The Atlantic: The End of Men (via Newsalert):
Polling data on American sex preference is sparse, and does not show a clear preference for girls. But the picture from the doctor’s office unambiguously does. A newer method for sperm selection, called MicroSort, is currently completing Food and Drug Administration clinical trials. The girl requests for that method run at about 75 percent.
Even more unsettling for Ericsson, it has become clear that in choosing the sex of the next generation, he is no longer the boss. “It’s the women who are driving all the decisions,” he says—a change the MicroSort spokespeople I met with also mentioned. At first, Ericsson says, women who called his clinics would apologize and shyly explain that they already had two boys. “Now they just call and [say] outright, ‘I want a girl.’ These mothers look at their lives and think their daughters will have a bright future their mother and grandmother didn’t have, brighter than their sons, even, so why wouldn’t you choose a girl?”
posted by Helen at 10:03 AM
49 Comments:
"These mothers look at their lives and think their daughters will have a bright future their mother and grandmother didn’t have, brighter than their sons, even, so why wouldn’t you choose a girl?"
--
Probably true.
More and more, men will just be relegated to keeping up the infrastructure and providing the technical basis for society - and forking that money over to women anyway in the form of family transfers, and then later child support, alimony and divorce settlements - while the women can self-actualize and develop and profile themselves on the backs of men. Or just sit and watch whatever replaces Oprah.
Why parent a beast of burden when you can have an Aristocrat?
I'm totally confused. Last week all women were watching Oprah and getting fat while their husbands were busy working 16 hours a day supporting them in their lazy lifestyle. This week women are busy earning 6 digits while their men are sleeping under a bridge. I can't keep up with these fast-changing trends.
Hey, SOMEBODY will need to marry all those surplus Chinese men.
If this keeps up, men will have a wide choice of women with whom to mate, have sex and marry. Many women will be left with no choice and a lifetime of frustration unless they're lesbian.
A country without enough men to fight and protect itself from hostile entities will also be in trouble. The qualities we see as faults, in this case self-centeredness, eqo centrism and selfishness, are considered faults for a reason. They have harmful effects on individuals and society as a whole.
Fooling with Mother Nature can be dangerous. We've conquered her in many ways. Boutique children don't bode well for society or the children. But, as long as we're feeding the insatiable desires of those ego centric women who believe the feminist meme that it's all about them, it's OK.
"I'm totally confused."
--
There are excellent books on developing your reading comprehension if that is the problem.
Who said all men are sleeping under bridges?
Men work and sometimes have to do the crap jobs in society (garbageman, miner, sewer worker). If you are unemployed you are a slacker.
Some women are lazy and sit at home, some are busy earning 6 figures, but they are all wonderful no matter what they do.
I believe that's been the consistent song and dance the whole time.
@Cham said...
I'm totally confused. Last week all women were watching Oprah and getting fat while their husbands were busy working 16 hours a day supporting them in their lazy lifestyle. This week women are busy earning 6 digits while their men are sleeping under a bridge. I can't keep up with these fast-changing trends.
______________
You illustrate perfectly why discussing gender issues with people on the left is frustrating. Not a single person here thinks all men work 16 hours a week and all wives are fat watching Oprah. Nor is there a single person here that thinks all women make 6 figures and all their men are sleeping under bridges.
What we take issue with is the misandry, and worse, the misandry that is supported by the full power of the federal government.
Take the woman watching Oprah whose husband is working his ass off. She can sit on her butt all day watching shows that tell her she's neglected and its all his fault. She can then start screwing the pool boy (the pool she wanted and he's working overtime to pay for), and once again she'll be told how its his fault. If they divorce over the affair, they'll go to family court, where they'll declare her the proud owner of a half million dollar home that he's still paying for, she can move the pool boy in (who will no longer the pool boy, since he doesn't work because of the alimony she receives), to live with the other man's children (make that alimony and child support). So the two of them live happily ever after on her hard working husband's nickel. The misandry is not in their marital arrangement, which is no one's business but theirs, but in the law and media.
