It's all downhill from here, kid. Via Just Taken Pics @ Flickr.
My love affair with Maureen Dowd was a brief one. It began and ended with this column. Alas, she’s back to her old tricks – namely, undermining other women. In her latest op-ed, she argues that feminism has made women unhappy, and provides ample evidence. She’ll keep her career, of course, but the rest of us are hopeless.
Women are getting unhappier, I told my friend Carl.
“How can you tell?” he deadpanned. “It’s always been whine-whine-whine.”
Why are we sadder? I persisted.
“Because you care,” he replied with a mock sneer. “You have feelings.”
Oh, that.
As a man, Carl’s only feeling is annoyance. At women.
In the early ’70s, breaking out of the domestic cocoon, leaving their mothers’ circumscribed lives behind, young women felt exhilarated and bold.
Women are so gullible.
But the more women have achieved, the more they seem aggrieved. Did the feminist revolution end up benefiting men more than women?
That can’t be. When I’m not reading about how the feminist movement destroyed women, I’m reading about how it’s sapped men’s will to live.
According to the General Social Survey, which has tracked Americans’ mood since 1972, and five other major studies around the world, women are getting gloomier and men are getting happier.
Before the ’70s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there’s a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives.
Could it be that, before the ’70s, women felt less comfortable expressing their dissatisfaction? Men still don’t have as much freedom to express their feelings as women do.
As Arianna Huffington points out in a blog post headlined “The Sad, Shocking Truth About How Women Are Feeling”: “It doesn’t matter what their marital status is, how much money they make, whether or not they have children, their ethnic background, or the country they live in. Women around the world are in a funk.”
(The one exception is black women in America, who are a bit happier than they were in 1972, but still not as happy as black men.)
Wait a second. It doesn’t matter whether or not they are married or have children? I thought marriage and babies were the keys that unlocked women’s inner bliss.
Marcus Buckingham, a former Gallup researcher who has a new book out called “Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently,” says that men and women passed each other midpoint on the graph of life.
“Though women begin their lives more fulfilled than men, as they age, they gradually become less happy,” Buckingham writes in his new blog on The Huffington Post, pointing out that this darker view covers feelings about marriage, money and material goods. “Men, in contrast, get happier as they get older.”
The reason for this seems so obvious to me, if it’s true. Dowd just assumes the validity of Buckingham’s research, which may or may not be sound. But anyway, it is not surprising that, in a culture where women are considered pieces of fruit that spoil over time whilst men are considered wines that improve with age, women would get depressed as their social value decreases.
Buckingham and other experts dispute the idea that the variance in happiness is caused by women carrying a bigger burden of work at home, the “second shift.” They say that while women still do more cooking, cleaning and child-caring, the trend lines are moving toward more parity, which should make them less stressed.
The trend line might be moving towards parity, but it legs behind parity in the public sphere.
When women stepped into male- dominated realms, they put more demands — and stress — on themselves. If they once judged themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens and dinner parties, now they judge themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens, dinner parties — and grad school, work, office deadlines and meshing a two-career marriage.
“Choice is inherently stressful,” Buckingham said in an interview. “And women are being driven to distraction.”
Who’s in the driver’s seat?
Right after disputing the “second shift” theory, Dowd quotes Buckingham contradicting himself. If women are distracted by too many things that contribute to their unhappiness, that must mean men are distracted by fewer things: looks, kids, wives, gardens, dinner parties? Don’t forget: women have to be “sexy” at all times. There’s your “second shift.”
One area of extreme distraction is kids. “Across the happiness data, the one thing in life that will make you less happy is having children,” said Betsey Stevenson, an assistant professor at Wharton who co-wrote a paper called “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.” “It’s true whether you’re wealthy or poor, if you have kids late or kids early. Yet I know very few people who would tell me they wish they hadn’t had kids or who would tell me they feel their kids were the destroyer of their happiness.”
Children mean less me-time and less time spend with one’s partner. I’m sure that sucks sometimes.
Having children will make a person even more stressed if they bear most of the burden of raising them. If parenthood sucks more for women than men, that may be the reason.
And who the hell is going to admit they regret having their children? It’s dangerous enough to declare, as a person without children, that you don’t want kids. Admit that you don’t want your own kids and you’ll have an angry mob marching down your block.
