Women and Happiness October 6, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Ethics, Philosophy of Gender.Tags: Feminism, Marcus Buckingham, the nature of happiness
1 comment so far
Women are less happy than they used to be according to recent research that received a lot of attention from commentators last week. Maureen Dowd in the NY Times reported:
According to the General Social Survey, which has tracked Americans’ mood since 1972, and five other major studies around the world, women are getting gloomier and men are getting happier.
Before the ’70s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there’s a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives.
As Arianna Huffington points out in a blog post headlined “The Sad, Shocking Truth About How Women Are Feeling”: “It doesn’t matter what their marital status is, how much money they make, whether or not they have children, their ethnic background, or the country they live in. Women around the world are in a funk.”
Marcus Buckingham, a former Gallup researcher and author of “Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently” describes the data:
“Though women begin their lives more fulfilled than men, as they age, they gradually become less happy,” Buckingham writes in his new blog on The Huffington Post, pointing out that this darker view covers feelings about marriage, money and material goods. “Men, in contrast, get happier as they get older.”
Buckingham argues that the unhappiness of women is explained not by the burdens of the second shift—housework in addition to remunerative labor—but by the increased choices that women have today:
When women stepped into male- dominated realms, they put more demands — and stress — on themselves. If they once judged themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens and dinner parties, now they judge themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens, dinner parties — and grad school, work, office deadlines and meshing a two-career marriage.
“Choice is inherently stressful,” Buckingham said in an interview. “And women are being driven to distraction.”
And these higher standards are exacerbated by female biology:
Add this to the fact that women are hormonally more complicated and biologically more vulnerable. Women are much harder on themselves than men.
They tend to attach to other people more strongly, beat themselves up more when they lose attachments, take things more personally at work and pop far more antidepressants
These data tell us something about how women think their lives are going, but they measure only one aspect of happiness, and we should be careful about drawing conclusions from this impoverished understanding of happiness.
The General Social Survey relies on self-reports of subjective well-being—how a person feels about her life as measured by the survey question: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days, would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?”
But feelings of pleasure, contentment or satisfaction are only one measure of how life is going. Part of happiness is exercising one’s capabilities to their fullest—realizing our full potential. The struggle to do so may not produce attitudes of pleasant contentment. Think of the lives of most athletes or artists. Their lives may consist of much frustration and pain—a hard slog on most days. But I doubt they invariably think of themselves as unhappy despite their struggle. They might gain contentment or have more fun by giving up their pursuit of achievement but would not think they had increased their happiness.
In other words we seek to live meaningful lives as well as contented and satisfied lives and these goals are not always working in tandem. Yet both are part of human happiness.
Evaluation of our lives can diverge significantly from mere reports of how one feels and surveys that ask only about subjective feelings miss this dimension of happiness. Impoverished definitions, as employed in these surveys, can lead to bad policies if, by relying on them, women reassess their commitment to full participation in society.
Women have rejected the idea that their human capabilities are limited, and they have made their full exercise the standard by which happiness is measured. They will not be satisfied with a return to the days when college was for finding a husband and achievement narrated on the pages of Good Housekeeping, regardless of how much peace and contentment such a retreat might promise. Of course, women should seek balance in their lives, which is the focus of Buckingham’s book, but not at the expense of their aspirations.
The problem is not that women aim too high. The problem is that a fully human life will be thick with clashing desires.
As to the improvement in subjective assessments of men’s happiness, I suspect women’s liberation has benefited men. We now have partners who can think independently, communicate, earn, and share all dimensions of life.
