Let’s be practical about this
Chinese authorities have been trying for three years to reverse the devastating imbalances of their one-child policy and coax couples to have more children.
Trying and failing. The birthrate remains low and – plot twist! – there are far more men than women.
Eh, what? Why’s that? A low birthrate doesn’t equal more men being…oh wait yes it does. If you can only have one it HAS to be a male, amirite? Nobody nobody NOBODY wants an only child who is a [retch gag puke] female. (Why not? Well, come on, I ask you – they’re so disgusting – they do all that gross pregnancy stuff and then milk-producing stuff. Ew. Men are clean and tidy.)
But now, an economics professor at Fudan University in Shanghai has come up with another — and, unsurprisingly, controversial — solution: allow women to have multiple husbands, and they will have multiple babies.
Oh they will, will they. Is he sure about that? Women who wanted no more than one child will automatically want one per husband if they decide to have several? Dream on, bro.
In China today, home to 1.4 billion people, there are 100 million only-children under the age of 40. But the traditional preference for sons — and the associated practice of aborting girls — means that there are about 34 million more men than women.
Oops.
So they prevent about 34 million women from existing, and then they want existing women to make up the slack by pushing out more babies for them. That’s a big NOPE, comrade.
His suggestion to solve the oversupply of men is to allow involuntary bachelors — known as “bare branches” in Chinese because they cannot bear fruit for their family tree — to share the relatively scarce supply of women.
Yes but women aren’t a “supply” and women are not things for real people to “share” among themselves. Thanks anyway.
Plus, it would just be more efficient, he continued, suggesting that women would have no trouble meeting the physical needs of multiple husbands.
Sure. They can just lie there. What difference does it make if it’s one or ten?
“It’s common for prostitutes to serve more than 10 clients in a day,” Ng wrote, before taking off on another offensive tangent. “Making meals for three husbands won’t take much more time than for two husbands,” he added.
How about twenty? Fifty? Let’s get really efficient.
Ng is steeling for a fight. He wrote that his next column aimed at redressing gender imbalances would be about legalizing brothels.
Because China’s gender mismatch has caused a fierce competition among men looking for wives, he said, “a man’s right to achieving sexual satisfaction is being severely violated if legal sex work is not allowed.”
Heyyyyyyyy, that’s what Amnesty International says! Also Elliot Rodger, also incels on Twitter shouting at women for existing.
Somewhere, James Bennett just leapt up from his chair, exclaimed “I’ve got to get this guy to write a NY Times op-ed piece! That’ll really rile up the readership!”
Then he remembered he had just resigned, sat down, and sighed. “Maybe Bari will put in a good word for me with the Intellectual Dark Web folks.”
Heh
One thing that really irks me is this push for more and more and more babies. We do it here, too. The problem is, the world is already overpopulated. We need to bring the birthrate down not up. We need to focus on getting food, health care, and shelter for the people that are already here, and on preserving some small trace of the existing Earth systems, which will not be possible if we continue to increase our population without limit.
Even if we found a way to feed billions more people (by creating synthetic food, maybe?), there is still the problem of space. A human needs a certain amount of space even if we stand shoulder to shoulder without moving. Even if we agree that we take over the small remaining habitat of all the other species. Even if we decide we don’t mind standing shoulder to shoulder without moving.
I particularly liked the ““Making meals for three husbands won’t take much more time than for two husbands,” he added.”
I am an economist. When something is scarce, the price rises. You can apply that to thinking about households, but when you do, you should expect that some assumptions will need to be changed. In this case, the price for having a ‘half-wife’ would more likely be that traditional household division of labour in China has to be discarded. Alternatively, what husbands must do in order to have a wife must rebalance in favour of the scarcity, which gets you to about the same place.
This clown is pretending to be radical, but really isn’t at all. You can see that once you actually look at the data – China’s falling birth rate in urban families is partly explainable due the missing ~34 million, but not entirely. Much like in Japan, as Chinese urban affluence increases, Chinese women have become less and less interested in putting that aside to have children in a role that has not changed much since Confucius.
I’m not sure why they’re using misleading numbers to make it seem like it’s a huge mismatch, comparing 100 million “only children” vs. 34 million more males total. These are “children” under 40, which are well over half the population of China, so we have at least 700 million “children” total (not just “only children”) with 34 million more males. That’s not that big of a difference. There are always people who’d like to be married but don’t find anyone. The number will be somewhat higher for men due to this disparity. It doesn’t seem like a huge deal.
But I certainly agree with the lack of sympathy for their male preference causing (shocking!) an excess of males. And the polyamory suggestions are ridiculous.
I don’t even think it’s fair to most modern polyamorists to call “have multiple husbands whether you want to or not for the good of your country and so all men get sexually serviced” polyamory.
Also didn’t Amnesty International stop saying that about how men have a right to sex?
I remember when population hit 4 billion. There will be 8 billion of us shortly and one little pandemic isn’t going to make a dent.
