Great article, apart from the lack of any mention of the serious effect this will have on women.

There’s already a lot of violence against women in China, first due to the historic preference for men over women, but now also the lack of women is leading to kidnapping, buying and selling women, and sexual violence of all kinds, and it’s getting worse all the time.

I felt that this article glossed over that issue a bit too quickly.

James Prescott, a reputable neuropsychologist, explains this relationship in his paper ‘Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence’ (1975). Prescott asserts that the greatest threat to world peace comes from countries where people are deprived of physical affection as children and sexual gratification as adults.

And thus the author demonstrates the pitfalls of basing your entire article on the crackpot findings of one 35-year old paper. Also, I think the word “asserts” in the above is pretty significant.

Finally, am I right in reading your proposed solution to be: educate Chinese men that it’s ok to crack one off, and that will stop the Yellow Menace from over-runing the world in search of horny babes to bang?

‘Cos I’m not sure I buy this as particularly insightful foreign strategic policy analysis…

“In Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence’ (1975). Prescott asserts that the greatest threat to world peace comes from countries where people are deprived of physical affection as children and sexual gratification as adult”.

sexual gratification? They’ve got hands, haven’t they? If hands aren’t good enough, it’s easy to make a liver box. And you can use the liver afterwards to make maksalaatikko. Anyway, how come I’ve reached 63 without being violent?

There is already a huge sex industry in China, by some accounts 5 percent of GDP (although that is from memory and refers to the mid-00s), this has been directly influenced by China’s policy.

There will be problems when you have 40 million single men about, moreover, those 40 million single men will be hard worked, in about 5-10 years time China’s demographic will begin to age at a much lower income level than other nations did.

The demographics are going to be messy no matter what, a big gender imbalance isn’t going to help.

I don’t know anything about the paper you cite and Paul mocks, but I am happy to assume a priori that millions of overworked, single, low status men in a fractious and poor country with a weak social safety net, dozens of ethnic groups, and a residual, diminishing but significant misogyny is something worth examining.

Well, folks, there is general agreement in the scientific community that, irregardless of global warming, the sixth great extinction of terrestrial species, both flora and fauna, is taking place, due primarily to the number of human beings on the planet and their proliferation. Additionally, however, the world population of human beings is reckoned to increase by another couple of billion, that is, two Chinas by 2050, and as a consequence of that, the overwhelming likelihood is that the next few decades will see increasing competition between human populations, amounting to armed struggles, for food and water. So folks, mass extinction of thousands or millions of other species, admittedly of no importance to socialists, or free-marketeers, is well under way, and your children and grandchildren will be fighting for food and water. So, whether 40 million Chinese men will be able to have sexual intercourse with the woman of their choice, is not a matter of outstanding importance in the scheme of things. But human beings are resourceful and adaptable creatures, aren’t they? Necessity is the mother of invention. What’s wrong with polyandry?

A scientifically conceived sex education programme could help to change this discourse, resulting in China’s spouseless men having an outlet for their sexual energy.

Or they could just stop censoring teh interwebs – it’ll be less hassle and have much the same effect once they find the right keywords.

Seriously, things have moved on considerably since Prescott’s 1975 paper which is not so much ‘crackpot’ as reflective of a period in which studies of human sexual behaviour were still rather crude and unnuanced, so I wouldn’t read too much into his ideas.

But, according to your theory, if there was a surplus of frustrated, violence-prone young men in China we’d have seen an uprising of the sort you predict when the sons under the One Child Policy came of age in 2000.

Sunny, I’m not being funny but this article is some terrible garbage.

Left Outside,

“I don’t know anything about the paper you cite and Paul mocks, but I am happy to assume a priori that millions of overworked, single, low status men in a fractious and poor country with a weak social safety net, dozens of ethnic groups, and a residual, diminishing but significant misogyny is something worth examining.”

Sure, who wouldn’t agree with that? I was taking issue with this claim:

“Prescott asserts that the greatest threat to world peace comes from countries where people are deprived of physical affection as children and sexual gratification as adults.”

This is just bananas. And the reason – Unity – I called it “crackpot” is that this paper, dating from 1975, was written during the Cold War. To come out and say that people not shagging enough is the main threat to world peace, when the USA and USSR were pointing several million tonnes of nuclear warheas at each other in a situation of mutual distrust and systemic uncertainty, demonstrates the stupidity of that claim.