The more important things that are crowded into their lives, the less attention women are able to give to each thing.
Add this to the fact that women are hormonally more complicated and biologically more vulnerable. Women are much harder on themselves than men.
They tend to attach to other people more strongly, beat themselves up more when they lose attachments, take things more personally at work and pop far more antidepressants.
“Women have lives that become increasingly empty,” Buckingham said. “They’re doing more and feeling less.”
The world is much harder on women than men. Excuse us for internalizing that. Damn feminism for complicating our hormones.
Another daunting thing: America is more youth and looks obsessed than ever, with an array of expensive cosmetic procedures that allow women to be their own Frankenstein Barbies.
Men can age in an attractive way while women are expected to replicate — and Restylane — their 20s into their 60s.
“Women are expected…” By whom? It’s called sexism, Dowd.
Buckingham says that greater prosperity has made men happier. And they are also relieved of bearing sole responsibility for their family finances, and no longer have the pressure of having women totally dependent on them.
Yet they have not compensated women by taking on responsibility for the gardens and dinner parties. I suppose it’s women’s fault somehow.
Men also tend to fare better romantically as time wears on. There are more widows than widowers, and men have an easier time getting younger mates.
Just a throw-away line that could have been expanded upon. But identifying and examining sexism would sort of dilute this column’s hypothesis.
Stevenson looks on the bright side of the dark trend, suggesting that happiness is beside the point. We’re happy to have our newfound abundance of choices, she said, even if those choices end up making us unhappier.
A paradox, indeed.
A paradox that may not even exist. Mark Liberman at the Language Log blog organized the General Social Survey results into a few graphs and charts that expose the empirical flimsiness of this claim. Women were over the moon in 1973, by the way (wink, wink).
Personally, the more I recognize patriarchy slithering through my life and the lives of other women, the sadder I get. The more I expect to be regarded as fully human, the angrier I feel when I am treated as a defective man and a second-class citizen. Ignorance is bliss; feminism opens women’s eyes to gender-based injustice. But overall, I’d say I’m happy with my life.
I finally created a “backlash” tag, by the way.
“Having children will make a person even more stressed if they bear most of the burden of raising them. If parenthood sucks more for women than men, that may be the reason.”
WORD. I have seen this burden–and the torrent of unsolicited “advice” and judgement that comes with it–drive many a woman into depression and even addiction. Their husbands? Not so much.
Also, Maureen Dowd is generally a smug, woman-negative, undermine-y bitch and I’d vote her out of the sisterhood if I could.
Good post! I find I am generally quite happy with my life, most of the time, when I just think about how I actually feel and not how the myriad outside inputs are telling me how I SHOULD feel.
Speaking of being told how to feel, MAN do I feel you on the comments received if you express anything less than sheer joy at the thought of becoming a mom. I plan to be a mom some day, but any time I express any sort of ambivalence about it on my blog, tons of people chime in to tell me that of COURSE one day I’ll be a resplendent, joyful, undoubting, unquestioning mom, and do I want my future kids reading about how I wasn’t sure I wanted them some day? I think I have a new hero in 18th century poet Charlotte Smith, whose husband was often in debtors prison. She wrote really melancholy sonnets about how her life sucked so bad that she was jealous of the insane whose ignorance was bliss and she wished she was dead. By these sonnets, she supported her 11 kids.
“Could it be that, before the ’70s, women felt less comfortable expressing their dissatisfaction? Men still don’t have as much freedom to express their feelings as women do.”
THIS. I hate vague statistics like this General Social Survey, because the last time I checked, happiness is not quantifiable. I’ve certainly never calculated a compound annual growth rate determining happiness trends. My husband’s boss believes that a reliance on statistics to make a claim means that your claim is weak to begin with, and in this case I think he’s right–especially because those numbers can be easily called into doubt, as you so handily did here.
Thanks for the link to the Language Log blog entry–it goes to show you how we all tend to manipulate data in order to serve our own purposes.
Word. It’s amazing how much people freak out over my making careful, reasoned choices about what will make a good life for me.
I’m a research engineer, and reading scholarly articles critically is a daily habit. When I researched having children the same way I do any other problem it was impossible to come up with any other answer than “not for me”. The same with marriage. In both cases the evidence is overwhelming that for what personally makes me happy, I’m better off as I am.
