1.3 Girls for Every Boy

The demographic news from the east and the west could not be more different, and yet the potential consequences are similarly dire.

China will have 24 million more men than women by the end of this decade.  Researchers anticipate that low-income schlubs will have trouble finding spouses and will turn to crime.

In the U.S. the opposite is true.  Here, we have an excess of women over men—in round numbers, about four million.  At a 1.3 to 1 female-to-male ratio we’re not quite the “Two girls for every boy” Valhalla dreamt of by Jan and Dean in “Surf City,” but we’re getting there.


Jan and Dean: Demographers ahead of their time.

An environment in which there is a material imbalance between the two major sex groups isn’t a happy one regardless of which way it tips, but when there are more men than woman–look out.  Social scientists of various sub-disciplines have noted that nations become more warlike when there are too few women to go around, and China–in case you hadn’t noticed-is starting to get an itchy trigger finger, building barrier islands in the Pacific, developing an electromagnetic rail “supergun” that could make many current conventional defenses obsolete, and most recently, successfully launching a supersonic nuclear missile around the globe while members of the U.S. military were fastening brightly-colored doo-dads to their uniforms.

Image result for military medals "fruit salad"

Here, by contrast, different side effects have begun to appear.  At some American colleges the grade point average of incoming female students is half a point higher than the men’s.  It has to be, anti-discrimination laws be damned, in order to keep the female/male ratio below 60/40, at which point the excess supply of women causes male students to become heartless cads (if they aren’t already), and move without remorse from one debauched coed to another like bees flitting from flower to flower.

Thinking globally and acting locally, there is only one thing to do.

It’s time to start exporting American women to China.

Don’t get me wrong.  My mom was an American woman, my sisters are American women, I married an American woman—some of my best friends are American women.  But we’re all in this together.  We’d better start working as a harmonious crew in order to right Spaceship Earth, which has drifted dangerously off course.

If you think this proposal is absurd, consider the alternative.

We have nowhere to put 24 million surplus Chinese men.  Even if we did, the U.S. currently has a $20.2 billion trade deficit with China, an all-time high.  We need to increase our exports, not our imports, and the U.S. takes a back seat to no one in the production and manufacture of American women.

But, you may say, all this is speculation on your part, you faceless internet scrivener.  What harm can there be in having extra men lying around?  Let me give you a concrete example.

At the college I attended males outnumbered females by a ratio of 1.4 to 1, and it was not unusual for hostilities between men over women to escalate rapidly from cutting remarks to outright violence.  At a party in my apartment one night I was surprised to find two normally affable Jewish men in my bedroom, squaring off over a shikse who’d been playing one off against the other.

“Guys–break it up,” I said, stepping between them.  “Look at you!” I yelled, and they fell silent in embarrassment.  “This is my bedroom, fer Christ sake,” I said, exasperated.  “I need it for a fight with an addle-brained scion of an old New England WASP family over an English major who’s got a balcony you could do Shakespeare from!”


Addle-brained preppy doofus.

Reverse the genders and you’ll see the problem.  Do we really want American women slipping off for hair-pulling matches in lavishly-furnished bedrooms, exposing high thread-count sheets, pillow shams and duvet covers to decorating mayhem?  I don’t think so.

Of course, it isn’t every woman who needs to be exported, it’s just the ones who are running up huge debts that have made China our largest creditor—we owe them $13 billion!  Did you borrow money from China?  I know I didn’t.  It must have been those surplus women.

Exporting free-spending women to China has a “multiplier” effect with ancillary benefits for our economy.  Fewer “hostess” gifts will be purchased and given to other women, who must then respond with even nicer presents when the favor is returned.  We’d finally get off the beggar-thy-neighbor treadmill and start living within our means.

Getting men to volunteer their wives for export will be difficult, and we can anticipate tearful scenes of separation on docks as couples kiss before the women are loaded onto container ships by sweating stevedores.  Men watching on TV can turn to their wives and say “If you get your shopping under control, we may be able to preserve you for domestic consumption rather than export.”

Think about it, okay?

The wife you save may be your own.

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