out of all the sliced bread, subjecting everyone to their juvenile tyranny,
while mom and dad watched, embarrassed and bereft of the ability to
intervene.
When my now-adult daughter was a child, another child once hit her on the
head with a metal toy truck. I watched that same child, one year later,
viciously push his younger sister backwards over a fragile glass-surfaced
coffee table. His mother picked him up, immediately afterward (but not her
frightened daughter), and told him in hushed tones not to do such things,
while she patted him comfortingly in a manner clearly indicative of approval.
She was out to produce a little God-Emperor of the Universe. That’s the
unstated goal of many a mother, including many who consider themselves
advocates for full gender equality. Such women will object vociferously to
any command uttered by an adult male, but will trot off in seconds to make
their progeny a peanut-butter sandwich if he demands it while immersed self-
importantly in a video game. The future mates of such boys have every
reason to hate their mothers-in-law. Respect for women? That’s for other
boys, other men—not for their dear sons.
Something of the same sort may underlie, in part, the preference for male
children seen most particularly in places such as India, Pakistan and China,
where sex-selective abortion is widely practised. The Wikipedia entry for that
practice attributes its existence to “cultural norms” favouring male over
female children. (I cite Wikipedia because it is collectively written and edited
and, therefore, the perfect place to find accepted wisdom.) But there’s no
evidence that such ideas are strictly cultural. There are plausible psycho-
biological reasons for the evolution of such an attitude, and they’re not pretty,
from a modern, egalitarian perspective. If circumstances force you to put all
your eggs into one basket, so to speak, a son is a better bet, by the strict
standards of evolutionary logic, where the proliferation of your genes is all
that matters. Why?
Well, a reproductively successful daughter might gain you eight or nine
children. The Holocaust survivor Yitta Schwartz, a star in this regard, had
three generations of direct descendants who matched such performance. She
was the ancestor of almost two thousand people by the time of her death in
2010.^77 But the sky is truly the limit with a reproductively successful son.
Sex with multiple female partners is his ticket to exponential reproduction