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On a trip several years ago to Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, I was captivated, like so many travellers, by the historical sites: the Potala Palace, residence of the Dalai Lamas; or the Barkhor, the warren of shops and holy sites in the town’s centre. But I also noticed a phenomenon I could not find in my guidebook: the city was dominated by men. Unemployed men lounged, drunk, in parks and bus stations. They patrolled the streets, and wandered through markets. For every ten I counted, I would see at most two or three women.
As science journalist Mara Hvistendahl shows in Unnatural Selection, a bracing work of investigative reporting, such scenes are increasingly common in developing nations. From China to India, to eastern Europe and the Middle East, sex ratios – the relative numbers of boy babies to girls – are becoming skewed. The norm should be around 105 boys for every 100 girls. But in China the ratio is around 121 to 100; in India and Vietnam 112 to 100; in Albania 110 to 100.
Sounds pretty scary to me.
Socrates: The highest wisdom is to know that you know nothing.
One of the unintended side effects of the one child only policy of China, is that girl babies are often terminated or abandoned in favour of posible boys. So often in these cultures girls are seen as a burden (financial at least) whereas boys are expected to provide for parents in later life.
Yes this is scary, but it may also lead to a change in balance of gender power.....
Paula
Just because you don't believe it, that doesn't mean it's not true
Until very recently, China had a 1 couple, 1 child policy in an attempt to solve an overpopulation problem. Over most of Asia and the Middle East, boys are valued over girls in their cultures, Thus abortion and infanticide were often practiced so that parents would be assured a son. The value in this was two fold: A son is expected to provide for his parents in their old age, those who are farmers would have someone to help work the land as the son grows up, and the son could be expected to marry well and bring a female with a good dowry into the family, which would increase the security of the parents. On the other hand, a female child would grow up and when married, would take away some of the family wealth as a dowry, which to the view of the parents, was a lose-lose situation. So, you do not want girls when you can select for son(s). Birth of a male child is reason for celebration, birth of a girl is cause for commiseration.
India has had a similar program, and since a wife (of an arranged marriage) brings a dowry into the family, it is important for the son to "marry well" and to produce sons. Even if a man is gay, and lives with a gay lover in a larger town, he is expected to come home to procreate with his wife, preferably making sons. The value of the arranged marriages is that families of slightly lower status can enhance their status and family wealth, by marrying their sons to a woman from a slightly higher status family, and vice versa. The woman's family also usually gains something in the process, including removing another mouth to feed from the family. If the wife is unhappy and complains, she will likely be beaten by her brothers and father to convince her to remain in the marriage. The mother-in-law gets a virtual maid to help with the chores of the family, and takes on the role of manager of the new daughter-in-law's time and activities. If a wife is able to hold a job and bring money into her family she is more valued, but at the same time that ability is a negotiation aspect in making an arranged marriage. Matchmakers are usually used to be sure the marriages are arranged to the mutual benefit of both families. The son and his intended may only meet one or two times before marriage, and then only under the eye of family members. Wives who run away from husbands may be killed by her own natal family or her in-laws. They do not like to lose a dowry or status that results from the runaway bride. Refusal to marry in an arranged marriage is enough to get the girl killed by her relatives.
A transgender woman is of no value, since she cannot be married to produce sons. In Thailand and other countrys they may work as prostitutes and add to her natal family's wealth, but that is usually the role they are seen to fit into.
In India, transpeople usually leave their natal families and are outcast, though there are exceptions. In India, there is also the caste of Hirjas, trans women who are of low status, but they form "families of choice" and have "mothers" who teach them their roles and skills. In the larger cities, the Hirja system is somewhat breaking down, and true transition and SRS is available rather than crude castration and penectomy of the Hirja system.
"It’s not given to anyone to have no regrets; only to decide, through the choices we make, which regrets we’ll have,"
David Weber – In Fury Born
I had an interesting conversation about arranged marriage with a Pakistani woman a number of years ago. She had lived in America for a number of years and had divorced her husband.
She said that marriage is too important in Pakistan to be left to teenagers to figure out for themselves. Most girls at least are married off young, for a variety of reasons such as preserving virginity for marriage, attractiveness and status, getting rid of the mouth to feed and so on. Probably a lot of it has to do with custom, that prior to the need for higher education people traditionally married shortly after they reached child bearing age.
