interesting as she is an amoral hitwoman working for pay and thus arguably morally ''worse'' than the ideologically motivated Black September members that make up the other victims.

* Natural Selection abides by this trope. Given the fact that men can fertilize an egg more quickly than a woman can have an egg cell ready, if you're going to run low on one gender in a population, it'd better be males.

Female characters are also expected to treat themselves as less expendable than male characters. Female characters do not lose sympathy for preserving their own lives or safety at the cost of other characters' lives and safety. Male characters lose considerable sympathy if they don't at least try to bend over backwards and help save female characters' lives even if the cost is their own. (Imagine the climactic [[YouShouldKnowThisAlready death scene]] in {{Titanic}} with the genders reversed.) This can also extend to male characters protecting female characters, as they would children, from knowing about negative situations. (Completely ignoring the possibility that, as an adult with experience, a female character might have valuable insight into solving the problem a negative situation presents.)

Female characters are also expected to treat themselves as less expendable then male characters. Female characters do not lose sympathy for preserving their own lives or safety at the cost of other characters' lives and safety. Male characters lose considerable sympathy if they don't at least try to bend over backwards and help save female characters' lives even if the cost is their own. (Imagine the climactic [[YouShouldKnowThisAlready death scene]] in {{Titanic}} with the genders reversed.) This can also extend to male characters protecting female characters, as they would children, from knowing about negative situations. (Completely ignoring the possibility that, as an adult with experience, a female character might have valuable insight into solving the problem a negative situation presents.)

* SuperPrison on Teletoon's Adult Swim makes a habit of killing male prisoners in the most graphically disturbing ways possible. One episode it depicted a woman getting shot and slumping over to suggest the chaos had gone [[MoralEventHorizon too far]]. Considering this was interspersed between images of men being decapitated and graphically disemboweled, it was a particularly jarring and perhaps intentional invocation of this trope.

* According to the Bureau Of Labor Statistics, males make up 93% of the workplace related fatalities. What makes this even more this trope is how much attention is given to the pay inequality, with men earning more money on average. Pay discrepancy? Something to fight against, spread education about and enact laws. Discrepancy in death? Because it's men, a resounding "Who cares?"

* In the ''Merlin'' episode ''Excalibur'' the BigBad is extorting food from the peasants and punches a woman who tries to stop him. A man runs out to save her and is shot with a crossbow. The camera lingers on the woman, and another man is shown comming to her aid and holding her, the man shot with the crossbow is apparently irrelevant as he isn't seen again nor is it shown that anyone comes to his aid. It's obvious that the audience is expected to worry more about a woman getting punched then a man being [[WallBanger shot in the chest with a crossbow.]]

* In the ''Merlin'' episode '''' the BigBad is extorting food from the peasants and punches a woman who tries to stop him. A man runs out to save her and is shot with a crossbow. The camera lingers on the woman, and another man is shown comming to her aid and holding her, the man shot with the crossbow is apparently irrelevant as he isn't seen again nor is it shown that anyone comes to his aid. It's obvious that the audience is expected to worry more about a woman getting punched then a man being [[Wallbanger shot in the chest with a crossbow.]]

* In MichaelBay 's ''{{Armageddon}}'', at the climax scene in the space shuttle, the protagonists stand around and draw straws to decide who will make the HeroicSacrifice. The one female member of the team, the BadAss co-pilot of the shuttle ([[InformedAbility or so we're told]]), doesn't have to draw because she's conveniently the only person qualified to fly the shuttle.

* In MichaelBay 's ''{{Armageddon}}'', at the climax scene in the space shuttle, the protagonists stand around and draw straws to decide who will make the HeroicSacrifice. The one female member of the team, the BadAss co-pilot of the shuttle ([[InformedAbility or so we're told]]), is notably absent.

** Except the first one where the only victim to survive the (arguably much easier) puzzle is a woman. The other females in the movie all happily escape. Not one male victim survives.
*** Apparently [[spoiler: Lawrence]] did, as he's back for VII.

