Split Thread Are post-feminism women happier?

[Puppycow]

Honestly who **** ing cares if women are happier? The whole point of feminism was to make women equal partners in the suffering that is providing for human existence. Sure they're no longer slaves or concubines, but so what? It's still a daily chore to secure food and shelter. You think many women are going to be happy about that?

I basically agree with this sentiment, and it's similar to the point I was trying to make above.


For example, as a thought experiment, if it turned out that getting a lobotomy could make you much happier, would you do it? I wouldn't.

 

[shuttlt]

Rather than happiness, at least one author says that, fundamentally, liberalism makes an ethical claim:

Liberalism - The Basics, by John Charvet.

Sure, but what is the basis of such ethical claims? One can have an ethic where Solomon tearing the baby in half is ethical because it is materially fair. Some tangible notion of "the good" with some kind of compelling reason why it is good surely must underpin things. One could just assert equality as the good, but then we are back to tearing the baby in half being good. Are liberte, egalite, fraternite so intrinsically good that even if they were to make everybody unhappy and suffer more, a society built on them would be more ethical? If that is the case, why would we want to live in an ethical society?

 

[shuttlt]

But that hasn't happened yet.

I agree the true equality hasn't been achieved, and I do not believe ever will be.

Beyond the point that happiness is a ridiculously vague thing to try to measure, let alone try to calibrate a scale that is consistent over time, I'm not even sure that happiness even means the same thing in different time periods.

Perhaps, but then can one say anything at all about whether one system is better than another for its people? Feminism makes all sorts of claims about how terribly bad life was like in the past, but whether it has made women happier is a terribly vague question an what even is happiness?

This is the same pivot homeopathy does when it talks about how clear and obvious it's ability to cure people is until you come to test it, and all of a sudden it is so subtle that there is no way to tell if it has done any good. This makes feminism unfalsifiable.

Expectations.

When I grew up, there were no cell phones and, until I was around 10, cable television wasn't a thing. We didn't miss either one. We were perfectly happy without either one and felt nothing was missing.

Now we have cable TV, internet and cell phones. Our expectations have increased and if these things are absent we miss them. I'm not sure it's true to say that I was happier in 1978 without cable or cell phones than I would be now if those things were unavailable. But knowledge of their existence, of the possibilities makes me re-calibrate so that what I called happiness then is at a lower place on the scale I use now.

Why is it at a lower place? Plenty of things one comes to need and require to be happy reduce happiness overall. Crack for example.

This is one of the things about liberalism and enlightenment values, they came in as the merchant and financial class was taking over from the landowners as the dominant power. The conception of what is needed to make people happy is very material as a result. Happiness is the ability to buy lots of products and take out loans.

It's kind of like "the more money you earn, the more money you need." Our needs calibrate to our expectations. So does the happiness scale. If one does not know of the existence of points on the scale above 7, 7 looks like a ten.

Or alternatively materiel plenty has a kind of deflationary effect on human happiness. Every year we need a little bit more than the year before to be happy. It's hardly an appeal to revolutionary change though - "to the barricades lads, that next year we will have thrown off the oppressor and be no happier than we are today!".

So, women are closer to equality with men. But they are not there. Men still make more. In most relationships, the man's career is still the one that drives relocation of the family. Women have gained responsibilities formerly reserved for men (and gladly), but men have not picked up as much of the load of responsibilities that were reserved for women.

You choose some very specific measures there. Why? Women get to spend far more time with their children rather than drudging away at work. Women are the ones who decide how to spend most of the money earned by the household. If being with their children makes women happier and children happier, should we tear them apart so that they can be more "equal"?

One makes the best of the life that is available to them. Suggesting that pre-feminism women were happier is kind of an "ignorance is bliss" assertion. "How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm
After they've seen Paree'"

If mobile phones have made me less happy than I would have been without them, then what good has eating from that particular tree of knowledge done me? Likewise crack? You hold liberty as an absolute good, even if it makes people unhappy. I don't. Again, was it good that China was opened up to opium so that it's people weren't kept in blissful ignorance of what their lives might be like taking it?

It feels like we have gone around in a big circle. Your ethics are, I think, rooted in liberalism. Hence liberalism becomes ethically self justifying. Whether it makes people happier is irrelevant - it's either assume to be axiomatically true that it makes people happier, or its ignored. My ethics, and I think the ethics of a great many people, are rooted in the long term happiness of people over time.

 

[shuttlt]

Was that what we were sold? I was pretty young, so I probably didn't understand exactly what was being sold, but I don't think happiness was being sold.

Really, what would you say was being sold and why was it supposed to be worth having?