Then, take the woman making 6 figures while her man is unemployed. Is there anyone alive that thinks he's neglected because of her career and he's confined to the home as his slave? Will such "victims" be featured on Oprah anytime soon? No, he's a lazy bum who deserves nothing if the marriage collapses. If he cheats, he's scum. If she cheats, who could blame her. He's likely to get nothing, he certainly won't own in a home paid for by her if he starts screwing the babysitter. And you know what? I think that's fair. He doesn't deserve the alimony and home. The difference is, neither does the woman in the other story. Seems the family courts only do the right thing when it helps a woman... if the right thing helps a man, they'll do the wrong thing.
It's amazing the left still thinks women are oppressed. My big challenge in raising my daughters will likely be overcoming culture and convincing them men are their equals and women aren't superior. (Equality is usually a noble sounding cover for unfair favoring of women).
Trust --
"Not a single person here thinks ... all wives are fat watching Opra."
With that eliding, your statement is demonstrably wrong. This site actually draws women haters. Worse than Spanky.
The rest is accurate.
@ Oligonicella said...This site actually draws women haters
___________
I think you confuse women haters with people who loath misandry.
I don't think all wives are fat.
This comment has been removed by the author.
Women select girls not boys. Surprise. Who selects what they despise?
Women make the choice. Surprise. At law and modern custom, children belong to mothers not fathers.
Women think girls will have a brighter future? Perhaps, but there's a simpler explanation: modern women dislike males and masculinity.
Whether she sits fat and fecund watching Oprah, or whether she works for a living, all is simply explained by a pervasive misandry among women.
Add India as a nation that is deselecting females as well. I don't think American overruns on girls will help either China or India, it won't be significant enough. I expect a long harsh "gentleman's" (non-nuke) war between the two soon. Though if either side makes too many gains... all is fair in love and war. It's the only way to deal with 40 million or more men who have zero chance at finding a wife.
Messing with the process of sex selection, either way, will only bring disaster. Well, it already has, the fiddler is not yet done though, so the check is not yet due.
Although I think women are just about to hit the brick wall of reality. It depends on if the economic realities are just a play by the big fish or if they have truly lost control. If it is real, women's futures are not bright and cheery. The stone age doesn't allow for that. But don't tell mommy, she hates bad news and will ignore it after having an emotional breakdown and then resetting the rosy glasses mindset.
People who go to a sex-selection clinic are probably not anywhere near a random sample of the population as a whole. For one thing, they probably have more money than average; for another, they are probably far more control-oriented.
In developed societies, women are able to play off the chivalry instincts of men, and I assume that it just gets worse until the society collapses.
I started seeing that in the early 1990s, when the American Association of University Women (AAUW) put out a report about terrible - TERRIBLE - situation of women at universities. More money was required for women. More affirmative action was required for women.
And this was just a few years before the data became unassailable the women were starting to dominate at universities (sometimes 80% of the entire campus).
In other words, men fall for propaganda, and men in high posts fall for it even if they don't personally believe it, because they want to keep their stupid jobs.
And then I see this, as an example:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1295000/The-boys-arent-good-Headteacher-appoints-head-girls-boys-fail-make-grade.html
An English school had always had a "head boy" and "head girl". Now they have decided that all the boys are stupid, but instead of throwing rocks at them (as they deserve), a girl was elected to the position of head boy.
And no one gives a flying fig. Everyone is smirking that girls are superior.
And sorry, but men still get 99% of the patents in the WORLD, and it ain't due to discrimination against women.
Two observations:
Polling data on American sex preference is sparse, and does not show a clear preference for girls.
Somebody at The Atlantic needs to expand the circle of acquaintances, I think. Most of the guys (and several of the girls) I know would disagree.
A newer method for sperm selection, called MicroSort, is currently completing Food and Drug Administration clinical trials. The girl requests for that method run at about 75 percent.
If I can just stay in the human race for another 20 years, I predict my chances are going up.
:)
What David said. This has to be one of the more ridiculous claims of female preference that has made it to this blog. And that's saying a lot.
Isn't it possible that these women feel more comfortable raising a daughter?
