A Little Game For You

I just can't stay away from that Huffington Post comments thread. What a train wreck it is! There's something extremely nasty about the ease with which the woman-bashing starts and about the nasty types of monsters whose disgusting heads suddenly surface about the bloody waters. And then there's just the plain stupidity.

But to allow all that to happen -- well -- Huffington Post is to blame. So I removed it from my blogroll. Heavens now tremble in consequence.

You don't really want to think of any of this, I know. But let's play a little game. Let's pretend that we don't know what the happiness survey tells us about the period from 2004 to 2006, and that we only know women came across as somewhat happier than men in the early 1970s. Then let's see what happens when the 2004-2006 results come out in different possible forms:

1. Suppose we find that the results are unchanged from the early 1970s: Women are still somewhat happier than men. How would you use that to attack feminism, hmh?

You could argue that feminism didn't do anything for women! They feel the same although their lives are supposedly so much better! Feminism was wasted, and it is time to focus on men's unhappiness.

2. Or suppose that the results from 2004-2006 show that women are even more happier than they were in 1970s. What does that mean? It means that we are ignoring the poor, poor men who are getting increasingly less happy while we focus on just women and girls. Time to change!

3. What if the more recent results show that men have caught up or even bypassed women on the happiness ratings? What would we write then? Well, feminism obviously failed to make women happier so let's scrap it.

4. Even absolutely equal happiness figures for men and women in 2004-2006 wouldn't do, because they would show a relative drop in female happiness. Thus, feminism failed again.

There you are.