History Main / MenAreTheExpendableGender

* NeutralFemale: Women are not obligated to help a man even if he is in a life or death altercation. Instead they will usually stand and look worried while the man is fighting for his (as well as her’s) life, even if they are perfectly capable of assisting.

* NeutralFemale: Women are not obligated to help a man if he is in an altercation, even if the man is in a life or death situation and she’s perfectly capable of assisting him.

* DoesNotLikeMen: Disliking and generalizing men on the basis of their sex is considered both justifiable and perfectly reasonable.

** While the background material hints that there are just as many females as there are males in the Imperial Guard Army, most of the Imperial Guard Models are all male, with few to no female variants throughout the years. Other races tend to have one set of "female" traits for every 3 "male" traits (breastplates mostly). One whole regiment of Imperial Guard is made up solely of males as well, the aptly named Vostroyan Firstborne (made of firstborn sons). Space Marines may be this at a glance, due to genetics basically making female space marines in fluff impossible, but are largely balanced because each new initiate marine is still infinitely more valuable than 10k imperial guard women and that their DistaffCounterpart, the Sisters of Battle, are all female.

* For a long time, ''VideoGame/PAYDAYTheHeist'' and ''VideoGame/PAYDAY2'' had no female police officers or playable female robbers, so all the violence was directed towards males only. Sometime during the sequel, two playable female characters were added and female FBI agents were added as enemies, though the latter only appear for one level. The Biker DLC adds a heist where you fight a gang of bikers that are composed of both men and women. The gang member that holds the keycard in day 2 is a female that wears a mask like the players, has a ton of health, and wields a light machine gun, a weapon that is only seen on Skulldozers (Death Wish difficulty) and the Commisar.

* When the ComicBook/JusticeLeagueOfAmerica moved to Detroit they introduced a group of new superheroes that had an equal number of males and females. However after the new additions proved to be unpopular DC decided to get rid of them by killing off the men (ComicBook/{{Vibe}} and [[ComicBook/CommanderSteel Steel]]) and having the women (ComicBook/{{Vixen}} and Gypsy) leave the team. The only reason for having only the men killed appears to be this trope.

-->-- '''Negan''', ''Series/TheWalkingDead2010''

* In the ''VideoGame/DynastyWarriors'' franchise and all of it spinoffs, the nameless numerous foot soldiers are almost always male. The only female enemies would be unique NPCS, or one of the playable characters being controlled by an AI.
** In all of the ''[[VideoGame/OnePiecePirateWarriors One Piece]]'' spinoff games, they even skip over the Amazon Lily arc, where the mook enemies would be canonically female.

* ''Mother's Day'' (the 2010 film, not the 1980 flick it is loosely based on) has seven male characters and nine female ones. [[spoiler: six of the seven men die while only three of the women do - and all three women who die are presented as someway 'unsympathetic' (one is an adulteress who has been sleeping with the heroine's husband and the other two are spoilt and obnoxious rich girls and very minor characters to boot). The men who die regardless of whether they are presented as sympathetic or not.]].

Strangely, women find it difficult to lose audience sympathy by being [[TheLoad useless]], ''[[TheMillstone worse]]'' than [[UnwantedAssistance useless]], or [[DirtyCoward selfish cowards]]--as long as they don't get ''other people with the audience's sympathy'' killed, that is -- and sometimes even then, if this person (usually a man) was perceived by the audience as somehow [[WhatMeasureIsANonBadass not strong enough]]. Stranger still, all this can still hold true if the woman in question has already been established as a badass (See {{Chickification}}). As a mark of the true DoubleStandard this trope exemplifies, a woman is more likely to lose the audience's favor by getting another ''woman'' killed than by getting a man killed.

** The death of [[spoiler:Charity Burbage]] in the VillainOpeningScene of ''Literature/HarryPotterAndTheDeathlyHallows''. The previous three books [[TonightSomeoneDies each featured]] the death of a sympathetic male character and all these deaths were treated with great weight. In contrast, [[spoiler:Charity Burbage']]s death was essentially just a plot device to explain why the Muggle Studies position is open this year and she's barely mentioned for the rest of the book (and in [[Film/HarryPotterAndTheDeathlyHallows the film]], she's not mentioned again at all). Of course, she had never previously appeared in the series, although she was quickly established as a sympathetic character. [[spoiler:It's also notable that Snape managed to not lose any sympathy points for allowing her to die as part of maintaining his cover.]]

