Split Thread Are post-feminism women happier?

[Chanakya]

Apologies, somehow I missed it.


I have no particular expectation of the world ever working that way. One cannot simply discover a set of just principles that, if followed, would lead to a good result. Theoretically good principles can easily have bad outcomes in the hands of the unscrupulous and powerful. The whole thing is a feedback system like coming up with some scheme for predicting the stock market that, once widely known, alters the behaviour of the market so it stops working.


I would say there are some very different types of happiness. My son was very happy when he got an xBox, but I am far from convinced that it has actually made his life happier. Give a toddler their own bodyweight in sugar and they will be ecstatic at first, but they will certainly be crying later. Equally, having children has certainly raised my base level of happiness. I spent some time in the countryside recently, and I don't think that caused any subsequent crash in my happiness.


Doubtless true, but one can also find that too much unhappiness can damage one's ability to be happy, I think.


Misery is an internal state. There is no condition that is intrinsically miserable in the absence of people experiencing the condition and being made more or less miserable by it. Therese of Lisieux coughed up blood during the night and described excitedly having to wait till morning to confirm the joyous news that she had TB and was being called to God.


I'm not sure that it makes much difference to the discussion. We all seem to agree on this part. The bit I disagree with is this idea that people's circumstances have somehow been made happier, even though they have become less happy, and that we should discount how they actually feel.

I agree, evaluating whys and wherefores of happiness is a complex matter. For instance, what you say about being very unhappy deadening your capacity for happiness: I've read something like that myself.

My point was --- or at least, the point was bruto's, not mine --- the more of something we get, the more of it we seem to want to arrive at same level of satisfaction/ fulfillment/ happiness. That seems to be a psychological fact.

I mean, think of it this way: Did the average woman back two hundred years ago score a 7 our of ten on the happiness scale, as opposed to today's woman scoring a 5? Well, put today's woman down back to that earlier situation, and I'll wager that the average woman will then score a zero or a 1 out of ten on that same scale! Or put that coddled woman of two hundred years ago in to today's world, and provided she were able to acquire the necessary skills that obviously she'd lack and that are necessary today, then it's possible, and I'd say likely, that she'd score a 9 or a 10 out of 10. (Although again, there's the question not just of skill but of temperament as well, so maybe she wouldn't? That last again brings us back to your earlier point about "who you are". Your "who you are" of the hospital bed is different than the "who you are" in the real world; and you don't care for the former "who you are". Likewise, it could be that the "who she is" of the woman of two hundred years ago would be of a temperament that rejects the challenges that today's women face; and maybe today's women reject that "who she is" just as forcefully as you yourself reject the hospital bed "who you are", regardless of the level of happiness.)

 

[shuttlt]

I'm trying to do that, to persuade you that people value more things than merely happiness, by showing you that you do that yourself.

Sure people value things that aren't happiness. I've never claimed that they didn't. Emily's Cat values all sorts of feminist stuff. I think they do tend to reduce down to happiness though. With lots of these higher order values, you have to ask the question why do you value X. I guess I am looking at happiness, certainly in the life satisfaction type, as some kind of subjective metric of the extent to which the things you actually value, maybe even unknown to yourself, are being realised. Otherwise, what.... I have to propose some universal principles that we should all want? I don't think I believe in universal principles. Again, Locke seems to found liberty on the need to be able to pursue happiness. I think it is kind of fundamental.

And in the process also show you how, sitting where I am, your approach looks like blatant double standards / special pleading to me.

I don't see it so far.

[*]What exactly is happiness, then? It's a state of mind, and that state of mind is the result of chemicals being fed into your brain.

That is a rather non-subjective materialist way of looking at it. If you pumped my brain full of that chemical while I walked through a field of dead children, would I be happy? I don't know.

What I'm proposing is to keep you, and your family, in a state of chemically induced happiness that exceeds the happiness the real world would have given you. Provided the technicalities of that proposition can be effectively dealt with --- or else ignored for the sake of argument, in order to focus on the principle of the thing --- I don't see how you can possibly say that this isn't really happiness.

