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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.
Pity The Sex Starved
A better analogy, I believe, would be a person who has to go work in a five star restaurant everyday. They're capable of eating any kind of food, but only ever can get unsalted white rice. They've tried repeatedly to attain the food that other customers don't want, but it never works out. At night, they go home to watch TV, but even the commercials are full of delicious looking food. They fall asleep every night only to dream of food...any food, they eat the white rice they need to sustain them, and life goes on. Would you pity that person?
Why are so many obsessed with sex? Well, there's this thing called natural selection...