What else is the SAHM supposed to do while ignoring the crying dirty diaper in the next room while scarfing down bon-bons? Pay attention to the kid? It’s far more important to absorb the messages being beamed into your brain from the glowing idiot box showing Oprah. If Dr Phil is on, it’s an added bonus of artificial happiness and feelings of self-worth.
Do you have a citation for that? Where does that come from?
I don’t have time to watch TV very much.
Really? Not one inappropriate joke so far?
You know why women are more unhappy? Because the roomba and packaged TV dinners have taken the purpose out of their lives.
If they ever invent a shirt that irons itself, be prepared to see a spike in female suicide rates.
See? (voice rises hysterically) See?
Some quick Googling didn’t produce much in the way of historical viewership stats, but did turn up plenty of references to such things as the importance of the “18-to-49 female demographic”. Here’s one link:
The following is based in cliche, but cliches have an origin in either fact or misunderstood fact:
It is really easy. Men are simple creatures, much like dogs: If your supply their base requirements of food, booze, good TV (usually sports, but it can also include shoot-'em-ups–I’m in that camp), and some occasional nookie, you will find we are usually cool. And as simple creatures, we don’t understand why women are not satisfied by the same things but, being simple creatures, we also don’t give it much thought.
My real-life experience says that women seek the same things, except maybe the specifics in the TV category. OTOH, PBS, when it’s talking about space and not when it’s talking about cooking, has my wife’s attention.
But women are happier than men when they are young, but as people age men become more happy and women less happy.
So if this were the reason, I’m not sure why a 20 year old woman would be happier (on average) than a 20 year old man, but a 50 year old woman is less happy than a 50 year old man.
The article said women are happier than men when young, but they get less happy with age. Men do the opposite.
Well, there was a thread in Cafe Society about the Sex And The City ladies I found enlightening. The women, who are all in their late 40’s and early 50’s, and look pretty good considering, were getting ripped apart in that thread for looking ‘horrible’. One of the last posters said that older women were great, but they weren’t sex symbols dammit! See, men get ‘distinguished’ and richer. Women get traded in for younger models.
I think that’s why you find that women get unhappier as they get older. Older women are expected to crawl into a hole and hide once they get to a certain age, lest they offend others. Women who don’t do this are subject to some pretty nasty abuse. Considering that overwhelmingly, women are told that their worth lies in how they look and their ability to snag a man, I don’t think it’s a surprise at all that older women are unhappier.
Men are dreamers. We know the futility of life, so we live in dreams.
Women are more down to earth. They live in the world. When they are young and haven’t been exposed to the vast emptiness of life, that is fine. But as they get older, they don’t have a refuge to escape to.
I suspect this is the most likely reason. (Or at least a heavily contributing reason.)
Moreover, older women would have been brought up in a time when gender roles were more restrictive than they are now. Thus, not only do older women have “depreciated assets”, they are also of a generation where they were encouraged not to develop other assets that would appreciate in value.
Possibly also because we’re usually around at least one misogynist who thinks things like post #23 are “necessary”.
Perhaps men become happier as they age because they know that when they become deaf they won’t have to listen to the bag of bones in the other room nagging them?
I’d like to know, also, why men were so relatively UNhappy in the 70’s. It’s possible that that was a local maximum for women - the womens lib movement was in full swing, barriers for women were going down, there was a lot of optimism about. But it was undoubtedly stressful and threatening for a lot of men at the time. Now we’ve had 30+ years to get used to it and the sky hasn’t fallen in, perhaps both mens and womens happiness levels are just trending back to the norm.
Just because women in the 70’s were happier has nothing to say about whether they were in the 60’s 50’s or 40’s.
A female friend of mine once said, “Men think about things that make them happy. Women think about things that make them sad.”
If true, not sure why this would be the case.
A very politically-incorrect response.
I would say it has to do with bucking natural roles. At the risk of raising the ire of liberals, I believe men and women have built-in, biological, instinctive roles from an biological/anthropological point-of-view. Confusion, anger, and frustration will ensue if men or women attempt to overly distance themselves from their natural roles.
I remember there was a time in the 1970s/1980s when the sensitive/touchy-feely male was in vogue. I remember these guys, and trust me they were anything but happy. Thankfully they’re now extinct. Not so for the female persuasion. Over the last fourty years, females have been taught to suppress any natural, nurturing feelings associated with motherhood and wifehood, and that they are “incomplete” unless they adopt the aggressive and domineering traits of the male. In essence, many women have been taught that they are failures unless they feel and act like men. This leads to an internal struggle, and confusion and anger ensues.
No matter how hard you try, you can’t defeat nature.
As a male I have a traditional role that has been beat into me. I can meet that - I have a job and am the primary provider. I am also exceeding those expectations by taking on roles males did not have in my father’s generation - involved father, cooking dinner, etc. I’m a “success” and the social needs I have are met by work and family and what my wife arranges.
A female has a traditional role that has been beat into her and an expectation of meeting a new role of in the outside the home world more than before. Some may be unable to not stop themselves from judging themselves by “mother and homemaker” metrics (in which case they are doing less than their mothers did, even though they are usually still the ones who do the bulk of the work) and by working world metrics (in which case the breaks many take for children, and perhaps some systemic biases, have handicapped them, so they may feel less than completely successful there.) So many see themselves as failing to be as good of mothers as their mothers were and yet not feeling as successful as they should be at work. Add in a lack of the same social connectedness (women do care more about friends - deep close friends - than do men who are happy to more superficially socialize) and you have a recipe for us males to feel just fine thank you very much and women to feel that they have not met some imagined standard and feeling relatively isolated at the same time.
Of course my wife would say I’m just too dumb too understand all that I should be unhappy about!
Thanks. Being married to you is probably quite the treat too.
I can’t believe nobody has mentioned this. To me it seems like a solid and obvious truth in a sea of conjecture.
Poverty makes you stressed.
Stress makes you unhappy.
Women are the new face of poverty.
In 2008, 13.8% of women were in poverty, as opposed to 11% of men. Some of this is attributable to single-motherhood rates. A lot isn’t. Among the elderly, 13% of women over 75 are below the poverty line, as opposed to just 6% of men.
As long as women are shouldering the vast majority of the work of raising children, they are going to be less happy. As long as women work harder and end up with less, they are going to be unhappy.
Good point.
Except that they are not so new at it. I don’t know how to link to this pdf, but it is the first thing that comes up googling “1960 poverty rate women” …
It’s not a change so it does not explain much.