Again, if you alter my brain chemistry to that extent... am I really me anymore? Are my family really my family? What you are offering feels like death.

And hey, if you're going to insist that only this kind of happiness is acceptable to me, and not that other kind of happiness, when it comes to me and my family; well then, why shouldn't women take that same line,

I don't say that they should take any particular line. When have I ever told women what they should seek? I've said that I think most women expect feminism to increase female happiness, and most people expect liberalism to bring them greater happiness. I've said I think people are mistaken and I've attempted to explain why. If they want to do things in the knowledge that it will make them miserably unhappy.... I'm not sure that one can really force happiness on people who don't want it. I'm not a totalitarian about this stuff.

and say that the kind of happiness that I get as some kept woman that isn't quite man's equal is unacceptable to me,

This is Rousseau's myth of the noble savage signing the social contract. This is not how it happened. Also, I haven't said "not equal" as in lesser.... men and women are different and expecting society to view them the same and to achieve the same outcomes is nonsense on stilts.

the only kind of happiness I care for is the happiness I get from (the chance of) full actualization of every talent and potential that I have?

Very few people actually live lives like that. What you are talking about is society optimised for the few that I believe JS Mill advocated. I'm much more prepared to believe that liberalism, and maybe even feminism, works for such people.

[*]As for this changing the person that you are, or that your loved ones are, well, then here we already are, at something that, by your own reckoning, trumps happiness.

Only in the sense that I don't regard people as interchangeable. What we are doing is clarifying my concept of happiness. It's the happiness of non-fungible people. This isn't a rival good to happiness. This is the thing which experiences the happiness. The job is to make the people who are here happy while ensuring happiness into the future, not to swap out unhappy people with happy ones.

Even when you and your family are being made happier, you reject that happiness because you don't like "who you become", and "who your family becomes" in the process.

I do not think it would be my family in the same sense. I do not think it would be me in the same sense.

Likewise, then, maybe --- in fact, quite likely --- women reject "who they become", when they become your typical patriarchal-society-caricature-woman, as opposed to the fully fledged human beings that they get a chance to be today, even if it means that they are in the process less happy.

Again, this is Rousseau's noble savage signing the social contract. It never happened like that. More like what happened is that a relatively small vanguard of women spurred on my political ideas thought up by men advocated for change in a society whose politics was dominated by men who shared those same ideas. Change was granted and society slowly began to change, economic incentives drove the change and advertisers began to see women as a new type of potential consumer. Slowly the culture changed and with it the incentives and gentle and less gentle nudges that society gives moved things along. Education and media began pushing the new way of viewing society and the world and the expectations that should go along with it. It's not as if conservative women are crying out to be saved by liberals today. How much more conservative were most women in 1900. What most women think or want has never been what has directed feminism any more than what most people think or want has directed liberalism.

There was never a moment when the women of the early 20th century were offered and embraced this journey in any kind of knowledge of the implications. That's not how these kind of things happen.

And in giving yourself and your family to determine "who you are", while clearly not doing the same with women in general, again you fall back to double standards / special pleading.

I think you are doing something a lot like equivocation here. I am not talking about seizing control of women's brains to force different thoughts and feelings through their heads and altering their brain chemistry.

[*]I think it's ultimately a question of consent, informed consent.

That's not how the world works though. The moment you imagine where the noble woman signed the feminist social contract didn't in fact happen. A bunch of ideas went through elite society in the West that connected to liberalism, and were in elite financial interests, society then changed to their profit. All of us talking here have been raised under the influence of that set of ideas. Your are no more a liberal or a feminist because of your "informed consent" than the child of Amish parents is a Christian because of "informed consent".

Should you, or I, decide for ourselves that we'd prefer a long and happy but comatose-on-a-hospital-bed life for ourselves, then it's good and right that we should have that life, if the economics and other incidental factors permit it; and should you, or I, reject that option, then absolutely, force-feeding that "happiness" to us tantamounts to ...I'd go so far as to call it evil.

Again, I haven't argued that one should do this. I am highly doubtful that one could. For the reasons given above, I think if I've taken charge of your brain chemistry I don't think you are quite you anymore.

