Split Thread Are post-feminism women happier?

[shuttlt]

I wouldn't.

Seriously, it has been firmly established that how people answer on questions about happiness depend on so many arbitrary things, time of day and when they last had a meal chief among them.

Happiness is not a useful metric, period.

Such things I'm sure can alter people's perspective. You can say that about almost any question. If you ask people about their attitude to the workplace after a bad day of work, or last thing on Sunday night, they are going to answer differently to after getting a longed for promotion. From memory, I think we are talking about multiple data sets involving multiple countries and involving something like 1.4 million responses.

If the responses swing in the breeze depending on the colour of the shoes they are wearing, or what they had for breakfast... then presumably we'd expect the different data sets to swing wildly, no? One of them would show that women had become vastly happier than men because the questions were typically asked in the morning, another would show wildly swinging rates of happiness for men as the survey was in fact measuring football results.... Ultimately though, if a good breakfast, or nice shoes makes you happy and satisfied with your life, then it makes you happy and satisfied with your life. That doesn't alter the question of whether people are on the whole happier.

If every single one of these surveys has terrible methodology, I would very much expect somebody to have detailed that, since the results are so unfortunate.

 

[Paul2]

Well you do find that women aren't as willing as men to travel for work, work in nasty/dangerous conditions. They prioritise things like time with family over pay more than men. The UBER equal pay study is a good example of that. It's still only tracking what women are choosing though, and if the claim is right, those choices aren't making them happy. I still don't know what this would prove.

This isn't a challenge, but what you said isn't about equal pay for equal work, it's about unequal work (preferring less travel, less danger). I'm wondering how you'd get data on preference between equal pay for equal work and less pay for equal work.

But doesn't stating it like that makes the answer obvious, even if we don't have the data (here) to confirm it?

 

[bruto]

I wouldn't.

Seriously, it has been firmly established that how people answer on questions about happiness depend on so many arbitrary things, time of day and when they last had a meal chief among them.

Happiness is not a useful metric, period.

I think that's the crux of it. Happiness is not only a matter of expectation, but of immediacy, and depends on what you decide to include in the bundle you call "happiness" at the moment you're asked.

When an alcoholic who is happiest when drunk seeks happiness in abstinence, both things may be true.

 

[shuttlt]

This isn't a challenge, but what you said isn't about equal pay for equal work, it's about unequal work (preferring less travel, less danger). I'm wondering how you'd get data on preference between equal pay for equal work and less pay for equal work.

I didn't intend to say anything about equal pay for equal work. There are arguments that the pay gap doesn't exist, there are arguments that it is does, there are arguments that demanding people be paid equally harms the people it is supposed to protect, and obviously there are arguments the other way as well.

I can't argue that at the same time as the main topic of this thread. I'm stretched pretty thin already.

If I were a woman and thought women were paid less for the same work, and that it would not disadvantage women to have some legally defined and enforced requirement for equal pay, I imagine I'd be in favour of it. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of women were in favour of it. Whether the underlying assumptions are true is something else.

But doesn't stating it like that makes the answer obvious, even if we don't have the data (here) to confirm it?

No, since it's a very different question and seems to be yet again trying to refute the idea that I am saying your average liberal woman isn't completely convinced that liberalism and feminism have improved things. It's practically a progressive-liberal trope that the white working class vote against their own interests. Just because Bougie white women think that all these things are good for them, doesn't mean they are.

 

[shuttlt]

I think that's the crux of it. Happiness is not only a matter of expectation, but of immediacy, and depends on what you decide to include in the bundle you call "happiness" at the moment you're asked.

Yes.I think these surveys tend to go with something like life satisfaction, but sure all of that is going to go up and down. That's why you ask vast numbers of people.

When an alcoholic who is happiest when drunk seeks happiness in abstinence, both things may be true.

If he is happiest when drunk, is he misinformed when he seeks happiness in sobriety?

