Quoted from "Signet"

Quoted from "mouth"
This is a critical issue I'm glad you're raising RH&B. Huffpo has been doing an interesting series of articles on women's happiness in the last 40 years and guess what? It's gone steadily down. Have we gotten access to more, had more success, achieved greater heights, made bigger impact, increased our choices/options, broken through so many glass ceilings? Yes, yes, yes. And yet we're less happy than we were. What's up with that?

I was under the impression that people in general have become less happy for at least the last half-century. Despite the increases in wealth, quality of life, political equality, etc that have been made. Additionally, I think there is a certain level of wealth where once you pass it, people actually become less happy. Perhaps it has something to do with a culture of appreciating what you do have, versus a culture of wanting more? People are also likely to have fewer tight friendships (in favor of larger, less personal networks) now than we were before the internet age.

I certainly haven't done a sampling of studies, but I was referencing this article, which clearly states men's happiness has gone up, while women's steadily down: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marcus-buckingham/whats-happening-to-womens_b_289511.html

An interesting thing there is that there are no really objective measures of happiness, so it's self reported. They told us the method of one, which seemed to be just asking people one time about how happy they are. One thing that's really changed that could impact womens' happiness is the expectations they have for their own lives. Our expectations are higher than they used to be, so it's more common that we don't reach them. One study mentioned there claimed that girls & young women were happier than older women. And the business of life not turning out as well as we'd hoped is seems likely to show more strongly as unhappiness in the sort of survey where you ask a person "How happy are you?" (as opposed to those who have people report on their level of happiness "right now" at intervals.)

Quoted from "Phlurg"

Quoted from "zeno"
There's Ayn Rand the novelist: Success. There's Ayn Rand the critical philosopher: Failure. (This is widely known in the world of philosophy.)

Agree, but I would formulate that as: There's Ayn Rand the novelist: Popular success, esp. with college freshmen, but as measured by literary critics, absolute failure. (Her writing is terrible. Try reading her dialogue out loud sometime.) There's Ayn Rand the philosopher: again, popular success (ask the man on the street to name a 20th century philosopher and I bet her name will come up more than, say, Rawls). Universal failure by the standards of mainstream academic philosophy. /on-topic The perfect woman is T'Pol, or perhaps Dana Scully.

/off topic still

To each his own, but even literary critics hail her writing. She's a moving, detailed writer with deep characters. Even if you don't agree with the underlying philosophies, certainly her own life story growing up in communist Russia highlights why she thinks the way she does. It's no different than any other novelist responding to the world around them.

Have you even read much of her work? It doesn't sound so - sounds like you heard some wacky opinion about Ayn Rand somewhere and have let it hold you back from reading a really great novelist.

And I agree she wasn't a failed philosopher either. I would say more people know Rand's philosophies than a lot of other major philosophers. And she wasn't all wrong, just extremist, which is the downfall of a lot of great ideas out there.

/back on topic

Quoted from "pocotell"
Have you even read much of her work? It doesn't sound so - sounds like you heard some wacky opinion about Ayn Rand somewhere and have let it hold you back from reading a really great novelist.

I've read the Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, Anthem, We the Living, and the Virtue of Selfishness. I attempted " Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" but gave up on it.

As for her literary reception, check the wikipedia entry under Literary reception. If you can take that at face value, the best you can say is "mixed" and wrt Atlas Shrugged in particular, tending towards the negative.

As for her philosophical writing, it's not a matter of "right or wrong," per se. Most philosophers simply ignore her.

Quoted from "r_c_s"
Good point, and good question. There was a time when nearly all American girls took "Home Economics" in school, and boys usually took some sort of shop instead. Shop might have taught them how to build stuff, but look at the kind of crap some old Home Ec book had: http://iws.ccccd.edu/grooms/goodwife.htm I've never seen lessons about how to be a good husband...

This wasn't a lesson ... it was originally printed in Housekeeping Monthly in 1955. Ladies Home Journal purportedly printed, in 1944, an article entitled "You Can't Have a Career and Be A Good Wife".

Look closely at why we have these expectations of ourselves ... because magazines (media) tell us that's what we should be doing. How many mens focus magazines are there - magazines that talk about how they should act, dress, cook, what job they should have, etc.? And what's the readership of those magazines? Compared to similar magazines for women? These are not classes we are currently forced to attend (like Home Ec., back in the day) - these are articles we CHOOSE to read and believe. So I'll ask again - why do we (as a group) do this to ourselves, and then buy into this? Who said we have to do it all? A journalist? And we follow their instructions because ... ? In this context, I'll agree with Alan Jay Lerner:

Quote
... Why can't a woman be more like a man? ... Why does every one do what the others do? Can't a woman learn to use her head? Why do they do everything their mothers do? Why don't they grow up, well, like their father instead?...

