As the global population hits seven billion, experts are warning that skewed gender ratios could fuel the emergence of volatile "bachelor nations" driven by an aggressive competition for brides.
The precise consequences of what French population expert Christophe Guilmoto calls the "alarming demographic masculinisation" of countries such as India and China as the result of sex-selective abortion remain unclear.
But many demographers believe the resulting shortage of adult women over the next 50 years will have as deep and pervasive an impact as climate change.
As bad as climate change? Oh, then never mind. No problem.
Seriously, while the sex imbalance is disturbing for many reasons (as a father of a wonderful daughter, I don't understand why you'd not want a daughter--no offense to my son, of course), why would it lead to bachelor nations recreating Mars Needs Women?
One, since the three countries mentioned are all next to each other, won't they be more likely to fight each other for women? Winner gets women and the loser gets a deeper imbalance?
Or will they form an Axis of She-fail to pick on the countries without excess males to steal their females?
Seriously, why wouldn't China, India, and Vietnam just develop a lot of men really good at video games, with only beer and mayonnaise in their near-empty refrigerators; and Manhattan Project-style engineering programs designed to improve online porn and FPS games, and make pleasure robots? I sincerely doubt that young men who don't even need to worry about sucking in their gut in the presence of non-existent single women will be in good enough shape to be a threat to anyone.
Hey, instead of war, maybe societies will evolve new norms:
When Munni arrived in this fertile, sugarcane-growing region of north India as a young bride years ago, little did she imagine she would be forced into having sex and bearing children with her husband's two brothers who had failed to find wives.
"My husband and his parents said I had to share myself with his brothers," said the woman in her mid-40s, dressed in a yellow sari, sitting in a village community center in Baghpat district in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
"They took me whenever they wanted -- day or night. When I resisted, they beat me with anything at hand," said Munni, who had managed to leave her home after three months only on the pretext of visiting a doctor.
Not that this is a good evolution. In non-Western societies, scarcity of women will result not in their elevated status as men pursue scarce women, but the turning of women into prized assets to be owned, bought, and sold.
Sex-selection abortion will have a lot of bad effects. But I doubt that we need to worry about rampaging Asian men out to steal women.
UPDATE: Scarce children are a commodity in China:
Police in eastern China have broken up a human trafficking gang that bought babies from poor families and sold them on for as much as $8,000, state media said Friday.
Tell me that the same fate doesn't await adult women from poor families.
