Sorrows

"We wasters of sorrows!
How we stare away into sad endurance beyond them,
trying to foresee their end! Whereas they are nothing else
than our winter foliage, our sombre evergreen, one of the seasons of our
interior year,--not only season--they're also place, settlement, camp, soil,
dwelling".

--Rainer Maria Rilke

Weeping Weemens, Part One

There have been a number of articles recently about the happiness, or lack thereof, of women. In this case, the discussion has largely been spurred by a Wharton study that showed that women today are less happy than they were in 1972. This is supposedly a counterintuitive finding, since apparently one would expect that women today would be ever so much more fulfilled, what with being allowed to be in the workplace without having their asses pinched and so forth. That hoary old anecdote about Freud ("After all zeze years, I still do not know vat vomen vant") has been giving a good airing. Then there's the inevitable anti-feminist smugness on the right: "Okay, so you got what you wanted. Happy now? No? Well, hafuckinghahaha. P.S. God hates you."

Which brings me to today's topic: "Why I stopped studying feminist theory." Basically, it's this: feminist theory has not come to terms with the fact that what we've "won" as women in the last 30 years seems to be only the right to work harder and longer than before. It's right to point out, as many women of color have done, that the stay-at-home mother model (the source of Friedan's discontent in The Feminine Mystique) was a distinctly middle class model. Few women of color had the opportunity to develop the malaise of the suburban housewife. Still, feminist theory, and feminism, is dead today because it fails to address this issue: apart from almost all women having to participate in the workforce (because of the decline in real wages and the astronomical increase in costs of living over the last 30 years, making it very difficult to support a family on one paycheck) not much has really changed and not much is all that much better. Whereas in the 1970s there was recognition of the essentially inegalitarian nature of society, there was also a concurrent hope that this, too, could be remedied. Now, we are bankrupt of this hope. Having won the "right" to work in jobs that are often mind-numbing, bereft of actual human meaning and purpose, for 40 hours a week, and then continue to do all of the work we always had to do of caring for our partners, children, and households, seems like a fucking hollow victory.

In the meantime, some people have taken some parts of feminism to heart: men. Feminism has liberated men from the idea that they are or should be responsible for the fiscal well-being of their family. It has freed them from feeling that, before they have or start a family, they need to demonstrate their capability and independence, their reliability and consistency: in other words, that they need to have, and keep, a J.O.B. These are now considered quaint notions. Thanks, feminism!

In the meantime, most men have not felt a concurrent increase in responsibility for other forms of care for their family and household, namely, doing the fucking dishes. What has happened, it seems to me, is that now it all falls to women: financial caring and physical caring. Men know if they do not do it--whatever it is--well, someone will; and women know that that someone is them. This is an incredible burden, and it is hard to see the upside. Most women don't feel more happy because most women don't feel more free.

Perhaps it is (in fact, it just is) unfair to lay this solely on a failure of feminist theory. Perhaps the absence of real, material social change after the Third Wave is exactly why feminist theorists now spend most of their time tinkering at the margins, hanging out in postmodern world where things aren't things at all. Especially in the United States, women's roles have changed but society (and consequently government) has adamantly refused to accept that this is the case. Women would be happier if they had help and support: subsidized day care, paid parental leave, a functioning educational system and, you know, universal goddamn healthcare. This is at least in part why our sisters in Sweden and Denmark are happier than we are.

Instead, American women, with an energy that is truly incredible, keep trying to hold it all together. For the most part, they succeed--but it leaves little energy for advocating for a more just and equitable distribution of resources.

(Image at top is a magnet by Ann Taintor.)

Seekers

In California, one becomes accustomed to the fact that a certain number of people one meets (say, one in ten) is on a quest of some kind. They are searching for something--many things--and they go through books and gurus and retreats and crystals, only to remain, usually, in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction. It's modern ennui, but draped in purple batik wall hangings and scented with incense. It's essentially the American Dream of total fulfillment, with a spiritual rather than a material end.

So these are the people who would pay $9,695 to attend a "spiritual warrior" retreat in Sedona led by some guy who apparently made 9.4 million dollars in 2008 by selling snake oil. Snake oil being, in this case, videos, books, CDs about getting everything you ever wanted, but doing so by manipulating the universe to your own ends (that is, a variation on The Secret*). Three of the participants in this particular sweat lodge actually died, which reminded me of two things: one, Milgram's experiments on obedience to authority, and two, the lengths to which Americans will go to get everything, the denial of the satisfaction of low expectations (as the happiest people in the world, the Danes who are interviewed often say that they benefit from having low expectations--they just want a normal, comfortable life). There is something so childish, it seems to me, about this idea: that we can have everything we want, all the time; that the universe exists to fulfill our wishes.

It makes me sad to think of these people literally killing themselves to try to get somewhere else, to be someone else, to find answers when there are none.

*For the best review I've ever read on Amazon, scroll down to the first review for The Secret, by one Ari Broullette. Sir, I salute you.