* In ''LightNovel/HowNotToSummonADemonLord'', male antagonists are usually evil due to arrogance (sometimes to the point of [[AGodAmI believing themselves actual gods]]), greed, or a desire for power. They all wind up dead by the end of their arcs. Female antagonists, on the other hand, end up being evil because it's their duty to follow someone or they've been driven to misanthropy due to cruel treatment by other people and end up being redeemed and surviving as friends of the protagonists.

* ''LightNovel/ShakuganNoShana'' likes to show a typical cross-section of society being frozen in time and eaten by monsters, with no distinction made or fanfare placed on any non-main character regardless of gender, age, or social status. (In other words, men, women, and children all die onscreen, and men and women die at roughly equal frequencies.)

* In ''LightNovel/GoblinSlayer'' adventurers of both genders are equally likely to be tortured and slaughtered by the goblins. Female deaths include burning a mage alive, raping a knight to death (and, in the novel, they also maim her until she no longer looks like a human being before killing her) and a goblin child brutally smashing an adventurer´s skull with a stone because she made the mistake of sparing him.
* In ''Manga/AkameGaKill!'' you can see many male redshirts and mooks being killed. Also, almost all mission goals of the assassination group Night Raid are male. On the other hand, about a third of the villains are female, and nearly all of them are killed. Even among the heroes where there are significantly more women than men, they are killed equally.

-->-- '''Negan''', ''Series/{{The Walking Dead|2010}}''

* ''Anime/{{Another}}'' manages rather oddly to [[ZigZaggingTrope both subvert and play this straight]]. It's subverted in that, in a class with roughly equivalent male and female ratios, only a handful of onscreen deaths are male, and by the end of the series (the novel as well; the manga subverts this slightly) only ''one'' of the main female characters is still alive (in fairness, she's functionally the only female character in the novel, so this isn't hard). It's subverted in that, when male deaths ''do'' occur, their repercussions are generally downplayed or flat-out not brought up: the first major onscreen death is a girl, which leads to one of the main conflicts in the final episode; a male student's death midway through is ''implied'' to have caused a SanitySlippage for a female student, but this is never outright stated, while her own death is the main thing that sets the two main groups at odds. In a series which features two rather gruesome and bloody throat injuries and dismemberment by ''boat motor,'' the only GoryDiscretionShot is also reserved for one girl, who bloodlessly (but still painfully) is strangled to death.

* ''LightNovel/{{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.

* A similar thing also happens in ''Manga/FullmetalAlchemist'', just replace ninja with soldiers. Thankfully it is a bit more justified and lenient about it, it's set in a 20s setting so female soldiers would be uncommon (they still are, for reasons of this trope), and even then, many characters that are male get lingering shots and it's shown with Mustang that to him, his men are not expendable, his friends are not mooks merely sent to die. I.E an example of a lingering shot on a dead male character [[spoiler: Colonel Maes Hughes]].

Strangely, women find it difficult to lose audience sympathy by being [[TheLoad useless]], ''[[TheMillstone worse]]'' [[UnwantedAssistance than useless]], or [[DirtyCoward selfish cowards]]--as long as they don't get ''other people with the audience's sympathy'' killed, that is -- and sometimes even then, if this person (usually a man) was perceived by the audience as somehow [[WhatMeasureIsANonBadass not strong enough]]. Stranger still, all this can still hold true if the woman in question has already been established as a badass (See {{Chickification}}). As a mark of the true DoubleStandard this trope exemplifies, a woman is more likely to lose the audience's favor by getting another ''woman'' killed than by getting a man killed.

* ''Series/AlteredCarbon'' has never shied away from showing violent female deaths, [[spoiler: including the female BigBad of the first season]], but a [[https://www.ign.com/articles/2018/02/17/does-altered-carbon-fix-the-books-issues common criticism]] [[https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/altered-carbon-cyberpunk-2018/ of Season 1]] is that the majority of female deaths are gratuitous sexual violence in the form of the DisposableWoman and DisposableSexWorker tropes, not to mention having mostly men as mooks, especially with CTAC Praetorians who are implied to be all-male. Season 2 rectifies this by not only pretty much eliminating depictions of sexual violence, but also [[GenderIsNoObject clearly having male and female mooks, both CTAC and regular soldiers, police and criminal goons]], who are frequently fought and killed regardless of gender, with the explicitly all-male {{Yakuza}} being an outlier. Of particular note is [[EliteMooks Ivan Carrera's personal squad]], which has two women and [[spoiler:is completely wiped out by the protagonists]].

