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Opinion: Boys are stupid, throw drag queens at them

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You’ve probably heard a thing or two about China’s woman shortage, and the roles that the ‘Market-Communist’ Republic’s one-child policy and old timey woman hatred have played in bringing that shortage about. But now, in opinion journalism’s answer to ‘Class of Nuke ‘Em High,’ The New Republic’s Mara Hvistendahl puts drooling, sideburned, knuckledragging flesh on the raw statistics. It’s not just that there are too many young men; it’s that they’re dangerous delinquents who play soldier with (illegal, naturally) air rifles!

The macho violence spurting forth through outlets like war games is a growing trend in Chinese society--and China’s one-child policy, in effect since 1979, is partly responsible. The country’s three decades of iron-fisted population planning coincided with a binge in sex-selective abortions (Chinese traditionally favor sons, who carry on the family line) and a rise, even as the country developed, in female infant mortality. After almost 30 years of the policy, China now has the largest gender imbalance in the world, with 37 million more men than women and almost 20 percent more newborn boys than girls nationwide.

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I smell a buried lede. No doubt somebody somewhere has at some point put his or her eye out with a BB gun, but this business about a rise in female infant mortality seems a good deal more alarming than the utterly unremarkable news that boys and men are aggressive morons. (You may counter that female infant mortality in China is not news at all, and that it’s been known for centuries that people will abort, murder or abandon girl babies solely on the basis of their gender. But then that just shows that the creepiest customs are the ones that are generally tolerated.)

And how much does a 37-million-person gender gap actually amount to in a population of 1.33 billion? It’s enough, as my old friend Jacob Sullum has explained, to create a market distortion in favor of child-hungry couples in the West. But when Hvistendahl heads out to see some of these children in action, the evidence is less astounding than you’d think:

Lianyungang, a booming port city in a Jiangsu province economic belt, is ground zero for some of these changes. According to the China Family Planning Association, it’s the city in China with the most extreme gender ratio for children under four--163 boys for every 100 girls. One sunny Saturday morning at verdant Cangwu Park, I count six boys and three girls bouncing on the inflatable castle. Near the ice-cream stand are a dozen sticky-faced kids, seven boys and five girls, feeding pigeons. The children running after kites adorned with Olympics mascots and China’s Shenzhou VII spaceship: three and two. The drivers of the cheerful little tanks circling an electric track: three and one.

A three-to-two gender gap among child kite flyers? The obvious eventual solution to that problem will have to be widespread acceptance of polyandry (the true mark of an evolved society). But as it happens, the Worker’s Paradise has already ruled against that idea. So again, the only solution is violence:

Two years ago in Nanjing, Jiangsu’s capital, businessman Wu Gang opened the Rising Sun Anger Release Bar in a cheap hotel near the bank of the Yangtze River. The bar featured staples of Chinese entertainment like big-screen karaoke and plates of sunflower seeds but also a central catwalk where, for 100 yuan ($15) per minute, customers paid to assault the waiters, single young migrants from poorer cities to the north. If a customer preferred, his victim would dress in drag.

You know, in any other publication, I’d say this whole anecdote sounds fishy. But since it’s The New Republic, I’ll accept that somewhere in Nanjing there’s a three-block-long line of applicants for waiter jobs. (They don’t actually want to dress up in women’s clothing and be manhandled by beefy young men, but you’ve gotta earn a living in this tough economy!)

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History will judge the People’s Republic of China harshly for its grotesque experiment in population control. Someday it may judge all of humanity harshly for our failure to breed out the Y chromosome and end the tyrannny of pampered princelings over better, smarter, higher-performing girls once and for all. In the meantime, it’s best to take your sociology — and your ‘Wild In the Streets‘-style cautionary tales about uncontrollable youths — with a grain of salt.

Courtesy of Arts & Letters Daily.

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