Without intervention, just a few more boys would be born than girls. If you compare the number of girls actually born to the number that would have been born had a normal sex ratio prevailed, then 600,000 Indian girls go missing every year. This is less distorted than the sex ratio in China, but whereas China’s ratio has stabilised, India’s is widening, and has been for decades. Sex selection is now invading parts of the country that used not to practise it.
You know you live in a world that basically sucks when there are more boys born than girls - due primarily to parental demand. I sometimes wonder what the world would be like if, say, by Nature alone, 52% of babies born were female. I suppose that would be asking for an even greater population explosion.
But assuming that population dynamics remained unchanged or were controlled by the broader empowerment of women, prosperity and advanced birth-control, I think having more women than men in the world would be a far, far better arrangement. What the hell do we need so many fucking men for anyway? It just increases competition and overall unhappiness, IMO - for both sexes. Women are needed by everyone - children, the elderly, by other women, by men... You can't really say the same thing about men.
Seems like Nature would have conspired to produce more males because men are so readily expendable and you really only want the really smart, capable ones around anyway. So you gotta kill a bunch of them off on a regular basis.
I wonder what the average sex ratio of ancient tribal societies was? Were male populations suitably reduced to more equitable levels by tribal wars and such? In war, the victors usually claim the women. I guess if a tribal society were to let its male population decline too far, neighbors would more easily take over that tribe's women and the losing tribe would go defunct.
I recall that once Mao Ze Dong offered 10 million Chinese women to Henry Kissinger as a gift to America - because, in China, boys are valued over girls.
Goddamn you, Henry! Did you ever do anything useful? Seems like wherever I go, whatever I do, there's 80% men, most of them unremarkable and totally superfluous.