Letters to the Editor
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I saw this on last night's TV news
The film clip made special mention that men feel happier at "family gatherings" than women. Well, DUH! If those parties are still on the order of what they were when I was growing up, OF COURSE the men are happier! They're in the rec. room drinking beer and watching the game (and of course engaging in parent-child bonding with their pop-drinking sons and nephews)...while the ladies and their daughters are cleaning dishes, tossing garbage, packing up the leftovers, minding the babies, etc.
Geez...was it a slow news day for Hollywood gossip or some other newsworthy event? :-)
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happy today, gone tomorrow.
The first clue in all of this tomfoolery should be the phrase "happiness data." Are they also assembling "love graphs" and calculating "sadness quotient" ?
I'm sure these studies purport to go into greater detail than superficial day-to-day moods, evaluating some deeper level of overall human satisfaction, but it smells strongly of BS to me. You can no more measure happiness than, well, any other abstract idea that varies so significantly in definition from person to person as to nearly render the term unusable without further qualification.
This sounds to me like your classic Spooky Science Oogly-Boo Survey Scare Tactic. "Survey Suggests Women Are ______." What they should be filling in that blank with is "Survey Suggests Women Are Too Freaking Complex To Be Analyzed With Happiness Data. Similar Findings Expected For Men."
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They'd Be Happy
If they met me.
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I'm a guy.
I'm unhappy. What could it be? A nowhere job? Perhaps the fact that I get all tongue tied and 4th grade around women? My car's broke? I could stand to lose a few pounds?
D) all of the above?
how much money was spent on this study? Aren't there starving children in some corner of the world who would benefit from those funds?
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But, Carol...
Broadsheet frequently writes about the insane, constant, and demeaning pressures on women of all ages to be pretty and thin. How can you NOT think that might have an effect on a woman's happiness?
The 40-year old woman in your example who is frustrated about earning 20% less than her male counterpart might also wonder if her 25-year old female subordinate is paid more for being perky-breasted and smooth-skinned. The 65-year old woman wondering if she can afford to retire might wonder if she'd have been financially better off had her husband not traded her in for a younger, more genetically lucky spouse.
Be consistent.
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work = unhappiness
Most people don't have a career. They have a job. Even if you go to college and/or grad school and even if you work in the field for which you were trained, you probably only have a job.
People choose what to study when they are quite young and then feel obligated to work in that area the rest of their lives. A lot of people make bad choices. Then they call their poorly chosen job a "career" and torture themselves with the thought that their "career" isn't going so great. A lot of the work that needs doing is unfun and lame. Just do it, make some money and carve out some free time to do what you really like.
So many people today are chasing money, including many women, often with great success. Sadly, even when making lots of money, its only human nature to look up at the millionaire and feel relatively poor, rather than looking down at the mail room staff and feel relatively rich. I have spent many long evenings listening to 28 and 29 year-old women making well north of $150,000 per year poor mouth and bitch that they know someone who is heir to some obscure fortune and why coudn't that be them and blah, blah, blah.
Much concern about hottness and housework and money making is all about competition and status seeking. Is it any wonder that people who strive after foolishness don't wind up happy? People need to think about all the bogus goals they have had set for themselves, not for the purpose of agitating against social pressure, but for the purpose of shrugging of social pressure. Then they can pursue what they really need and want and make real progress toward being happy.
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No and no
This whole study seems incredibly vague and unscientific. There are a myriad explanations for the supposed male/female happiness gap which have nothing to do with the much-ballyhooed "pay gap" (as if!) or any other feminist rallying cry.
Simple one: survivorship bias. Men are much more likely to commit suicide (not attempt, but actually succeed) than women. They are also more likely to die in accidents and daredevilry, to drop out of society, and to become incarcerated. This thins the herd of many of the most dysfunctional and unhappiness-prone males, with the remaining, more well-adjusted males being happier than the average. You can see that comparing this group of survivors to the group of accessible-to-study females, which includes a lot of dysfunctional women who manage to remain in society better than their male counterparts could, could easily yield these results.
Nothing, and I mean nothing, annoys me more than seeing people bolster their annoying political stands with utterly uninformative "studies" like this one.
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I know why
Women are miserable no matter what. It's the Hawthorne Effect. No matter what you do you effect the same change. Except in this case it's negative. There is really no other plausible explanation - when things are bad women are miserable. When things are good women are miserable that there are few things to be miserable about. I know lots of Martyrs with Martyr complexes up to the sky. I can sell you a cross if you'd like to hang on one.
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the "hottie" pressure?
I love how feminists like to imagine that men can all go about looking like Danny Devito, while all women must look like they stepped out of a Victoria's Secret catalogue. This isn't true of straight men, unless they are incredibly wealthy; and for gay men it's so totally alien as to be out of this world.
I imagine there are as many women fat and happy and aging fearlessly as there are men - of any description - suffering in self-conscious, body dysmorphic misery.