Men have never in any society been seen as victims and eligible for special treatment. That's because men are disposable. In hunter-gatherer societies they die on the hunt, in agricultural societies they die defending the settlement. It's fine because the important thing is that there are women around to pump out the next generation of fighters.
So why aren't women just as disposable?
Because men can father a child in under three minutes (or so I hear!) but for a woman it takes 388,800 minutes and even after that you want at least the boobs to be around for a couple of years. Furthermore, women can only bear a maximum of 40 children in their lifetimes (dying of childbirth long before that, too) but men can father children for basically their entire natural lives.
So if one woman gets killed you have hugely reduced the reproductive capacity of the tribe and they are that much more likely to get clobbered by the next rival tribe or sabre-toothed tiger to come up the valley. If one man gets killed it's no problem, the other men have a limitless supply of spunk and a limitless desire to inject it into as many women as possible, so they'll step up and fill the gap.