Asia's Hormonic Convergence

It's bad enough that we have to worry about birds with flu, mad cows, deer ticks, global warming, global terrorism, globalization, suicide bombs, suitcase bombs, shoe bombs, dirty bombs, the federal deficit, baby boomers bankrupting Social Security, Iran getting nukes, North Korea getting nukes and al-Qaeda getting nukes.

Now, Foreign Policy magazine has come up with a new worry to chew your nails over -- hordes of hormone-addled, sexually frustrated Asian men.

This nightmare scenario appears in an article with a wonderful title -- "The Geopolitics of Sexual Frustration." But the scary part starts in the subtitle: "Asia has too many boys. They can't find wives, but they just might find extreme nationalism instead."

The problem began 20 years ago, when ultrasound technology gave Asian women a cheap way to determine the sex of their unborn babies, writes Martin Walker, editor of United Press International. In China and other Asian nations, millions of women chose to abort female fetuses so they could instead give birth to boys. Consequently, those countries will soon have millions more men than women.

The result, says Walker, will be "mass sexual frustration." By 2020, he writes, China alone could have "40 million frustrated bachelors."

That's sad. But why should we care about the love life of Chinese bachelors?

Because, Walker says, young men tend to misbehave when they're suffering from what he calls "testosterone overload."

Back in the 19th century, famine caused a rash of female infanticide in northern China, Walker writes, citing the work of Valerie Hudson, a Brigham Young University scholar. The result was unmarried guys forming "bandit gangs" and running amok in what came to be known as the Nien Rebellion.

This time, Walker writes, the hordes of horny bachelors could cause a war: "A Beijing power struggle between cautious old technocrats and aggressive young nationalists may be decided by mobs of rootless young men, demanding uniforms, rifles, and a chance to liberate Taiwan."

Hudson agrees: "In 2020, it may seem to China that it would be worth it to have a very bloody battle in which a lot of their young men could die in some glorious cause."

That's a scary scenario. But I'm an optimist and I believe we can solve this problem with good old American know-how.

In fact, we've already solved the problem in the United States. Sure, we, too, have millions of sexually frustrated young bachelors. They're sitting in their mom's basements in their underwear right now, eating reheated Chinese takeout and channel-surfing, searching for sports or "Baywatch" reruns. But they're not begging to invade Taiwan, or anyplace else. In America, it's not sexually frustrated young men who want to invade other countries, it's happily married middle-aged politicians.