Split Thread Are post-feminism women happier?

[theprestige]

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.

My curmudgeonly tone aside, I really do believe that happiness is neither the point of feminism and women's liberation, nor the appropriate metric to measure the success of these things.

However, I do not agree with what appear to be your ideas about the detrimental nature of liberalism in general, and have no interest in discussing them. You seem to be conflating the ostensible topic of the thread with some broader, tangential ideas.

 

[Chanakya]

In this thread, males decide that females would be happier with less autonomy and agency.

The fact that the females in the thread disagree, is apparently irrelevant.

As well as not-medieval-peasants seem to be deciding that Middle Age knaves or villeins or whatever the hell those miserable slaveys were called, were happier under the yoke than we are now. That's a super weird POV. I mean, if you want to argue that under the feudal system the barons and kings and whatevers were happy, then that just might be true, but the ******* peasants?

That said, I'm only on the first page so far, with another page to go, and no doubt more posts coming in. Interesting read so far, with "the other side" not badly argued, actually. Let's see how this goes.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Indeed, but then is it worth upending society...

Was it worth "upending society" to treat black people as fully human and citizens in their own right, as opposed to sub-humans relegated to servitor roles?

 

[shuttlt]

My curmudgeonly tone aside, I really do believe that happiness is neither the point of feminism and women's liberation, nor the appropriate metric to measure the success of these things.

OK. If feminism isn't supposed to make women happy, I have no idea why we should care about it or want to implement it.

However, I do not agree with what appear to be your ideas about the detrimental nature of liberalism in general, and have no interest in discussing them. You seem to be conflating the ostensible topic of the thread with some broader, tangential ideas.

That's not really my fault. I was expressing exactly the position you are now calling a digression and the mods picked up my posts and put them here. Now I'm off topic. You can't hardly win.

 

[shuttlt]

As well as not-medieval-peasants seem to be deciding that Middle Age knaves or villeins or whatever the hell those miserable slaveys were called, were happier under the yoke than we are now. That's a super weird POV. I mean, if you want to argue that under the feudal system the barons and kings and whatevers were happy, then that just might be true, but the ******* peasants?

In, say, 1200 your average peasant worked far fewer hours a day/days per year, had enough to eat, had a functioning community around him and could feel confident that there would be a secure place in the world for his kids. Today, how many people are on anti-depressants?

That said, I'm only on the first page so far, with another page to go, and no doubt more posts coming in. Interesting read so far, with "the other side" not badly argued, actually. Let's see how this goes.

Thanks for your post. I confess, I was a little bit concerned about having a thread dedicated to this since I know there is unlikely to be anybody joining on this side, it is very easy to get dogpiled and I can't exactly count on my position feeling like common sense to people. Also, I'm really only part way in to formulating my position on this stuff. Much more reading still to do. This thread kind of happened against my will. Still, here we all are.

 

[shuttlt]

Was it worth "upending society" to treat black people as fully human and citizens in their own right, as opposed to sub-humans relegated to servitor roles?

If it made them and people in general happier then probably yes, if not then probably no. In any case, one of the things you find if you read accounts of former slaves is in the aftermath of slavery their condition did not necessarily improve because of how utterly and completely the South's way of life was broken. Some found things better obviously, but others found it worse. I think to the extent that the welfare of the black population was a consideration, that was unfortunate.

My impression from those accounts (I think collected by the library of congress in the 1920s), the complaint I remember most about slavery was the breakup of families. In the aftermath of slavery many of those families broke up as well to look for economic opportunities. I remember in particular one lonely old man who hadn't seen his family in decades and only had a vague notion where they might now be. Quite a few of the old former slaves seemed to remember the old days warmly because of the community. Obviously others had awful experiences. Maybe it's partly the tendency to see our youth through rose tinted spectacles, I don't know.

You presumably wouldn't be in favour of making people wretched for their own good, would you? There has to be some idea of the recipients of our largess being made happier, or at least less unhappy, by it? Otherwise, are we doing it for them, or for ourselves?

This feels like a big digression though.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Given the claims of feminism, don't you think it's kind of odd that it's not relatively easy to say that women are happier today than they were in 1972?

Have you bothered to actually engage with any feminists on this topic?

