Now, we get why people prefer to have male children rather than female. It’s totally understandable. Girls are floppy and worthless, and they’re likely to turn out to be whores, and they’re a terrible drain on the wallet without giving anything back. If only humans could figure out a way to have male children exclusively.
A combination of cultural preferences, government decree and modern medical technology in the world’s two largest countries has created a gender imbalance on a continental scale. Men outnumber women by 70 million in China and India.
Yay! Now to get to no women at all.
Out of China’s population of 1.4 billion, there are nearly 34 million more males than females — the equivalent of almost the entire population of California, or Poland, who will never find wives and only rarely have sex. China’s official one-child policy, in effect from 1979 to 2015, was a huge factor in creating this imbalance, as millions of couples were determined that their child should be a son.
India, a country that has a deeply held preference for sons and male heirs, has an excess of 37 million males, according to its most recent census. The number of newborn female babies compared with males has continued to plummet, even as the country grows more developed and prosperous. The imbalance creates a surplus of bachelors and exacerbates human trafficking, both for brides and, possibly, prostitution.
Well not really “brides” as normally understood. If they’re trafficked then they’re slaves, even if there is a “marriage” of sorts.
In short? It’s a problem. The devaluation of women and girls has consequences.
Comments
16 responses to “No daughters please”
The one child policy wasn’t too bad; if only they’d been able to coerce their peasants into not murdering all their girl babies (good luck with that).
Setting aside the nasty sexist cause and just looking at the results for China…
34 million sounds huge but in a population of 1.4 billion it’s only 2.4%.
So China is roughly 51.2% male and 48.8% female. I’m actually astounded the difference is that small.
There is always going to be a signicant percentage of people who don’t want to or can’t get married, much higher than 2.4%. So the men who China who want to get married and never find anyone will be somewhat higher. Offhand, that doesn’t seem likely to cause catastrophic damage to society, but who knows, sometimes small changes can have surprisingly big consequences.
Polygamy: (one husband, several wives) is far more widely practiced than its counterpart, polyandry. The latter is confined to a few isolated regions (eg Tibet) where resources are scarce, though that may be changing there. Otherwise, wives can be counted as male possessions along with house, servants, maids, oxen and asses (see the 10th Commandment).Other domestic animals are not listed, but presumably include dogs, sheep, goats, chooks, ducks, pigs, horses, elephants and of course, peacocks and peahens: without which no garden is complete.
BTW Cats get not a mention in the Bible. They are out on their own, and presumably were so when Moses was compiling his Commandments.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/primate-diaries/case-of-the-missing-polygamists/
polygamy: multiple spouses
includes
polygyny: multiple wives
polyandry: multiple husbands
Chigau @#4:
That too.
@Omar:
I knew there was a reason I couldn’t get on with that book, that must be it ;)
I’m pretty sure there are lions in it. And leopards? I wonder why no domestic cats. I can’t get through a day without mentioning cats at least once.
Maybe it’s because the Egyptians liked them so much :)
There’s bound to be a list on Wikipedia of animals in the bible, I’, going to have to spend an hour looking at it, aren’t I?
Sure enough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_in_the_Bible
Oh, to continue my derailment of this thread, from that page:
Well done that man…!
;-)
Domestic cats… well, so-called ‘domestic cats’ were sacred to the Egyptians, presumably because they were inclined to hang around granaries, where they could catch no end of vermin rodents.
https://www.ancientegyptonline.co.uk/cat.html
@Omar
Yes, although I’m always wary of the word “sacred”, especially when it is applied to animals. And especially now that we seem to blunderbus the word “sacred” to apply to anything we marginally and tangentially care about.
Are cows “sacred” in India in the same sense the word is used elsewere? I don’t know, but as I understand it they are venerated in culture rather than being considered something godlike by religion. I was told by my father (who is not reliable and has never been to India) that Indians will stop their cars and wait for hours for it to leave if a cow is on the road. This sounds like bullshit to me, why wouldn’t people just gently persuade the cow to move somewhere it would be happier?
The same goes for cats. They were surely useful and possibly venerated by Egyptians, but worshiped? Sacred? Are we using the wrong words here?
I’m not attacking you, Omar, but my bullshit sense goes crazy when people apply words like “sacred” to things like cows and cats.
I can say without reservation that my cat is not sacred, it is A BAD CAT. It brought a sparrow into the house last night and made a point of arranging each of its feathers in evermore inaccessible places.
During the massive cultural/religious/military meltdown we now call the Taiping Rebellion—which Guinness used to name as the bloodiest conflict in history—one of the many sub-rebellions was called ‘Bare Branch.’
Years of famine and economic depression had vastly increased the infanticide of girls, to the point where the surplus of young men fueled its own desperate and violent movement. Added to the presence of a self declared Messiah, Hong Xiuquan, and an outbreak of Islamist imperialism in Sinkiang, the decade and a half of violence may have cost 50 million lives.
And, a reminder that polygamous patriarchies generate surpluses of young men, to be spent on war, or simply discarded a-la Warren Jeffs.’
There are economic pressures behind the preference for sons, as well as misogyny. Most traditional societies practice patrilocal marriage. Sons stay with/near their parents. Daughters move away to join their husband’s families. Having a son is the only retirement plan available. Having multiple sons provides more “security” in case the eldest son dies or is unreliable for some reason.
That’s not an excuse, of course, and the patrilocal tradition is just another tentacle of patriarchy, but it is part of the context.
Government pensions for the aged are one solution to this problem. Not only do they reduce the pressure to have sons rather than daughters, they also reduce the pressure to have multiple sons. The seem to be born out in societies that have such pensions, though cultural differences complicate drawing such a conclusion without reservations.
Latverian Diplomat, it isn’t just government pensions that would be a solution. Perhaps recognizing that daughters, too, can work, and not insisting that the women must always follow the husband…some women might prefer the husband follow them, but the societal construct that still views women in the light of being the follower of her husband still runs amok in societies today (including our own – when I was working for a recruiter, most of the women would tell me they couldn’t relocate for a better job, because they needed to stay where they were for their husband’s job. These were all educated, professional women (Physical Therapy was the field we worked with). In one case, the woman’s husband drove an ice truck. Truck driving is a job you can do anywhere, but she wouldn’t move because of her husband).
So I still think it is basically related to misogyny. The idea that women are possessions of their husbands is still common even in the highly industrialized west – just a bit more subtle is all.
Interesting to note that part of the outcry about this is about men going unsexed.
iknklast,
Can’t speak for Latverian Diplomat, but my guess is that it would be much more promising a strategy to introduce an old age pension and see patrilocal marriage and other traditions only held up by the need to avoid antagonising your clan wilt away over the next two generations than it is to tell the clan to just not insist on such traditions pretty please.