Stuart Wolfendale

 

 

At the moment, Hong Kong is one of the most infertile spots on the planet. Its production of babies is bottoming along at somewhere between 0.9 and 1.2 babies a woman a year. This is well below the population refill level of 2.2. The place is slowly emptying out. If the local women weary further of childbirth, the statistic might drop into minus babies, in which case the death rate by itself will not be enough and people may have to be suctioned out of the population to keep up with the statistic. Think about it. I’ve stopped.

 

TVB Pearl television recently produced a half hour magazine report on this. Almost the entire programme was taken up with interviews with women about why they did not get married or, if they did, why they married so late and then, in some cases, why they did not have children anyway.

 

The show was all about how thoroughly Modern Millie found matrimony a problem. Barely one bass voice was raised to explain how the problem might be Modern Millie herself.

 

You see liberated, if not necessarily liberal, women -more or less all of them in Hong Kong- are unwilling to stay home, slop it out during the day and lie there at night, taking it from husband and thinking of Confucius. They take everything from MBAs to certificates in hospitality science and email management and tear out into the workplace.

 

A powerful percentage of women find the workplace potently interesting. The first task of those ladies is to turn it into a pot of politics where passions over position putt-putt away between simmer and boil. Most men probably go to work just to earn and get through the day until they can get onto the more interesting stuff. Those women travel to work from sexless lives, nagging parents and vulgar siblings, reading cordial coloured magazines about female achievers. For them, work is the interesting stuff; not so much the job itself as the new gains in status through  passive aggression and intimidation to be achieved whilst on it.

 

Once caught off balance by these orchestrated mood swings, the office Amazon finds men can be swiftly clubbed to the ground by the blunt weapons of allegation ; discrimination, harassment and molestation. I have been told that last one can arise from shaking hands longer than three seconds.

 

So, after a few years of militant Millies at work and being sulked at and soldiered around by them everywhere  from planes to pubs to post offices, emasculated and vaguely resentful, these younger men are asked to consider the prospect of marrying one of them. And they say ‘no’, if not out loud in the front of their minds then more silently, in their guts and their unstirred loins.

 

 

Surprising numbers of young women, settling into this sub Sapphic assault on the mating game, dress to repel. They go for items their grandmothers might have togged out in for early Sam Hui concerts. Those seriously upset by the prospect of penises and prams favour what in interior design is described as ‘distressed’. Hair is straight and uneven. Blouses and woolens are lumpy greys, off-centre, frayed, the aftermath of a cat fight. Skirts are short with jagged hems but more suggestive of junkie than ‘You-Jane’. A clutch of these gels meandering back from lunch could be a survivor group from a nuclear exchange.

 

I am told that what they are really doing is continuing the unpatriotic local craving for Japanese fashion. I need hardly point out that, in Japan, human reproduction has almost ceased and that, by mid century, a worn and shrinking rank of youth will spend its time helping millions upon millions of geriatrics on and off the loo.

 

To compensate for this collision of grannies’ woolies, workhouse two-pieces and hair dragged through a hedge backwards, Hong Kong men have made themselves more beautiful in a bashful sort of way. Now, if you add the brilliant androgyny of men’s fashion in this town to the relative ease with which men bond socially in the face of harridan hostility, you are looking at an imminent outbreak of mass homosexuality. Once that passes a certain temperature, it will take irreversible hold over a small area such as this and make the consequences of global warming for the species here seem mild by comparison.

 

I cannot fathom why the TVB programme did not get to this. Younger men and women at this point in history are groping towards this doomsday arrangement. Given that the social fabric without new bodies coming into it would just about survive their own lifetimes, it would be the most thoroughly efficient and least troublesome situation to make a lot of money in.

 

In the TV programme, two featured pairs had more or less drifted together for company but not children. The need to go ‘coo-ee!’ at something was still there so one pair got themselves a little dog and the other, ironically, bought a rabbit. In San Francisco, dogs now outnumber children. Bring on the migrant hordes.

Posted in All, environment