It’s interesting that those who get freaked out by that base all their arguments on, “but someone else would benefit if you make the choices I’m pushing!” Yeah, I know. Someone else would benefit at my expense. That’s why I’m not making those choices. Duh.
Men also tend to fare better romantically as time wears on. There are more widows than widowers…
Well, this is true. Unless the man in question is dead. But dead men can’t be unhappy. So she’s right!
Carl sounds like a prize. Why does MD persistently ask a dude why women are unhappy? How would he know?
Ugh, I can’t stand this woman.
Personally, the more I recognize patriarchy slithering through my life and the lives of other women, the sadder I get. The more I expect to be regarded as fully human, the angrier I feel when I am treated as a defective man and a second-class citizen. Ignorance is bliss; feminism opens women’s eyes to gender-based injustice.
I have a friend who’s been living in Spain for the past few years; some time during her first year there I went to visit her. She hadn’t really met any feminist women yet, and coming from a women’s college and a bevy of radical women, she was a bit depressed about it, and most of the vacation was spent with her getting her fill of feminist conversation with me (I happily obliged). She was living with two younger women who were not feminists at all, who thought feminism was icky and who read Cosmo because they felt it was helpful.
She asked me if I thought that being ‘aware’ made us less happy–her roommates, she thought, just hadn’t seen the light yet, weren’t feminists because they didn’t realize (yet) how patriarchal and sexist the world was. She thought that they might never see it, because it’s easier to not see it. She was wondering whether it would be easier if she had never seen it, if she had never understood, and if she could go back to ignorant bliss.
But I don’t think so. Most of the women like this that I know are actually really unhappy, or more–feel crazy. But if they were to answer “are you happy?” they’d say “yes,” because they are pretty and have boyfriends and…that’s what it means to be happy. Right? But, being a vocal radical feminist, lots of these women (and girls) come to talk to me when they feel like they need someone who isn’t all pro-status quo, and (usually acting very unlike their public selves) they admit to being confused about things, to feeling like “it wasn’t rape but it wasn’t consensual” sex is not good, but they’re not sure why it is consuming their thoughts when they just want to stop thinking about it. Stuff like that. I think that critically thinking about the world can be very depressing–it makes me feel crazy, and lately I’ve stopped reading feminist blogs and newspapers because it had been seriously affecting my physical and mental health, and I was spiraling downward and needed to stop and spend time with my dog, not thinking so much. Or trying not to, anyway. But I can’t stop, and knowing where the misery and confusion comes from (the patriarchy!) makes me feel less like I’m crazy and alone. My mother, for example, feels crazy and lonely because she didn’t want kids or a husband or a life in the suburbs, but she did it because that’s what makes you happy (right?). She ends up being miserable about things like which rug to buy or the lack of storage space in her house–as angry about that stuff as I get about abortion and rape. But she also knows, somewhere, that it’s absurd to be so angry about such silly stuff, and can’t figure out why she’s angry or how to get happy–even when she buys the right rug and cleans out the closet. None of that makes her happy, because ultimately what’s making her unhappy is that she was forced to “choose” a life that she didn’t want, fulfilling feminine roles that weren’t for her. And feeling crazy and lonely are worse, I think, than getting migraines because you can’t stop seeing the patriarchy everywhere.
“And who the hell is going to admit they regret having their children? It’s dangerous enough to declare, as a person without children, that you don’t want kids. Admit that you don’t want your own kids and you’ll have an angry mob marching down your block.”
You seem to imply that the reason people do not say they don’t regret having children is because people would look down on them. While perhaps this is the case on some occasions, I do not think it’s too much to believe that even though having children can be and IS extremely stressful, that parents can LOVE their children. Romantic relationships can be stressful, too, but that doesn’t mean we do not find joy in them, or regret being in them.
Marie, I imply that it’s a barrier for those women who wish they had not had children, not that parenthood makes all women unhappy.