[[/folder]]

* ''{{NCIS}}'': According to the wikipedia entry, ALL the regular/recurring good guys who have been killed off were female.
** Except for Pacci, but he was in about three episodes and was promptly disemboweled... in season 1. That was in 2004. He was the ''only one''.
* The ''{{Blade}}'' Trilogy, where female vampires get ashed in the background to no more note than the male vampires, though there are far more male vampires getting killed.
* ''InglouriousBasterds'': With the exception of the briefly-glimpsed farmer's daughters at the start of the film, none of the female characters survive, whereas three important male characters do. However, the women's deaths are far less graphic than some of the men's.
* ''BuffyTheVampireSlayer'' was far more willing to kill off its major female characters than its male ones; [[spoiler: Jenny, Kendra, Joyce, Tara and Anya]] all die before the end of the final episode, whereas the only significant male good guy to die (and stay dead) was [[spoiler:Jonathan]]. That said, the vast majority of the mostly-all-killed-off villains were male.
*''{{Lost}}'' is often criticized by female fans for constantly killing off female characters. 7 of the 9 main female characters have died or are unaccounted for.

* In RealLife, when a plane crashes, healthy adult men are the most likely to survive. This is because everyone on the plane panics, and not only does everyone fend only for themself, but they trample the others in the process.
** A remarkable number of stewardesses (and stewards, it must be said) have not survived in 'surviveable' fires in aircraft on the ground. It's one of the dangers of being required to help people get off the plane...
* ''Series/{{Heroes}}''.
* ''{{Supernatural}}'', anyone? As of the Season 5 Finale, the only recurring female character alive is Lisa Braeden.
** 2. Meg is still alive. (or whatever you call demons)
* ''DeathProof'' has a significantly higher body count for women.
* DeusExInvisibleWar is one of the few video games that completely averts this trope. The Order, SSC, the WTO military, and the Knights Templar all have an abundance of female troops for the player to gun down. Male cannon fodder enemies still outnumber female ones, but not by a very wide margin. The only human enemy types that don't have female character models are the Arctic Templars and the Illuminati Commandos (the latter may be justified with the possibility of them being cloned). This is likely the result of the developers compensating for the lack of gender equity in the original DeusEx, where the only female non-boss enemy is the occasional Woman In Black.
*David Weber's ''HonorHarrington'' series completely subverts this. There is an abundance of female villains, including {{mook}}s. There are women serving in the navies, marines, and armies of Haven, Manticore, and every state except Grayson, plus there are female pirates, merchant crewmembers, thugs, and Havenite {{StateSec}} personnel. The women die as often as the men - which is very frequently, considering that it is a military sci-fi series. In universe, the conservative Graysons are the only ones who play this straight, but they are gradually moving away from it.
** For a long time in their history Graysons had to adopt this strategy as they were teetering on the brink of planetary extinction. They needed babies to survive which required lots of women having lots of babies.
* The Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher BlackComedy ''{{Killers}}'' is amazingly egalitarian about killing off male and female bad guys. There are equal numbers of male and female bad guys and there is no difference at all in how (un)sympathetically they are depicted and how they are killed.

* Games have often included {{gorn}} deaths for both men and women.

* Averted in MassEffect 2. Just in the first half hour, members of both gender are blown up by exploding computer consoles or mown down by enormous battle mechs in gruesome detail in roughly even numbers. Even the Random Mooks that you get to fight have a pretty decent male/female split considering some of the violent ways you get to dispose of them.
* In the [[FullmetalAlchemist Full Metal Alchemist manga and Brotherhood]], [[spoiler: Lust]] suffers one of the more brutal deaths in the series [[spoiler: as she is repeatedly burned alive onscreen by Roy Mustang.]]
* One subplot in the original ''MobileSuitGundam'' is Char Aznable's hunt for revenge against the Zabi family. Three of the men die in explosions, one is shot in the head, but the worst is saved for last when the only woman, Kycelia Zabi, is decapitated by a bazooka.
* The animé Angel Cop features a female terrorist being shot several times, with the final bullet blowing her skull into pieces in full Gorn-y detail. The death isn't remarked upon as anything particularly noteworthy by the nearby police officer witnessing it other than an impressive display of marksmanship.

*Sin City (Comic and Movie) contains many double standards. Most of them Fridge Logic. Many more women are dead at the end than men, but the men are anonymous masks.

<<|DeathTropes|>>