If a drunk is happy he is happy. If he is hungover and unhappy, he is unhappy and hungover. If he makes people around him unhappy with his drunkenness, they presumably that will be recorded as well. You seem to be looking for a deeper moral truth here beyond whether the person is happy and content with their life. You seem to feel that that is a meaningful question that this imaginary drunk could answer, but then you reject the imaginary answer because you disagree with it. My contention is that we should start from whether or not people are more or less happy, rather than starting out with our assumptions about what should make people happy and what is the right kind of happiness and reject answers that don't conform to that.

 

[TomB]

Sure... and I'm sure Huxley's brother pushing all this stuff at UNESCO would have had some similar justification. To me, I think an objection to Brave New World, would be that if one actually tried to do it.... I am doubtful that one could get to it without a great deal of unhappiness and I am also doubtful that it would truly produce happiness. Equally a world that valued liberty above all else, but everybody was wretched, doesn't seem very good either.

One further, and more critical, thought is that things like Brave New World are partly about the tyranny of rationality. The managed world. The idea that you can and should, top down, impose utopia. That is kind of where the progressive-liberal idea of the rational utopia gets you - see Burke's criticism of the French Revolution. Liberalism talks a lot about the freedom of the individual, but it sure has been a wonderful engine for centralising power. My contention is that progressive-liberalism is precisely in the business of imposing its utopia.

You kind of miss the point (a lot).

No one is talking about a Utopia. What it would take to impose the society in Brave New World is irrelevant, as is wether such a society would "produce happiness."

The point is that you are suggesting things were better...people were happier...when distinct groups of people had distinct roles in society based upon birth which could only rarely be crossed. It's essentially a caste system. Brave New World is simply what you are advocating taken to the extreme. (Most Utopian/Dystopian fiction does that.)

What you advocate is that women were happier when they were isolated from the responsibilities and concerns of the outside world. Men could handle that. Women got to stay home with their babies and keep the house clean.

But that was not really the way things worked historically:

For example, during Medieval times, most working-class English people lived in work-homes. The single-story, one-room houses were “a combination of kitchen and spinning/weaving/dressmaking workshop, bedroom and dairy, dining room, butchery, tannery, and byre.”

Domesticity was a focal point of early work-from-home activities. Managing the home meant multitasking and managing resources, finances, and the division of labor. Boundaries between home and work life, if they existed at all, were blurred at best.

Early at-home work in the middle ages covered professions like bakers, seamstresses, shoemakers, potters, weavers, ale brewers, and blacksmiths. Notably, the gender gap was not a significant factor, given that home-based workers could as easily be male as female.

The all-hands-on-deck spirit of working from home placed value on many of the skills at which women excelled, like sewing, calligraphy, or other of the so-called “womanly arts,” an umbrella term that includes domestic science and home economics.

https://www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/complete-history-of-working-from-home/

It wasn't until the Renaissance, apparently, where working away from home and family was the norm. Did being away from their wives and kids make men less happy? More happy? Who knows. But the point is that the lesser involvement of men in the household seems to be a relatively recent thing.

It's like the Nirvana song I quoted, which compares that to an insect kept in a jar. Safe from the dangers of the world, food and anything else you might need provided for. But utterly dependent on the zookeeper (husband).

Is a lion happier in a cage in a zoo? It doesn't have to worry about predators or hunting for its next meal. Even mates will be provided, and plenty of toys for exercise.

Exposure to things that you find you enjoy, the opportunity to do those things, creates a desire to do them. If I never played guitar, I would be perfectly happy. But now I'd miss having them. Not because I would really be less happy than if I never had them, but because having them expands my range of possible happiness. Without my guitars, I'm at, say a 5 on the happiness scale. But without ever playing one, I thought the scale only went to 6. So I would have said, I'm pretty happy. But now I see a scale that goes to 8. With my guitars, I'm at a 7 and would say I'm pretty happy. Without them, I would be back at a 5. The same 5 as before. But now I'm evaluating it on a scale of 8 instead of 6. I'd term a 5/6 as pretty happy but a 5/8 is more meh...I'm OK, but could be a lot better.

But objectively, I'm still at the same level of happiness, I just perceive it differently because I know that the upper end exists.

