In May, I blogged about this article by NYT Op-Ed columnist Ross Douthat. It and many other trend pieces about the unhappiness of women were spawned by a study conducted by UPenn Economists called The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness. It's about how women are unhappier now than they were in the '70s, since the popular feminist movement. I read the study. It's really long and there are graphs that I don't understand. There is obviously an interesting topic here, one that deserves over forty pages summarizing tireless reseach spanning three decades and the economic spectrum. Douthat's and others' articles diminish the subtlety illustrated in the study to quips and generalizations.
But Maureen Dowd's article on Saturday took the cake.
In short, it was really depressing. It opened like this:
Women are getting unhappier, I told my friend Carl.
“How can you tell?” he deadpanned. “It’s always been whine-whine-whine.”
Why are we sadder? I persisted.
“Because you care,” he replied with a mock sneer. “You have feelings.”
Oh, that.
I wasn't surprised that Maureen Dowd would choose to hang out with a sarcastic and depricating dude like Carl. She's not exactly my favorite redhead. But I was bored with the article already. Luckily, it wasn't that long.
Dowd's basic thesis is that women are more overwhelmed now than they were back then because they not only have to worry about, "looks, kids, hubbies, gardens and dinner parties," as they once did, but also, "grad school, work, office deadlines and meshing a two-career marriage." She also brings up the point that having kids generally decreases people's happiness. And that women become increasingly unhappy when they age, when the opposite is true for men.
As a woman who just officially entered her late-twenties last week, Dowd's outlook does not sit well with me. Is this really what I have to look forward to? A lifetime of resentment and futily trying "to replicate — and Restylane — [my] 20s into [my] 60s." If this is the time in my life when I am supposed to be the happiest, I am screwed. Juggling hunting for a job, postponing fun, finding time to write, what I do to make money out of necessity, compromising my lifestyle with my fiance's, and realizing that I'm only getting older are not the ingredients for a blissed-out existence. To be honest, I've been tolerating these things with the hope that, eventually, I'll be stable, comfortable and confident at thirty-five or forty. Alas, according to Dowd, this probably won't be the case.
You know what makes me really sad? Reading articles like this one. But I have to because I write about women's issues. Yes, Maureen Dowd (I keep typing Down when I write her name…), this is a paradox, indeed.
