In this series, we’ve been expanding on a topic addressed 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 based on a paper about “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness” from economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers. In his article, Mr. Douthat noted that:
“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.”
And he added that:
“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.”
Since most people reading this aren’t old enough to remember how things used to be way back then (prior to the sexual revolution which had started in the latter part of the 1960s), we set the stage in “Part 1” by showing where things started and why things were the way that they were back then.
In “Part 2”, we looked at reasons why women suddenly gained dramatic ground beginning in the mid-1970s. In “Part 3”, we looked at how the rules of the game have changed as a result since then.
We’ll conclude this series in “Part 4” by examining …
- Why women (despite having gotten much of what they had asked for from the government, employers and even from most men) would be less happy as a result and
- Why men (even though the gains accruing to women in the past few decades have come largely at the expense of men) would be marginally more happy as a result
On the face of it, such an outcome is highly counter-intuitive, so let’s look more closely.
It wasn’t until women began grumbling about what a raw deal women had been getting that men started thinking about equality between the sexes and realized that men’s old deal was worse than women’s old deal.
So much so that …
Simply being able to
opt out of the old deal
was a huge improvement for men
Men too had the choice of participating (or, more importantly, of not participating) in the current hostile gender relationship environment.
Rather than being subjected to persistent coercion common in past generations when everyone was expected to play their assigned gender role, men also appreciated the right to take more freedom for themselves.
So even though women still get a better deal than men, the margin of difference has narrowed from “huge” to merely “quite big”. And that’s what human nervous systems are designed to perceive: change (that being why we can feel acceleration or deceleration but not speed per se).
Everything in life is relative, and…
Men today are somewhat
better off in relative terms than
they were a couple of generations ago
Even though they’re still quite far behind in absolute terms, however.
One reason, of course, is that employers no longer insist that a guy be married for him to get onto the “fast track” at work. So men are no longer forced to accept a package deal in terms of needing a wife to be considered for responsible (and potentially lucrative) roles in the workplace.
A second reason is that men are no longer subject to a military draft and, with it, the threat of being forced to kill other guys like ourselves and then coming back home traumatized for life, possibly with missing limbs or in a box (only to discover, as many returning soldiers did, that “your girl” didn’t wait).
Women never had that worry, so they received no relative benefit from the draft having ended, only a philosophic one of them being able to push much harder for equality with men. But that was a very heavy burden lifted from men’s shoulders.
And a third reason is that the “good ones” were not already taken. Back in the olden days, when nearly all men (and women) did marry – and marry young – the pickings quickly became very slim if a man (or a woman) did not marry young. “All of the good ones would be taken”.
And in those days, with divorce being much less common than nowadays, the “good ones” were unlikely to come back on the market again some years down the road.
It was a self-fulfilling prophesy. So as more and more men and women postponed marriage (and as many of those who did get married young were back on the market again within several years), it was no longer true that all of the good ones were taken.
“…
men now have the luxury of taking their time about deciding when to get married
…”
And as a result, men now have the luxury of taking their time about deciding when to get married (there’s no rush now) and also about whether to get married at all. And that has shifted the playing field.
In the old days, societal pressures were geared to getting people paired off and married at a young age, typically once they graduated from college (or, if they were not going to college, after graduating from high school).
In other words, at exactly the point in time that women were at their most desirable (sexually) and that men were at their most vulnerable (not having learned much about women or life) and also at their most desperate (with their testosterone levels practically off the charts).
As I’ve mentioned earlier, that extreme imbalance in terms of relative bargaining position resulted in large numbers of young men ending up saddled with obligations for the next several decades that they’d not have settled for had they been a little older and a little wiser.
So for men, it makes sense that…
Male happiness has inched up
despite still having a
worse deal than women get
… and despite the fact that women are less happy than a few decades earlier: it’s gotten a lot easier for us to limit our dealings with women if we wish and to define the nature of our relationship if we do wish to get together with a particular woman.