 

[Meadmaker]

Clearly to Emily's Cat it does not mean that trans-women should be treated as women even though she herself expects to be treated as a woman. By the Golden Rule, should she not do this?

To the extent that no harm is done, yes. And I think she does, or at least strives to.

Aren't the principles of liberalism supposed to be universal?

The Golden Rule is suppose to be universal. Liberalism, in its essence, is an outgrowth. That doesn't make the Golden Rule easy to follow or apply, and sometimes well meaning ideologies with solid moral foundations are perverted when meeting with real world implementations.

I'm not sure I care so much what liberals support.

It's not always about you. Sometime, on this message board, even when we are replying to you, we are addressing a general audience.

OK, but most harm can't be directly shown, is mixed up in confounding variables or is a confused mix of harms and benefits.

True. That's what makes application difficult.

Nobody really looks into this stuff because the project of increasing liberty and equality is assumed a priori to be good.

No one? Just because it doesn't fit well in a campaign commercial doesn't mean no one is thinking about it. Maybe a given elected official who has power to implement it doesn't think about it. I do, and so do lots of others, including, even, lots of politicians. They just don't yammer on about it, for marketing reasons.

Right... so there is an assumption in liberalism that if you pursue equality and liberty as "goods", the harms kind of come out in the wash. Is this true?

Oversimplified, but I would mostly agree.

Let's suppose some combination of Feminism and liberalism resulted in women prioritising career and delaying having children, and then having fewer children... that then causes below replacement population growth and an aging population requiring constant and increasing immigration to keep the economic necessities of the community going. The community that adopted feminism is now dying and being kept alive by continuous blood transfusions. There are plenty of examples like this. Would you count the above as a harm?

Yes, I would see that as harm. However, if trying to apply that to the real world we actually live in, I don't think it has happened.

(ETA: And I don't think the only possible solution to a situation where that, or something similar, happened would be to get rid of liberalism or feminism.)

There is an understandable tendency in liberalism to look at everything as a question of individuals.

True.

Let's try to avoid that, then. However, you are right that a lot of people do indeed look at it that way, and will continue to do so. C'est la vie. Not every voter has time or inclination to examine the philosophical underpinnings of whatever candidate or party he's choosing.

 

[Meadmaker]

Right... so there is an assumption in liberalism that if you pursue equality and liberty as "goods", the harms kind of come out in the wash. Is this true?

I thought about my previous answer, and realized I might have misunderstood the question, so I want to clarify the answer.

If you pursue equality and liberty, that will generally be the path to causing less harm in the first place.

Of course, that's not always true, mostly because the manner of pursuit sometimes fails. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and sometimes an attempt to pursue equality ends up causing misery. It is my opinion, though, that when equality is pursued thoughtfully and intelligently, there is little or no harm caused, and the good outweighs the bad.

 

[TomB]

This statement by shuttlt stood out to me when I was reading Meadmaker's response:

There is an understandable tendency in liberalism to look at everything as a question of individuals. It's like looking at the tragedy of the commons and saying, "I do not think harm is caused by giving people the opportunity to graze their goats on the common" and then thinking about it through the frame of a single individual grazing his herd of goats, ignoring the people who graze sheep, and cattle.

Is this accurate?

To my thinking, this is more a characteristic of libertarianism that liberalism.

Liberals, to my understanding think more about groups: labor unions, for instance.

Don't get me wrong. I think both conservatives and liberals value facets of individual freedom, though maybe emphasizing different areas. Liberals want to regulate grazing, conservatives want to build fences and rent out the land, and libertarians want unrestricted access to any public lands.

 

[shuttlt]

You kind of miss the point (a lot).

No one is talking about a Utopia. What it would take to impose the society in Brave New World is irrelevant, as is wether such a society would "produce happiness."

I disagree. The thing is that the history of actually making it to the promised land is not good. The French Revolution and who knows how many Marxist revolutions are evidence enough of that. What we think should be a better world, is very often nothing of the kind. Given that the New Jerusalem is unlikely to actually appear as imagined, the amount of blood that must be spilled to find out seems relevant to me.