Allow me to share some views with you, that are commonly held by a lot of older feminists like myself.

In the 70s we had just won a fair bit of liberty, and were full of hope.

Throughout the 80s, we saw increasing opportunities for females in business and the economy, and witnessed the erosion of superficial sex-based roles and behaviors. We saw "gender benders" like Bowie, Prince, Grace Jones, Annie Lennox, and countless hair bands. We saw the rise of androgynous styles of clothing, hair, make-up, and comportment being acceptable, although not universally embraced (and not expected to be universally embraced by the way).

In the 90s we had a fairly steady-state. We saw increasing numbers of females in politics across the developed world, we saw increases in the number of females earning college and advanced degrees. We saw the internet rise.

In the 00s we saw internet porn really take off. We saw gay rights passed, and saw lobbying organizations begin to shift their focus to transgender. We saw anime rise in popularity, along with depictions of females as simultaneously infantilized and sexualized, and we saw those depictions bleed over into other media. We saw the beginnings of the push to view sexual promiscuity as "liberation" and we saw deleterious sexual behaviors being lauded as "progressive" among young people.

In the 10s we witness the erosion of female rights really speed up. We watched as gay and lesbian children began to be "transed" into being straight. We saw the erosion of reproductive rights for females. We saw a pernicious and persistent presentation of females as highly-sexualized objects for male use. Internet porn skyrocketed into the hands of users, with uploads by any random person, and we saw the deterioration of safeguards on those videos. We saw child pornography increase, and the sexual predation of children increase. We saw depictions of rape and violence against females become popular topics for amateur pornography. We found repeated instances of amateur uploads containing nonconsensual material ranging from voyeuristic up-skirt panty shots to actual rape. We saw revenge porn, which nearly universally targets females.

Today, in the 20s, several locations in the developed world have rescinded the reproductive rights of females, leading to many avoidable deaths. We've seen males lauded as being the very best of females on the basis of their lipstick and clothing. We've seen males with penises declare themselves to be lesbians... and then harass and verbally abuse lesbians for not being willing to suck their "ladydiques". We've seen political positions held for females being taken by males who have declared a gender identity of "woman" despite having zero experience or understanding of the challenges that females face. We've seen male prisoners placed in female estates on the basis of magic words, where they have sexually assaulted and raped female inmates. We've seen school-aged females told that they have no right to visual privacy - and that it is the right of a male who claims a gender identity of "woman" to see them while those young females are naked, regardless of their consent. We've seen our very words deemed to be hateful, and watched as our politicians, our medical practitioners, and our advertisers refer to us as "birthing bodies", "menstruators", "bleeders", and "cervix havers"... and then watched aghast as politicians on-air claim that some males can have cervixes. We've watched female academics and leaders be hounded out of their careers while subjected to harassment, abuse, and threats of death and rape. We've watched female athletes lose spots to males, and seen those males lauded as "brave and stunning", and seen the female athletes threatened and intimidated and chastised if they voice their displeasure. We've seen females protesting against female genital mutilation, protesting violence against females be physically and verbally assaulted by males and watched as media sympathizes with the males as the victims. We've seen the world turned upside down, and seen female rights, safety, and dignity being rolled back.

Are females happier today than they were in the 70s? Nope. Not at all. Most of us are a whole lot ANGRIER than we were in our youth.

But it's NOT because we're more equal now. It's precisely because we're seeing our liberty and our very humanity being stripped away from us.

 

[Emily's Cat]

No, but in the paper they give some reasons.... like women still feel the burden of the home while when men do housework they feel they they are being uber progressive. Housework depresses women and makes men happy.

Look, I don't doubt there are partial explanations like that that have some level of truth in them. However, after 50 years and this huge social change.... women are less happy. Was that what we were sold at the start? Is it even the story we are sold now? Look at Emily's Cat, she is convinced women are happier today and points to feminist ideology as her reason for thinking that. Is there a point where the assumptions ever get questioned? For sunk cost reasons, I'm kind of doubtful. It's not as if feminism was ever empirically founded, it's an ideological project.

Please refrain from declaring how I feel, and from putting words in my mouth. I believe that I am happier now than I would have been a century ago. And it's not "feminist ideology", it's simply that I am not treated as a second class citizen, and I have agency that my great grandmother did not.