So, I'm not sure that that was the goal, and I'm not sure the unhappiness isn't an artifacd. And I'm fairly confident that the vast majority of women don't wnat to get rid of it.

I didn't say anything about getting rid of happiness. Equally, if we are going to say that people don't want to get rid of unhappiness completely, then that amounts to saying that some level of short term happiness is necessary to long term happiness (which is what I'm talking about).

Meanwhile, I look at pop culture portrayals, and outside of TV sitcoms, I see an awful lot of improvements in women's lives. For example, I'm old enough to remember a standard trope in movies. There's the middle aged or old woman talking about her husband, saying, "He wasn't perfect, but in 20 years of marriage, he never laid a hand on me." In other words, lack of beatings was enough to be cited as a positive. In general, problems with husbands and being stuck in dismal marriages was a really common problem. So, today, poverty after divorce is a problem, but in my childhood, being trapped in an abusive relationship was a problem. Regardless of how they fill out a survey, I think they are better off.

In what sense are they better off if they aren't happier? In what sense is that form of better off worth having? Again, this feels like people are just arguing something like "liberalism is better for people because it seeks to reorganise society along liberal lines". Sure, I'm questioning whether doing that has made people happier.

 

[shuttlt]

I really don't know, and I'm not entirely sure that it matters.

A quick google search turned up this:
The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness*

Here's the thing though. Women (or men) could be happy or unhappy for reasons that have nothing to do with feminism. A lot of things are different than they were 50 years ago. Maybe it's social media that's making people less happy. Thus, the reason could have very little to do with feminism.

Sure. I've said this myself in earlier posts. Having said that... feminism was a critique of society with a bunch of specific demands which they have had a lot of success implementing. If society has changed to be in many ways far more as feminists wanted, but women are now unhappier.... are we saying that feminism was working on the wrong problem?

Again, society was upended because of feminism and women are less happy. The whole enterprise looks willfully unfalsifiable if that doesn't cause some questioning of the basic assumptions. Effectively they are the basic assumptions of liberalism, so I can see strategically why it wouldn't be necessary to question them.

Let me pose a separate but similar question: Do you think if people 200 years ago, or 800 years ago were surveyed, that they would have reported much less happiness than they do today? If it turned out that people in the past were actually happier than people are today, would you switch places with them? You would have to give up your iPhone, your television, your refrigerator, hot water maybe, modern toilets, antibiotics, and so on. You might have to worry about things like small pox or the bubonic plague, or terrible wars (yes, wars still happen even today, but not as often).

I would imagine there were times in history where people were happier and times where they were less happy. The period after the plague seems to have been a good time. During the enclosures, or the height of industrialisation were bad times. I would imagine that living under puritan rule with the closure of the theatres had an impact on the happiness of the people of England. Some cultural shifts would have caused happiness to increase long term, some would have caused it to decrease. Having been born and grown up today, I think I would be unable to live happily in these time periods because I have been exposed to TikTok, I think being born into England after the plague was probably a good and happy time to be alive.... so I might well choose then.

I think it's somehow baked into the human nature to never be happy. You could be objectively much better off, but still be unhappy. Surely we've all heard stories of rich, famous people who commit suicide. It sometimes leaves me scratching my head: Why would Robin Williams kill himself? Why would Anthony Bourdain kill himself?

If people's happiness has no relation to the system one is living under, then who cares what system one is living under. There is no difference between living in 1984, Gilead, or the idealised future in Bill & Ted... people are just going to be unhappy and it makes no difference. I would say people have natures and a society can either be in tune with that, and have a happier population, or out of tune with that and force people to behave against their natures, and have an unhappy population.

People are genetically programmed to be dissatisfied, regardless of how well-off they are from an objective standpoint. As soon as you get something good, you take it for granted. Seriously, every day we should be thanking our lucky stars that we own a refrigerator and a flush toilet and a computer and 100 other things. But nobody does because we already take those things for granted.

Why should we be grateful for these things if they don't make us happy? If you gave me an incredibly complicated and ingenious device of the most expert craftsmanship that kicked me in the testicles every morning.... am I being churlish not to appreciate it?

 

[shuttlt]

Honestly who **** ing cares if women are happier? The whole point of feminism was to make women equal partners in the suffering that is providing for human existence. Sure they're no longer slaves or concubines, but so what? It's still a daily chore to secure food and shelter. You think many women are going to be happy about that?

This is closer to what I think. Liberalism is the justifying ideology of the merchants and the money lenders. One thing feminism has certainly achieved is to get women in to the workforce, and hence kept wages down, while turning the domestic sphere into something open to commercialisation.

