This is CRAZY! It's all about the technologies available for you to be able to choose the gender of your baby. They weed out the X-chromosome sperm from the Y-chromosome sperm. Apparently in the West 77% of request have been for female babies.
They also talk about how in China, the ratio of males to females born is 121:100 for reasons I'm sure you are familiar with. But a new book predicts that this will have grave consequences for the future because it "will create a hoodlum army of 30 million single men that by 2020 will be a menace to world peace." They're effectively breeding an army.... I would not want to be a woman in China in 15 years... I wonder if they will resort to polygamy... or just mass rape... or tons of gayness? The book is from MIT press so you know it's legit.
This is the article specifically about the future of tilted sex ratios. It getting worse becuase of ultrasound and selective abortion. You don't even have to deal with messy infanticide anymore! It's messed up world, man.
Interesting quote: "Anthropological studies have found, for example, that female infanticide and son-worship sometimes emerge in warring nomadic communities that frequently lose many men in battle, or that are vulnerable to having their women and children kidnapped by a rival group. In such situations, the theory goes, a group can preserve its integrity by tightly controlling the number of women within it."
Posted by bluprnt at October 7, 2004 05:56 PMThis seems a little sterotypical to me. As a single male I am usually able to restrain my urge to conquer other nations, rape, and pillage. Not only does this imply that men are war hungry barbarians, but it also implies that women are incapable of waging war.....of course all of this is coming from the point of view of a guy that just almost got in a fight with a twelve year old kid at the grocery store.
I think at some point things will go too far, people will realize they have gone too far, the pendulum will shift and then things will go to far the other way.
Posted by: Jackson at October 7, 2004 06:29 PMwhat- you didnt think we'd be fighting a war with china in 2020?
Posted by: Don Coma at October 7, 2004 07:57 PMBut 20 MILLION SINGLE MEN??? That's insane! Have you ever hung out in arenas of all men? Or rooms of all men? The atmosphere just shifts. (of course, I could not physically be in a room entirely of men, but mostly of men, I've experienced).
I do think that women have the capacity to wage war and be bloodthirsty nationalists, but massive groups of women rarely decide to do this, unlike massive groups of men....
Besides, you are single now, but imagine if you had never had a girlfriend and had absolutely no hopes whatsoever of ever having one except MAYBE you could visit what will surely be very expensive (or possibly government subsidized)prostitutes on rare occasion? I bet that 12 year old would have an arm missing.
Posted by: rebecca at October 7, 2004 07:59 PMHaHa, yeah, I guess I thought the China war was in the future regardless...But now I just think we're going down faster.
Posted by: rebecca at October 7, 2004 08:03 PMI think the problem is that the culture the men are raised in is not factored in at all. YES if north america was 90% male we would be kicking some ass right now. Because kicking ass and taking names is what it means to be male in our society.
I don't know enough about what it means to be a Chinese male to say whats going to happen. Maybe we will just get a bunch of convenience stores. I think society forms what it means to be male and female so comparing one male dominated society to another is pointless. We could probably find statistics proving that societies with a high percentage of women go to war more.....maybe all the married guys just need an excuse to get out of the house so they go out and get their conquer on.
"Besides, you are single now, but imagine if you had never had a girlfriend and had absolutely no hopes whatsoever of ever having one except MAYBE you could visit what will surely be very expensive (or possibly government subsidized)prostitutes on rare occasion?"
hmmmmmm good point. I will ask our intern Ben about that.
It's a downward spiral: The fewer women there are, the hornier the men get, and the less Prozac they use. The less Prozac they use, the less estrogen ends up in the environment to increase the rate of female births. Perhaps their only hope is to build more refineries... Well, either that, or to make good friends with the Aamjiwnaang.
Posted by: Eli at October 8, 2004 03:06 PM