Likewise, if it is the considered choice of some woman to embrace the happy but limited life of the domesticated coddled kept woman, well then it is good and right that she should have that life, if she's able to. Indeed there are women, even today, who do opt for exactly that, and more power to them if that brings them fulfillment. But again, and as above, I think it tantamounts to, well, evil, to compel all women, including those that don't want that kind of life, to be force-fed that happiness against their wishes.

I haven't talked about compelling women to do anything. However these choices have elements of a zero sum game about them. In a book I read recently there was the example of automobiles. When they were first invented, they simply added choice. If you could afford it, you could drive. Then more automobiles appeared and it became less safe to walk. Cities were designed with the expectation that you would drive. Sure, you could still walk.... but that choice had been undermined. Redesigning society around the idea that women work undermines the choice to do otherwise. Secondly, the values of a society in which women work and which everybody needs "representation" and all the rest of it has been propagandised for decades as surely as the Amish child I mentioned earlier is propagandised to be suspicious of technology. There is no society free choice that people are making here. I'm not advocating forcing happiness on people. What I'm saying is that feminism has been forced on people and, well, I'm not sure that it has made them happier. It's increased the labour force, depressed wages and increased household expenditure, so it's done some good.

(And of course, the above assumes that women's happiness is indeed compromised by feminism. That too is by no means given, because clearly we have at least two valid-sounding objections here: one, the bit about correlation not amounting to causation, unless this can be expressly shown; and two, bruto's insight about higher levels of happiness (or the stuff of happiness) leading to greater requirement of happiness (or greater requirement of the stuff of happiness), which forces us to see such studies on happiness in a very different light.)

Bruto's insight about a type of happiness that leaves you less happy. How does that lead us to see such studies in a different light? If I falsely tell you you've won a million dollars, I haven't discovered a great new source of happiness... I've just burned the non-renewable resource of your faith in me and your fellow man to get a brief spike in your happiness that is surely going to be followed by a decline. Heroine is a great source of happiness too along the same lines. I fail to see what is game changing about Brutos point.

As to Emily's Cat's point... I've agreed with her since the first of many times she has raised it. Each time I have given the same explanation about how nonetheless, I find it peculiar (from Emily's Cat's standpoint) that it isn't a cause for concern and doubt about the direction 2nd wave feminism took society.

 

[shuttlt]

I agree, evaluating whys and wherefores of happiness is a complex matter. For instance, what you say about being very unhappy deadening your capacity for happiness: I've read something like that myself.

My point was --- or at least, the point was bruto's, not mine --- the more of something we get, the more of it we seem to want to arrive at same level of satisfaction/ fulfillment/ happiness. That seems to be a psychological fact.

I'm not sure this is true of everything, certainly not to the same degree. My wife, my children, my extended family, friends I've known since school. Those things don't seem to fall away in terms of the happiness I get from them.

I mean, think of it this way: Did the average woman back two hundred years ago score a 7 our of ten on the happiness scale, as opposed to today's woman scoring a 5?

I don't know. I would imagine a medieval peasant was happier than their equivalent in the 19th century living in a slum and working 16 hours a day in a factory.

Well, put today's woman down back to that earlier situation, and I'll wager that the average woman will then score a zero or a 1 out of ten on that same scale!

Sure, we are suited to the world of our times. A medieval peasant might well find the isolation, crowding, noise and enclosure of a modern city appalling as well. We are children of our time and place.

Or put that coddled woman of two hundred years ago in to today's world, and provided she were able to acquire the necessary skills that obviously she'd lack and that are necessary today, then it's possible, and I'd say likely, that she'd score a 9 or a 10 out of 10.

You'd blind them with technology and free stuff of course, like a kid eating all the sugar.... but I really don't think they would end up a 10. People in the past had very different conceptions of themselves and the world. They weren't wanna be moderns who had the bad luck to be born 3000 years ago. Is the experience of primitive tribes encountering our civilisation that they immediately perceive the moral superiority of our culture and abandon their barbaric savagery? I'm not sure that that is typically what happens. More that the free stuff happiness that leaves you empty and wanting more rots their culture.