What about for women?
They’ve gotten much of what they asked from employers and the government, and yet they’re even less happy than they were before. What gives?
One reason is that, with men now having the luxury of taking their time about deciding when to get married and even whether to get married at all, the playing field has shifted.
And most women have unwitting gone along with this shift by taking their sweet old time about deciding it’s time for them to find a hubby. After all, girls just want to have fun, so why settle for one (possibly homely) dork when you’re at your most desirable?
Where women went wrong
It’s so much more fun to party hearty, get hit on by dozens of hot hunks at clubs, play the field and go wild. It’s a big exciting world out there, so why not taste all the delights that life serves up?
As a result, women today increasingly postpone marriage since so many of them aren’t ready to give up the excitement of the dating world and to limit themselves to just whatever one guy they can lure to the altar.
But women are at their peak desirability for a relatively small number of years, so by the time they decide to “settle down” it will be a lot harder for them to find a guy to marry (especially one who’s as hot as the guys they’ve been dating, as hot guys are less apt to be “the marrying kind” … after all, they’re hot).
The more guys she’s been with, however, the more qualities there will be on her “must have” list and also on her “can’t have” list.
And the less likely it will be that she can attract such a guy … her expectations will have expanded but her “market value” marriage-wise will have declined. And that mismatch tends to make women very bitter toward men.
The problem of
unrealistic expectations
A second problem for women these days is unrealistic expectations. A key mantra of the feminist movement was “having it all” …
- To have an exciting job than pays fabulously well, offers extraordinary fringe benefits and perks, and in which she is highly respected at all times by all parties
- To have a loving husband who makes even more money that his wife (so that she has the option of telling her boss where to shove it if things come to that and she also had the option to drop out of the labor force at any time if she feels the need to “find herself), is exceptionally handsome, makes no demands on her and of course never even so much as looks at another woman
- To have one, two or three superbly good looking children with IQs north of 160 and who never misbehave, with top-quality day care available (and paid by the employer) right from about the sixth week so that she can have great kids but without them impinging on her lifestyle
- To have a larger, more luxurious and (of course) more expensive home than any of her female friends has
- To be happy all the time
- To have no regrets ever
- And so on
That’s a pretty tall list. And some of the items on it are mutually exclusive.
For example, a very handsome husband who earns a megabucks paycheck will be looking at other women. And if she sticks her kids in day care right from infancy (so as not to limit her own lifestyle), odds are that they won’t turn out to be great kids who never misbehave.
In other words, women have been
sold a bill of goods
The fact is that life often demands compromises.
And “having it all” is the female equivalent of the “get rich quick” schemes that so frequently sucker naïve men. But women see the concept of “having it all” as an entitlement, and it greatly adds to their bitterness when reality falls so far short of that unattainable fantasy.
After all, happiness is a relative concept (it reflects a comparison between how you perceive things to be and how you believe that they should be).
And that’s why women in other countries who have vastly less than do American women can still be much happier (and a lot more pleasant to be around) than American women are.
I can recall back in my grade school days having several kids in my class who were an “only child” and came from well-to-do families where everyone doted on them and where their every wish was granted. And guess what? They were a real pain-in-the-backside to be around.
Why? Because they were spoiled rotten (or “overindulged”, to use the polite word for it), that’s why.
“…
quite a few of the women I meet in America these days remind me a bit of those kids
…”
But oddly enough, even they (the spoiled kids in class) were not happy. Partly, of course, it was because the other kids didn’t like them (like I said earlier, they were real pains to be around).
But partly it was because they were bored. They had no challenges in life. They didn’t have to struggle. They atrophied emotionally.
Quite a few of the women I meet in America these days remind me a bit of those kids. They’ve seen it all and done it all. And as a result, they’re very bored … and very boring.
There’s an old cliché which says to “be careful what you ask for … because you might just get it”. Could that apply to women and feminism?
Stay tuned,
-Mack Doppler
