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Comment by FearNotDaniel | Hacker News Reader

The tone of this article makes my skin crawl. It reads as if the author believes women are possessions that every man is entitled to own. Can we all start treating female humans as humans please, that is the only way that the root cause of this kind of problem will ever be eliminated.

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Hey! I'm the author of this article. I completely understand this criticism. I was very afraid of how this might come across. My sincere apologies for this. My intention was to highlight the effect skewed sex-ratios have on the population, as an aggregate. I abhor the thought of men acting entitled to women, and being treated as possessions. But I also wanted to highlight the impact that is already being felt in countries such as china where 'family life' is taught to be a 'truth' that every human must go through. Sorry again!

Some articles that got me thinking : https://www.ft.com/content/d44122c0-a435-11e5-873f-68411a84f...

https://www.economist.com/special-report/2017/11/23/a-distor...

It has to be possible to talk about the effects of this phenomenon on all people, as well as the related changes in behavior people choose. We're all new to that, so I think we're all figuring out what language is appropriate. So we all have to be open to discussing that too. Thanks for that openness!

i didn't read that tone at all. just numbers, lots of numbers. yup, china is the same. maybe less strong as the chinese are getting more and more affluent.

The root cause of the problem as describe by an other article recently submitted to HN is the case that male humans are treated as possessions. Males are expected to support their elders, making males walking pension funds in the possession of their parents. If they started to treat the male humans as humans then there would not be any economical incentive and the root cause resolved.

I for one would not like to have been born just to provide money to my family, and sadly money is in the center of the problem as the statistics shows.

I don't think that's the actual root cause. If it were 100% just the 'walking pension' distinction there's only a selection preference for male babies when there's a large difference between the earnings and status attainable by men. If there were no differences between what a man and a woman could make why would the desire for support as an elder lead to infanticide and preferential abortion of female fetuses?

The reason only male offspring are considered as a pension plan is that the female offspring is expected to support the family they marries into. Things would be more equal if both the male and female offspring was expected to stay at home and support their parents, and preferential abortion of female fetuses would stop, but marriages would then be a bit of an issue. For cultural reasons people do not flip a coin and have the male offspring being expected to be the pension plan 50% of the time and female offspring the other 50%. A married couple is also unlikely to be able to stay at the homes of both families and support both at the same time.

But the crux of the discussion is that we want humans to be treated like humans. Having both men and women being walking pension plans in the possession of their parents is not a big improvement all things considered. A better solution is to enable people to survive growing old without depending on offsprings to support them, and that require us to look at the money issue. A solid pension system and universal health care does wonders to a lot of issues in society, and looking at countries with both these I see a distinct decrease of problems that occur because parents uses their children as financial support systems.

when you are growing up like that, with this being your social responsibility, and everyone else does it, and you also love your parents, you'll feel it as totally normal.

you'll also get the full love of your parents. you are first, your sisters are second. your wife will be more important to your parents than your sisters are. the difference is noticeable. though you may not notice it as your sisters will be married and get the same treatment from their husbands family.

your parents will provide for you as long as they can, and then when they no longer can, it's your turn to provide for them, and for your children. but by then your parents will have done more for you than most western parents would have.

your parents don't have pensions they can live off. neither will you. so one day your children will take care of you...

Generally I'm quite sensitive to that stuff but not really seeing that with this article (besides the phrase 'pool of women' maybe). Can you give some examples?

I'm not sure there's any way to talk about people in aggregate whilst keeping a compassionate tone.

There's definitely better ways and worse ways. All we can do is our best.

Well, the tone that you describe is very "evolutionary" PoV -- where everyone (young/old, man/woman) have different role in a pack of humans.

It's definitely not playing nicely with our modern sensitivity.

Can you give examples from the article of this?

I felt the same way when I quoted a particularily strange passage. Got downvoted. Go figure.

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