The point is that you are suggesting things were better...people were happier...when distinct groups of people had distinct roles in society based upon birth which could only rarely be crossed.

I'm suggesting that that graph calls into question whether, for all its material advantages, the modern world has made people happier. By all means reject them all, but there are studies showing conservatives being happier than liberals, anxiety levels increasing and being correlated with loss of social cohesion. All the graphs I see seem to show measures of wellbeing heading in the wrong direction.

That a man would have something very like the life his father had and a woman would have a life very much like her mother had has been the state of man for the whole of human history, save for the blink of an eye. The idea that entirely novel principles that run contrary to human evolution are in fact the best model for man to live under seems to me to require proof. Many aspects of the modern world are here by historical necessity, so there is nothing that can be done about them. I am talking about whether the principles founding liberalism are actually "true".

When all of this was first thought up, the liberal principles were justified in terms of a fantasy of noble savages and the state of nature that bore little relation to reality. Effectively my argument is the same as Rousseau's in terms of looking back to the state of nature.... only he was referring to an 18th century fantasy.

It's essentially a caste system. Brave New World is simply what you are advocating taken to the extreme. (Most Utopian/Dystopian fiction does that.)

No. I am advocating nothing beyond thinking that maximising happiness is more important than maximising equality. I am saying what I believe the nature of man is and that the progressive-liberal interpretation of liberty and equality are questionable principles. The brave new world thing requires a top down centralised managerial state of the form progressive liberalism produces. It's the same rationalist idea of implementing utopia that gets repeated over and over. It's tricky though.... a tyrannical state seems like an inevitable side effect of progress. Maybe that is another reason that the past was better ;-)

What you advocate is that women were happier when they were isolated from the responsibilities and concerns of the outside world. Men could handle that. Women got to stay home with their babies and keep the house clean.

I think that that may be the case. I don't say we should reimplement it, since one can't go back. I do think the liberal assumptions about man are false though.

But that was not really the way things worked historically:

https://www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/complete-history-of-working-from-home/

I'm not sure that I am going to take a site promoting flexible work as a reliable source on the history of flexible work.

It wasn't until the Renaissance, apparently, where working away from home and family was the norm. Did being away from their wives and kids make men less happy? More happy? Who knows. But the point is that the lesser involvement of men in the household seems to be a relatively recent thing.

Humanity has spent much more time in small groups and small communities than in any other lifestyle. Throughout that time, what you see over and over and over.... is the man as the provider/protector and the woman as nurturer, homemaker and so on. Does that change forms, of course. I don't know what you think the significance is of a medieval peasant working a field close to his home, or driving his flock to a nearby market. If somebody had to spend weeks marching the christmas geese to London and somebody had to stay home looking after the children, who do you think had each role?

I don't know what case you think I was making, but that site doesn't refute it.

It's like the Nirvana song I quoted, which compares that to an insect kept in a jar. Safe from the dangers of the world, food and anything else you might need provided for. But utterly dependent on the zookeeper (husband).

Unless we are sociopaths, the nature of the world is that we depend on other people for our happiness. All this is pointless. You have a bunch of principles about what makes people happy based on liberty and equality, I have a different set that focuses more on community. If we are arguing based on different axioms, we are never going to agree about these things. That's why I initially brought up the paradox of female happiness, because it is actually data.

Is a lion happier in a cage in a zoo? It doesn't have to worry about predators or hunting for its next meal. Even mates will be provided, and plenty of toys for exercise.

Sure, are the sexual roles that have evolved over millions of years a socially constructed prison, or are they baked into us in some way? If lions ancestors had lived in zoos for the past 100 million years, maybe they would indeed be happier in the cage.

Exposure to things that you find you enjoy, the opportunity to do those things, creates a desire to do them.

Yes, like crack and internet porn.