It is hard to imagine anything that would do more to enhance the happiness of men.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
The Battle of the Burqa September 24, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Culture, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Philosophy of Gender, politics.Tags: Islam and feminism, Naomi Wolf
6 comments
It has become fashionable in recent years to argue that for many Muslim women, wearing the Chador or Burqa is liberating. Feminist icon Naomi Wolf, recounting a visit to the Muslim world, wrote a couple years ago:
The West interprets veiling as repression of women and suppression of their sexuality. But when I travelled in Muslim countries and was invited to join a discussion in women-only settings within Muslim homes, I learned that Muslim attitudes toward women’s appearance and sexuality are not rooted in repression, but in a strong sense of public versus private, of what is due to God and what is due to one’s husband. It is not that Islam suppresses sexuality, but that it embodies a strongly developed sense of its appropriate channelling – toward marriage, the bonds that sustain family life, and the attachment that secures a home. […]
Indeed, many Muslim women I spoke with did not feel at all subjugated by the chador or the headscarf. On the contrary, they felt liberated from what they experienced as the intrusive, commodifying, basely sexualising Western gaze. Many women said something like this: “When I wear Western clothes, men stare at me, objectify me, or I am always measuring myself against the standards of models in magazines, which are hard to live up to – and even harder as you get older, not to mention how tiring it can be to be on display all the time. When I wear my headscarf or chador, people relate to me as an individual, not an object; I feel respected.” This may not be expressed in a traditional Western feminist set of images, but it is a recognisably Western feminist set of feelings.
It is easy to grasp why some Muslim women feel this way. To no longer feel the need to display oneself in a way that is pleasing to men is undoubtedly a relief.
However, it is a bit of a stretch to argue that such clothing is liberating, not oppressive. The need to cover themselves is itself a product of the repressive patriarchy from which they desire to escape.
But what exactly does it symbolize? Many say it stands for piety. No, that’s wrong, says Marnia Lazreg, an Algerian-born professor of sociology at the City University of New York. Piety has little to do with it; the Koran doesn’t even mention the veil. In truth, the veil stands for political ideology and male power.
It also establishes the wearer’s extreme distance from the rest of us. We recognize people by seeing their faces and we acknowledge their humanity by reading what their faces tell us. Without that information humans cannot come alive to each other. A woman wearing a mask is a woman declining to be human. Unable to look anyone in the eyes, lacking peripheral vision, her hearing muffled, she becomes an abstraction. Encouraging a woman to wear the burka is like offering her a portable isolation cell. (h/t to Butterflies and Wheels)
Lazreg, author of Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women, is right. A system of belief that forces women to hide themselves is barbarous and inhumane. Women who embrace the custom are making the best of a bad situation; they ought not be criticized for their decision. But feminists who praise it as liberating in the name of cultural tolerance are loosing sight of the conditions that give rise to the custom.
In France, President Sarkozy has called for banning the burqa.
In a speech at the Palace of Versailles, Mr Sarkozy said that the head-to-toe Islamic garment for women was not a symbol of religion but a sign of subservience for women.
“The burka is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience,” he told members of both parliamentary houses gathered for his speech.
He added: “It will not be welcome on the territory of the French republic.”
But this strikes me as wrong-headed as well. Women who choose to wear it are doing so for personal reasons. The burqa may be a symbol of repression, but it is a violation of their personal liberty to ignore those reasons and force woman to become symbols in a culture war they do not wish to fight.
We can oppose the burqa while granting the strategic role it plays in making a woman’s life livable.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Women in Science June 30, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Culture, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Philosophy of Gender.Tags: Women in science
add a comment
Via Ars Technica:
A new study commissioned by Congress and carried out by the National Academies of Science shows that, in 2005, women received nearly 38 percent of the doctorate degrees in science and engineering, but only between six and 29 percent of associate and full professors in these fields were women.
However, women were hired and granted tenure at a rate roughly equal to men. Thus, the disparity has to do with the small number of women applying for these jobs. In biology, 45 percent of the PhDs awarded went to women, but they only accounted for 26 percent of the tenure track applications.
The study found that both sexes have comparable access to institutional resources such as start-up packages, travel funds, and grad students and postdocs to employ. Nevertheless, in all six fields, women were underrepresented at all three levels of the tenure track. On the positive side, those who were up for tenure were at least as likely to receive it as men.
Women are getting degrees in science but not going into academia. What explains this?