 

[Emily's Cat]

If we are going to be like that, what is the point of anything? Why was fascism bad? Why was communism bad? If Feminism succeeded in achieving true material equality, but left women miserable then it would surely have succeeded.

The reason I am referring to happiness is that I think that that is the root of the moral claim that feminism makes, and indeed liberalism. What is the point of equality if achieving it makes everybody miserable? Likewise, what would be the point of liberty if we did not enjoy it? Ultimately, I think materialist ethics is about different schemes for maximising happiness and minimizing unhappiness, isn't it?

No, not happiness. Independence, agency, and the ability to participate in society without externally imposed barriers.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I was more agreeing that changes in society since the 70's have made us all less satisfied in general.

As I said, I don't think the problem has been changes in autonomy and agency (and I was applying this view to both men and women).

I don't think people being free to make choices about their own lives is a bad thing, and to reply to your post specifically I don't think women being free to make choices about their lives is a bad thing.

 

[Emily's Cat]

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?

It's a very strange theory in this thread, that because females aren't ecstatic today, they would be happier if they were prohibited from having bank accounts or owning property or having jobs or going to school... and really, they'd be "happier" if they just stayed in the kitchen and made babies.

I think it would be highly entertaining to see someone arguing the same view with respect to race, that black people would be "happier" if they were still slaves.

 

[Meadmaker]

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".

I think you're in "reflexive disagreement" mode instead of actually trying to understand mode.


You noted declining happiness and asked, "Is that what we were sold." I noted that I didn't think it was, in fact, "what we were sold". After some back and forth, I said that the women's rights movement didn't seek happiness, but sought the right to pursue happiness.

You don't like that? Take it up with Jefferson.

 

[Venom]

There, some rights. You happy now? You're on your own now bet you wish you could go back...

 

[theprestige]

That's not really my fault. I was expressing exactly the position you are now calling a digression and the mods picked up my posts and put them here. Now I'm off topic. You can't hardly win.

Alrighty then. I guess that means I should revisit this:

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.

One, what's wrong with commerce?

Two, are you claiming that liberalism was invented by commercial interests to increase their labor force and customer base?

Three, what's your take on the people with commercial interests also being subject to the same forces of liberalization, and therefore subject to the same presumed detriments?

Four, how would you prefer to order society, if not along commercial lines?

Five, what is your justifying ideology, for your preferred social order?

 

[Meadmaker]

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:

Subjective well-being is measured using the question: “Taken all together, how would you say
things are these days, would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?”

I think this is a questionable way to measure happiness.

The authors did do a bunch of cross correlations with other questions. That's certainly true, so their central question, above, was supplemented with some other information from the same survey, but that question was the central point of the paper.

This was discussed at length in the Hfffington Post article you apparently posted as a joke, so, really, this doesn't add anything to the HuffPo article, which was a perfectly adequate summary.

So,

1. I'm not convinced the data shows a decline in happiness.
2. I'm not convinced any change in happiness, positive or negative, is a consequence of feminism, given all the other changes of the last fifty years. There's a real danger of a "post hoc ergo proctor hoc" fallacy here.
3. I don't think the goal of the women's rights movement was "happiness", but rather freedom of action, which I referred to earlier as "the pursuit of happiness."
4. Even if it didn't result in happiness, I'm not convinced that means it was bad. If you could actually show data that feminism, or some social change brought about by feminism, actually was responsible for a decrease in happiness, that would be a reason to at least examine feminism and question whether the goals of feminism were a good idea, but I don't think you've met that burden yet.
5. And, finally, even if you could show that changes in civil rights law and other victories of the women's rights movement resulted in a net change in happiness for the average woman or the average man, I would be reluctant to say that we ought to repeal those legal changes and return to pre-feminist society. Those changes would have to be pretty dramatic before I would tell people that they couldn't pursue their own dreams because it made the average woman unhappy.

 

[xjx388]

Happiness is not the right metric. First of all, what the hell is happiness?

But more importantly, I think we can all agree that women are better off than they were in the past. If we agree on that, then feminism has had some success in accomplishing its goals.

If you don’t agree they are better off, I don’t know what to tell you.

 

[shuttlt]

Have you bothered to actually engage with any feminists on this topic?

