As for children making women unhappy, it’s not the kids, it’s other people annoying the crap out of you and being unsupportive. I mean, I’m married, am the only wage earner (part-time), only driver, only cook, do the laundry, pay all the bills (when I say ‘pay’, I of course mean I live on revolving credit, because you try doing everything for 3 people on less than $1000 a month – and I earn a good wage). Now, do all that and try to raise an 18 month old and have some sort of time to reenergize yourself on a daily basis, and good luck to you. The only difference between my work days and my off days? I don’t get paid for my off days. Hell, most of the time I don’t even get a nap.

So, yeah, to reiterate, it’s not the baby who makes me unhappy and resentful, it’s the other so-called ‘supportive’ people in my life who are anything but, who pile on the pressure even more for reasons I can’t even begin to explain.

Oro

*yes, I am bitter and resentful. Thanks, family, you suck. Apart from my son, natch.

Also, men have a tendency to lie about how they feel.

For me family and friends have been spread all over the nation by corporations\careers. It seems we all, men included sacrifice way to much for career. We all come home to our empty apartments and cut off from our communities. I want community again. It seems like even meeting other people and men has become artificial. One must join a group or do the online dating thing. One must make an effort to reach out or be left alone.alone.alone.

The only thing I could possibly add to this, is that it seems ludicrous to me to blame *feminism* for women’s decline in happiness. The 1970s where the *heyday* of feminism and the feminist movement. A time at which women felt a real sense of feminist community and many were actively engaged in the feminist movement. So even if the stats were true, it seems to me to show that women are happier during the times when the feminist movement is strongest, and less happy during the times when the backlash rises to the fore. FTW with blaming feminist?

And one thing I can’t comprehend is how feminists STILL question why women are unhappy after certain battles are won, some legislature has passed, education bans have been lifted, Title XYZ is now in effect.

I also never understood true freedom in striving for the sameness of men. The opportunities and pathways to achievement should be fair and accessible, but whoever said that joining the high ranks of education, corporate, or higher paying jobs is equivalent to more meaning? Haven’t we learned that the purpose and integrity we put into our lives – and the right to define what our self-purpose is – delivers more than any feminist movement victory could?

If the purpose of the feminist movement – or any movement for that matter – is a truer sense of happiness, more equality, just conditions, and increased opportunity in LIFE (not just job, money, career), before we go and measure our so-called freedom and happiness, let’s take a serious look at how we’ve defined “success.”

I think we’ll find that we need more radical envisioning of ourselves and future, and it means to be truly happy.

I.e. point of unhappiness: having automotive-mechanical knowledge and potentially a source of income stolen from me by harassment by my male classmates when I took shop classes in high school, to the point where I a) spent the entireity of those classes in a state of mortified terror and learned basically nothing, and b) decided against going to tech college to study auto mechanics because I feared that those classes would be the same, and at the time I couldn’t handle that. BUT I had the option to attend those classes in the first place, and have the option to learn those skills in the future, neither of which I would have had without the advances of feminism.

Point of unhappiness: I am easily triggered by angst, darkfic, and sometimes canon plot in my favorite fandom, resulting in being sorta stuck in someone else’s created nightmare from some character’s perspective. And people don’t always warn for it, and occasionally the warning is descriptive enough to be triggering on its own. BUT I love that fandom, I love the stories, the fanfics, the characters, and my own ability to imagine and write—it is very, very, thoroughly worth it.

Point of unhappiness: I am frustrated with my slow progression of skill at ceramics. But I know this will pass with more practice, and I love being able to work with clay, and I love the feeling of accomplishment when I create something beautiful.

Point of unhappiness: I FUCKING HATE speed limits. But I love driving, even when it’s too slow.

Of course, there’s stuff that just plain makes me unhappy (misogyny, the entrapping day-nightmares that don’t come from fandom), just as there is stuff that just plain makes me happy (daydreaming, sun-warm concord grapes right off the vine, masturbation), but I don’t at all find that freedom or the ability to seek fulfillment brings more unhappiness than happiness, although it may well provide more awareness of unhappinesses that one might otherwise not notice.

However, if one is saying something makes one less happy but was worth doing and they wouldn’t do it any differently, they perhaps are barking up the wrong tree with the focus on happiness, or defining happiness improperly, so as to miss fulfillment. I was not happy in those shop classes, but I was more fulfilled by the pursuit of something I enjoyed doing than I would have been sitting in some other class, having accepted defeat at the hands of my misogynist classmates.

There’s also the difficulty of finding out what to do with freedom, when one is neither educated nor empowered properly to do so, as I would argue that women are often not. But yeah, not everything that is worth doing provides an instant happiness ugrade.