But to bring things up to day: I’m not sure Al Qaeda blew up the Twin Towers just because they couldn’t get a shag, and I’d caution heavily against reducing middle eastern geo-politics to the claim that Arab men don’t get enough cuddles as toddlers or enough action as grown-ups. Y’know, just saying. But really, what Gwyn @7 said.

I think the point is a broader one about social cohesion, not just about nukes. But who knows, nukes might be launched by leaders who need wars to deal with their angry populace.

It reminds of an article I read about India, specifically about the state of Haryana – which has a gross gender imbalance too, towards men. The article was about how the number of unmarried men was so large, that in a few cases women had actually married more than one man. This is fairly unheard of in India broadly. The same problem exists in the South of India, where infant girls are killed sometimes by families who want men.

It does bring with it, it’s own social issues. It’s just not clear what form specifically they will take.

Surprised no one’s pointed out how woodenly written the piece is, with paragraph breaks inserted seemingly by rote rather than to organize the content, and with the tone of someone regurgitating a poorly-digested textbook chapter. Sixth-form essay, anyone? I notice that the claim in the first line isn’t sourced, and the rest seems to come from papers/articles which are each over 15 years old. Unconvincing and rather shallow, IMHO.

Also, last time I looked, that isn’t how you conjugate the verb “to (fore)cast”…

Slightly quirky take on things, but certainly worth pointing out that China has big demographic problems ahead, unlike the US…

A remarkable piece, notable for

a) the bizarre assertion that wars are caused by a lack of cuddles and totty. Was that the problem with Bismarck’s Germany – or the Kaiser’s ? With Revolutionary France? Is Palestinian sexual frustration responsible for Hamas’ uncompromising attitudes? Seems unlikely given the high birthrates there.

b) the implication that more masturbation and more sex education could solve this. Likely I’d have thought to increase what frustration there is. Lust feeds on itself.

c) the bland presentation of eugenic policy, which from a rightie would make Sunny have kittens.

“As the women become more selective, it could be forecasted that the least able men might be cast aside from the gene pool, potentially resulting in a more able population.”

Quite possibly. Whereas in the UK we have a dysgenic policy, where the most-educated women have the fewest children.

China’s conscious interest in this is apparent through their introduction of the MIHCL (Maternal and Infant Health Care Law) which causes the sterilisation of those suffering from mental illnesses and hereditary diseases, whilst governmental policy dictates that those returning from abroad (social mobility being a sign of prosperity) are allowed to have another child. “

Forced sterilisation and nary a tweet.

Interesting demographics piece here :

In 2005, China’s median age was 32. By 2050, it will be 45, and a quarter of the Chinese population will be over the age of 65. The government’s pension system is almost nonexistent, and One-Child has eliminated the traditional support system of the extended family—most people no longer have brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, or nephews. It is unclear what sort of havoc this atomization will wreak on their society. China will have 330 million senior citizens with no one to care for them and no way to pay for their upkeep. It is, Eberstadt observed, “a slow-motion humanitarian tragedy already underway.”
By 2050, the age structure in China will be such that there are only 1.6 workers—today the country has 5.4—to support each retiree.

Will the Chinese, after studying the success of the UK, solve the problems of demographic change via mass immigration ?

I wrote about Chinese eugenics here.

“it is illegal in almost every province for single women to have a child and that people who have children out of wedlock must pay “social compensation fees” (29 Feb. 2009, Sec.1.f). The US Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) reports that those who give birth to a child outside of marriage can face fines six to eight times the amount of their income from the previous year (US 31 Oct. 2008, 97). According to a 2005 article in Reproductive Health, very few children are born out of wedlock in China (11 Aug. 2005, 3).”

The piece actually gets worse (for me) on rereading – if I were grading this as an essay there’d be red pen all over the place… What evidence is the author giving for these assertions, and why doesn’t he have sources dating from after 1995? It’s as if he’s taken a tendentious paper and then done a bad precis of it.

