And if that is the case, then the reason why 'widow' gets so many more hits than 'widower' could be mostly because widowed women are considered more interesting than widowed men.
This can be problematic. It's important to keep in mind that the existence of something versus another on the internet does not becessarily map cleanly to a larger interest in society as a whole. We need to consider that the audience of the internet might not be the same as the larger society. That said, I do think there is more interest in widows, but not for the reasons you pose.
It could be that our society (or at least Google) assumes that a woman is harder hit by losing her husband than a man is hit by losing his wife.
This is not adequately supported. In fact I see no connection between presence of "widows" (however that gets marked by google--an image of a crying woman, text mentioning "widow"--I think its the latter and if so this brings up other problems regarding writing, etc) and a woman harder hit by the loss of a husband. It could have to do that women are more likely to write about bereavement than men. That also does not prove that they are harder hit than men.
And because of that, there will be more articles and references to bereaved women than to bereaved men.
Or perhaps it is because it's more societally sanctioned to discuss female grief as opposed to male grief--at least in a lot of Western societies.
Again, this supports my hypothesis that it might be particularly interesting to write about widowed Clark, because he can be assumed to take the loss of his wife much more seriously than "the average guy" would do.
As I see it, there are too many fraught assumptions about the "average guy" in place to make such a claim (at this point, I add). Google can hardly provide the initial (unquestionable) basis for adequate support.
alcyone
