Res-Erecting the Patriarchy, Pt. I

Mushrooms grow in bullshit. Patriarchy grows in bad analysis posing as scholarly analysis in Foreign Policy. Really. Who writes this stuff?

In The Geopolitics of Sexual Frustration, Martin Walker offers information about the imbalances between male and female birthrates in Asian countries.

Mother Nature’s usual preference for about 105 males to 100 females has grown to around 120 male births for every 100 female births in China. The imbalance is even higher in some locales—136 males to 100 females on the island of Hainan, an increasingly prosperous tourist resort, and 135 males to 100 females in central China’s Hubei Province. Similar patterns can be found in Taiwan, with 119 boys to 100 girls; Singapore, 118 boys to 100 girls; South Korea, 112 boys to 100 girls; and parts of India, 120 boys to 100 girls.

(This is the kind of information, by the way, that puts the whole notion that women are equal on a par with the report of WMD in Iraq. We're so equal that prospective parents abort us at higher numbers because they don't want to bring up girls. Feel equal yet? )
What pisses me off about this particular article is the incredible shallowness of the analysis. According to Mr. Walker, whose writing style denotes either a complete blindness to the inappropriateness of his language, or else a tongue-in-cheek approach to the problems of misogyny, the fault for this appears to lie with Professor Albert Macovski--the inventor of the ultrasound.

Oh yes. I know it's a rhetorical device. But it's so fucking inappropriate in this article it gives me agita.

The lost boys of Prof. Albert Macovski are upon us. Twenty years ago, the ultrasound scanning machine came into widespread use in Asia. The invention of Macovski, a Stanford University researcher, the device quickly gave pregnant women a cheap and readily available means to determine the sex of their unborn children. The results, by the million, are now coming to maturity in Bangladesh, China, India, and Taiwan. By choosing to give birth to males—and to abort females—millions of Asian parents have propelled the region into an extraordinary experiment in the social effects of gender imbalance.

Let's just parse the first paragraph, shall we? The lost boys is a reference to another of the arguments that Walker will make: namely, that it's bad, bad, for boys to grow up without girls, or more accurately, for men to live in a world without women. You see, when men live in a world without women, they become homosexuals. Shudder. Perish the thought. But never fear, because Mr. Walker is going to make a joke out of all of this. Ready??

The long-term implications of the gender imbalance are largely guesswork because there is no real precedent for imbalances on such a scale. Some Chinese experts speculate, off the record, that there might be a connection between the shortage of women and the spread of open gay life since 2001, when homosexuality was deleted from the official Classification of Mental Disorders. It is possible to dream up all kinds of scenarios: Mumbai and Shanghai may soon rival San Francisco as gay capitals. A Beijing power struggle between cautious old technocrats and aggressive young nationalists may be decided by mobs of rootless young men, demanding uniforms, rifles, and a chance to liberate Taiwan. More likely, the organized crime networks that traffic in women will shift their deliveries toward Asia and build a brothel culture large enough to satisfy millions of sexually frustrated young men.

Okay, leaving aside the whole issue of nature/nurture and homosexuality for the moment, let's get back to that first paragraph.
the device quickly gave pregnant women a cheap and readily available means to determine the sex of their unborn children.

WHAT THE FUCK??????
First off, ultrasound is not cheap, a point that Walker actually acknowledges, although not directly, when he points out that the highest rate of sex-selective abortion occur in the richest provinces. Poor people are still having girls. That aside, however, what is unbelievable in the sentence is its assignation of agency (blame) to women. It's not an overt statement, but I can't believe it's accidental, either. Ultrasound has become a way to know the sex of your fetus, but its purpose is to detect fetal defects, among other things. It's a diagnostic tool used on all parts of the body to detect soft-tissue problems. I'm sure Prof. Macovski did not invent the damn thing in order to influence gender imbalance. That's a fucking specious argument. as is the way Walker conveniently shifts the blame for all of this onto women--it's women who are given the ability to determine the sex of their fetuses.

Later, he argues that the communication of whether the fetus is a boy or a girl takes place between the ultrasound technician and the mother. The father is conveniently absent from the room, and perhaps from the decision.

See? You let women have abortions, and they're just going to abort their girl babies. Another goddamned reason you can't trust a woman with a choice.

The problems posed by too many boys has, according to Walker, left the Chinese government groping for answers. Groan. Did this guy not have an editor?? The real problem, you see, is that all these guys growing up without women will become one of two things: homosexuals or roving bands of sexually frustrated men, tearing up the place or marching off to war.

The second part of that analysis is, in fact, a constant theme in cultural history. Marriage domesticates men. It gives them something to do with their sexual energy, channels it (see? I can make puns, too) into one woman, and keeps bands of horny men off the streets.

Martin Walker had an opportunity to contribute something of value to the discussion about the social effects of gender imbalance. Instead, he chose to make cheap jokes and offer the kind of toss-off analysis that an undergraduate pulling an all-nighter to get in an essay is likely to do.

In Part II, I'll take a look at another article in this month's issue of FP, and try to offer a deeper analysis of patriarchy and its discontents.

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