happiness
Maximilian's first flight
Just got back from D.C. and "The Global Well-Being Forum" where they talk about happiness around the world and economics and psychology and such. Everyone is super-jealous of Denmark because they always rate the happiest in the world, but the real question is Who can squeeze the most happiness out of the fewest resources? Check out the (Un)Happy Planet Index.
I've been asking around about women and happiness, myself...
How happy are you?
Does it have anything to do with gender?
Feminism?
Hmm...
posted by Contact at 9:31 AM
11 Comments:
Good (complex) question. I think it appears men have the capacity for greater happiness, and I'm certainly happiest when I'm acting more male than not (surfing, doing physical work, hanging with my mates), but I believe it comes down to personal values and living in line with them. Perhaps women have the capacity to know what they value but not necessarily the means to honour it. Men may have more freedom of choice but without an awareness of what they truly need, they're just pissing in the wind. Know thyself AND live it=happiness. IMO.
Both philosophically and politically, I've come to understand that aligning myself with feminist politics, organizations and theory made me miserable. I don't yet know why, but it is feels like a very stuck movement that was not able to represent the lovely life force of the women and babies it fights for. Maybe your happiness question has something in it to help me understand this.
Ariel I am all about positivity and happiness. I am very happy with my life and myself. I have to agree with deb about feminist politics, I have had enough...not because of the mission but because it seems such a negative-based movement that does not empower women to choose freedom and equality, rather than demand it from men. Also as the mother of sons I got tired of there being a resistance to build resources for male children and teens, and to respect gender differences between (generally) male and female children.
I believe that happiness is a choice, especially in a country like the USA where there is so much opportunity and freedom. I have met so many people in my life from other countries who had absolutely nothing and lived under terroristic conditions, yet still became happy and went through life with a positive outlook. So when I feel tempted to whine about whatever particular misery I put it in perspective and keep it moving. Since choosing to be happy I have had a profound positive change in my personal equilibrium over the past year or so. Ok I will stop as I am writing a book in your blog comments, LOL!
:)
That conference sounds like it was awesome, I wish I could have gone!
i lived in denmark for 3 years - it rains 360 days of the year. i think their recipe for happiness is the elimination of poverty (but certainly not racism), lots of alcohol, and the fact that people don't complain or admit that anything is difficult...i had my first child there and it took months for the other women in my neighbourhood "mother-group" to admit that they too found new motherhood extremely difficult - while i was crying for the first few months, they were walking around telling people how lovely everything was - and were only able to admit that it was hard once it got better...
Have you done a Happiness issue in Hip Mama? It's a worthy topic.
Good comments above. I agree with them.
I associate happiness with not only a relative absence of fear and pain, plus something positive. I don't expect it as a continual experience but rather as momentary recognitions. Maybe it's a capacity for happiness that is happiness itself. I've had many, many moments where I say to myself, "I can die and go to heaven now."
In the United States, there is a heavy emphasis on material things, status, etc., and I wonder if people wouldn't be happier if the focus was more on ideas, work, creativity, love, friendship, family, beauty, art, learning, achievement, and all those good things as opposed to racking up debt on useless objects, spending most of life as a captive in dead-end jobs, staring at screens all day and into the night, eating expensive and unhealthy junk food, and prowling the world for sexual gratification. Unfortunately, the latter is how many, many Americans live their lives. While it's not as bad as living in, say, Africa, it is awful in its own way.
The comments you have received are remarkable. I'm astounded at the negativity directed at feminism. Feminism doesn't demand anything of men. It doesn't empower women. Women empower themselves with their choices - or not. Change is hard; knowing the right thing and doing it is hard; sometimes it's lonely; sometimes it feels like the 'greater of two evils.'
Read BITCH Magazine's winter issue, out this December. There will be a feature - an interesting retrospective of feminist literature of the 60s and 70s. I feel as if I've stepped back 30 years when I read some of the commentary on feminism here; what that stepping backward may mean, what we stand to lose in terms of our health and safety and happiness is not quantifiable. Let's just say it's a lot. Don't take what you have for granted.
Another thing about happiness - we live in a country that literally lives off consumerism. That may be the biggest factor in unhappiness. Things are no longer about food, shelter, safety, love - see Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
One of the problems ushered in with Ronald Reagan in 1981 was that we got tired, we wanted to forget the struggle, we wanted to fold ourselves into the comfort of a seemingly paternal 'strong' male figure. Then the mainstream media got into bed with the enemy. And then we got fat and comfortable and confused it with happiness. Look at history before you decide that feminism is a negative.