But anyway marriages are arranged, and it is considered the parents responsibility to arrange a good marriage. In her case her parents did not do a good job, and married her off to a cousin who treated her badly. She considered this failure on her parents part. Her husband brought her to America, and after a couple of years she told him that in America it's against the law to beat your wife and divorced him. She thought this was a great law.
She was a pleasant and outgoing woman. Her refusal to conform to stereotypical Pakistani norms can be seen in the fact that we would converse-we were neighbors and she'd see me taking my daughters for walks and strike up a conversation with me. She still held on to some old country opinions however. Her daughter wanted to go to her senior prom and she said okay, but you have to be home by 9 pm. Shortly after that her daughter ran away from home to live with her boyfriend. Whereupon her son went to the boyfriends house and threatened to kill him if he deflowered his sister. I guess this is a step forward from killing his sister, although a great many Muslims do not approve at all of honor killings. The police were involved and she was indignant, wondering what is wrong with America where a boy can not even protect his sisters virginity by killing her boyfriend. I tried to explain this to her but to her loss of virginity outside of marriage was just too unthinkable.
We also discussed rape one time. She told me rape is almost unknown in Pakistan because rapists are castrated. At which point I asked her if a rich man rapes one of his servant girls does she really think this will happen? She said no, of course not, rich men will always abuse and rape poor women and there is simply nothing to be done about it.
There were a number of Pakistanis living in that neighborhood, and my daughter became friends with some of their children. In general I found them to be quite pleasant. The women were not at all reticent, as might have been expected from reading about Pakistan. One of the funnier memories had to do with birthday parties. My kids went to several. Usually pizza was served, and there was always one pepperoni pizza for the Americans, the non Muslims who could eat pork. They would point to it with great excitement and urge us to enjoy it, and I think this was really just their attempt to be friendly and openminded, even if it sometimes made me thnk of a Black person being offered watermelon.
On 9-11 I remember talking to my daughter about her friends. I told her she'd been lucky to live where she did, and that to remember that if her friends parents had been on flight 93 they would certainly have been among the passengers trying to take back the airplane.
everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
Carolynn, while I certainly do think the tradional attitudes are important, the most disturbing thing about the article for me was the suggestion that this was the result of these attitudes colliding with modern technology. The article says that some of the disproportion between girls and boys in these countries was the result of parents being able to screen pregnancies and termininate unwanted female fetuses (that wouldn't have been possible until recently). I mean basically these countries have modernised (or are modernising) technologically, but retain cultural attitudes from the past - and the technology gives people the possibilty of actiing on those attitudes to a greater degree, so disturbing the society's equilibrium.
There's quite a few examples of the collision between modern and traditional producing awful results (albeit in not quite this sort of way and often you get other results, as in Absaroka's friend) - Some genocides seem to have appeared in non-modern countries that have modernised abruptly - And I'm just wondering if this is going to get out-of-hand.
Socrates: The highest wisdom is to know that you know nothing.
Anthony, why are you surprised? Adoption of technology is NOT the same as cultural change. Technology is only one small component of culture, and the most fluid and open to change and adoption. New technology adds words to a nations lexicon, as in France where a telephone is a telefon, a useful device for long distance communication without being there. It is the long held attitudes toward life that are slow to change. So, since the cultures still value sons over daughters, then they will USE the new technology to insure they will meet the culture norm. There is nothing inherently BAD about what they are doing, and actually it is none of our business if that is what they are doing. Trying to tend to other people's business and how they deal within their cultures is why we get into wars that do little more than cost many, many lives.
I have seen the studies on population shifts and sex ratios in professional journals, the same information you were reading in the book. The author is about 10 years late in publishing. Even the governemnts of the countries and cultures involved are concerned, in part because they see the possibility that the young people of their country will be leaving to find mates and stay there with their skills needed by their home countries, or that they will bring people from outside their culture into their countries, with new ideas that might destabilize their economy and government in the long haul.
