Are Women Today Really More Unhappy?

By Sady Doyle, Comment Is Free. Posted May 23, 2009.

Yet, when you look at the study, without the sensationalist "women: now sad" trappings, it doesn't seem to convey that women are descending into the black pits of despair. What it says is that women and men now experience similar levels of happiness: there's been an overall happiness decline (well, unless you take the increased happiness of black people into account - which, again, the study doesn't; nor does it seem to address other people of colour), with women's being slightly more precipitous than that of men. In other words, as women and men have become more equal, their subjective experiences of life have become ... more equal. Shocking!

Well, not if you're a feminist. The point of the movement has always been that women and men are more alike than they are different, and that it doesn't make sense to assign limited roles or grant access to social power and status based on something as arbitrary as gender, rather than talent or intelligence or work ethic.

It makes sense, doesn't it? If you have a job, you can lose your job. If you have sexual freedom, and the ability to try out multiple relationships before settling down (if you ever want to settle down), you're also going to break up with more people. If you have the ability to choose what you want to do with your life, it's also possible to fail at what you've chosen. That's true for everyone.

But oh, how infatuated the world at large seems to be with female failure! The old restrictions have lessened, but haven't gone away, and women are constantly being bombarded with contradictory expectations: be as good at your job as any man, but never lose that special feminine touch. Be pretty and sexy, but not so pretty and sexy that people can't take you seriously - and, for the love of God, not so sexy that you actually wind up having lots of sex. Get an education, work hard, be ambitious - but don't be so focused on your career that you can't find time for your man or your inevitable babies. Speaking of those babies, you should be having them, don't you think? Remember how sad you'll be if you don't have the babies! And, about the success thing: you should have some, but not too much of it. You don't want to scare the men off by getting more attention than they do.

If women are less happy than men, maybe it's just because they have more to work at than men, and therefore more chances to screw up. Which brings me to the main thing I learned from this study: we're not done yet. By the time that we are, it won't make sense to measure happiness - or any other basic human experience - by gender. We'll all just be people.

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