Time the world appreciated little girls more

Ask any young heterosexual adult male from outside the fundamentalist Muslim world, and I do not think that there would be any doubt that young women are appreciated.

Glamour and sex still sell, and across much of the world young women can play that card if all else fails (in many cases they have other cards that they can play, in Germany girls outscore boys in educational performance by some way, in the USA 60% of college graduates are girls, and even in Sunni Islamic Saudi Arabia and Shia Islamic Iran, more girls attend universities than boys!).

Which raises the question as to why when it comes to people having families, that boys should be preferred to girls!

Anyone understanding my point of view on world overpopulation (subject of another article to follow) would also understand why I approve in principle of China's one child policy.

The problem in China - particularly in the rural districts - was that the preference for boys was such that at best little girls were dumped in orphanages and their existence denied, while at worst, they were left out to die.

The policy has been in place for some twenty plus years. One side effect is that there are now a large number of young men in China for whom, surprise, there are no potential brides. Apparently some 40 million of them in fact (equivalent of almost the complete population of Spain, if you want an interesting comparison). I doubt whether a lot of these young men are all that happy about this situation.

I also read a statistic about one province in India where there are 100 young men of marriageable age for only 86 girls. A similar problem and how quite they ended up with that situation, I really do not know. For all that I remember an Indian correspondent on MyLot indicating that a large number of middle-class Indians flying to Bangkok where they have a medical procedure where they can guarantee the gender of their child, and these parents almost invariably wanted boys.

Imagine these boys in 20 years time when they want to find a girl to marry!

IMHO messing around with nature like this is undesirable, and I think that a lot of 20 year-old males would agree with me!

Japan, a country where women are appreciated and probably as emancipated as anywhere in Asia, has also a surplus male population, at least in the 20-35 age range. Quite why is an interesting question.

Then of course it is time to come back to Muslim culture and look at those countries where men can have four wives. As there is no surplus female population anywhere (except war-torn Afghanistan!), how do they all manage to meet this need? Some people have got to be disappointed!

Which in turn brings me back to the title of the piece. The attitude where boys are preferable to girls is based on silly traditions. Given a chance to develop girls will do often do better than their male siblings, and as any major aid organisation round the world will indicate, the healthier the female population is in any country in the world, the healthier is the state of the culture.

That should be borne in mind. Young parents to be should be encouraged to appreciate girls and let them grow into the wonderful people that they can be as adults. There is no reason based upon any criteria why they should be considered any less desirable than boys.