Actually, in the long haul, this is a burp, a minor adjustment to new technology and it will self correct over the next generation or so. It is nothing to be concerned about. We have already adjusted to that in this country and in most western countries. Before good, easily affordable birth control, and before so many people moved into cities, large families were valued in the US. Now, WASPS prefer replacing the parental units with two children as most valued in our culture, a few with just one child, which from the standpont of population maintenance, is a good thing. They look down on the subcultures of poverty within our own cities because they adapt to their conditions and value children out of wedlock since they can get financial support for having them, and the poverty and lack of jobs leads to crime, which breeds another kind of subculture.
I have overheard people speak disparagingly of Mexican immigrants because they still do value large families, or out of their Catholic religious beliefs, they do not practice birth control other than abstenance. Those people get hysterical nearly as they are in part, fearful that the new immigrants are going to out populate the WASP population, to the detrimate of political and economic clout of the WASP population. They are not part of the actual political and economic controller of the country, but the fear the loss of what they have. Usually, as people see the opportunity and join in on the hunt to have luxury items, they will modify their behaviors to be able to afford these items.
The same kind of thing happens when immigrants move into a western nation, as Zari was talking about with the Pakistani woman. There were aspects of our legal system she found useful, but then there were cultural attitudes -- such as the morality of preserving virginity -- that she fell back on Pakistani values, and she defended her son for threatening anf fighting with her daughters boy friend. Her daughter was also a disobediant daughter, from the standpoint of her old culture. As far as the arranged marriage of her culture went, she blamed her parents for making a bad marriage for her, she did not say arranged marriages were bad. She likely was disturbed by her daughter running off because it will make arranging a marriage difficult if not impossible if her virginity can't be guaranteed. In Pakistan, not only would the boyfriend be killed, so would the girl, for dishonoring the family.
All immigrants run into culture shock, and when we move to other countries, we do too. Selectively accepting change is part of being human. If you understand that, then little hiccups like the situation in the book are not that alarming. It will take a few generations to completley assimilate the new technology and understand how it can work better for them, and while that is happening, new tech and new cultural attitudes will challenge the old culture. That is being a modern human being.
Carolynn
"It’s not given to anyone to have no regrets; only to decide, through the choices we make, which regrets we’ll have,"
David Weber – In Fury Born
Carolynn is right in the idea that techonological change and cultural change are not the same thing, although technological change can bring about cultural change. We can see this most easily in the area of food. China's one child policy was a response to population growth which was due in part to techonological changes in food production. Not that long ago infanticide was considered an acceptable form of population control and when overpopulation became a problem girl babies were killed. This was typically done by the new mother. Now they are aborted instead. Other means of addressing popuation problems can be found in birth control and also in better educated women, who typically have fewer babies. But those require larger cultural shifts.
I personally have to say I get very perplexed by the yuppie WASP types who have 6 or 7 children. Sure they love kids but it seems selfish. Overpopulation is a problem, period.
Carolynn was very right in that my friend viewed the problem in her marriage as the failure to arrange a good marriage, rather than the idea of arranged marriages. However my friend would have pointed to the number of unarranged marriages in America as proof of something......She would have been okay with her daughter finding a nice Muslim boy on her own and choosing to marry him. She wanted her daughter to go to college and to be more independent than she had been at that age. But the virginity thing had been so ingrained into her that she would have had great trouble accepting her daughters premarital loss of virginity. It was a question of if you browbeat someone long enough and hard enough with an idea that they will quite possibly come to believe it.
In general my friend (her name was Farida) was a nice person. She used to babysit the neighbors non Muslim children and never seemed prejudiced. I think in the end the goodness in someones heart can overrule a great many cultural teachings. She also sometimes tried to help explain American culture to some of the other Pakistanis in the area and was very supportive of an Indian woman who lived next door who's husband was very domineering.
Zari
everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
I guess I'm just a little less sanguine - in part because I'm a bit of a natural pessimist and in part because I know how very difficult it can be to change peoples' personal ideas.
You're probably right, Carolynn, it probably is a "burp" in the very long term. But then we're all (and the Earth is) pretty (totally?) insignificant looked at it from that sort of perspective. I do also have to say I believe in the contingency of events. I don't think that it's necessarily going to work out this way of that. I think it depends a lot on the competence of the people involved and the decisions they take.