A perfect woman understands that Ayn Rand was a popular success but failed in literary and philosophical impact.

We're trying to save RedHOtNBluE some reading time.

Quoted from "Shanabanana"

Quoted from "mrz"

Quoted from "Shanabanana"
Dagny Taggart. Hard to make into a Halloween costume, though.

Isn't a Dagny Taggart costume just a John Galt costume with a bent-over female mannequin stuck onto the crotch?

That depends. Would you make a Halloween costume of your mother in the same position because at some point she had intercourse with your father?

I dunno. Are my parents characters featured in a long-winded propaganda piece for a crappy ideology?

Quoted from "Shanabanana"
The perfect man would understand that the perfect woman can make decisions for herself.

Yes but since she's perfect, all her decisions would magically match her perfect man's.

Quoted from "mouth"
The bottom line is, if she wants more, her man has to get less. And most men haven't been properly prepared to accept that. Sorry guys, it may hurt to hear, but it's true.

Relationships are not zero-sum.

Quoted from "soundinmotiondj"

Quoted from "mouth"
The bottom line is, if she wants more, her man has to get less. And most men haven't been properly prepared to accept that. Sorry guys, it may hurt to hear, but it's true.

Relationships are not zero-sum.

That has nothing to do with it. We're not talking about having a relationship vs. not having one. We're talking about having a career plus taking care of a family, vs. doing just one or the other. If she's going to do both, she needs more help from him. That means he has less free time, or maybe his career has to come second to family sometimes, just as hers does.

The interesting thing, though, was that the article mouth quoted said that the "happiness gap" continued to increase, even though equity in the workload was getting better.

I think it's more as OpeningMinds says, our expectations are out of line with reality. The "why" is a good question.

I think it has a lot to do with us needing to prove something. When a disadvantaged person wants to gain equal status, he has to do more to gain status, than someone who already had the status does to keep it.

Quoted from "mouth"
But how will "we" ever be able to understand that when everyone and everything around you says you're a failure or broken for not trying to have it all?

That's just the question, isn't it? And no matter which choices we do make, we often feel like we have to defend the choices, especially to other women who've made different choices.

Quote
Choosing to focus on your family is the easy decision - easy meaning society rewards you for choosing it.

And yet, stay-at-home moms often feel like career moms look down on them.

Quote
But sadly, it's getting harder and harder to afford this option.

Plus, it simply doesn't suit many of us. I was home with my kids when they were very young, but I can't tell you how happy it made me to go back to work. It's hard for me to imaging choosing not to have children, but I really wonder if I would have regretted the choice if I had to stay home with them until they were grown.

If you listen to Dr Laura, that makes me a bad mom.

Quote
And not being the PTA mom? Try not feeling guilty when a choice you make about your personal well being involves taking something away from your child.

Yeah, I struggled with that one for years. But at some point, I realized that skipping the PTA thing just wasn't hurting them. I've got to know enough about some of the moms who are active in the PTA (and other kid-oriented volunteer stuff), and I learned that as much as I appreciate some of the stuff they do, they aren't the kind of people I want to be. I'm glad some people are like that, but it's not for me, and that's okay.

I can spend time with my kids, doing things we both enjoy, on a schedule that we can work out just between us, so there are fewer conflicts. We can still bake cupcakes for the class party... we just might not get the dusting done that week. So what?

One thing I've learned is that it's not a bad thing for the children if I balance their needs and mine. They don't always, 100 , come first. That's life. I don't always get it right, but they are resilient, and if my whole life revolved around them, that would both give them an inflated sense of their own importance, and also put responsibility on them for my happiness, which is something they really shouldn't have to deal with. You can be a stay-at-home mom without falling in to that trap, but having a career makes it much harder to fall into that.

OTH, you can't really expect to become a high-powered executive and be the primary care-giver for your children. The few women who manage to accomplish things like that, have husbands who fill many of the same roles corporate wives are traditionally expected to.

I don't know... I don't have it all, but I do feel like I got most of the important stuff. I've made some decisions that hurt career because my children needed more of my time. I've also asked my husband to take on more, and trusted my older kids to take a lot of responsibility for themselves, so I could take a really good job that unfortunately involved an awfully large time commitment for a mom. (There's a reason most of my coworkers are men.) My kids are okay, and I like to think they're handling independence, although I keep paying attention to my son. There may come a time when I have to make a difference career decision to provide him more supervision. (I hope not.) I guess I'm lucky. But there was a time, when I wasn't so lucky. And maybe going through some really hard things when I was young made it easier for me to except the less than perfect decisions I've had to make.