If I never played guitar, I would be perfectly happy. But now I'd miss having them. Not because I would really be less happy than if I never had them, but because having them expands my range of possible happiness. Without my guitars, I'm at, say a 5 on the happiness scale. But without ever playing one, I thought the scale only went to 6. So I would have said, I'm pretty happy. But now I see a scale that goes to 8. With my guitars, I'm at a 7 and would say I'm pretty happy. Without them, I would be back at a 5. The same 5 as before. But now I'm evaluating it on a scale of 8 instead of 6. I'd term a 5/6 as pretty happy but a 5/8 is more meh...I'm OK, but could be a lot better.

Why would you be just as happy without a guitar, if you are the same as before, but now miss having a guitar? Are you sure it isn't that, having experienced the guitar, the previous state of not having the guitar is now rendered less happy?

But objectively, I'm still at the same level of happiness, I just perceive it differently because I know that the upper end exists.

Happiness is pure perception. It is a subjective state. The questions in the data we are discussing use a fixed scale. You need to scale your happiness based on how happy you feel, not based on whatever this notion of objective happiness is that you are using.

 

[shuttlt]

This statement by shuttlt stood out to me when I was reading Meadmaker's response:



Is this accurate?

To my thinking, this is more a characteristic of libertarianism that liberalism.

Liberals, to my understanding think more about groups: labor unions, for instance.

Don't get me wrong. I think both conservatives and liberals value facets of individual freedom, though maybe emphasizing different areas. Liberals want to regulate grazing, conservatives want to build fences and rent out the land, and libertarians want unrestricted access to any public lands.

Libertarians are liberals that favour the liberty part of the liberal assumptions. They come out of Enlightenment liberalism just as surely as any "classical" liberal. There are obviously forms of liberalism that are more focused on equality. I think those are the ones that you are maybe thinking about.

You may be using the terms liberal, libertarian, conservative in terms of the current political tribes in the US. Those don't necessarily map onto the philosophical traditions with those names.

 

[bruto]

Yes.I think these surveys tend to go with something like life satisfaction, but sure all of that is going to go up and down. That's why you ask vast numbers of people.


If he is happiest when drunk, is he misinformed when he seeks happiness in sobriety?

If a drunk is happy he is happy. If he is hungover and unhappy, he is unhappy and hungover. If he makes people around him unhappy with his drunkenness, they presumably that will be recorded as well. You seem to be looking for a deeper moral truth here beyond whether the person is happy and content with their life. You seem to feel that that is a meaningful question that this imaginary drunk could answer, but then you reject the imaginary answer because you disagree with it. My contention is that we should start from whether or not people are more or less happy, rather than starting out with our assumptions about what should make people happy and what is the right kind of happiness and reject answers that don't conform to that.

I think you're getting it wrong. I think the word "happiness" is too vague, and the events that give rise to its use too evanescent, for any survey to be useful. When we are asked whether we're happy, it depends not only on when we are asked, but on what we, at that moment, believe the word even means. You seem to consider the answers to be dependable. I do not.

 

[xjx388]

Here's a comic from Vox that attempts to explain why maybe women are reporting lower levels of happiness than they did before.

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/11/13/20959863/women-happy-chores-gender-gap

 

[Meadmaker]

I think you're getting it wrong. I think the word "happiness" is too vague, and the events that give rise to its use too evanescent, for any survey to be useful. When we are asked whether we're happy, it depends not only on when we are asked, but on what we, at that moment, believe the word even means. You seem to consider the answers to be dependable. I do not.

In the "paradox" paper, they even noted how in some years the placement of questions, and adjacency to other questions, modified the responses.

 

[Meadmaker]

I disagree. The thing is that the history of actually making it to the promised land is not good. The French Revolution and who knows how many Marxist revolutions are evidence enough of that.

I think the French Revolution shows that short term outcomes and long term outcomes can be very different.

Yes, ok, there was a Reign of Terror, which wasn't good, and some heads were detached that really should have remained connected, but when all was said and done, the French Republic is a better place to live than the Kingdom of France, and far, far, better than the French Empire.

 

[theprestige]

If feminism* is successful, then we should expect men and women to report happiness at about equal rates. The fact that they don't implies there's still equality work to be done. The fact that women are reporting lower levels of happiness than before implies that progress is being made.

