New Books in Public Policy7 Sep 2011

Mara Hvistendahl, “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men” (PublicAffairs, 2011)

The students in my undergraduate class on gender, sexuality, and human rights are a pretty tough bunch. They know they’re in for some unpleasant topics: sex trafficking, domestic violence, mass rape in wartime. But when I have them read Amartya Sen’s classic article on the effects of son preference – that stops them in their tracks. A hundred million girls and women simply missing from the planet due to sex-selective abortion, infanticide, and neglect of daughters. You can almost see the chill go through the room. Thanks to Mara Hvistendahl, I now need to revise that number upward. 160 million girls and women are missing in Asia alone, she writes in her new book, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men (Public Affairs, 2011). And the effects are grim. These include sex trafficking and sale of brides to meet the demands of the “surplus men” who can’t find mates in their own communities, and they include high rates of violence in societies with a large number of unattached men. And the Western side of the story is equally depressing. Here we see Western population planners suggesting sex selection as a way to curb “Third World” population growth – and exporting the technology to make it possible. And we see pro-choice feminists completely at a loss for how to grapple with the issue. This is not a happy book, but it’s an almost unbearably important one. You’ll be glad you read it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(2127)

Doubled Up: Shared Households and the Precarious Lives of Families

More than eleven million children in the US live in doubled-up households, sharing space with extended family or friends. These households are even more common among low-income families, families of c...

9 Jul 56min

Nicholas Freudenberg, "Fighting for New York: Activism for Health and Social Justice Since The 1960s" (Columbia UP, 2026)

Today I'm speaking with Nicholas Freudenberg, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Public Health at the CUNY School of Public Health. We are discussing his book, Fighting for New York: Activism for Hea...

7 Jul 56min

Martina Baradel, "21st Century Yakuza: Death of Japanese Organised Crime" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Once dominant and institutionalised, the Yakuza, one of Japan's best known criminal organisations, is now shrinking under the combined pressure of legal exclusion, social stigmatisation, and market...

5 Jul 1h 5min

Why Democracy’s Troubles Should Come as No Surprise

Why have so many democracies become more polarized, unstable, and vulnerable to authoritarianism? And why did so many political observers fail to see it coming? In this episode of the People, Power, P...

23 Jun 0s

Jonathon W. Penney, "Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

In Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age (Cambridge UP, 2025), Jonathon W. Penney explores the increasing weaponization of surveillance, censorship, and new technology...

23 Jun 48min

Street Level: HUD at 60

In 2025, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) marked its 60th anniversary. Created amid the optimism and urgency of the civil rights era, HUD embodied a bipartisan commitment to ...

23 Jun 58min

Jeremy J. Holland, "The Political Worldviews of American Social Movements: Partisan Politics and the Future of Democracy" (Routledge, 2026)

The Political Worldviews of American Social Movements: Partisan Politics and the Future of Democracy (Routledge, 2026) explores the political worldviews of progressive American social movements and h...

21 Jun 33min

Inside the Mississippi Marathon: How Mississippi Dramatically Improved Its Education System with Rachel Canter

In 2008, Rachel Canter founded Mississippi First, an education non-profit with the mission of improving educational outcomes for students across the state. Dating back to the 1990s, Mississippi ranked...

19 Jun 55min