It takes some deep relection to understand that all these anxieties come from the bottomless pit of unresolved feelings of self-worth whose flames are only fanned by the constant need for external validation. Does "society" value me? Do men like me? Does the million dollar female exec look down on me?

How about just accepting what you can't change, learn from the mistakes you made, and move forward armed with the ability to make better decisions?

Life is full of simple pleasures that are around every day. The biggest challenge to enjoy them is to escape the self-absorbtion bubble and realize that there is more to life than looking at yourself compared to others.

Quoted from "OpeningMinds"
And, IMHO, that's what makes you a perfect woman. You've done what's right for you, for your husband, for your family ... with little regard to the societal expectations. And you've sacrificed and adapted, and you continue to be willing to do the same, without losing your sense of self and self-worth.

But I'm not. I can think about decisions I've made over the past 15 years and say, I've done the best I could with what I had to work with, and things have worked out okay. But the fact that they've worked out okay depends a LOT on having a better-than-average husband.

AND... I still live in a world where plenty of people think I'm neglecting my children to spend so much time at work (and dance as much as I do... although I involve the kids that are old enough in that), and others don't understand why I don't come out and dance as much as I used to (because I need to spend more time with family), and I've have no real friends, other than my husband, because I don't have the time to invest in relationships with people who can't (or don't want to) include my family in social activities or have patience with our schedule, and I haven't spent a lot of time doing the things that let you get to know the other moms. (Well, okay, and also because we've moved a few time & you lose friends when you move. But the fact remains, my social relationships are currently very shallow with anyone other than close family. And the juggling act has a lot to do with it.)

It's hard to have much real confidence when few people really approve of you. So yeah, I'm basically happy, but it's been a struggle -- there have been real sacrifices, so it's easy to see why many people wouldn't be.

Quoted from "r_c_s"

Quoted from "OpeningMinds"
And, IMHO, that's what makes you a perfect woman. You've done what's right for you, for your husband, for your family ... with little regard to the societal expectations. And you've sacrificed and adapted, and you continue to be willing to do the same, without losing your sense of self and self-worth.

But I'm not. I can think about decisions I've made over the past 15 years and say, I've done the best I could with what I had to work with, and things have worked out okay. But the fact that they've worked out okay depends a LOT on having a better-than-average husband.

But you CHOSE that better-than-average husband - or was it an arranged marriage? And how you conduct your relationship with him and your methods of communicating with him make him willing to support you ... give yourself credit. He might have started off pretty good, but YOU have encouraged/empowered him to grow into better-than-average.

Quoted from "r_c_s"
It's hard to have much real confidence when few people really approve of you. So yeah, I'm basically happy, but it's been a struggle -- there have been real sacrifices, so it's easy to see why many people wouldn't be.

But that's the thing ... you've made choices based on what's important to YOU at the time, not what society said you should do. And yes, you don't have it all - who does? But you have maturity and acceptance of what you DO have - and you celebrate and embrace that. You don't put too much weight in someone else's opinion of what you do and why you do it - that's not to say that pressure doesn't exist. But it seems that you have a balance between what is good for you, what's good for your husband, and what's good for your kids, and that balance that YOU'VE created seems to be more important to you than what some group says should be important to you. Which is why I stand by my opinion that you're a perfect woman.

Quoted from "r_c_s"

Quoted from "mouth"
It's everywhere. And it really frakking hard to push it all aside and constantly believe you're ok the way you are making the choices that make sense for you. Really frakking hard...

And in your case -- you don't have children, right? That's one of the hardest things for many people to understand. They think, how could anyone really not want children? So you've sympathy to deal with, and when someone offers sympathy for something you feel is fine, or someone insists that you're kidding yourself if you're fine with it, it's a judgement that your feelings are wrong. Having someone unable to believe that you feel the way you do, is just one of the hardest things to take.

Sympathy, condescension, assumption, judgment, questioning - I work in fundraising and was speaking to a donor (a successful corporate woman) who was relating some crazy story about her children. She casually commented something like, "You'll see what I mean when you have kids." In a non-work environment I might've made a joke about how great it is that I don't want kids and so won't have to go through that craziness. But in this context, I had to keep my mouth shut and say something like, "of course!". I knew there was a possibility she would have a negative reaction to my not wanting children. And I need to keep her happy and trusting me because I have to keep asking her for money. Isn't that sad?