Thank you all for reading.
I did not want to suggest that a modern, scientific sex education programme would solve the issues which no doubt will be posed. With the internet less available for the poorest sections of society, and the freedom of it unlikely to happen, I hoped to suggest the severity of the issue could be alleviated or lessened by the introduction of a sex education programme.
The citing of the Prescott article was made as a scientific verification of the relationship between sexual gratification and violence. My mention of his statement that it was a major threat to world peace was poorly edited from the original, I admit, and is weak. Originally I wanted to illustrate how explicit the relationship between sexual gratification and violence is, making someone cocksure enough to make such a statement.
The point of the article was, firstly, to create an awareness of the hardship that Chinese society will face with its concentration of sexually suppressed men, but secondly, to also express China’s potential interest in fostering such a situation. The latter showing that China is more interested in creating a, supposedly, more able population than preventing the social ill which will most probably manifest itself in rape and kidnapping, among other things.

40 million’s a big number, sure. So’s the population of China a big number.

1.4 billion or so? So we’re talking about 6% or so of Chinese men (assuming 50/50 sex ratio, the whole point of this being that it isn’t but it’s still close enough) not being able to marry. As opposed to the 17% of US men that never marry causing such heinous problems in that society?

As to the points @ 1: when things become in short supply they generally have a greater value. And yes, we are already seeing changes in the status of women as the shortage of them hits home. Their status is rising, not falling to that of slaves to be kidnapped.

And the reason – Unity – I called it “crackpot” is that this paper, dating from 1975, was written during the Cold War.

It also dates to end of the Vietnam War and the tail end of the Cultural Revolution and is, therefore, far from being out of kilter with the cultural mores of the period.

You have to take into account the fact that, by the mid-70s, the Soviet Union was very much a known quantity, its economy had stagnated and we’d had the SALT 1 treaty and Helsinki accord. As far as the US was concerned, the USSR were pretty safely contained, inasmuch as you can say that of a major nuclear power.

China, on the other hand, was still a big unknown, particularly in terms of its nuclear capabilities, and that made it seem rather more threatening than even the USSR.

I wanted to respond, but I’m laughing too hard to think of anything to say.

Or they could just stop murdering girls and aborting female fetuses. But oh no, that will get away from talking about teh poor menz.

Oh yeah, the “the greatest threat to world peace” stuff I took with a pinch of salt, that is obviously nonsense, but the general idea has legs.

With respect to gwyn at 7, I’m sure demographics are not that deterministic. TO be honest, a bigger factor in men finding a wife right now is the fragmentation of society and the weird rural-urban migrant dynamic in China. People are registered where they are not and often migrants are housed in single sex dorms and not let out much. Moreover they move about the country a lot, not really conducive things for marriage or relationships. So the fact that there isn’t a clear causative breakpoint for this doesn’t mean that the idea is fundamentally flawed.

You also over look the fact that there are, in fact, tens (hundreds?) of thousands of mass actions (of varying violence) across China every year, and have been for some time.

“Or they could just stop murdering girls and aborting female fetuses. But oh no, that will get away from talking about teh poor menz.”

Haha, stop giving feminists a bad name, some time teh mens is a relevant subject of interest. The main problem is of course misogyny and that gets coverage, there’s certainly room for one post looking at lonely men on teh internets.

“there’s certainly room for one post looking at lonely men on teh internets.”

isn’t the whole of the internet designed around serving the interests of lonely men?

@thomas # 21: Where my “Like” button??!?! =)

On a more serious note, and I can’t believe I actually have to spell this out, Left Outside: the root cause of the problem is the systematic murder of female babies, and latterly aborting of female fetuses. It’s ridiculous to have any kind of discussion of the subject without so much as acknowledging that, which the article above doesn’t – it’s presented purely as a problem for men. That’s what made it more deserving of snark than rational opposition.

No amount of sex ed will make the basic problem go away in time to avert the demographic imbalance, and a similar one is looming, unaddressed, in India (where the elective abortion rate is if anything even higher). So like I say, it’s crazy talking about teaching Chinese men to pull one off without so much as mentioning that it might be an idea to also teach them not to kill their infant daughters if they’re lucky enough to have them.

MarinaS

I’m not denying the root causes of this, I know a bit about Chinese society.

Perhaps I’ve just internalised the importance of that to the extent that I don’t need to see every post I read on Chinese demography, especially those around 400 words in length.

Basically, I see this as complimentaty to other posts, articles and papers on the misogyny and murder that led to this situation, not in competition. Why do you see otherwise?

@thomas # 21

That was funny, but I hope you don’t completely dismiss my point.

