If you’ve been around for quite a while and you suspect that women nowadays seem to be less happy than you can remember them being long ago, it turns out that your gut feeling is right!
This is the message in a very interesting article entitled “Liberated and Unhappy” (which was posted recently on the New York Times website). It was written by Ross Douthat and was based on a paper about “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness” from the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers.
As the author recounts:
“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.”
He continues by pointing out:
“But all the achievements of the feminist era may have delivered women to greater unhappiness. In the 1960s, 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 post-feminist America, men are happier than women.”
That progression actually makes perfect sense, but because this will seem so counter-intuitive to most people — and because female happiness (or unhappiness) has such profound effects on the rest of us — we’ll explore this topic in depth over the next several days.
Pre-Sexual Revolution
History
Relatively few guys nowadays are old enough to remember clearly how dating and mating worked prior to the sexual revolution beginning in the late 1960’s, so we’ll fill in that void here in “Part 1” for context.
The basic unit of social organization in most countries until recent decades was the nuclear family: husband, wife and their children. The US began providing some elements of a safety net in the New Deal in the 1930’s but it generally takes cultures a couple of generations to catch up with underlying changes in the economic, governmental and social environments.
A family prior to the 1960s sexual revolution
But prior to that, there was virtually no government “safety net” in most countries (and, in fact, many poor countries provide none even today).
In countries without a government safety net, you were on your own:
- Unemployment insurance? There was no such thing … if you didn’t work (and didn’t have family members able to feed you), you didn’t eat.
- Health insurance? If you didn’t have the cash (from either your savings or your family) to pay for needed treatment, you didn’t get treated. And if your illness or injury was sufficiently life-threatening, you died.
- Disability insurance? If you got injured or otherwise became disabled, here also you had only your savings (if any) and your family to fall back on.
- Old-age pension? Nothing there either. If your adult children weren’t working and sending money home to you once you had gotten too old to work, you were out of luck.
Life was tough for the older generation
Put very simply…
Life could be quite grim
in such a society
… unless you were born into a well-to-do family.
But most families were not well-to-do, and the small portion of very well-to-do families got that way and stayed that way by not being big on sharing that wealth with the less fortunate members of their society.
That was (and still is in the poorest countries) a big part of the reason behind having large families … the more children you had, the more “insurance” you had against unforeseen mishaps as well as for old age.
And for the society, more children meant larger armies, both to expand that country’s domain by invading and conquering its neighbors and to defend its own turf from neighbors trying to expand their domains.
“…
nearly all cultures up until the last few decades adopted a “social contract” that was built around the concept of marriage and children
…”
As a result, nearly all cultures up until the last few decades adopted a “social contract” that was built around the concept of marriage and children and, with varying degrees of success, they are attempting to maintain some version of that social contract today.
If you’re not familiar with the concept of a “social contract”, it’s an arrangement under which people give up some rights in order to maintain social order or provide some other societal benefit. But it’s not a contract in the sense that you get to negotiate the entire deal yourself … you get limited (or no) choice in the matter.
And the rules of the game are set up so as to “corral” you emphatically in a specific direction.
Without rules, for example, mating would be Darwinian. Males would try to have sex with as many females as possible while also trying to keep other men away from those women. And women would try to snare a guy to support her and her children by having sex with him but also surreptitiously having sex with hotter guys now and then (whose resulting offspring, if any, the first guy would raise in the mistaken assumption that he had fathered all of those children).
And the resulting relationships
would be brief
There would likely be a lot of one-night stands, of course, but even relationships where the couple stayed together were unlikely to last for more than several years. And that same pattern can be seen in modern societies if divorce is easy to get and also carries little or no social stigma.
“…
males (especially young ones oozing with testosterone) without mates tend to cause considerable disruption for society
…”
In addition, the most desirable males would tend to have many mates whereas the least desirable males would end up being able to attract no mates. And males (especially young ones oozing with testosterone) without mates tend to cause considerable disruption for society.
Therefore, nearly every society until recently put tremendous pressure on people to marry, limited each male and female to one spouse, made divorce very difficult to get (or outlawed it altogether), placed very heavy social stigma on being divorced and then pressured couples in various ways to have children.
For men, societies made concerted efforts to take away any chance of having sex other than in marriage and with the possibility of parenthood:
- Prostitution was usually banned. That took away the option for men to buy sex on an á la carte basis as needed (instead of having to sign up for the full package deal of marriage to one woman for life).
- Fornication (sex between two unmarried persons) was socially repressed and very often also made illegal.
- Adultery (sex between a married person and someone not their spouse) was even more heavily repressed and penalized than was fornication.