Finally, I'm not certain that happiness has a gender bias, although statistics come out that state one sex is happier than the other at different times. Media has a gender bias that we're buying. If happiness has a gender bias and men are happier than women, then it might have to do with anti-feminism.
I'll stop here. This is an interesting topic but I have to get back to what makes life full.
If I may, this comment is in response to Evelyn's (above).
I'm 41, so I was a child when feminism of the 70s emerged as a revolution. My grandmother was a child when women won the right to vote in this country. There is no doubt that women have not enjoyed political or economic equity with men. I think of the 70s wave of feminism as an assertion that women are not second class citizens nor are we children. Specifically, women asserted core reproductive rights and the right to equal opportunity.
Where feminism fails for me, is the way some women behave toward women who choose not to work outside the home but rather to undertake caring for their families as a central focus of their lives. Somehow these women are not liberated. Somehow these women are not comrades. Somehow these women are to be ridiculed.
This inability to respect other women's choices or to find common ground among women from a broad range of experience strikes me as a failure that leaves feminism dead in the water.
What do you mean feminism doesn't demand anything from men? That's a posture feminism takes: makes demands, points fingers. It creates hostility between the sexes when we really need love and understanding.
Feminists of the 70s tend to say younger generations don't get it, we're giving everything back that was gained in the choices we're making, and that we're going to lose everything. There is a disrespect even between generations.
Feminisim is what we make it...we can choose to see it positively or negatively. I think feminists (including men) have to demand more from society....less talk with more actions that value women, children, and family.
I am happier since leaving the rat race to be with my daughter,and getting my head unstuck from the tv.
My wife always says that happiness is a chocolate chip cookie. It is profound, fleeting, and hopefully still warm.
In our last many years holed up on a rural island in BC, I've spent a lot of time thinking about happiness and what it means and who gets to have it and how to find it again if you think you've lost it.
I agree with whoever said that men have more of it. I think they have permission to be happy with themselves in ways that women don't. I know no man who apologizes for eating/enjoying food, for example. I decided a few years ago that behaving as men do--specifically not asking or apologizing for what they like or what makes them happy--might just be the key.
I think happiness is understanding that we're all ok and knowing that the value of happiness means that you *can't* have it all the time. Like chocolate chip cookies, it's the very best to just be aware when you have it and devour every last crumb.
-Ambeaux
Wow! I am so surprised to see more than one comment equating identifying with feminist politics with unhappiness. I am a very seriously dedicated feminist in so many senses of the word. As a young woman (who was very unhappy due to the oppression with which I was being raised) discovering an ethos of feminism with its tenets of female equality and empowerment was extremely liberating, and my years of studying and practicing feminism (I now hold a degree in Women's Studies) has helped me to heal and to become so much more the person I always wanted to be.
So today I am this remarkably blessed mother of two sons who lives in theoretical poverty (meaning paycheck to paycheck and no health insurance and any minute the bottom could drop out of it all), but I have a beautiful home and so many supportive and loving friends and live my dreams every day by homeschooling my kids, teaching classes to community youth, working a blessedly flexible if low paying job, listening to music, writing, eating great food, and so on.
I am happy not because everything is easy, because it's not (try being a single homeschooling mother sometime!), but because I choose to be. I think Americans are brainwashed by capitalism to think they can not be happy unless they can have/get/buy more stuff all the time and have/get/buy good looks and have/get/buy sex, and so on. And it is utterly untrue.
After having been abused and neglected as a child, after years of still suffering with numerous chronic health conditions, I am elated because I decided I wanted to make the best of my life. And, truly, feminism has only contributed to my ability to deconstruct the negative lessons around me and create my own, more positive view of the world.
Anyhow, thanks for asking, Ariel. As always, the new issue made me cry, lots, in really good ways. Max is supertastic cute and I hope all is well with you. Love you, love HipMama always.
Justina
I would be much happier if I were paid the same thing as the man working next to me. I have a BA, he has a high school diploma. I would be happier if I had a month's vacation every year like most other people in the 'first world' (and even third world) and health care, free university if you can pass the entrance exams, free daycare for your kid until she's five. I'd be much happier if the Lesbian Seven were freed, their attacker given 11 years instead of them, and the streets were safe for all women all of the time. Hell, I'd just be happy to see people turn and talk to the person sitting next to them on the bus instead of talking on their cell phone.
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