Great takedown, SarahMC. To torture myself, I checked the comments at the Times. Sure enough, most of the early ones are dudes mansplaining (my new favorite word!) exactly why we’re unhappy. If we just hadn’t gotten that silly idea into our heads that we’re equal, we’d have nothing but sunshine. Oh, and it’s also because we started wearing pants. (He truly seems to be serious about this):
“BUT…and this could be a factor leading up to the cause of their unhappiness. PANTS!!! Women were wearing PANTS!!! Follow the crowds walking up or down Madison or 5th Avenue. Who are the girls? Who are the guys? Gone are the days of ankle lenghth or knee lenghth or even 12″ above the knee lenghth skirts. Men had lost interes. Who, among the men who had striven mightily to demonstrate the nobility of manhood is going to whisle at someone wearing a pair of pants. Or flirt with someone trying to be more like a man??”
Thanks for the tip, dude! Guess I better go buy more skirts, in all lengths.
Oh my gaaawd, SO.
“Who, among the men who had striven mightily to demonstrate the nobility of manhood is going to whisle at someone wearing a pair of pants. Or flirt with someone trying to be more like a man??”
Exactly. I wear my pants like a shield of armor against retrofuckers like him!
@shinyobjects: No, just the length the menz deem appropriately non-threatening!
Also from the comments:
“It’s a shame, but the feminine revolution designed by a few active feminists of the ’60′s, probably wasn’t meant for the vast majority of women, and certainly isn’t a formula for happiness for a generation coming of age in its midst.”
Are you f*ing kidding me?
And “Mohamed” also wants to weigh in:
“Maureen, you essay does not surprise me at all. Among all the chest thumping touting feminist triumph, very sad things happened to women in the process. They made themselves too cheap and lost the only advantage they had: their desirability and their motherhood.”
$@^$%#^@%$^@%#!!!!!
Seriously, I am only up to #20 of over 400 comments and am already brimming with bile. I can’t take it anymore. I guess I will get back to working on my completely unsatisfying job and counting the days until I ovulate.
Maybe this is just my Western co-option of Eastern spiritual practices speaking, but personally I have come to believe that the more “happy” people insist they are, the farther away it gets. Cimorene hints at this.
We are sold a sort of “happiness package” by this culture, which includes not just husbands and children but also usually a nice house and decent clothing oh and also along the way fulfilling work. And also the appearance of happiness because if you are Michelle Obama and you happen to not smile one hundred percent of the time you will be said to be sour and this too will make you unhappy. (Your face will stay that way!)
At any rate at some point several years ago I sort of gave up on “happy,” or at least happy as we commonly understand it, and tried to concentrate less on wanting things so much as wanting meaning. oh sure these are two sides of the same coin sometimes, but not always. Meaning is never automatic; the acquisition of things/titles/acclaim etc, do not necessarily have these things.
I suppose I’m rambling. today has been a day of much caffeine but also of counting down the minutes until I am free from my current position, which is more of a Thing than a Meaning, if you catch my drift, and so I may have projected my own neuroses on the post.
Ahhh. ““Who, among the men who had striven mightily to demonstrate the nobility of manhood is going to whisle at someone wearing a pair of pants. Or flirt with someone trying to be more like a man??”
I love that the nobility of manhood involves street harassment.
@ausgezeichnet: PhDork once compared the commenters on newspaper sites to monkeys flinging their poo against the wall. She was talking about the NY Post, but juding by these comments think some of the poo-flingers also read the Times.
@cimorene: It breaks my heart that this dude might not whistle at me. Or flirt with me. Truly, I’m crushed.
I’m with you on the “happiness package,” PSoul. It’s a bill of goods. And I think it is just getting worse – “having it all” these days means “having all the stuff.” I’m really disturbed at how materialistic American culture has become, at least the culture as filtered through the inescapable lens of the MSM. I would be really interested to see what sort of effects this recession/depression has had on these attitudes: are people, forced to temporarily stop accumulating stuff, realizing that their lives are still okay? That they can be happy without all those false symbols of happiness?
I realize how hard that is to measure, as evidenced by the BS (in my opinion) study that Dowd uses. I also know that such a study would only focus on the middle-to-upper classes, leaving out the lower-income people who’ve been doing without ‘stuff’ all along (Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a _good_ piece in the Times opinion section about this a while ago). But, again, the media only cares about those mid-upper class folks. So I wonder if there might be any small change in the dominant media/cultural norm as a result of the downturn. Probably a pipe dream.