I mean, a lot of the reason that they have the problems in China is Mao decided that increased population wouldn't be a problem. And then, when it was clear that wasn't so (apparently) the decision to do something about it came as a result of a non-specialist (literally) doing back of the envelope calculations. That's where "the one child" policy came from. I've got a book from 17 years ago with exactly the same sort of figures for the gender disproportion in China that we see now - and they've been trying to do something about it for quite a while. But they haven't succeeded.
You look at that record (as opposed to China's record of economic growth) - which is the same time brutal and cack-handed - and it makes you think...
Socrates: The highest wisdom is to know that you know nothing.
A little off topic, but are arranged marriages not more succesfull than "love" marriages, given that around half of all marriages end in divorce, how can we claim that giving people the total freedom of choice in thier partner is the best way? Sometimes I wonder if we would not be better off with parents making an informed, compasionate choice, than leaving it to the child to decide. I made my choice, and I am happy with it - I just hope that she is too.
Paula
Just because you don't believe it, that doesn't mean it's not true
I only know one, which is that of my dentist, an Indian woman. I did make the kind of standard, appalled, Western argument to her about how can this be better if you don't make the choice. But she didn't see it that way.
For a start she does get on with her husband and they seem compatible in quite a lot of and deep ways. She also has a daughter who's her pride and joy and a career which represents a big achievement coming from a relatively conservative background. From what she says about her parents they seem to have always had her best interests at heart - apart from knowing what they're doing. So, while I'm not sure how they made their choice, it's quite likely that they did select her husband on a pretty good basis.
Her husband's family, on the other hand, seem more interested in binding their son ever more tightly to them (this applies particularly to the mother). So it would be hard to argue that they really have his best interests at heart. That's been S****a's main problem, coming to terms with that continual pressure on her relationship (and she's also quite isolated in the UK - her family being abroad). Partly, I think it's helped her to see her mother-in-law as a kind of victim, a very talented woman who's kind of blocked with her talents - so that she's prepared to give a bit. But also she's had to fight her corner.
I mean that's another thing about marriages - the family of your partner. Generally speaking, in the past (say in dynastic marriages in this country's Royal Family) it's the interests of the families rather than the children that seem to have been paramount in arranged marriages.
Socrates: The highest wisdom is to know that you know nothing.
Many Asian familys with the tradition of arranged marriages may resort to marriage brokers, since as uninterested parties truly have the standards of the family and person as their directive. Consequently, it removes a level of emotional involvement from the search. most look for the potential of economic success in India, while Moslem based countries are more oriented toward alliances that enhance their family standing, regardless of what the sometimes prepubescent daughters might want in the future. Often when a marriage is so arranged, usually to an older man, then the young wife moves to the home of the new husbands mother to be taught how to please him. If the older man already has a wife and the girl will be a second wife, the first wife will teach her. Second wives are said to be lettle better than slaves to the first wife.
Cultural values do have an effect, and the happiness of the individual is not a definition of success in the marriage. Children, and being perceived as a person of good character according to the ,is.
Carolynn
"It’s not given to anyone to have no regrets; only to decide, through the choices we make, which regrets we’ll have,"
David Weber – In Fury Born
The use of marriage brokers, or match makers was until very recently popular in Ireland and I don't hear many complaints, also my understanding is that Islam like Christianity and Judaism rather frown on polygamy, not too sure about Hindu, but the Hindu ladies I know would definitely frown on it
Paula
Just because you don't believe it, that doesn't mean it's not true
Ahhh, but just how many wives does the leader of the Saudi's have? And it was a subsiderary wife who was with Ossam when he was killed. Given his conservatism, how can you say it is not valued in Islam? And recall the supposed reward for the selfsacrifice of the bombers and suiciders in terrorism was supposed to be 40 virgins. Multiple wives depends on wealth. If one can support them, he can have them. Same in Pakistan, India. Most other asian nations have monogamy.
It's actually 72 virgins, but what's a few virgins among terrorists, eh?!?
According to my Saudi friend, don't be fooled by what's being said by or about our POTUS: there's only one way to truly stop being a Muslem . . . and that's the same way one 'leaves' the Mafia.
- SL
SilverLady(SO) - Native Motor City and Wolverine gal . . . GO BLUE!! - Molon Labe - Saepius Exertus, Semper Fidelis - Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum - Proud Military Family - Navy, Army, Coast Guard, National Guard
Proud Military Family - Navy, Army, Coast Guard, National Guard