If you have two children, you treat them equally. Older or younger, sporty or academic, boy or girl – no matter what, you show them the same love and affection, do not discriminate, do your best for them both. That is how modern western society would like to view the world. It is not the case. Son preference is pervasive in patriarchal societies, where families place greater value on sons than daughters. It happens more often than we think. While my work focuses on China, a preference for sons is common in countries in South and East Asia, as well as the Middle East and North Africa. In traditional Chinese households, men are the head of their houses. Women should be working inside; men should be working outside as breadwinners. This is where son preference is significant, and you find it a lot in rural areas. But even among modern urban families in Shanghai, you still see it. I have had many conversations with Chinese women about their experiences of son preference, and quite a few friends have suffered from it. It even affected my mum in Taiwan. My research builds on these conversations, examining posts on webpages such as zhihu.com and bilibili.com. Here, women articulate their sufferings of growing up in families where they experienced son preference. The posts I studied are from 2016 onwards – the year in which Chinese TV shows such as Ode to Joy featured plots around son preference that prompted renewed attention to the family discrimination and abuse many female children continue to endure in modern China. In these families, sons are favoured over daughters when it comes to childcare, educational investment, and inheritance. Daughters are expected to make substantial financial or labour contributions to their parents, often subsidising the schooling or living expenses of their brothers. This is sustained exploitation, and the victims encounter profound self and social alienation as a result. THE DESTINED GIVER Through sustained exploitation, daughters can be shaped into a ‘destined giver’, someone socialised into believing she is bound to shoulder the role of giver in a family. Lifelong differential treatment promotes a selffulfilling prophecy, whereby daughters act in accordance with preconceived gender roles they grow up with. They are raised to believe they have an obligation – a duty – to give, that they have been raised for the purpose of supporting their parents and male siblings in particular. One of the posters I came across, Zhaodi, spoke of the moral obligations her mother placed on her to be an old age security blanket, and to support her younger brother. Zhaodi ‘never felt loved’, wrote of being ‘insecure’ and having ‘very low self-esteem’. She wanted to commit suicide so she could ‘finally be happy’ – the only escape she could envision from the financial exploitation she faces in the coming years. 18 |
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