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Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl charts how the trend towards choosing boys over girls, largely through sex-selective abortions, is rapidly spreading across the developing world.

While the natural sex ratio at birth is 105 boys born for every 100 girls, in India the figure has risen to 112 boys and in China 121. The Chinese city of Lianyungang recorded an astonishing 163 boys per 100 girls in 2007.

The bias towards boys has been estimated to have caused the "disappearance" of 160 million women and girls in Asia alone over the past few decades. The pattern has now spilled over to Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia, the Balkans and Albania, where the sex ratio is 115/100.

The unnatural skewing towards male populations has become so pronounced in recent decades that Hvistendahl, a writer for Science magazine, says it has given rise to a new "Generation XY". She raises the possibility that with so many surplus men – up to a fifth of men will be single in northwestern India by 2020 – large parts of the world could become like America's wild west, with excess testosterone leading to raised levels of crime and violence.

Deborah Orr looks at why some women still don’t adopt feminism or call themselves feminists. She starts by saying that there is a myth that women reject feminism simply because it has a bad image. A kind of 80s dyke image. I agree with her point in relation to that myth, that:

‘The very fact that some feminists are so willing to accept that women don’t want the label for such superficial reasons, rather than crediting women with more profound intellectual discomfort, is an indication that even feminist attitudes can sometimes be dismissive of women and their legitimate concerns.’

Orr writes:

‘The fundamental and rather serious problem is the blunt and somewhat stubborn emphasis on “equality“, difficult enough in a society deeply divided by economic inequality generally, even without the added complication that it’s the people with care of children, whatever their sex, whose economic freedom is most compromised the world over.’ (my emphasis)

‘Feminists (and I’m generalising here) tend towards the conclusion that women who don’t sign up are simply hostages to the tyranny of the patriarchy, whose feeble personal consciousnesses have refused to be raised.’

And, her belief that women reject feminism for more complex and thought-out reasons than mere ‘false consciousness’.

you’ve no doubt gotten wind of the controversy caused by two Toronto parents who decided not to tell the world the gender of their new baby, Storm. The story jumped from our national press across the 49th parallel, where the hosts of ABC’s The View had this to say:

The Blonde One To Whoopi’s Left: I don’t get it, it’s like when the baby was born they said, “Congratulations, it’s an It?” What did they say?

What Not-Whoopi is getting at here is that something just doesn’t feel right about not being able to identify a child’s gender. It’s such a key piece of how we categorize the world — a simple, binary classification. In fact, I suspect, given gender’s importance in reproduction, that it’s often the first distinction we make on encountering someone.

Documenting the rise of the notion of adolescence, Philip Cohen searched Google Books for the term, tracing its rise at the turn of the 20th century till today:

Both sex-related cases with victims who were underage, but there are differences. Let’s compare the two cases: