APRIL 23, 2024
More and more women are saying it. Despite the great promises and despite the real freedom and advancement in opportunities women have achieved, they are not happy. Some are even admitting that most men aren’t all that bad and are turning to youtubers, like The happy housewife, for advice on how to make their husbands or boyfriends happy.
Nobody puts the case against feminism better than Janice Fiamengo.
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The Goddess That Failed
On International Women’s Day, we should admit that the feminist movement has not been good for anyone—even its alleged beneficiaries.
JANICE FIAMENGO, 8 MAR 2024
A recent poll has shown that a majority of young people think feminist laws and policies have gone too far and now discriminate against men. It’s good to see reaction against anti-male discrimination.
For International Women’s Day, let’s also consider feminism’s impact on women, and recognize that it’s been very bad there too.
Not just radical feminism. Not just the hateful or fringe variety. The whole thing, with its sob stories and sentimental celebrations, its exaggerations and cover-ups, its relentless focus on the demands and alleged needs of one half of humanity at the expense of the other, has been a monumental disaster.
For over 50 years, the movement has been mired in fraudulent claims, myopia, special pleading, double standards, abandonment of principles, manifold hypocrisies, and emotional incontinence.
It has continually misrepresented the situation of women and men, and has induced in its female adherents an unhealthy mix of wounded self-regard, festering resentment, and self-righteous indignation, often overlaid with an unfounded conviction of moral superiority and contempt for the unenlightened.
And despite its energetic stroking of the feminine ego and repeated assurances that women are innocent of wrongdoing; despite also the various perks and exemptions, the fawning media representations, and the outsized public sympathy; despite steady exhortations of “You go, girl!” and promises of all that must still be done to protect, promote, succor, and bless the female of the species, the movement has not managed to make women happier or more satisfied than when it first took hold in the 1970s.
In fact, the opposite has occurred. Women are significantly less happy than previously.
An article in Neuroscience News for September, 2023 sounded the alarm, calling it “The Paradox of Progress: Why More Freedom Isn’t Making Women Happier.” In the same year, CNN reported that the Population Reference Bureau was identifying a marked decline in well-being among millennial women. In 2022, David G. Blanchflower and Alex Bryson declared that across time and space, “women are unhappier than men […] and have more days with bad mental health and more restless sleep.” Oft cited is a large meta-study from 2009 called “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” which demonstrated the persistence of women’s decreasing happiness across the decades.
What these feminist academics and journalists call a paradox may seem fairly straightforward to the rest of us: movements based on assertions of angry victimhood are not likely to produce happy customers. But before fleshing out that conclusion, let’s take a look at the pundits’ attempts to deny the obvious.
“The Paradox of Progress” in Neuroscience News outlines the problem thus: “Despite having more freedom and employment opportunities than ever before, women have higher levels of anxiety and more mental health challenges, such as depression, anger, loneliness and more restless sleep.” The article is typically feminist in its teeter-totter balancing act between two conflicting priorities: to assure readers that women are superior to men—in this case, “more emotionally resilient,” with “more intimate” friendships, greater “capacity for personal growth,” and commitment to “more altruistic endeavors”—while also stressing that women have it worse than men—in this case, are more depressed, lonelier, and more anxious.
It would seem that both cannot be true—capacity for intimacy, for example, ought to decrease loneliness—but the article attempts to resolve the contradiction by falling back on a third feminist chestnut: that women are (justly, of course) “unhappy at how society treats them.” All the emotional resilience in the world, it seems, cannot make up for that.