The obvious hypothesis is that the tenure clock is unfavorable to women who want to have families.
Ars Longa, Vita Brevis June 11, 2009
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Art and Music, Culture, Nina Rosenstand's Posts, Philosophy of Gender.Tags: fertility figurine, Gerda Lerner, Hohle Fels, Marija Gimbutas, Mother Goddess religion, symbolic thinking
17 comments
Or: “Art is long, life is short.” In mid-May German archaeologists announced that they had found a piece of three-dimensional art, a little figurine carved out of mammoth ivory depicting a naked woman, in the Hohle Fels Cave, a region that has already yielded interesting human artifacts, including the oldest known musical instrument, a flute. The style resembles the famous Venus of Willendorf and other fertility figurines, but “Venus” is only ca. 24,000 years old, and the newfound little statuette is older than any other three-dimensional depiction of a human, going back ca. 40,000 years. Here are some dates to put this find into perspective: About 150,000-200,000 years ago Cro-Magnon humans traveled out of Africa to colonize the rest of the world. Cave art have been found dating back 75,000 years, and 40,000 years ago we humans were still sharing Europe and the Middle East with the last of the Neandertals.
Why is this so fascinating? Another headless, big-breasted figurine found in Europe—what is significant about that? Some commentators can’t get over those big breasts, and the exaggerated genitalia, and talk about “pornographic” images. Like many other conversations about art, those comment reveal more about the beholder than about the work of art. We have no idea what these little figurines were for. But we do have so many of them (albeit from a later time period) that we may be able to speculate: Certainly it might be that they were made by men, and for men, to add something tangible to their fantasies during lonely times—and what of it? I would assume that if there is anything that remains stable in the human condition, it is a natural preoccupation with sex. But in the archaeological community it hasn’t been the sexual aspect that has been accentuated, but the fertility symbolism: These figurines are not only “voluptuous,” they are apparently pregnant. For ancient cultures this may have been far more significant as a symbol of the fertility of the tribe, the herds, and nature itself, than being a sex-symbol (then again, one does not preclude the other. We’re just so used to the Victorian and post-Victorian mindset where sex is dirty…) .
Thanks to scholars such as Marija Gimbutas and Gerda Lerner who have studied ancient cultures centered around female fertility, we may see these little figurines as stylized images of creative power. According to Gimbutas and Lerner, the worship of female fertility is linked to what is probably the oldest religion in the world, the worship of the Mother Goddess. Archaeological evidence seem to indicate that there was indeed a time, dating back some 8,000 years and beyond, where the Goddess worship was widespread all over the ancient world, and (according to Lerner) this would imply that the Goddess’s human representatives, the priestesses, would have had a prominent presence in the social structure. Scholars don’t like to use the term matriarchy, because we have no evidence that women actually ruled in those ancient times, but there is enough evidence to suggest that women did play a more integrated role in society. So scholars prefer to talk about matrifocal or gynocentric values. Now, thanks to the new find of the little figurine, added to the other Venus figurines from a later date, we can perhaps move this tradition back an additional 30,000 years, and speculate that a matrifocal system may have been in effect among the Cro-Magnon humans, even as the hunters outwitted or outcompeted the Neandertals. As Lerner would say, patriarchy has only been around for some 3500 years—but for most of our time as humans, we have been matrifocal. (We will talk about all this in my Fall 2009 class, Phil 125, Philosophy of Women, by the way!) Just for the record, in my personal opinion patriarchy is not the source of all evil, as it has often been presented by radical feminism, but it is a thought-provoking idea that a tradition preceding patriarchy can perhaps be anchored that far back in time, thanks to this new piece of evidence.