 

[Puppycow]

I would say people have natures and a society can either be in tune with that, and have a happier population, or out of tune with that and force people to behave against their natures, and have an unhappy population.

Well, in a true liberal society, I don't think people are forced to behave against their natures. And feminism, at least the kind I would subscribe to, should allow women to chose traditional gender roles. If a woman wants to be a housewife and a mother, and a man wants to be a life partner with that woman and be the breadwinner, more power to them I say. As long as those roles are not imposed upon them against their wills.

Why should we be grateful for these things if they don't make us happy? If you gave me an incredibly complicated and ingenious device of the most expert craftsmanship that kicked me in the testicles every morning.... am I being churlish not to appreciate it?

Well, that would be a strange device indeed. It's maybe not the best analogy but I think I see what you are saying. There are some things that may give us pleasure or amusement in the short term, but lead to suffering and dysfunction and ill health in the long term. Most recreational drugs, for example. Or the over-consumption of food. We certainly haven't solved all of these issues yet. Choices have trade-offs. People who can delay gratification will be more successful over time. People who make wise choices rather than foolish choices about how to live their lives should tend to have better outcomes on average. Natural selection could take care of it in the long run.

 

[shuttlt]

I also think it's hard to disentangle a lot of things there. Our lives have changed in many ways in the past 50 years, and while feminism is certainly a major change, it's not like the rest of society has stood still. Are changes in overall happiness related to feminism, or the cost of housing?

Well, it's not as if feminism has had nothing to do with the cost of housing. But again, if all the gains of feminism are lost in all these other issues, then it does beg the question of how significant the problem that feminism set out to tackle actually was for ordinary women, and whether there weren't far more important challenges facing women that feminism didn't prioritise.

Liberalism, or declining fertility rates (and if those are related, which is the causal factor in happiness here)?

Again, I'm not sure that you can really call declining birth rates a wholly unconnected issue to feminism. Feminism is a branch of liberalism focused on women though, so if liberalism hasn't made people happy.... then I would say it calls into question the assumptions of feminism.

Declining religiosity? Diet? Outdoor activity? Changes in what we do for employment?

Indeed. Again though, it seems like if female happiness really has declined since 1972, it might at least we a cause for reflection for feminists.

Divorce rates? Norms around parenting and child safety?

And these are changes unconnected to feminism?

Schlutt, I think, has at thesis that some of these things are caused by liberalism, and it's thee root cause of each of the things that have affected happiness (not necessarily the ones I listed, which was a random list and I'm not actually endorsing it).

Yes, but feminism includes the basic liberal assumptions about "the good" being something to do with liberty and equality. I'm doubtful of that.

I'm not entirely convinced that we're less happy, but even to the extent to which I agree that some of these things have made us less happy, I think we can strive for both personal liberty, and a social culture that upholds ideals that lead to strong community relationships and guides people to lives aligned with their actual drives.

Striving for it is fine, but it doesn't seem to be what happens.

 

[shuttlt]

Well, in a true liberal society, I don't think people are forced to behave against their natures.

True liberalism has never been tried ;-)

And feminism, at least the kind I would subscribe to, should allow women to chose traditional gender roles.

OK, but nobody chooses in a vacuum. We choose in the context of a bunch of practical constraints, but also socially defined ideas. This is the whole Gramscian realisation in the 1920s about why the poor weren't choosing the Marxist revolution. Feminism has attacked things like Disney princesses precisely to try to manipulate what little girls grow up wanting to be. The question is, does the new vision being sold make girls happier than the old one.

Then you have the issue that traditional gender roles really only make sense in the context of like minded communities that push back on liberalism. Does an Amish make sense living alone as a salary man in some tiny Tokyo apartment? Generally liberalism is extremely hostile to such communities, and sees them as oppressive. I don't think you can have a community that does not think individual liberty (at least as conceived by liberalism) is that important in a wider society that is on some kind of a mission to bring people liberty. Our wars get justified by appeals to liberty. Liberalism is not very tolerant of illiberalism beyond a few grandfathered in communities like the Amish.

If a woman wants to be a housewife and a mother, and a man wants to be a life partner with that woman and be the breadwinner, more power to them I say. As long as those roles are not imposed upon them against their wills.

OK. I'm reading this as - an illiberal community is fine, so long as it operates by liberalisms rules. Well, I don't think such communities can operate by those rules. That is to treat all of our roles as mere cosplays that we wear as long as they please us, and then we discard them. That's kind of where we have got with the definition of woman on the trans thread where this started.

Liberalism is fundamentally corrosive of illiberal modes of life.

