"At least they only killed the women"

I was struck yesterday by an idea buried in a post about the 50 hostages in Iraq that were killed and then dumped in the river.

There was a point made about how one side had said they had killed women and children, and that later on that proved not to be true, and that the dead were all men.

Being one of progressive gender perspective, I have to ask why it's worse to kill women than to kill men, or, to flip the perspective, why it's more ok to kill innocent men than to kill innocent women? No one would like the idea that it's more okay to kill women than men, or that it's more ok to kill blacks than whites. Can you imagine someone saying "At first, we thought there were many races among the victims. But it turns out that there were no white people, and that all the dead were black." What a relief! Yet it doesn't bother us when it's implied that we should be relieved that there were no women among the victims.

To continue on my "expendability of human life" theme, it seems there's an underlying assumption that men are more expendable than women, or that men subjected to violence is somehow less bad than women subjected to violence. I think this idea helps us to be more comfortable with War. I think people would feel differently about War if as many young women as young men were coming back in boxes, missing limbs, or suffering PTSD.