Some families are big some small. It seems that I would have been a different person if I had a sister. Coming from a two boys family I considered women as coming from a different planet: (eg. when I was a teenager it suprised me that girls eat (a lot) - somehow I supposed that they lived on air fragrances of roses with some small addition of milk and yogurt.) If my parents had more kids (untill a girl was born) I would have known and related and experienced girls better. Coming from one sex children family is a sort of handicap. I wonder do eg. girls from all sisters family experience something similair? How about boys. Should it be (a moral) duty to have as many children as it takes to have both sexes between them?
Hmmm.... This is, I believe, wishful thinking on your part... No doubt you and your brother (and further hypothetical brothers) would have turned your younger feminine sibling into a tomboy whose later years would have been plagued by a highly disfunctional perception of her gender-role... She would most likely have become a flaming bulldike enamored of wearing longunwashed baseball jerseys and chewing Red Man tobaco while buggering her equally malimprinted paramours with the largest black plastic strap-on available... Seriously... Of course you would have been a somewhat different person had your parents had more children, whether they were girls or boys. I just think that to presume that you would have had a better understanding of the "mental makeup'' of girls is going out on a limb. You're obviously more perceptive now than then, due to having experienced more and - one presumes - understanding more. Would you have really given a rats ass about the differences between you and a sister back then, or just held the attitude "girls are dumb", as most young boys do? At any rate, I believe that "forcing" families to have any number of any gender of children represents a manner of social engineering of the sort one might see in "Red" China. (Pardon one whose childhood saw the last civil defense air raid drills his Cold War jargon... China at some point enforced a "one child per family" law in order to attempt to reduce their population...)
RE Killjoy Refreshing view. But if I had a sister (possibly a couple of them), I guess I would have became less of a macho....Anyway why do I feel more comfortable, more open, more myself when I am with men? (I am married, not gay) Possibly it lies in the capacity which only a brother can develop: to care about a woman deeply without anything sexual about it. The way one cares about a brother or the best friend. To understand her. Well I like women but I do not understand them. I think if saw one grow up I would understand them all. You see now they are black boxes to me...