But we need not take sides about patriarchy and Goddess worship to see an additional significance to the little figurine: As a work of art, which it indisputably is, it speaks to us from across 40,000 years about the human capacity for symbolic thinking: Our language, our gestures, our artifacts, and the very ways we think utilize images and expressions to signify other images and expressions. The little headless figurine is probably intended to symbolize something: maybe Woman as such, maybe Fertility, maybe Mom, or Sweetheart, maybe the Goddess who Gives and Takes Away—we don’t know. What we do know is that she has meant something—to he or she who carved her, and to the generations who kept her in their tribe. The little statuette has reached out, beyond the lifetime of the artist, to the future—which is what good art does. And that brings me back to the Latin proverb (translated from an even older Greek saying): Art is long, life is short. Life may be a lot longer for most of us than what the artist who carved the figurine could expect—some 30 years at the most. Still, each lifetime is not long enough to accomplish everything we’d like to accomplish, and experience and understand all there is to understand. But art ties generations together, and makes our short lives link up in a common experience transcending the individual lifespan. And thanks to the little figurine, Art just got a whole lot longer.
Girls Can Do Math Too June 10, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Culture, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Philosophy of Gender, Science.Tags: Gender Gap
add a comment
The hypothesis that boys are better than girls at math has been bandied about for years and it is often used to explain why girls and women tend to avoid math-heavy fields like engineering and physics.
A new analysis of the research suggests that the hypothesis is just a stereotype unsupported by data.
Psychologist Janet Hyde had previously studied scores on standardized math tests in the United States, and found no difference in performance between girls and boys. Her new study expands the scope of the work by analyzing international data. She and her colleague analyzed studies from around the world on math performance along with gender inequality as measured by the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index. This index measures the gap between men and women in economic opportunity, educational attainment and other socioeconomic factors [LiveScience].
They found that countries with poor gender equality, like India, had a larger gender gap in math, while in countries with excellent gender equality, like the Netherlands, girls performed as well as boys. If males really did have an innate advantage in math, the researchers note, that advantage should be obvious throughout all these cultures. Instead, the study suggests that cultural issues are the basis of the math gender gap.
The United States, by the way, is 31st on World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index behind bastions of freedom and opportunity such as Cuba and Namibia.
Possible Worlds and Misogyny May 28, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Philosophy of Gender.Tags: conservatism and sexuality, conservatism and women’s rights, Ross Douthat
3 comments
Brad Delong channels a friend who comments on conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s views on women:
Ross Douthat:
- believes that abortion is murder.
- thinks that women who use birth control should be stigmatized as (or perhaps are) unattractive sluts.
- thinks that single parents should be stigmatized too.
Don’t you only get to pick two of those three? Unless you’re a real p—- who thinks women should be locked up by their fathers until title to them is passed to their husbands, that is.
I suppose there is some possible world in which someone could, without contradiction, hold 1, 2, and 3. But not in this world.
Delong provides the analysis:
I agree. If you think birth control and single parenthood should both be stigmatized then you must be for abortion on demand. If you both forbid abortion and stigmatize birth control then single parents are valuable parts of society performing important work raising the next generation. If you forbid abortion and disapprove of single parenthood then women on the pill are Visible Saints.
Since there are possible worlds in which people think “women should be locked up by their fathers until title to them is passed to their husbands” Douthat’s beliefs are not quite unintelligible—but they are very close.
Thoughts on Friendship December 3, 2008
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Ethics, Nina Rosenstand's Posts, Philosophy, Philosophy of Gender.5 comments
What is a true friend to you? The person you hang out with the most? The one you can call late at night when distressing thoughts keep you awake? The one who’ll speak up for you when nobody else will? The one who never forgets your birthday? The one who will tell you the truth, for your own good? How about the one you e-mail or text when you have good or bad news, even if you never actually get together in person?