* ZigZaggingTrope in ''VideoGame/TheLastOfUs''. You will fight female Infected, but any non-Infected enemy you encounter will be exclusively male (the exception being a single female who the player can kill in contrast to the dozens of men). However, the Boston Militia is co-ed, and Tommy's group has plenty of armed female members. Whether it's a case of time constraints, InUniverse misogyny, or simply a desire to save money by not hiring female voice actors for the mook dialogue, is hard to say, considering that while there are most definitely women in the group of enemies you face during Winter, they seem to have more [[StayInTheKitchen domestic]] responsibilities. Also subverted in relation to the main characters: [[spoiler:Joel is horrifically wounded and neutralized during the ending of Fall and most of Winter, and since the Laconic for the trope describes itself as "Male suffering is less meaningful than female suffering"..]].

* Male characters get more explicit and brutal deaths. It's no secret that viewers are more uncomfortable watching women get tortured, maimed, and/or killed. If a man and a woman are killed in equally grisly ways (or even if the woman's death is ''less'' gruesome than the man), the woman's death is still treated as worse. Extra points if [[GoryDiscretionShot the camera cuts away]] right before she gets butchered. If a woman ''does'' die, and we actually get to see her body afterwards, expect her never to ''[[BeautyIsNeverTarnished look]]'' dead.

* In the original ''Under the Hood'' comic, Black Mask's assistant Mr. Li is killed by Jason Todd. In the film adaptation, '' WesternAnimation/BatmanUnderTheRedHood'', Mr. Li [[GenderFlip becomes]] ''Ms.'' Li, who ends up BoundAndGagged by [[Characters/BatmanTheJoker The Joker]], but is otherwise unharmed.

* Creator/RobertAHeinlein has LazarusLong defend it full bore:

* In the ''VideoGame/AssassinsCreed'' series, the in the present day Desmond only ever kills male guards and Templars, with the exception of [[spoiler: killing Lucy Stillman through the apple; through Juno's command. Her death is treated with much concern and grief on Desmond's part]]. And in ''VideoGame/AssassinsCreedBrotherhood'' and ''VideoGame/AssassinsCreedRevelations'', Ezio only ever assassinates 3 female Templars across both games. ''VideoGame/AssassinsCreedSyndicate'', however, averts this to hell and back. See below.

* ''Literature/APaleHorse'': The character Ariadne Oliver (considered by many to be a self-insert of author Agatha Christie) pretty much just comes out and says this directly. In her case, she's talking specifically about how audiences will react to the death of a male character versus the death of a female character. From the tone and presentation of the remark, one gets the impression that Christie is lampooning this particular mindset.

* Almost every secondary character dies over the course of ''Film/ClashOfTheTitans2010'', but the death of TheChick is a much bigger deal to Perseus; later Zeus brings her back to life, but everyone else stays dead. This was due to ExecutiveMeddling since Io was meant to stay dead and Perseus would have ended up with Andromeda with Io and Perseus's relationship being more brother/sister. The studio disagreed. This was also inverted with the death of Andromeda's mother, which got swept under the rug as quickly as any faceless mook. Several of the male characters who died in the fight against Medusa were given far more import. The sequel ''Film/WrathOfTheTitans'' has Ares massacring Andromeda's army. He kills about five male soldiers with no fanfare. But when he stabs the lone female, it's presented as a MoralEventHorizon.

* In ''Manga/FullmetalAlchemist'', [[spoiler:Lust]] suffers one of the more brutal deaths in the series [[spoiler:as she is repeatedly burned alive onscreen by Roy Mustang]]. Compare her role in [[Anime/FullmetalAlchemist the 2003 anime version]], where she is recast as a sympathetic villain and her death is used to destroy sympathy for Wrath.

* In ''Literature/TheLionTheWitchAndTheWardrobe'', [[SantaClaus Father Christmas]] provides Susan and Lucy with weapons (a bow and arrows for Susan, a dagger for Lucy) but warns them that they are to be used only as a last resort because "battles are ugly when women fight". Their brother Peter gets a sword and shield and no such warning against using them proactively, presumably because it's somehow less "ugly" when it's men doing the fighting and dying. Or in this case, a ''boy'' doing the fighing and dying -- did we mention that they're ''all'' ChildSoldiers?