(Although again, there's the question not just of skill but of temperament as well, so maybe she wouldn't? That last again brings us back to your earlier point about "who you are". Your "who you are" of the hospital bed is different than the "who you are" in the real world; and you don't care for the former "who you are". Likewise, it could be that the "who she is" of the woman of two hundred years ago would be of a temperament that rejects the challenges that today's women face;

I would strongly suspect that that would be the case. Isn't there an old cartoon about the town mouse and the country mouse that is kind of about this?

and maybe today's women reject that "who she is" just as forcefully as you yourself reject the hospital bed "who you are", regardless of the level of happiness.)

I don't doubt it. I have said exactly the same thing to Emily's Cat.

 

[bruto]

Concern and doubt about the direction....

So if you are heading down the road to a goal and hit a landmine, it's because you were on the wrong road?

Cars make life easier also in places with good crosswalks and trolleys and pedestrian laws. The abandonment of those things is a consequence of thinking about cars wrong, not of their existence. That would be true, I think, even if you can argue that the erosion should have been foreseen and forestalled, unless you can argue that like Chekhov's gun it must happen.

Sure, many persons claiming to be feminists or their representatives have turned permission into obligation - that the ability to work becomes the necessity, and so forth, and that may be an artifact of how feminism is practiced, and a critique of the organized movement called "feminism," but I question its being inherent in the goal.

I think you have to make sure you distinguish between doing something and doing it wrong.

 

[shuttlt]

Concern and doubt about the direction....

So if you are heading down the road to a goal and hit a landmine, it's because you were on the wrong road?

It could be. I mean, a 50 year continuous decline in female happiness making women less happy than men was not, I think, what had been expected. If you are in the middle of a minefield and hit a single mine, maybe it doesn't mean you are on the wrong road. If you were sure you were driving north, but the military testing ground is south.... maybe you might want to double check a few things. If I was driving my kids to school and hit a mine, I think I can confidently say that I would take the situation seriously and reconsider the plan.

Cars make life easier also in places with good crosswalks and trolleys and pedestrian laws. The abandonment of those things is a consequence of thinking about cars wrong, not of their existence. That would be true, I think, even if you can argue that the erosion should have been foreseen and forestalled, unless you can argue that like Chekhov's gun it must happen.

It's not a question of foreseeing and forestalling. You can't. Ultimately making the world suit cars more makes it suit walkers less. One can throw money at the problem and maybe minimise the tradeoff a bit, but then you are taking that money from somewhere else and so something else is made more difficult. We can not simultaneously live in a world where 50% of CEOs and politicians are women, and the average income of women is the same, and there aren't all sorts of industries where there is a single woman in the department..... and not take away from the world that used to exist for housewives. The more you achieve the former, the less will there be the community of other women for the housewife to be part of.

Sure, many persons claiming to be feminists or their representatives have turned permission into obligation - that the ability to work becomes the necessity, and so forth, and that may be an artifact of how feminism is practiced, and a critique of the organized movement called "feminism," but I question its being inherent in the goal.

I've said already that the goal is obviously impossible and to the extent that it is possible can't remotely be achieved by leaving it to women's natural inclinations and talents. Hence the constant push.

I think you have to make sure you distinguish between doing something and doing it wrong.

It isn't possible to do right.

 

[Emily's Cat]

As an aside... There's always some entertainment to be had watching males discuss whether or not females are doing feminism right...

 

[shuttlt]

As an aside... There's always some entertainment to be had watching males discuss whether or not females are doing feminism right...

You girls are doing great. Women are unhappier than they have been since records began and traditional concepts of sex and gender have been undermined to the point politicians and judges pretend they don't know what women are. I definitely wouldn't reconsider anything.

Also, if being a man makes my opinions a joke on this, being a cis woman makes your opinion a joke on the trans stuff. These are your rules. They are lower than you on the privilege stack. You need to shut up and listen, as the saying goes.

There is an argument that I find somewhat convincing that quite a bit of the TERF reaction to trans-women comes from their misandric attitude to men. The analogue for men would be that their attitude to trans-women is connected to homophobia.