Unhappy Women: Why Are There So Many?

Ross Douthat com­ments on a recent study that many women will denounce angrily while secretly agree­ing with it:

…all the achieve­ments of the fem­i­nist era may have deliv­ered women to greater unhap­pi­ness. In the 1960s, when Betty Friedan diag­nosed her fel­low wives and daugh­ters as the vic­tims of “the prob­lem with no name,” Amer­i­can women reported them­selves hap­pier, on aver­age, than did men. Today, that gen­der gap has reversed. Male hap­pi­ness has inched up, and female hap­pi­ness has dropped. In post­fem­i­nist Amer­ica, men are hap­pier than women.

The longer that I lived in the West­ern world, the more I noticed that an increas­ing num­ber of twenty-something and thirty-something women — at least on the urban, East Coast — who were angry and bit­ter. I had a long day at work, so I’ll refer to sev­eral posts that I have writ­ten on this topic.

Women go against their nat­ural impulses by inten­tion­ally delay­ing mar­riage and moth­er­hood into their thir­ties and for­ties. They know — but will not admit — that fem­i­nism sold them a false bill of goods. After they finally won their entry into the work­force, they real­ized that no one really likes to sit at a cubi­cle all day in a high-pressure envi­ron­ment that makes women more aggres­sive, manly, and less attrac­tive to the oppo­site sex. They under­stand that the mass entry of women into the job mar­ket low­ered real salaries — an increase in the sup­ply of labor with the same level of demand — and turned chil­dren into latch-key kids. More women are buy­ing small dogs and car­ry­ing for fake babies since they waited too long to have chil­dren and men can still date twenty-something girls when they are in their thir­ties or for­ties. Women are also catch­ing on to the fact that many men are increas­ingly sus­pi­cious of mar­riage in a world of no-fault divorce pro­ceed­ings that rou­tinely strips chil­dren from fathers and gives their money to their ex-wives.

As I wrote in a lengthy essay, mod­ern soci­ety has essen­tially devolved as a result of the unin­tended con­se­quences of fem­i­nism in the dat­ing scene. As women became more suc­cess­ful, they became more picky. (In gen­eral, women want to date “up.”) They decided to focus on their careers and edu­ca­tions while remain­ing sure that they could even­tu­ally marry quickly after a given age. Well, the unpleas­ant real­ity is that men become more attrac­tive with age while women do not. As game the­ory dic­tates, the women who win at the mar­riage auc­tion are those who find a good guy and marry early. Those who wait will see only the left­overs and exclaim: “There are no good men left!”

Why are mod­ern, sin­gle, fem­i­nist women so unhappy? Let’s break it down by decade:

Twen­ties — Women have an intense, bio­log­i­cal desire to set­tle down, get mar­ried, and have chil­dren while they are in their prime. But soci­ety tells them to get master’s degrees and have ful­fill­ing careers while get­ting drunk every night, hav­ing casual sex with imma­ture bar­bar­ians, and destroy­ing their souls. So they are con­flicted on phys­i­cal, men­tal, and spir­i­tual levels.

Thir­ties — Women have advanced degrees, edu­ca­tions, and resumes, but they are rapidly los­ing their looks. At the same time, men in their thir­ties — whose mar­ket value in the dat­ing world has only increased as a result of wealth and looks — can rou­tinely have casual sex with the women who are now in their twen­ties. The thirty-something women find it harder to meet some­one who ful­fills their unrea­son­able expectations.

For­ties — Get a small dog or a fake baby, a tub of ice cream, and rent “Thelma & Louise.”

Now, I expect that some read­ers will think that I am being misog­y­nis­tic. Far from it. I am reach­ing log­i­cal con­clu­sions from what I observed in the United States in the con­text of evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy and eco­nom­ics. When soci­ety messes with nature, bad things result.

In the study cited by Douthat, men are report­edly hap­pier then they were decades ago. It is easy to under­stand why. In today’s post-feminist world, men have beer, video games, sports, sex with no strings attached, and free, Inter­net pornog­ra­phy. Men are sim­ple crea­tures — what more could they pos­si­bly think that they need?

I write this post with extreme sad­ness at the state of West­ern soci­ety. I want men and women to marry, have chil­dren, and be truly happy. (I per­son­ally con­sider it a holy, spir­i­tual action.) But fem­i­nism, albeit unin­ten­tion­ally, harmed the rela­tions between the gen­ders that had worked for hun­dreds, if not thou­sands, of years. I am not sure it will ever be repaired.

My ear­lier essay: Cri­tiques of Fem­i­nism: Argu­ments Against Fem­i­nism Essay