WE USED TO MARRY OFF OUR DAUGHTERS AGAINST THEIR WILL AND THEY SELF-REPORTED HIGHER HAPPINESS LEVELS APPARENTLY
And in the least convenient world where women married off against their will are literally happier and healthier, what do you do? Are you only capable of living in a world that does not offend your sensibilities? Must you live in fantasy, forever denying every fact that opposes your dearly held views? For I cannot see how any humane being can look at the world as it stands and not be horrified to the point of despair. But neither despair nor outrage will make the world better.
First you must know the world as it is, in all its horror. Then you must decide how the world should be, fraught with every peril and self-serving trap such involves. And then you must build a bridge from the former to the latter. Your delusions don’t help the suffering. They may help you, to the degree that they’re politically useful and keep you from being ostracized. But that don’t help you figure out how to make the world a better place. So long as you deny the world as it is, your plans to fix it will keep failing to move the world to where you want it to be.
ah so I have agency and it’s cool if I act against other people’s expressly stated preferences if I know it’s for their own good, that’s reassuring and not terrifyingly exploitable at all.
It’s just a protocol that we’ve adopted to solve a problem forced upon us. I don’t see what the big deal is.
mmm okay I’m done actually.
If arranging marriages makes women happier, tell women, “you can marry as you choose and have freedom, or you can marry your parent’s choice and have happiness”. Some people prefer happiness and some people prefer freedom; let each have the value they prefer.
You know, I have been trying to follow this argument as best I can, and I have no idea what it’s about. Near as I can tell, @lambdaphagy posted a graph purporting to show that despite the victories of femminism since 1970, women in the US have become less happy while men have become more happy. Then @argumate said it was stupid to conclude that freedom is bad if it makes women unhappy. Then @inferentialdistance said hey, if we don’t judge freedom by its consequences, then what do we judge it by? And then everyone had a strong opinion on whether people should be thrown into volcanoes, which was a proxy for various policies about the role of women in society, even though no one expressed support for changing any policies regarding the role of women in society.
Maybe there’s some previous argument in which inferentialdistance staked out a position in favor of restricting freedoms on women, and maybe that’s in part what argumate is reacting to. But I don’t see any of that in this recent exchange.
So, inferentialdistance, are you taking a position against any of the freedoms women have gained since the mid-twentieth century?
And argumate, do you have any reason to believe that inferentialdistance wants to roll back any of the freedoms you’re in favor of?
Or should I just go ahead and throw myself into a volcano for even asking this?
I’d like to hop in briefly to clear my plate of this discourse. I posted that graphic as a pars pro toto for the various ways in which the much-sought “After The Revolution” has failed to materialize. In doing so I tied this point to the field of happiness research in general, and to one study in particular. This was a weak move, and I regret it. It is apparently disputed whether self-reported subjective well being (SRSWB) is even decreasing (per @somnilikes), and it seems that the most methodologically conservative conclusion to draw would be that feminism has not budged SRSWB much one way or the other. (I’m confident that this compromise that will please everyone.)
I don’t think that studying SRSWB is completely worthless, but I do agree with detractors in this thread that it is a rather low-fi (and unfortunately bike-sheddy) construct for the thing we’re trying to get at, so consider the point withdrawn.
Since then the thread has spun off into remarkably ahistorical territory, and I admit I have not much kept up with it. As for what I actually favor, I endorse this post by @samueldays and, even more so, this one by Sarah.
I’m intrigued that both of your links are about the changes in marriage, while when I think about declining female happiness the first thing I think of is the expectation that women be successful both inside and outside the domestic sphere and the extent to which women end up being both full-time workers and full-time homemakers/mothers.
Obviously my perspective is biased by living in an upper-middle-class trad bubble of low divorce rates and high fertility rates.
But like, I reeeeeeally don’t see the case for marital rape being a good thing.