I purchased Acomplia from WWW.MEDSHEAVEN.COM , I lost 20 lbs in two week, without any workouts! if i worked out while taking this im sure I would have lost a lot more!
I'm cranky. So I'll be even more obnoxious than usual. Who cares what women think or in what domains women succeed?
The big brute fact is that human beings run the planet because they're a lot smarter than other animals. The smartest human beings run the human world for the same reason. And they're almost all men. There are almost no really smart women.
I say this as someone who's smarter than 99% of the women in the world and still a standard deviation or two away from being a Ruler of the Universe. At least I'm smart enough to know my limitations.
Statistically, women are more normal than are men. Women are average. Average doesn't run the world and never will. For every Einstein-smart man there is .01 smart woman.
Bell-curvy-wise, men are way smarter and way stupider than women. The stupid man edge doesn't matter here. The point is that past IQ 150, women aren't just an anomoly but a what the fuck what that? Any of you ever seen anything like that?
(Yes, there are women with IQs over 150. Not a lot, but enough to justify protecting the species from extinction.)
The world is run by people (almost all men) who have IQ's above 150.
Those men don't care if loudmouthed fat women and cowed beta men battle it out in middle management. They know that whatever happens, they will always fuck and discard the hottest women and use other men as human shields against uppity women, even those who sue for a living.
So every time I hear another "the end of men" proclamation from some dumb academic cow I think, yeah, I bet wildebeasts wonder too why they're not running things because smart white men are obviously out of shape and unable to run and are easy stamping prey.
Helicopters, bitch.
Trust --
"I think you confuse women haters with people who loath misandry."
No. I'm certain I'm able to differentiate. You recall the now-absent Reality####? It would be fairly easy to dredge the comment archive for "all women ..." some extreme disparagement.
Let's see, I recall within this last year, when I provided a personal example of two competent and decent female managers, the first thing asked was if I was a liar. The general thread stood biased at no woman could be a decent manager. And no, it wasn't humor.
And how will the boys in this brave new world learn to become men? As mother-headed households become the norm for boys you see more and more anti-social or dysfunctional behavior from boys. This behavior becomes more unmanageable as they age into adults.
Look to the black community to see the leading edge of this consequence moving through society. It's going to become like Lord of the Flies, it's quite like that now in whole segments of society. Our future will see the cultural norm become Lord of the Flies.
@Oligonicella
I would call jerks like Reality exceptions, not the rule. Most of us here do not have women. Just like one lone woman trashing men doesn't mean an entire group hates men.
"The world is run by people (almost all men) who have IQ's above 150"
Nonsense. The typical high-quality CEO of a large corporation probably has an IQ of around 130, ie the 98th percentile. While the ability to think abstractly is indeed important for these jobs, there are many other essential abilities (decisiveness, emotional intelligence, etc.)
The IQ of the typical successful *politician* is probably a bit lower, since there is less reality-testing and more room for pure posturing in the political world.
They want girls so they can marry Chinese and Indian boys.
Trust, your apparent typo cracks me up:
"I would call jerks like Reality exceptions, not the rule. Most of us here do not have women. Just like one lone woman trashing men doesn't mean an entire group hates men."
You meant most of us don't hate women, right?
I think the Atlantic article itself had some ventriloquist journalism going on:
"Even more unsettling for Ericsson, it has become clear that in choosing the sex of the next generation, he is no longer the boss. “It’s the women who are driving all the decisions,” he says—a change the MicroSort spokespeople I met with also mentioned."
The only facts in this paragraph is that mothers are more assertive than they used to be about asking for a female. So how does that become anxiety that "[Ericsson] is no longer the boss?" Like he was picking the sex before, like that fertility doc who used his tadpoles on patients? Instead of simply noting that customers want to play God, Ericsson is presented as a 'fragile male ego' who desperately wants to be a control freak about his customers' babies' gender and is being overruled by Mommy. It sounds a lot like the old "nervous fathers no longer rule the household" meme which you'd know if you took your cues from household product commercials.