, that would be a strange device indeed. It's maybe not the best analogy but I think I see what you are saying. There are some things that may give us pleasure or amusement in the short term, but lead to suffering and dysfunction and ill health in the long term. Most recreational drugs, for example. Or the over-consumption of food. We certainly haven't solved all of these issues yet. Choices have trade-offs. People who can delay gratification will be more successful over time. People who make wise choices rather than foolish choices about how to live their lives should tend to have better outcomes on average. Natural selection could take care of it in the long run.

Natural selection is only going to take care of any of that stuff if society is set up to let it. At the moment, it's the people who are unable to delay gratification and who are socioeconomically worse off who are having the most children. There is quite a bit of evidence that IQ scores are now declining in the West. Natural selection has been operating to make us more dysfunctional for decades, this is another natural end result of liberalism.

 

[shuttlt]

Is Jordan Peterson a member here?

Please go easy on the benzos as it might be more difficult to get treatment in Russia right now.

Regrettably for my bank account, I am not Jordan Peterson. I agree there is an element of crossover, but I disagree with him on a host of issues.

 

[Paul2]

Sure, but what is the basis of such ethical claims? One can have an ethic where Solomon tearing the baby in half is ethical because it is materially fair. Some tangible notion of "the good" with some kind of compelling reason why it is good surely must underpin things. One could just assert equality as the good, but then we are back to tearing the baby in half being good. Are liberte, egalite, fraternite so intrinsically good that even if they were to make everybody unhappy and suffer more, a society built on them would be more ethical? If that is the case, why would we want to live in an ethical society?

The point isn't that ethics has to be the foundation, just that happiness isn't necessarily the foundation, as well as the metric by which we measure things. That there are problems with perfecting ethics is paralleled by the problem of determining whether people are happy, and what that exactly is.

 

[Paul2]

Again, society was upended because of feminism and women are less happy.

Correlation is not causation, even if there is an identifiable link between something in the cause and something in the effect.

 

[Lithrael]

One thousand eye-rolls at the suggestion that we need to prove women are really better off for no longer dealing with a status quo where you were supposed to be satisfied if you had a role to perform and a man who didn’t beat you.

All this ‘liberalism corrodes’ stuff is ridiculous. Nobody said you can’t be a housewife, they just started to say you have the option not to be. You can still be a housewife and stay at home mom if you want, the hard part is finding a guy with an income that can support that. Feminism had a part in the two-income household standard but so did the postwar economy.

I’ve heard a lot of people say girls are pressured to climb the totem pole in the rat race to the exclusion of raising a family but down on the ground I’ve never seen that. I’ve only seen girls, like everyone, trying to make rent, and putting off kids in hopes of reaching better circumstances to raise them. That’s a labor-situation-is-****** thing, and if you want to blame feminism exclusively for that I think you’re using it as s bogeyman.

Roboramma has articulated a lot of this pretty well imo.

 

[Meadmaker]

Really, what would you say was being sold and why was it supposed to be worth having?

I'll relate it to the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson did not say that happiness is a natural right. He did say that the pursuit of happiness is a natural right. I think what the women's rights movement sought was the ability of women to make their own choices and have their own opportunities to pursue happiness.

 

[Meadmaker]

Again, society was upended because of feminism and women are less happy.

Despite articles in the Huffington Post, I'm not sure you've made a very strong case that the above assertion is actually true.

Maybe I'll read other links on the subject, but so far, I'm pretty skeptical. My observations don't support your statement, though I'm willing to accept more data on the subject, time permitting, of course.

 

[shuttlt]

I'll relate it to the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson did not say that happiness is a natural right. He did say that the pursuit of happiness is a natural right. I think what the women's rights movement sought was the ability of women to make their own choices and have their own opportunities to pursue happiness.

I didn't say happiness was a right either. Rights are just public promises from the state. Since happiness isn't something that government, or indeed anybody can bestow directly, it would be nonsense on stilts to make it a right.

That doesn't mean it isn't the basic good that all these things are, at least notionally, trying to achieve. What is the point of having the "right to pursue happiness" if happiness isn't considered some ultimate good to be pursued? Why didn't they go with the "right to fornicate" or something else? Happiness is there because it is seen as a basic "good".

 

[shuttlt]

Despite articles in the Huffington Post, I'm not sure you've made a very strong case that the above assertion is actually true.

Maybe I'll read other links on the subject, but so far, I'm pretty skeptical. My observations don't support your statement, though I'm willing to accept more data on the subject, time permitting, of course.

I posted the article from the HuffPo as a joke because it amused me that even the HuffPo admitted it. I also posted a link to an academic paper, that I think was referenced by HuffPo, talking about how universally acknowledged this effect was and linking to other papers and so forth on the subject.