I am so unhappy that because of the advances of feminism, I’m a queer woman who won’t be forced to marry a man and have kids I don’t want! And I’m so unhappy that I get to wear pants! Oh, why should I be allowed to wear pants? And throwing these dinner parties is damn hard work! If only I could be absolved from them…do I dare stop throwing dinner parties…? Oh, the stress…my little female brain is about to explode…someone catch me and bring me some smelling salts, ASAP…
I’m totally LOLing at that guy’s comment. So it’s easier to resist a woman’s ass than her ankles? You have to hope these are just really old dudes and that they are dying out. Not that patriarchy is, mind you, but the kind that feels threatened by dungarees.
I think that women have access to modes of unhappiness now that used to be reserved solely for men. Because different choices come with different sacrifices and kinds of pain. I don’t think we are unhappier overall, I think that we have more varieties and kinds of experiences that lead some us to the kind of feelings and expressions that men can recognize as “unhappiness,” if that makes sense. We have louder voices and our narratives are told now.
It just sounds like another way of patriarchy being like, “are you bitches STILL TALKING?” and then trying to act like it is for our own good to shut up.
Also, was feminism invented to make women “happier?” I thought that was what meditation was for. Feminism was invented to make women more powerful and free, I always thought.
Agreed, JD. Feminism was meant to ensure our political, economic and social equality. No one ever said that once we got those things we’d all be happy and live in a meadow with puppies and kittens and unicorns.
Having those things, though, gives women a lot more tools with which to create their own happiness. I am happy because I have a job I love, can pay my own bills, own my own home, have plenty of lovers without shame and control my own fertility. None of those things would be possible for me without feminism.
If women were so damn happy before feminism, then why the hell did it even take off in the first place? To read crap like this you’d think that a few angry bitches forcibly stuffed all of womanity into an ugly pants suit to be dragged off kicking and screaming towards a dismal, feminist future. OMG ladies, I can see it so clearly now! We’re all really just sad, whiny victims of the evil Axis of Estrogen!! Thank god Maureen Dowd and her sensitive, respectful friend Carl showed me the light.
“Men can age in an attractive way while women are expected to replicate — and Restylane — their 20s into their 60s.”
What a load of bollocks…unhappy and unattractive older men abound.
@June: True, although there’s not nearly the societal pressure for them to stay young and sexy as there is for women.
And about 2 seconds face-to-face with Maureen Dowd will tell anyone that she’s wholeheartedly embraced the Restylane-and-botoxed 20-something wannabe look.
“True, although there’s not nearly the societal pressure for them to stay young and sexy as their is for women.”
Becky, you’re right- but the pressure is slowly building for them to stay young and sexy too- at least in the steady growth of the advertising/marketing pitch of cosmetics/cosmetic surgery aimed at older men here in Australia.
My point is more that I get tired of the constant “men get more attractive as they age” mythical like statements.
btw, I love this blog- read everyday. Thanks!
tallgirl wins for “Axis of Estrogen.” One zillion harpybuxx to you, sister.
I’ve developed an easy plug-n-play template for a MoDo column.
Opening personal reference
Leading question
Unfounded claim
Generalization
Generalization
Complete absenting of non-white/middle-class/straight/cis/able-bodied/etc. women
Unfounded claim
Bold Assertion!!!
Wrap up w/ end to personal reference.
I invite you all to draft your own MoDo madlibs; we might even post the most brilliant ones.
We have a protester at our clinics here who claims that women wearing pants causes abortion. I am not making this up. You’d think the wearing of trousers would inhibit unwanted pregnancies, but…This guy once made a young woman protester who was wearing pants break down in tears. I almost felt sorry for her, but came to my senses.
I always thought that happiness was something you measured at the end of your life. We can have moments, or periods, of contentment but happiness is a product, not a goal in and of itself. Productive work (for pay or not), the ability to give and receive love, the freedom to learn and grow as a person, time for rest and for using your body, giving of yourself to make your community and your world better places-all these can lead to happiness. But obsessing about being happy will never get you there.
And yeah, Maureen Dowd lost me back when she started banging on the Clintons. I’d much rather read Ellen Goodman.
[...] I said in the comments on SarahMC’s Maureen Dowd post that I’m totally up for trading Maureen, because she is an underminer-y frenemy of women [...]
[...] talked about the questionable studies on feminism and the “paradox of women’s unhappiness” [...]