Yes. It's not like I'm a passionate advocate for it and want to push it on people. I didn't start this thread and had already said in the other thread that I was content to back away from the topic. It seemed relevant in the previous thread when I brought it up.

Feminists tend to react quite aggressively and want to shut down the argument by taking it personally and claiming that because they are women they know and I don't, even though there are women who disagree with them. It feels like a personal attack to some people.

My mother is a 2nd wave feminist. I recall her getting feminist books and magazines delivered back in the 80s. I am broadly aware of her views. I did read a bunch of feminist books about 20 years ago when I was trying to understand the world from the left. The impression I have from the literature is that you can find a feminist to argue both sides of almost anything if you look far enough. I don't care about that though. I care about the ideas that have enough purchase to change peoples lives.

Allow me to share some views with you, that are commonly held by a lot of older feminists like myself.

In the 70s we had just won a fair bit of liberty, and were full of hope.

Throughout the 80s, we saw increasing opportunities for females in business and the economy, and witnessed the erosion of superficial sex-based roles and behaviors. We saw "gender benders" like Bowie, Prince, Grace Jones, Annie Lennox, and countless hair bands. We saw the rise of androgynous styles of clothing, hair, make-up, and comportment being acceptable, although not universally embraced (and not expected to be universally embraced by the way).

Absolutely. I remember watching working girl a bunch of times with my mother and the whole bit at the end with Let The River Run playing as the camera pans back to show her office amongst all the other offices in New York. It's an exciting idea. My parents and their friends were involved in student politics back in the 60s. I do get all those feelings, in so far as one can by being amongst people who were there and had those dreams.

In the 90s we had a fairly steady-state. We saw increasing numbers of females in politics across the developed world, we saw increases in the number of females earning college and advanced degrees. We saw the internet rise.

From a younger generation, I would say in the 90s you also get a generation coming up who both took everything that went before for granted, and took the affirmation side as well. I remember my mother worrying that my sister and all her friends thought they were infinitely superior to boys in ever way. The era of the commercialised Girl Power Maybe that's everybody's sister though?

In the 00s we saw internet porn really take off. We saw gay rights passed, and saw lobbying organizations begin to shift their focus to transgender. We saw anime rise in popularity, along with depictions of females as simultaneously infantilized and sexualized, and we saw those depictions bleed over into other media. We saw the beginnings of the push to view sexual promiscuity as "liberation" and we saw deleterious sexual behaviors being lauded as "progressive" among young people.

There wasn't any sexual promiscuity as liberation in the 60s? As to the rest of it, sure.... once you have liberated the obvious things you have to dig deeper and deeper to find new things to liberate.

In the 10s we witness the erosion of female rights really speed up. We watched as gay and lesbian children began to be "transed" into being straight. We saw the erosion of reproductive rights for females. We saw a pernicious and persistent presentation of females as highly-sexualized objects for male use. Internet porn skyrocketed into the hands of users, with uploads by any random person, and we saw the deterioration of safeguards on those videos. We saw child pornography increase, and the sexual predation of children increase. We saw depictions of rape and violence against females become popular topics for amateur pornography. We found repeated instances of amateur uploads containing nonconsensual material ranging from voyeuristic up-skirt panty shots to actual rape. We saw revenge porn, which nearly universally targets females.

I am not unaware of all this.

Today, in the 20s, several locations in the developed world have rescinded the reproductive rights of females, leading to many avoidable deaths. We've seen males lauded as being the very best of females on the basis of their lipstick and clothing. We've seen males with penises declare themselves to be lesbians... and then harass and verbally abuse lesbians for not being willing to suck their "ladydiques". We've seen political positions held for females being taken by males who have declared a gender identity of "woman" despite having zero experience or understanding of the challenges that females face. We've seen male prisoners placed in female estates on the basis of magic words, where they have sexually assaulted and raped female inmates. We've seen school-aged females told that they have no right to visual privacy - and that it is the right of a male who claims a gender identity of "woman" to see them while those young females are naked, regardless of their consent. We've seen our very words deemed to be hateful, and watched as our politicians, our medical practitioners, and our advertisers refer to us as "birthing bodies", "menstruators", "bleeders", and "cervix havers"... and then watched aghast as politicians on-air claim that some males can have cervixes. We've watched female academics and leaders be hounded out of their careers while subjected to harassment, abuse, and threats of death and rape. We've watched female athletes lose spots to males, and seen those males lauded as "brave and stunning", and seen the female athletes threatened and intimidated and chastised if they voice their displeasure. We've seen females protesting against female genital mutilation, protesting violence against females be physically and verbally assaulted by males and watched as media sympathizes with the males as the victims. We've seen the world turned upside down, and seen female rights, safety, and dignity being rolled back.