JG,
"I started seeing that in the early 1990s, when the American Association of University Women (AAUW) put out a report about terrible - TERRIBLE - situation of women at universities. More money was required for women. More affirmative action was required for women. And this was just a few years before the data became unassailable the women were starting to dominate at universities (sometimes 80% of the entire campus)."
Camille Paglia had a great line about that AAUW study (which claimed girls suffered low self-esteem in school simply because they said so, Christina Hoff Sommers called it "junk science") which went something like this in paraphrase: "the new complaint in the classroom is that the boys are more boisterous in class and blurting out answers, and you can just see these sit-still women with their homework perfectly done in perfect handwriting sitting angry that their politeness is not rewarded."
I think Camille hits it squarely on the head. It's the same attitude as beta males who wonder "I did everything the girls said they liked, so why can't I get a date?"
AmericanWoman,
"What David said. This has to be one of the more ridiculous claims of female preference that has made it to this blog. And that's saying a lot."
...you start with one premise, that there is no preference for females, then totally flip to the other side:
"Isn't it possible that these women feel more comfortable raising a daughter?"
It's clear there IS female preference among the sex-selectors, you cite it right here yourself.
And besides, it IS the point of the post that "these women feel more comfortable raising a daughter?" Thing is, nature is designed to randomize gender so we have balance. Society has feminized and thus made it more favorable to have daughters, and has 'empowered' the privileges of mothers over fathers so Mommy makes the decisions. Both of which are probably going on in these clinics.
notaclue,
"You meant most of us don't hate women, right?"
Haha, nice catch on a potential Freudian slip. This also preempts the old "you're a lonely loser who can't get laid and that's why you hate women!!!" complaint. It's getting so trite anyway...the establishment does not like the idea of men going their own way.
My wife looks great wearing a Freudian slip.
notaclue,
Is that part of Austrian lederhosen?
Those future American women who marry Asian men are in for quite a shock.
Awesome! We'll finally have something to export to China.
I have done my part with 6 sons and 1 daughter. Fight the matriarchy!
Forgive me for being blunt, but as Johnny Gutts says, if I have a boy, I have one pecker to worry about; If I have a girl, I have a million peckers to worry about.
Somber,
That is what I have been told as well...girls are easier until they hit the teenage years, and then the parental anxiety flips.
I'm sure there is an entire generation in China and India that are thanking God for this news...
Right.
Cyberdyne will supply the womyn
of the world with all the wooers
warriors and workers needed for
their paradise.
Which is the better 'Chick Flick':
'Zardoz' or 'Oklahoma Crude' ?
Topher, I never said that there wasn't a preference, but WHY there may be a preference for SOME women to want a daughter over a son. AFter all, it's a SEX SELECTION clinic. So naturally people are selecting one sex or the other. Why no article on why some select boys?
The premise was that some women want a girl baby because they feel that women will be better off in the future than men. I think that premise is absurd.
AW,
I agree with your denial of the premise. The premise is also induced from a poor example in the story; a family with two boys is justified in hoping, even just a little bit, for some gender variety.
All in all, a lame piece of a lame story. There have been a lot of feminist stories about how boys are falling behind - but it's always couched as the 'fragile male ego' in between screams that we aren't doing enough for our little girls.
@notaclue said... Trust, your apparent typo cracks me up:
"I would call jerks like Reality exceptions, not the rule. Most of us here do not have women. Just like one lone woman trashing men doesn't mean an entire group hates men."
You meant most of us don't hate women, right?
__________
LOL. Good catch, definite typo. I'm married with two daughters, so I definitely meant 'hate'.
That is pretty funny.
Normally I take a walk in the evenings, but it's been unusually hot so I find myself watching TV much more. So, yesterday, I became enamored with Tyra. Tyra was playing hostess to 4 female teens all over 400 pounds, it wasn't pretty. I thought, "How did these girls get so big so fast?". The mothers didn't participate but they were in the audience, so you could see that mommy felt like a victim too, she didn't see herself as the source of the problem. Evil Satan had put a hex on their daughters and they turned into elephants. Tyra was trying as hard as she could to help the girls but you could pretty much guess that these gals weren't going to be changing their ways even though they already were showing signs of diabetes.