Unity,

1. In 1975 China was still undergoing the effects and tortures of Maoism. This paper was not written with China in mind, because in 1975 China was not viewed as a major strategic threat to the west because a) it was still backward and pretty fucked up internall and b) was breaking with the USSR and had already been courted by Nixon.

2. The paper cited isn’t about China anyway, you’re conflating the author of this post’s interest in China with a paper about war being caused by – as somebody put it beautifully above – a dearth of hugs and totty.

3. Adding China and Vietnam to the list of 1975 geo-political military factors hardly validates the claim that war is (always! everywhere!) caused by adult male sexual frustration and lack of cuddles for kiddies. I mean, let’s take Vietnam and the pronlonged American refusal to admit defeat and withdraw: did this happen because of successive US Secretaries of State needing a shag, or because of long-term strategic planning in relation to a “domino-theory” that if the spread of communism was not halted by military force then it would spread across the globe and destroy American capitalism? Or perhaps Communists are really all just gagging for it, and the Yanks were pre-anticipating the theft of their daughters. Or something.

LO,
I don’t dismiss the point, and I agree that the male-oriented Chinese society has a lot to answer for.

Nevertheless if gender imbalance becomes increasingly marked there are more possible outcomes than the apocalyptic ‘social unrest’ suggested here (it signifies politicised thinking in an individual to determine possible causes for organised revolution first).

For example it may lead to a rise in homosexuality, or it may encourage greater gender reassignment (of which there is some small anecdotal evidence from the greater urban hubs along the Chinese coast, and there is some suggestion of this as a cause in Indian and Iranian society).

Equally gender imbalance may lead to greater divergence in the age of marriage between the sexes and this may result in more divorces with higher rates of remarriage for women.

Finally, there are several sketchy early psychological studies from the inter-war period in continental Europe which suggest rather than widespread social unrest localised gender imbalance coupled with brutalised individual conditions may have been a partial cause for periodic surges of incidence of mass murderers (which, though horrific, still accounted for relatively few numbers people).

But frankly the alternative that 40m male Chinese could form an overwhelming military corps to threaten the west (consequent of a mid-70s maoist threat post-Vietnam, similar to the Korean invasions) is somewhat undone by the ‘little emperor’ symdrome and the more consumer-dependant economy which renders large numbers of these individuals unfit for such duties to all practical purposes.

Whatever, the fact may explain some cultural phenomena in Chinese society, such as the lack of widespread internal concern over the rates of prisoner execution (who are overwhelmingly male).

History shows plenty of examples where gender proscription has occurred under different conditions and with different effects – in particularly highly-militarised classical society wasn’t averse to exposing infant girls, and enforcing 20-year military service on men without marriage. And in which case part of the result was the reproductive control exerted over a mass servant class (slaves and prostitutes).

So it’s far too simplistic and vague to suggest ‘social unrest’ is a likely result of even a massive gender imbalance in any society, which leaves the idea hanging wide open to all sorts of politicised negative interpretations.

Why not promote the optimistic view instead that demographic changes will change gender power relations and this will increase democratic pressure for peaceful constitutional and political reform?

MarinaS : “the root cause of the problem is the systematic murder of female babies, and latterly aborting of female fetuses”

(I’m not up with the terrminology – is this gendercide or female foeticide?

Are you saying that abortion is wrong, just because it’s not gender-neutral? Surely it’s a woman’s right to choose? What kind of a feminist are you?

27
You surely can’t believe that women, in countries that place a premium on male babies, freely choose to have their female foetus aborted?

I do agree with your point@12, the notion that a lack of sex can increase violence is, indeed, bizarre, especially when we see that annually nearly 50% of female homicides are carried-out by a partner or ex-partner, and that one in four women experience domestic violence.

@Laban #27: The kind that doen’t rise to transparent provocation.

@LO #24: As to your question why I see this particular post as not integral to the broader conversation about gendercide, I guess that’s because it is so overhwlemingly silly in most other respect. Such flimsiness of argumentation doesn’t inspire me with confidence that the author had considered the material point, or as you put it “internalised” the importance of gender dynamics to his subject.

“The Chinese government will not necessarily see the effect of these 40 million unmarried men as completely problematic though. As the women become more selective, it could be forecasted that the least able men might be cast aside from the gene pool, potentially resulting in a more able population.”

Since India and Taiwan also have a surplus of males – little (or not little) war can help to get things back to norm