Imaging smelling good food you know that you cannot eat.  This is probably a pleasant experience, if you’ve had enough other good food to eat lately.  But it might be a painful experience if you were starving, or had long been living on a bland diet of rice and beans.

Similarly, being around attractive sexy people is often a pleasant experience, but probably feels quite different when it is clear to all that you have zero chance of attracting them, and if you feel severely deprived of satisfying sex.  And while our society is rich enough that few starve for food anymore, wealth is much less able to prevent sexual starvation.

So our society has far more sex-starved than food-starved folks.  Yet it is far more acceptable to publicly lament the plight of the food starved than the sex starved.  Signaling compassion is not about helping the needy.