Everyone knows that the Chinese practice of sex selection abortions over the last 30 years has produced a huge surplus of young men in comparison to the number of young women. This imbalance is simply not sustainable over time and inevitably something will happen to correct it. Whatever that something is, one can imagine the circumstances playing into the hands of those Chinese leaders who want to re-establish China’s hegemony in Southeast Asia which it lost as a result of the First and Second Sino-Japanese wars. In particular, there are those who would be happy for an opportunity to even the score with Japan for the brutality of Japan’s invasion of China during the second Sino-Japanese war. It matters not one whit that we are talking about events stretching back well over 100 years. That long span of time is inconsequential to the Chinese mind as every Chinese student is educated to think in terms of the glorious 4000-year history of their country.
Though there are those who will see it as 19th century thinking, it is not too much of a stretch of the imagination—at least to the eyes of a realist who sees political leaders of this century as being driven by the same ambitions today as they have been throughout history—to see the drive for expansion of Chinese control throughout the region partly as a pragmatic means to deal with their male-female imbalance and thus as an accommodating factor to the actions of those Chinese leaders’ who are engineering increasingly aggressive military action in the South China Sea.
In 2013 China announced the establishment of its East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ), which abuts to Korea’s ADIZ and overlaps Japan’s ADIZ and serves as a direct challenge to Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands over which Japan exercised control initially in the late 1800s though to the end of WWII and again since the United States returned control over Okinawa and the rest of the Ryukyu Islands. China is likewise in disputes with both Vietnam and the Philippines over Islands in the South China Sea.
The United States, on the other hand, faces quite an opposite set of consequences stemming inevitably from policies of the feminist revolution that have been reshaping American society for the last 40 years. One very notable consequence of feminism’s conquest of the culture —an outcome that is as artificial, destabilizing and unsustainable as the Chinese indulgence in sex-selection abortions—can be seen in the shrinkage of male participation in both higher education and participation in the labor force.
It may suit a certain segment of female leaders for young women to now account for 57 percent of those enrolled in colleges and 57 percent of those earning Bachelor’s degrees (plus they earned 60 percent of the Master’s degrees) but over time this feminization of both education and the work force will have far reaching consequences for society and there will inevitably be a recalibration to right this imbalance. With upwards of 3 million more young women enrolled in college than men and 600,000 more women than men earning degrees (and flowing out of the ivy towers and back into the work-a-day world), the sexual imbalance in information-worker sectors grows all the more lop-sided. It is startling to realize that the 620,000 women earning degrees each year who have no male counterpart is equal to the population of Baltimore.
The idea that women are disadvantaged in terms of competing with men and thus require preferences is demonstrably a myth. Though the results of the November 2nd election are not yet finalized, of those elections already determined, more than 100 of them have sent women to serve in Congress: at least 20 in the Senate and more than 80 in the House. While these gains are laudable, the feminization of our culture warrant a re-examination of the myths about feminine disadvantage. We already see glimmers of rationality breaking through; there is a website devoted to correcting the “wussification” of American culture based on a book with the same title that laments the lack of emphasis on good training for “mentally strong warriors.” Liberal critics are after Fox News for discussions on “the feminization of America” and the “crisis of American manhood.” There is increasing concern about shortchanging boys in education. There’s been a spate of articles about a “war on boys” and “boys losing ground” and being “feminized.” The pendulum at some point has to swing more toward the middle where all children are encouraged and supported throughout the education systems and culture, in general.
Already, social scientists are concerned about the male/female imbalance in educational attainment — the gender gap and the achievement gap are both being widely discussed, with even the Pew Research Center addressing concerns about the male/female educational gaps, particularly as it regards minority populations.
A major area of concern for both China and the U.S. is the decline in prevalence of marriage that correlates with the crisis of male education and feminization of culture as a result. Social science researchers are almost unanimous in noting that “the most salient change in the U.S. family structure over the past forty years has been the substantial decline in the prevalence of marriage.” So why are so many women not getting married? The answer is simple, according to the Pew Research Center: there is a severe shortage of marriageable men.
And if, as seems increasingly likely, we are drawn into conflict in East Asia over China’s designs to establish a new empire that will rival the Ming or Qing dynasties, we are going to need a lot of the burly men that we currently confine to the football gridirons.