Vintage thrills and innuendo - about as sexy as it got
- Masturbation was strongly frowned upon as that didn’t require a wife and didn’t result in children. This one couldn’t be stamped out entirely (since you could do it in private by yourself) but there were a lot of “old wives tales” that were invented to frighten or shame guys out of the do-it-yourself option. For example, it used to be taught that masturbation caused blindness and also that it caused insanity.
- So-called “pornography” (pictures that men might find sexually arousing) was also outlawed. Why? The official reason was that it degrades or “objectifies” women, but that’s a smokescreen (after all, societies rarely have qualms about doing other things that degrade or objectify people). The real reason was that “porn” is a masturbatory aide. So while the authorities could not totally eliminate the possibility of guys masturbating, they tried to limit it by taking much of the fun out of the experience. Want to see a naked woman? Then you’ll have to marry her first.
- Homosexual behavior was seen as the greatest threat of all and was ruthlessly suppressed. Why? Because it was seen (incorrectly, as it turned out) as a “lifestyle choice” which let the guy have fun in bed without having to put up with the cost and hassle of dealing with women and children at all. It was perceived as an “opt out” strategy and that couldn’t be tolerated (any more than “draft dodgers” were in those days).
- Birth control (what little of it there was in those days) was restricted or outlawed altogether, especially in Catholic countries.
- And abortion was also outlawed nearly everywhere, and is a hot-button issue in America even today.
And prior to the sexual revolution, it was common for companies not to hire men for the management career track if they were…
- Single (which was seen as “irresponsible” and a sign of immaturity) or
- Divorced (which was interpreted as “How could he be trusted to handle our business affairs if he can’t even handle his own wife and family?”).
And the same was true within the military … unless you were married, your chances of being promoted to the high ranks (such as Colonel or especially General) plunged to near zero.
It was all done to herd guys into
fulfilling their assigned role:
becoming “married with children”
For women, society made concerted efforts to take away almost any chance of having an above average standard of living other than in marriage.
That was the so-called “glass ceiling”. Young women just out of school would be hired for low-paying office roles as secretary, stenographer, clerk or receptionist, but they’d not be considered for a management or executive position.
In fact, it wasn’t too many decades ago that women were expected to quit work and become stay-at-home housewives once they married. And guys of that era were stigmatized if their wives did work! If his wife did work outside the home, this proved that the guy had no pride as a man (since it was his role to support his wife and family).
“…
most men stuck it out no matter how unpleasant married life had become
…”
And therefore being divorced would be a major career-killer for men, enough so that most men stuck it out no matter how unpleasant married life had become.
Women in that era did not have to get married, of course. But if they didn’t the only types of jobs open to them would be ones that paid only a very basic income and had no future upward potential (maid, school teacher, librarian, waitress and such).
A woman could not get a job paying the equivalent of a six-figure or seven-figure salary (in today’s dollars). To be able to live in that sort of luxury, she had to do it through marriage.
And because guys already making the megabucks would also already be married, women had to spot the up-and-comers, lure them to the alter and then ride them (in the sense of a jockey, not in the sense of a porno movie starlet) relentlessly to make sure that the guy did all of the right things needed to climb the corporate ladder.
Behind every great man
was a woman
She’s the one who was cracking the whip.
Were women discriminated against in those days?
Absolutely!
That was how society was attempting (usually successfully) to pressure them into settling for only one guy and then to stay with him “till death do us part”, regardless of how sick she got of him (or how bored).
And guys also got a raw deal: some occasional tepid sex with a woman who nagged him more than she shagged him, who spent more money than he made and who regularly overloaded him with drama. The men were sperm banks with checkbooks, cogs in the economic wheel for their employer and cannon fodder for their government when summoned to make the ultimate sacrifice.
Both genders were corralled into an arrangement which did provide some benefits to themselves in the very long-term (by providing a safety net that society at large was unwilling to provide) and which also benefited society in several ways, but it was often not very satisfying personally on a day-to-day basis.
In many societies (not the US, however) you did not even get to pick your mate … marriages were arranged. And it was common to not even meet your spouse until your wedding day!
“…
in societies which arranged marriages, love was seen as a frivolity
…”
What about “love”? In societies which arranged marriages, love was seen as a frivolity.
What mattered first was survival and second was improving the family’s economic and social status to the extent that it could do so. “Love” (or even “like”) was not one of the requirements. It never entered into the calculus.
But even in most societies where the partners could pick their own mate (albeit with very heavy parental pressure), it was a “roach motel” arrangement. Once married, they were in it for the duration.
They were corralled into marriage at a point in life when their hormones were raging at their hottest. And when they did later figure out what they had gotten themselves into, it was too late to walk away without incurring catastrophic consequences.
“Marry in haste, repent at leisure.”
That’s where gender relations stood before the sexual revolution. In “Part 2”, we’ll look at what has changed since then … and why.
Stay tuned,
-Mack Doppler
