House of Eratosthenes

American women are wealthier, healthier and better educated than they were 30 years ago. They’re more likely to work outside the home, and more likely to earn salaries comparable to men’s when they do. They can leave abusive marriages and sue sexist employers. They enjoy unprecedented control over their own fertility. On some fronts — graduation rates, life expectancy and even job security — men look increasingly like the second sex.

But all the achievements of the feminist era may have delivered women to greater unhappiness. In the 1960s, when Betty Friedan diagnosed her fellow wives and daughters as the victims of “the problem with no name,” American women reported themselves happier, on average, than did men. Today, that gender gap has reversed. Male happiness has inched up, and female happiness has dropped. In postfeminist America, men are happier than women.

This is “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” the subject of a provocative paper from the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers. The paper is fascinating not only because of what it shows, but because the authors deliberately avoid floating an easy explanation for their data.
:
…[P]erhaps the problem is political — maybe women prefer egalitarian, low-risk societies, and the cowboy capitalism of the Reagan era had an anxiety-inducing effect on the American female. But even in the warm, nurturing, egalitarian European Union, female happiness has fallen relative to men’s across the last three decades.

Draw your own conclusions, I guess.

I have never met a woman born since 1960 who hadn’t been inundated with propaganda regarding her “victimhood,” whatever her own response may have been. The fact that it’s possible to produce polling samples proving that American women are unhappy for some undefinable reason should surprise nobody.
- rob | 05/28/2009 @ 03:06
Somewhere in the postwar economy this advertising theme came up that says “something’s missing from your life now but if you buy X you will achieve total bliss.” It hasn’t hit the gentlemen very hard up until now because it’s in our nature to consume minimally; by the time we’re ready to endure the drudgery of shopping, we’ve got a pretty goddamn good idea why we have to buy the thing we’re buying.

Internet shopping, and the 1990-2000s gender-bending, have changed that lately.

Also, it should be pointed out that happiness is a skill. Embarking on a journey to achieve that happiness, is a primal instinct that requires no skill at all. To achieve it and then say to yourself “yupsiree, this is exactly what I wanted, that requirement’s been met now” — that’s a skill a lot of people don’t have.

Many of these bunny trails people head down nowadays to achieve their happiness, embrace the paradox that their efforts will bring them into compliance with what everyone else is doing, and at the same time, establish for them the very individual identity that they’re assaulting by pouring so much energy into trying to resemble everyone else.

Thing I Know #265. You can’t be better than everyone else when you’re trying to be like everyone else.

So the post-modern feminist movement is only a part of what makes so many women unhappy. But it’s still a big part of it, nevertheless. The paradox is somewhat different though: “Achieve harmony with everyone you know by finding good reasons to be angry at the men.”
- mkfreeberg | 05/28/2009 @ 09:52
Aggressive capitalism both created the stress and the rise of unreasonable feminism (not the reasonable parts of feminism). Don’t ask how I define reasonable – that’s another thread altogether.

To be happy in America, you need to effectively counter capitalism’s seedy underside. I am one of the most capitalism-friendly people I know, but I can freely acknowledge that personal responsibility, thrift and perspective is given short shrift by those who are selling the opposite. Once the drumbeat of “you-can-live-a-better-life” started towards women in the fifties on TV, movies and radio, Feminism (TM) ran amuck. It took root in those women who were already “softened up” by the marketing departments – it was going nowhere when the militants ran it, but the housewives found common cause and added heft to the movement. There’s more causation than correlation than meets the eye.

Now there are no static goalposts anymore, which is why females are crossing the old goal line only to discover it was moved back again. Unhappiness is inevitable.

I would never throw the baby out with the bathwater: capitalism is the best. It’s just not an unalloyed good.

The way to combat this is for women to not let commercials define or grade their performance as mothers, girlfriends, etc. Oprah and The View are not your friends. One must find friends that can affirm your lifestyle, not scare you into believing that your needs are unmet. Friends with strong senses of self-worth (or ones with worse problems) can help – they either define better, attainable goalposts (or they move them back behind you). Either way happiness is inevitable.
- wch | 05/28/2009 @ 12:39
You’re right, of course, about the insidiousness of advertising – particularly the kind that has appealed to YOU as an in-group type (YOU’re hipper than other people. YOU drive a Volvo, wear all black, eat at Joe’s, etcetcetc.) I would contend, moreover, that this has been a much more constant drumbeat since the ’70s, maybe better characterized as “The YOU Decade,” though the marketing of envy has always been ugly.

Having been very, ah, interested in women for over 50 years, however, I have been stunned at the level of “I’m a victim, you have to understand” that I’ve encountered among middle- and even upper- class white girls in the last 20 years. All of them went to grade school/high school/college in the ’70s and ’80s, and were thus bombarded with of-course-it-is-true-that-women-have-always-been-second-class-citizens “education.” Since I briefly clawed my way into the middle-class by main strength and clumsiness, I found it doubly annoying that they had almost universally been born into more money and advantages than I had.

Coincident with this was the dismissal of the needs of boys for positive role modeling and validation (see Christina Hoff Summers’ The War Against Boys.) There’s no doubt in my mind that the relentless downgrading of men, and particularly white men, in the classrooms of middle America led directly to the horror shows at Columbine and other awfulness. I also see a direct link to the “Why don’t I get to be a Princess?” mentality evident in so many under-50 American “women.”

As I’ve said before, I find much of this attributable to the concession of the public square by men, and I’m real glad to see younger men take up the cudgels. It’s been kinda lonely up til lately.
- rob | 05/28/2009 @ 15:29

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Liberated and UnhappyWednesday, May 27th, 2009

Liberated and Unhappy
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009