The population took all of human history to reach 2,500,000,000 not long before I was born. We’ve added twice that number just in my lifetime, and I’m only 62. Just like global warming, the growth is feeding on itself.
Funny the timing of this piece, given the fact that, because of the sudden and unexpected apearance of COVID-19, a huge percentage of Earth’s human population turned on a dime to make rapid, massive changes in individual and institutional behaviours and practices, costing untold trillions of dollars to the global economy. Please explain again how it’s impossible to change people’s attitudes, and “the way things are” so that women are treated fairly, decently and equally?
I realize that the sex imbalance will take decades to redress, but what better time to start than now? If women and girls were valued equally to men and boys, this mess would not have happened. Fixing that difference in value now would keep the current imbalance from being perpetuated.
In the meantime, I have some suggestions. Stop thinking of women as being some sort of raw material, commodity, or supply to be divied up between men. Stop assuming that only the female sex is expected to be doing unpaid labour in the form of housework, and that the extraction of even more isn’t going to be a problem. I know it’s really easy to spend other people’s lives if you don’t see yourself as ever being subject to the same demands, but do try to make the effort.) Stop talking about men’s “right to sexual satisfaction” (at the expense of women) is another useful step. Stop thinking that this is a “problem” that is the responsibility of women to solve, or the solution of which is paid for exclusively by women, would be another.
Transphobic trash. Surely not all of those aborted fetuses were girls. Did anyone ask their gender identity first?
Strictly speaking, 17 million, because the baby boys in question are had in place of baby girls.
Now: 34m male—0m female
Alternative: 17m male—17m female
Moment of pedantry over.
This is the thing that has always bugged me, too. For some reason, a declining national birthrate is always seen as a sign of impending doom, nay, apocalypse. Why? Seriously, why? Why does the population have to be monotonically increasing? What is the supposed benefit? Is there one, or are people just so innumerate that they think that if a given generation has 50% the fecundity of previous generations, that will mean 50% of the population disappears?
Nullius, the answer I always receive when I ask that is that we must have more people to keep the economy moving. Our economy is built on the idea of unlimited growth. Apparently the only way to do that (it’s impossible, of course, but too many economists refuse to recognize that) is to have unlimited growth in population. Plus there’s the inevitable “We don’t have enough people to pay taxes to build more roads”. Well, if you have fewer people, you don’t need as many roads, right? But they can’t see that, because to them progress means building things, paving systems, and building more things…into infinity and beyond. Their hyperimprobability drive convinces them they can do it.
Thing is, making fewer babies results in fewer children growing into young adults to keep the economy going through wage employment and buying stuff, unlike unproductive and frugal old people, who don’t buy much except drugs and medical care and have the nerve to expect those to be subsidized by those productive young people who then have less to spend on the stuff they produce. A vicious circle leading to ruin!
Simple, see?
The commodification of human beings has always been a repulsive notion to me, even the LDS church promoting maximum procreation to increase the number of ‘worker bees’ on the family farm since the 1800’s points to an ominous, dehumanizing ideology. Not to mention the history of the slave trade and the breeding of slaves to increase the herd. It’s inhumane and diabolical.
I have a better, nasty idea:
Capital punishment for those who kill their girl babies. Would’ve nipped it in the bud ages ago.
Interesting choice of phrasing.
Surely application of the true free market doctrine of scarcity would be that the ‘buyer’ would value the ‘product’ more highly and therefore would be prepared to ‘pay’ a higher price?
By pay I mean in this specific case demonstrate to a woman that she was loved, cherished, respected and treated as an equal so that she felt no need to look longingly at the many other potential suitors out there. The idea of sharing the scarce resource around on some sort of roster smacks more of a demand economy. Which of course China is, so there’s that. I can’t help but feel this smacks more of the plain old sexist and misogynistic crap of viewing women genuinely as products and vessels for pleasure and work, rather than people. Sadly that seems to be universal regardless of race, culture, religion…
Stand back, people! I have arrived at the perfect solution! We take all the “trans women” and ship them off to China for the excess males to have all the (male) babies they want with. Because TWAW, right? And then real women lesbians will be free to have all female events again!
@southwest88:
I had more or less the same thought… or they can pull an Iran and start declaring men female; problem solved!
southwest, BKiSA, that fits with what I was thinking yesterday. If they really are women, they need to be treated like women. They need to be given sandwich-making duties at the office. They need to be the one to have to bake cookies for school functions. They need to be required to sit on the boss’s lap while taking dictation, or asked to lean over and pick up the pencil (in a mini skirt? low cut dress?). They need to make coffee, dust the bookshelves, fix the ouchies, straighten the cabinets, buy the birthday present for the boss’s wife, and say nothing as hands creep up their skirts while they wait at the copier, attend meetings, meet with clients, or whatever their job involves (like all the flashers my sister and I dealt with working McDonald’s drive-thru in our teens). And they need to do it for only 77% of their current pay.
If they go through all that for, let’s say, five years, then I might consider that they are on their way to “feeling like a woman”.
Oh, I almost forgot. They need to be told to smile…to brighten up everyone’s day.