Okay there is a point here. In a way, we have the same thing going on with boys in classrooms. There is a common belief circulating these days that boys can't sit still. Only girls can sit still long enough to receive a college degree. But I wonder, how did boys sit still long enough during the last 2 millenniums to receive all those previous college degrees? Why now can they not sit still?
Could it be that no one is telling them to sit still? Maybe they don't know enough to turn their phones off? Just like the mothers of the fatties nobody is laying down the law with them. Society finds it okay for boys to be jittery and not sit still. We don't extrapolate the cost of not getting educated into future implications. To be honest with you, I can't sit still either but I did it long enough to get my 2 college degrees.
Nothing has changed except the attitude of the parents.
Cham - you are partially right but also considerably wrong. If you had kids, especially boys, you'd probably have a better understanding.
It's not just parenting though that has certainly not helped. Teaching practices have change significantly over the last twenty to thirty years. When I was in school in the 1970's, most of our work was graded on a individual basis, and almost always on very objective criteria - you either got the answer right or wrong. The number of collaborative projects was pretty low and usually represented some sort of special assignment outside day to day class work.
Since grading piecework is boring, and doing all that math calculating grades is hard, teachers have over the years shifted their style to incorporate more collaborative projects, less piecework, and to grading based on subjective criteria like group participation.
Under the older style, it was possible for a bright but socially inept boy like me to be rewarded for participation in school. The same goes for a slightly hyperactive but bright boy who might be disruptive at times but was capable of learning.
The fact is that schools now give grades based on social skills, not knowledge accumulation. Such an environment heavily favors most (but not necessarily all) girls especially in the younger grades where girl's language and social skills are more advanced than boys.
It's not a matter of boys being unable to sit still when they were able to before. Schools have inverted the curve so that instead of being a condition required for learning, sitting still is rewarded as learning.
BTW my son was a decent student in grade school, flunked out of HS, got his GED, but at 23 is a supervisor for a team of thirty call technicians, and I'm not worried about skipping college.
Well said der.
Well said indeed.
The teaching profession and public education has become feminized.
Trey
Trey,
"The teaching profession and public education has become feminized."
And kids, like dogs, are very perceptive even if they can't cognitively articulate it well...they can pick up when the teacher resents them, and today's educational styles and junk science encourages the resentment of boys. The boys no doubt pick up on this and act out accordingly.
Yep. Add that to how most of us learn differently than girls, and you have boys as an underserved minority. One that will never be served as others because it does not fit the narrative of the bad, all powerful white man who makes things bad for women and minorities.
Can you imagine what it would be like to have all that power??? I mean, to be able to hold half the population of America and most of the population of the world back by our mighty, white power! (Sarcasm, this is sarcasm for the irony and sarcasm deficient.) What a crock!
Trey
Trey,
"One that will never be served as others because it does not fit the narrative "
Instead it is blamed on the "fragile male ego" - shaming language that men's needs need not be considered or catered to.
I have an alternate explanation. I know several families with only boys. In every case, the wife would like a girl, but doesn't want to leave it to chance, knowing she would very likely have a boy. Increasingly the likelihood of having a girl may be worth it to them. (None of these families would abort a male if that happened.)
Anecdotally, I think their sampling is rather small since I find boys overwhelming favored over girls as being "easier to raise."
My oldest girl was a total hellion--I call her my demon seed--and still consumed more of my money and energy than her three siblings. When the topic comes up, people refer to my oldest as perfect example of why to have boys.
I, on the other, wouldn't trade my demon seed for anything. I adore her beyond words and given a choice would have had nothing but girls. (As it is I have two of each of such massively differing personalities it's... interesting.)
"As it is I have two of each of such massively differing personalities it's... interesting."
---
Well, certainly don't get a DNA test. The results may be ... interesting.
It seems that Helen is supporting this.
"Well, certainly don't get a DNA test. The results may be ... interesting."
Oh trust me, they are from my wife and I. Besides neither of us having cheated, their physical characteristics alone make their genetic background obvious.
Their major personality characteristics can clearly be traced to their ancestry, sometimes in quite specific ways.
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