From The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness:

To preview our findings, section II shows that women in the United States have become less happy, both absolutely and relative to men. Women have traditionally reported higher levels of happiness than men, but they are now reporting happiness levels that are similar or even lower than those of men. The relative decline in well-being holds across various datasets, and holds whether one asks about happiness or life satisfaction.

It does say that in some countries in Europe female happiness has increased a bit, but less than male happiness.

I go back to my original contention.... if the patriarchal world of the mid-20th century was so terrible for women, then surely there would be some evidence that it had made women dramatically happier? My contention is that that evidence doesn't exist and that feminism hasn't in fact made women happier or more content with their lives.

Given the billions that have been spent on pushing feminism, it seems kind of unlikely that, had feminism made women happier, there wouldn't be lots of evidence to that effect. Instead, we move from claims of women being terribly oppressed, to the alteration in women's happiness and life satisfaction resulting from feminism being a subtle and insubstantial thing that the slightest confounding variable renders invisible.

It's like homeopathy... big claims, and then when you probe the claims shrink and shrink and there is nothing left but testimonials.

 

[shuttlt]

The point isn't that ethics has to be the foundation, just that happiness isn't necessarily the foundation, as well as the metric by which we measure things. That there are problems with perfecting ethics is paralleled by the problem of determining whether people are happy, and what that exactly is.

OK, if you like... the original claim was that it doesn't look like feminism has made women happier.

It seems to me that a system of ethics that isn't about happiness, or something very like it must either be religious, or a very dry and inhuman kind of ethic. Isn't ethics really just a system of rules for acting in the world to achieve some concept of "the good". That is probably a digression though.

 

[shuttlt]

Correlation is not causation, even if there is an identifiable link between something in the cause and something in the effect.

I agree. I am not claiming that the data shows that. If I have appeared to do so at all, it is me failing to be precise enough in my language. What I am claiming is that, as the paper I posted earlier makes clear in its title, declining female happiness is a bit of a paradox given the feminist narrative.

Personally, I suspect feminism has been a net negative for happiness, but I don't mean to imply there is data to prove it.

 

[shuttlt]

One thousand eye-rolls at the suggestion that we need to prove women are really better off for no longer dealing with a status quo where you were supposed to be satisfied if you had a role to perform and a man who didn’t beat you.

I'm not saying you need to prove it. As a matter of pure practicality, I would say it is very clear that you don't. What I think is interesting though is that you can't.

All this ‘liberalism corrodes’ stuff is ridiculous. Nobody said you can’t be a housewife, they just started to say you have the option not to be. You can still be a housewife and stay at home mom if you want, the hard part is finding a guy with an income that can support that. Feminism had a part in the two-income household standard but so did the postwar economy.

The thing is that you look at this as a pure matter of individual choice. Yes, you can choose to stay home but the more of your peers go to work, the more that is undermined. The pre-feminism world isn't there any more for somebody to choose to still be part of, or at least it retreats further and further back with every passing year. They can be lonely trad housewives on their own, I guess. Liberalism acts to prevent women living the lifestyles their mothers lived just as surely as illiberalism would have prevented them living the lives their fathers lived.

It's also a lie to say that it was simply that women were given the option to be a housewife or go to work. There was a huge PR drive around the idea of having it all, being a career woman, delaying having children, having fewer children etc. etc. etc. That isn't about free choice, that is about encouraging women to make the "correct" choice. You always end up having the culture feel some kind of lifestyle is the right one, no culture is neutral... it's just that the promoted lifestyle changed, rather than that there was suddenly a free choice.

I’ve heard a lot of people say girls are pressured to climb the totem pole in the rat race to the exclusion of raising a family but down on the ground I’ve never seen that. I’ve only seen girls, like everyone, trying to make rent, and putting off kids in hopes of reaching better circumstances to raise them.

You say they aren't pressured, and then you list two types of pressure. This pressure is the pressure men used to face, then feminism said women should have what men had, now women face that pressure too.

Have you read Alice Through the Looking Glass? Alice finds that no matter how far she walks she never seems to get anywhere until she is told the following by the Red Queen:

“My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.”

All you are describing is the battle to get ahead and get on that is price of going out to compete in the modern liberal world. As I said, there is little choice, since the world has been changed to enable you to experience exactly this.

That’s a labor-situation-is-****** thing, and if you want to blame feminism exclusively for that I think you’re using it as s bogeyman.

I don't blame feminism exclusively, or really even primarily. Much of what you are talking about are problems with living under liberalism. Men have faced these issues much longer than women, and it certainly wasn't the fault of feminism back then. I think I would say feminism is really just the expression of inevitable factors within progressive liberalism.