Yes. This is where liberation leads. If you just abstractly pursue liberty and equality as "goods" without any notion of whether they are making people happy, what should one expect? The whole thing becomes like They Shoot Horses Don't They? with the dance getting faster and faster and more and more awful.

Are females happier today than they were in the 70s? Nope. Not at all. Most of us are a whole lot ANGRIER than we were in our youth.

Every time we talk I find more common ground than I expected. I know you find many of the things I say.... let's say "difficult" even though that isn't the right word.... I can't think of the right word. I do find your posts interesting and thought provoking though.

But it's NOT because we're more equal now.

I'm not sure that one can really quantify equality like that. A lot of feminism, at least as it has translated into government action has focused on things you can measure.... like how many CEOs are women. That managerialism is one of the diseases of the modern age. The value of the things we can't measure is put at zero.

For myself, I think the value of domesticity has been hugely underrated in the calculus. It's not like many of these changes have been great for men either. Do you think porn is actually good for men, or makes them happy? I suspect very few people look back on their lives and think "I wish I'd masturbated to more porn". I could produce a list just like yours. If indeed it's gone from women being happier than man in the 70s, to men being happier than women now... I think I would agree that what ever happened has been worse for women.

Does it not make you question it all a bit that all the hope embodied in your description of the world up until the 90s has come to this? Back in the 20s marxists started questioning marxism because things weren't panning out as promised. Does there not come a time when it's time to question basic assumptions?

It's precisely because we're seeing our liberty and our very humanity being stripped away from us.

Is it though? When people have liberty they make all sorts of choices that often make them unhappy. I mentioned porn above. Women have the liberty to appear in porn, and men have the liberty to watch it. I don't think on average either has their lives improved by that. You don't seem to like this expression of liberty either.

Men and women can never be equal because they are different and have different desires and needs. My view is that the best we can do is to be sympathetic to each others different problems and be guided by what actually makes people happy rather than ideology.

 

[shuttlt]

Happiness is not the right metric. First of all, what the hell is happiness?

This is like the trans thread and people claiming that they really don't know what a woman is. Are you happy? Do you feel more satisfied with you life than not? Are those not meaningful questions?

But more importantly, I think we can all agree that women are better off than they were in the past.

Only if you view the world in a mercantile way where you count CEOs or something as the measure of how well off each sex is. Emily's Cat was just saying that women are now worse off.

If we agree on that, then feminism has had some success in accomplishing its goals.

I agree it has changed the world so that women are discouraged from spending time with their children and are less likely to hear their babies first words, while being encouraged to try to become CEOs. If that is being better off, then it's definitely a win for feminism.

If you don’t agree they are better off, I don’t know what to tell you.

I don't. I don't see the world in the mercantile, materialist way that liberalism does.

 

[shuttlt]

Please refrain from declaring how I feel, and from putting words in my mouth. I believe that I am happier now than I would have been a century ago. And it's not "feminist ideology", it's simply that I am not treated as a second class citizen, and I have agency that my great grandmother did not.

Apologies. I thought I was summarizing a position you had articulated. When previously I had said that I was not convinced that women today were happier with women in the past, you disagreed with me and used yourself as an example. I think I said at the time that that didn't really refute my claim, but I didn't realise you didn't disagree. I don't understand that exchange now, but maybe it doesn't matter since you have certainly clarified your position since.

Your current position is that women were indeed happier in the 70s/80s than today. Yes?

 

[shuttlt]

No, not happiness. Independence, agency, and the ability to participate in society without externally imposed barriers.

Why would you want any of those things? You didn't seem happy in another post that women were using their independence, agency and the ability to participate in society without externally imposed barriers to appear in pornography simulating violent rape. Surely it's a good thing that that option is available to them so freely now?