We all have our different ideas about what a good friend is, and some of those ideas are rather self-serving. Some of us like for our friends to agree with us, but is a good friend someone who agrees with you because otherwise you’ll pout? Or who always does what you want to do because otherwise you’ll pout? Aristotle would say “That’s an imperfect friendship.” Kant would say that the friendship has to involve respect for the other’s humanity (but friendship based on reason alone barely reaches room temperature). Jane English would say, “But it has to be mutual”. The linguist Deborah Tannen, one of the great contemporary communicators and masters of the written word, says that what you expect from a friend greatly depends on your gender: A man will expect a friend to stand up to him and challenge him, to bring out the best in him, because that’s how boys play—they challenge each other for top spot. And when you just hang out, you do things together, without really having to say a whole lot. A woman, on the other hand, will expect a friend to tell you her troubles, as she will tell you hers, without judgment or advice, unless asked for; this is what Tannen calls “troubles talk,” mainly intended to share problematic experiences in good company. One might ask if Tannen is being a sexist here? Not according to Tannen herself; to her, men and women aren’t all stereotypical, and besides, men and women can, with a bit of good will, learn the other’s style and be the buddy their different-sex partner expects them to be.
Philosophy occasionally shines the spotlight on the metaphysics and ethics of friendship; we may think, with Tannen (who works the descriptive side of the scientific street, rather than suggesting normative rules), that women and men have different ideas of what friendship entails—but philosophically, I believe we have pretty much the same bottom-line expectations. Who among us, female or male, would call a lopsided relationship a true friendship? If a friend is your friend so he or she can obtain something from you, it isn’t a real friendship. If they’re perpetually agreeing with you just because they’re afraid of you, or afraid to lose you, it may qualify as a semblance of friendship, but something is out of balance (in either case we can use the Aristotelian label of imperfection). So mutuality and equality are features of a good friendship, regardless of gender. (And of course we have to add, among competent adults.) So is loyalty—we need to be able to trust our friends not to gossip about us behind our backs, and not to be merely fair-weather friends; and we must be willing to be a trustworthy friend ourselves, in good times and bad. Another essential element is respect for the other as a person, and his or her life and views, even if they differ from yours—unless those views happen to be so fundamentally different that they, to you, preclude being friends (could you stay friends with someone who turns out to believe in the righteousness of something you are strongly morally opposed to?). This evolves into the virtue of honesty, avoiding the Aristotelian extreme of crudeness/rudeness. In other words, a sensitive honesty. And then of course, like Aristotle says, you have to like each other. But just because we like each other doesn’t mean we’re automatically willing to be there for each other, and listen to each other, at 3 am during the Bleak Hour when the ghosts of past and future problems come to visit, and at other times when we’re needed/we need a friend. So being willing to give of yourself and your time to the other is part of the deal—reciprocated by your friend with respect for your life and work hours. When you need your friend to be there for you, remember that she has to get up at 6 am. And, getting back to Aristotle, the bottom line is that “Those who wish good things to their friends for the sake of the latter are friends most of all, because they do so because of their friends themselves, and not coincidentally” (1156b9-11).
But does it have to entail physically being there? Aristotle says it does—doing things together is essential. But is he right? Times are different; most of us no longer live in small communities. Some of us are lucky to have our best friend close by—and the ultimate good fortune is to be married to one. But some of us live far away from childhood friends, or people we have bonded with under special conditions, and yet they may be the closest human beings we have in this world. (Some of us will be reluctant to call the people we hang out with every day after work, down at the sports bar, “friends,” even if everybody there knows your name.) And some of us have long-distance friendships that never have involved, and perhaps never will involve an actual meeting in the flesh. I lost such a close friend recently. We met over research on the Internet and were able to pool our resources, and work together on a project. Once the project was completed, we found that we had become friends. Our relationship was one of written words, evolving through the friendship criteria of mutuality and equality, loyalty, respect, and honesty. Being there for each other, in cyberspace, and listening to each other’s words, the written ones as well as the background thoughts and feelings, and wishing each other well. And now, with my friend’s passing, I detect no discernable qualitative difference between the sense of loss of a cyber friend and that of a friend whose physical presence has been an integral part of the relationship.
So let me turn this into a question about the metaphysics as well as ethics of friendship: What do you consider the most important qualities of friendship? Do you agree with Aristotle that a physical presence (at least occasionally) is essential to maintaining the relationship? Do you agree with Tannen that men and women have different expectations of a friendship?
