28 January 1999, 885 words
Whatever improves the condition of women improves the condition of society. Want to reduce teenage pregnancy and spousal abuse? Get more girls involved in sports. Girls who play a sport are more likely to start sexual activity later in life, less likely to get pregnant, more likely to leave an abusive relationship. Want to curb population growth? Ensure more females get a secondary education. Women with higher educational backgrounds tend to have their first child later in life and to have fewer children. Want to reduce crime? Give single mothers tax breaks and pass laws to make delinquent fathers pay child support.
In a recent survey, over one thousand scientists and scholars were asked what was the most important invention of the past 2,000 years. The answers varied considerably, but one very favoured item was the contraceptive pill. It was this which allowed women to begin freeing themselves of the tyranny of biology. Now, in any nation worth labelling itself such, women are a crucial part of all key institutions, from family to government. And their value can only increase - ironically (and logically) most of all in those countries where their status is still that of an oppressed underclass.
In China, for example, there are now 118 men to 100 women. This is because girls babies are not valued in China: there is significantly higher infant mortality among girls than boys. The same thing goes on in India, where girls are 43 percent more likely to die than boys and five million girls "disappeared" from the population between 1981 and1991. The ratio of boy babies to girl babies is also on the rise in South Korea and Taiwan. But, while Asian countries have the greatest disparities, the phenomenon of males outnumbering girls is probably happening in every country. It has already happened in Trinidad, where there are now more men than women according to the last CSO census.
The reason for this is that, in every normal population, women give birth to 106 boys to every 100 girls. But then more boys than girls die in childhood so the ratio evens out. However, with better child care, more boys are now surviving those early years. Given this, and given the female-killing habits of the world's two most populous nations, it is almost certain that there will be many more men than women on the planet within a few generations.
In the long run, women will benefit from this: the law of supply and demand guarantees their rising value. But in the short run, they will continue to be abused, oppressed, enslaved and murdered. And it will get worse before it gets better. Before the development of the modern nation-state, the prime reason for warfare was never to get territory, but to get women. Within societies, violent crime is rooted mainly in two connected causes: economic disparity and the search for mates. In any society where high-status males have a disproportionate amount of fertile females, violence increases among the lower-status males - a direct response to the need to win mates for themselves. And, when men are not confident about the sexual loyalty of their mates - a fear which naturally increases when males outnumber females - then they are more apt to abuse and even kill the women.
When you understand this, you understand a lot of what is happening in Trinidad right now. The "deputy(s) essential" mentality allied to the widening gap between rich and poor is at the root of murder, spousal abuse and rape. It is also why the highest HIV infection rate is among young women.
Unfortunately, I do not think we can avoid the increase in violence and murders and STDs. But we can take measures to ensure that the inevitable changing of gender sensibilities happens as quickly as possible. Some of these measures I have outlined in the opening paragraph. Forget all the guff about treasuring women and women needing to respect themselves and so on. Those platitudes are always being mouthed by people who haven't the slightest real interest in women being treated as equal human beings. Roman Catholic priests can talk till they are blue in the face about respect for women, but as long as their Church opposes contraception, abortion and divorce, action will speak louder than cliché. Same for the Hindus, where the Maha Sabha pundits want 14 to remain a legal marriage age for Hindu girls; and same for Muslim leaders, not one of whom has seen fit to criticize the opinion of letter-writer Ahamad Baksh of Rio Claro that once a girl starts menstruating she must be married, but all of whom agree that a man has the right to beat his wife.
Gender relations must either change drastically or increased societal violence is inevitable. After all, look at the figures I have cited. It is quite obvious that, with those trends, there will come a time in certain societies when one woman will have several husbands, either serially or contemporaneously. I don't suppose this will bother those males who have thrown off the shackles of biology and tradition. Such men are the ones who truly respect women as equals: it is the killers, the batterers, the rapists, the paedophiles and the moralists who will be most outraged at that almost-certain future.
Copyright ©1999 Kevin Baldeosingh