Saturday, September 19, 2009

Yet Another Angry Post



Huffington Post is running a series about a gender gap in happiness. Women are less happy than men, according to its male author, but he will tell how women can be happy, too! Let me guess: Probably by buying his book. Well, it certainly can't be by imitating whatever the guys are doing even though it seems to work for them, right?

Then you get thousands of comments on the post and quite a few of them suggest that one can't fight biology and that feminism is the cause for women's unhappiness (which means that the happiest women in the world would be found in Afghanistan). That one of the graphs in the post shows that young women are happier than young men is ignored in that discussion altogether.

Then think of this scenario: If Huffington Post was running a series about a reverse gender gap in happiness, with men coming out as less happy, don't you think feminism would be one of the popular explanations for that one, too? I'm pretty sure of that. Feminism usually IS the favorite culprit for everything, including silly studies of something as hard-to-define-measure-and-compare as happiness.

P.S. I could do a proper post on what's wrong with the initial post in that series, on the sources used, on the methodological difficulties one faces in research of this kind, and on the odd setup of the whole series (because we could equally ask what makes men happier if that's what we believe to be true). But mostly what makes me unhappy is crap like this and the ponderings that go along with it. Women are from Venus, Men from Mars! That they ever interbreed is your fucking imagination.