Chinese gender imbalance will leave 24 million men unable to marry. We wonder: Why didn't anyone see this coming?
A new study released Monday by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences found that more than 24 million Chinese men of marrying age are likely to find themselves unable to find women to marry come 2020. The reason? There just aren't enough females to go around, because Chinese mothers often abort their baby girls.
"Sex-specific abortions remained extremely commonplace, especially in rural areas," the study explained, saying that the reasons for this imbalance of the sexes were "complex." Generally, however, experts speculate that male offspring are preferred in China because they have better earning potential and are therefore better equipped to take care of their parents as they age. Because of this, a report from Mirror Evening newspaper calculates that in some regions of China the male-female ratio was 130 males for every 100 females (a normal ratio would be 103-107 males to 100 females). Worse yet, according to Yahoo! News, "Abductions and trafficking of women were rampant in areas with excess numbers of men." Illegal marriages and forced prostitution were also problems in those areas, it said.
Not only is this news tragic, repugnant, and lower-than-low female-hating (I mean, seriously, how deep can the misogyny go? If you're a girl, you'll likely be killed off in utero, but if you do manage to make it into the world are doomed to a life of rape and torture at the hands of horny men? Sweet Lord, that is terrible), but it also makes China's population control policy-adopted in 1979, one child per family-look tremendously short-sighted. Did no one anticipate a gender disparity? Especially in the '80s, once pregnant women started getting ultrasounds and terminating girl fetuses like 'Whoa'? There wasn't one sex researcher who said, "Hey, guys. Guys? We might need these girls at some point...for the mating and the reproduction, if not simply because this practice of aborting them is truly and utterly f*cked?"
What a world.
Yahoo! News
