Jan and Dean – "Surf City" (1963)

You know we’re goin’ to Surf City 

‘Cause it’s two to one . . . 

Two girls for every boy!

Imagine living in a place where there were two girls for every guy.  If that’s not heaven on earth for guys, I don’t know what is.

But I don’t think the reverse is true.  I don’t think most women would want to live in a place where there are two guys for every girl.  

American women already complain about having to put up with unwanted attention from sexed-up men.  Just imagine how much worse it would be for them if the U.S. population had twice as many men as women.

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If I’m right about that, you ladies do NOT want to move to China, where there are 34 million more men than women.

There are 100 million only children
under the age of 40 in China

China has the worst population gender imbalance in the world for three reasons.  First, the Communist Party told couples for decades that they could have only one child.  Second, Chinese families much prefer boy babies to girl babies.  Third, abortions were easy to get in China.

  

Put those three things together and what do you get?  You get Chinese wives who want their one and only child to be a boy opting for abortions when they find out they are pregnant with a girl.  That way they can try again, hoping that their next pregnancy will result in an XY instead of an XX.

Abortion for the purposes of sex selection was supposed to be illegal in China, but relatively inexpensive scanning machines that enabled a pregnant woman to determine the gender of her fetus became widely available in the 1990s.  One researcher has estimated that China’s “One Child Policy” resulted in 80 million selective abortions of girls on the basis of their gender.

Admiral/General Aladeen would have approved:

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In 1990, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen estimated that there were 100 million “missing” Asian women.  

That’s the equivalent of the entire female population of the UK, France, and Italy never existing because their parents either aborted them, killed them after they were born, or allowed them to die through neglect.  (Poor families sometimes scrimp on food and medical care for baby girls, preferring to use their scarce resources to keep their boy babies healthy.)

Drowning was the most popular way
of getting rid of unwanted baby girls

Given the “One Child Policy,” it’s not surprising that most of the missing Asian women were Chines.  But gender ratios are also skewed in India and Pakistan due to preferences for boy babies in those societies.

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Three years ago, China reversed course and began to encourage couples to have at least two babies.  But the birth rate remains low, which could result in China’s population not only declining in the future but also becoming much older on average – what a recent Washington Post article referred to as a “demographic time bomb” that could bring economic growth in the country to a crashing halt.

Economics professor Yew-Kwang Ng recently published an article suggesting that China consider allowing women to have more than one husband – which is known as “polyandry.”

“If two men are willing to marry the same wife and the woman is willing, too, what reason does society have to stop them sharing a wife?” Ng asked, citing polygamy as a common custom in ancient times and a continuing practice in some strains of Islam.  

Those of a libertarian bent would agree with Professor Ng’s argument.  But unfortunately, he then stuck his foot into his mouth big time.  

From the Post article:

Plus, [polyandry] would just be more efficient, [Ng] continued, suggesting that women would have no trouble meeting the physical needs of multiple husbands.

“It’s common for prostitutes to serve more than ten clients in a day,” Ng wrote.

The good professor must have missed school the day the teacher taught the class about the “First Law of Holes,” which states that “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”  He mos’ definitely didn’t stop digging:

“Making meals for three husbands won’t take much more time than for two husbands,” he added.

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Not surprisingly, many Chinese women took exception to Professor Ng’s line of reasoning.

“It made me throw up,” one woman tweeted.

“Let me translate what he means: he wants to legalize sex slaves,” wrote another.

That woman wasn’t far off.  Professor Ng followed up with an article proposing that prostitution be legalized.  From the Post:

Because China’s gender mismatch has caused a fierce competition among men looking for wives, he said, “a man’s right to achieving sexual satisfaction is being severely violated if legal sex work is not allowed.”

Legalizing sex work and building more brothels would allow men to attend to their “urgent needs,” he wrote.

Professor Ng may be proposing legal polyandry and legal prostitution as alternative solutions to the gender imbalance situation in China.  

But upon further reflection, I think you may need to legalize both to take care of the problem.

Think about it.  Polyandry would provide wives for many of those extra 34 million Chinese men.  But not all of them will be able to find a wife – so you’ll need to allow prostitution to take care of them.

Would it work to legalize prostitution only for unmarried men?  After all, married men don’t need to go to a brothel to attend to their “urgent needs” – that’s what wives are for, correct?  

But what if polyandry is legalized and both husbands suffer a simultaneous attack of “urgent needs”?  Presumably the wife can take care of only one of them at a time.  

In that case, husband #2 may not be able to wait for husband #1 to get ’er done – necessitating a quick trip down to the neighborhood brothel.

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“Surf City,” the first surf-rock song to reach the #1 spot on the Billboard “Hot 100,” was co-written by members of the two greatest surf-rock groups ever: Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and Jan Berry of Jan and Dean.

Mentioning Jan and Dean in the same breath as the Beach Boys seems almost blasphemous today.  But at the peak of Jan and Dean’s popularity, they were certainly the equals of the Beach Boys.  

Jan and Dean were so popular that they were chosen to host the 1964 concert movie, The T.A.M.I. Show, which featured the Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry, the Supremes, James Brown, the Beach Boys, and many others – arguably the greatest collection of pop music talent ever assembled in one place at one time.

I was very familiar with “Surf City” when I was a teenaged boy.  One of the first LPs I ever owned was Jan and Dean's Surf City and Other Swingin’ Cities – which included not only "Surf City" but also covers of Bobby Bare's “Detroit City,” Wilbert Harrison's “Kansas City,” and Freddy Cannon's “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans” and “Tallahassee Lassie.”  (It also included a cover of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” which was not really a good choice for Jan and Dean.)

The quintessential middle-aged man's fantasy may be having two women at the same time.  But that’s not what “Two girls for every boy!” is all about.

If you were a teenaged boy in 1963, you couldn’t have really wrapped your head around the concept of a threesome.  Just getting one girl to make out with you was a daunting enough task.  The attraction of a place like Surf City – which existed only on Jan and Dean's record, alas – was that there were so many girls there that even losers could feel confident of ending up with one.

Click here to listen to “Surf City.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: