Asia will one day be filled with "millions of men desperate for women", researchers warned last week.

You mean it isn't now? These guys should look out the windows a bit more.

Being desperate for women is pretty much the default state for guys aged 13 up.

What the people who wrote the Chinese government report were trying to say was the sex imbalance will have consequences.

Already, Tianmen city in China's Hubei province is like a World of Warcraft convention: wall-to-wall lonely guys. Shops selling girls-only stuff (hair conditioner, salad, Justin Bieber posters, yoghurt, etc) are going bust on a daily basis.

By the end of this decade China will have 24 million surplus guys, the report said. Other reports say India already has 30 million surplus guys, and seven-figure groups of spare males can be found in Bangladesh, Taiwan, Madonna's waiting room and every Internet café in South Korea.

What to do? The gang at my local canteen came up with some options.

One old guy said: "They should do what British army officers do with their privates." I shut my ears to avoid hearing about gruesome self-inflicted surgical procedures, but it turned out that senior officers distracted low-ranked ones by assigning them cold showers, 10k runs, and lots of weapons to play with.

Hmm. Comfort millions of stressed-out men by handing them deadly assault weapons? No sane nation would do that.

Wait. I see a reader putting up a hand and saying: "What about America?"

Hey, I said no SANE nation.

Another possible direction is polyandry, a social system in which women can have many husbands, already practised in small communities in Sri Lanka, India and China.

This would ABSOLUTELY suit modern females, who are (let's be honest here) WAY more bossy and macho than guys.

A younger member of the group claimed that "most guys" these days prefer computers to real life, so surplus men could expend emotional energy in World of Warcraft-type games.

Since 100 percent of females in video games are doe-eyed characters with tiny waists and huge breasts, this could leave "guys married to actual women burning with jealousy", he said.

No way! That would only be true if men were shallow automatons totally controlled by their testosterone glands. Wait. He may be on to something.

The last option came from a female journalist who suggested we "airlift the surplus men to Mongolia".

For reasons unknown, Mongolia has a surplus of women. Many are highly desirable, as long as your idea of a sex kitten is a hardy peasant raised on dung-cooked animal fat.

Her airlift idea reminded me of the Virgin Import Agency, which got into the news in Shanghai a couple of years ago.

This agent arrived in China with a cargo of Vietnamese women whom he married off (after collecting large fees) to surplus men.

Two days later, the women, the agent and all the money vanished. Turned out they were visiting clusters of surplus men and pulling this scam repeatedly.

The newspapers predicted riots.

But the guys just went home, realizing that they'd tried the marriage thing, got over it, and were now free to spend the rest of their lives using their computer mice to interact with Kasumi from Dead or Alive Xtreme. Lucky dogs.

Not that I'm jealous or anything, darling.

(Nury Vittachi is an Asia-based frequent traveller. Send ideas and comments via www.mrjam.org)

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