Maybe women are discovering that there's a lot not to like about being responsible for society. Maybe women are reporting higher levels of unhappiness because they're discovering that being free cold sucks.

Or maybe it's a hormone inequality thing, and women will always report higher levels of contentment than men.

 

[shuttlt]

I think you're getting it wrong. I think the word "happiness" is too vague, and the events that give rise to its use too evanescent, for any survey to be useful. When we are asked whether we're happy, it depends not only on when we are asked, but on what we, at that moment, believe the word even means. You seem to consider the answers to be dependable. I do not.

You don't think there is any information content in asking, I think, 1.4 million people this question over 50 years? No averaging effect is going to round out their different daily experiences and personal circumstances into any kind of overall trend? The graphs of the different data sets are going to be nothing but noise and will all likely contradict one another?

 

[shuttlt]

I think the French Revolution shows that short term outcomes and long term outcomes can be very different.

I would say the French Revolution is a bit like the Russian revolution. An old revolution was on the point of collapse due to failure to adapt to the times. What is tragic in both cases is that out of the groups vying of power it was a bunch of swivel eyed zealots who won out in both cases. Again in both cases the revolutionary lunacy was ended by a strong conservative figure restoring order. Napoleon in one case, Stalin in the other. It's not as if we would have the ancien regime today in France, had it not been for the Jacobins, any more the Russia would have been under the absolute rule of the Romanovs. America was very lucky that such people were not able to dominate its revolution.

Finally, the point I think I was making is that the revolution didn't achieve the results that were supposed to be produced by the orgy of violence. Such things certainly produce change, and generally order rises out of the ashes. That isn't a validation of the reasoning of the people who carried out the revolution.

Yes, ok, there was a Reign of Terror, which wasn't good, and some heads were detached that really should have remained connected, but when all was said and done, the French Republic is a better place to live than the Kingdom of France, and far, far, better than the French Empire.

But the French Republic had an Empire. They sold the French territories in the New World to the US to fund the Napoleonic Wars. France in that era wasn't against conquest. Is the argument that because after the Terror France fell into the hands of Napoleon whose military over-ambition cost France much of their Empire, then the French Revolution was good because it ended French imperial ambitions? By the 1850s you have Napoleon III and the 2nd Empire. France didn't fully lose its colonial Empire until the 2nd World War. They didn't lose ALgeria until 1962. All this is a consequence of the old forms of government being incompatible with the modern world, not Robespierre.

I'm really not following. The French Revolution was an attempt to create the society that Enlightenment progressive liberalism had said was possible and desirable. While that was going on it was an orgy of violence and death. Those liberal principles were vindicated because after those principles were put on the back burner, and various Emperors and kings returned, order was restored and things got better?

 

[shuttlt]

If feminism* is successful, then we should expect men and women to report happiness at about equal rates.

May I suggest that, taking this admirably egalitarian view of Feminism, if it was successful the levels of happiness should be equal and the unhappier sex's hapiness should have been raised? It's interesting that in this view the success of feminism would have been in raising men's happiness to match womens, or lowering women's happiness to match mens. I'm not entirely sure that that is how it would have been seen in 1972.

Anyway, this reminds me of a rather famous Margaret Thatcher speech.
https://youtu.be/rv5t6rC6yvg?t=113

The fact that they don't implies there's still equality work to be done. The fact that women are reporting lower levels of happiness than before implies that progress is being made.

Would the goal be to get male happiness to fall faster so that it catches up with the falling female happiness?

Maybe women are discovering that there's a lot not to like about being responsible for society. Maybe women are reporting higher levels of unhappiness because they're discovering that being free cold sucks.

Maybe.

Or maybe it's a hormone inequality thing, and women will always report higher levels of contentment than men.

But they used to in the US and now they don't.

 

[shuttlt]

Here's a comic from Vox that attempts to explain why maybe women are reporting lower levels of happiness than they did before.

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/11/13/20959863/women-happy-chores-gender-gap

I love the panel with them sitting on the two bars - You feel less happy, but actually you are happier in a way that doesn't make you feel happy. I know that's the kind of happiness I'm hoping for in my life.