Graham the sexism in the one child policy gets more complex than that.
Not sure if it's across the board or just some provinces but it appears the rule could be relaxed if the first child was female or disabled.
Somewhat of a backhander in that.

Also if both parents were from single child families. A lot of it seemed to be around the likely hood of the child being able to support parents and grandparents in their old age.

I've been thinking about the reaction to the article, hope I'm not breaching rules of conduct with some of what follows.

I tried to find what research was around to support the views put forward in the article about attitudes to VAW amongst Pacific Islanders. The stuff I found looked like the usual advocacy research so I'm still undecided how much truth is in it.

The Islanders I've known have been very protective of family and nothing I've seen suggests that they think it's Ok for men to beat up women. I'm not really inclined to wonder next door and ask my neighbours, it may be Ok to beat up rude white guy's.

Part of the hassle with these discussions is that so much of the material is spin built on spin built on half truths. Data that's clearly relevant is left on the cutting room floor, anecdotal views are on-quoted, focus groups of people with a special interest are interviewed then treated as a normal sample. It's very easy to get extremely cynical about anything coming out of the industry because so much of it is either false or way out of context.

Violence is a human problem, those who continue to want to make it about the subset of violence that's handy for pointing the finger and little else are in my view part of the problem, not the solution.

R0bert

Graham, you're conflating outcomes with motivatons. If I choose red for my solar panel collector because I think that red is going to do the best job, then I'm still not being colourist, even though my motivation was incorrectly based. I didn't choose the colour simply because I prefer red, but through sound reasoning based on a faulty proposition.

I suspect that most peasant families would prefer boys for the same reason - they are stronger and they are historically more disposable, as vanna's figures on the population sex ratio show. A family group needs only one woman to produce more children, but may need several men of more than one generation to support that woman and the children she bears. This may not be a sound assumption, but I'm sure it has a lot to do with the cultural background that informs the preference for boy babies.

Let's not taint the discussion with our own bourgeois predispositions.

R0bert, the Pacific Islanders I know are also very gentle people, but they don't handle their grog well. I understand tht the Polynesian population derives from an East Asian parent group that lacks the ability to synthesise some forms of alcohol dehydrogenase and are hence more affected by alcohol than typical westerners. Aborigines are in a similar boat, I understand.

Perhaps UNIFEM should be simply campaigning for alcohol to be removed from sale in PI communities?

Apologies for being off-topic, however have to point out to Anti that black is the best absorber of heat of all colours. If you have chosen a very dark red it will work but not as effectively as black.

You don't have to take my word for it a little research will reveal which colour absorbs the most energy from the sun.

Yes, the reason it is not "colourist" whatever that might be, to choose an absorbent colour, is that there is a direct relationship between the colour and the absorption of energy.

There is no such relationship between gender and ability to support, just a probability factor across the whole gender. When you act on the basis of that probability factor rather than the individual in front of you, you are being sexist.

I'm not saying I don't understand why they might do it, or that it might appear to be rationally smart for them individually, but that doesn't make it not sexist.

The babies are being aborted because of their gender. It doesn't change that when there are economic or other reasons involved in that choice.

I think that's splitting hairs Graham. The quote under consideration is 'precisely because of their gender'. The implication is made that it's an innate hatred of women, not because women are disdvantaged in the culture in terms of producing money, and that money is important for survival.

It goes to motivation.

It also goes to responsibility. The underlying theme is that men have somehow engineered this as an expression of some innate misogyny and men have sole responsibility for all the problems of the world, and that women have had no input in the make up of cultures.

As usual 'societal expectations' are something for which women bare no responsibiliy and these expectations only ever negatively affect women. It's ridculously one-sided.

It's the central tennet of feminism that women are never responsible; From aborting babies of a certain gender, to dressing up their daughters for beauty pageants, to 'regretted sex', to prostitution, to the worship of fashion and modelling, to the sales of women's magazines women are forever the helpless pawns of the evil men.

It's not hairsplitting, it is the definition of sexism, or any other discrimination. You don't get out of discrimination merely by saying you had good reasons for stereotyping.

That doesn't mean I buy the victim culture of a lot of feminist discourse. But you don't answer that by perpetrating your own dodges.

I was raised in a family where it was just accepted that girls could do anything, and my two sisters frequently proved that.

One of my sisters went through the stock standard feminist stage in the 70s, but I think she's grown out of the "patriarchy made me do it" phase, and I've never heard the younger one use any of those lines at all.

It is undoubtedly why they have both been quite successful.

I've employed plenty of men and women over the years, but never on the basis of pre-formed impressions of what either is going to do based on gender. However I know that there are lots of people who do, and that is grounds for legitimate complaint.