Monday, October 05, 2009

Dialed about a Hundred Numbers Baby    [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

There's been a spate of writing these last two weeks on the unhappiness of American women, including Maureen Dowd, Sharon Lerner at "Double X," and Marcus Buckingham in the Huffington Post. Everyone keeps weighing in on "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," that recent hefty study by Wharton economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers. It argues that during the past 35 years, “women’s happiness has fallen both absolutely and relative to men’s in a pervasive way among groups, such that women no longer report being happier than men and, in many instances, now report happiness that is below that of men.”
 
But why? In the new issue of First Things, Mary Eberstadt offers a different take in "What Does Woman Want? The War between the Sexless." Eberstadt moves on from the Wharton study to an overview of the angry new confessional women's writing (think Sandra Tsing Loh's "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" in The Atlantic this summer).
 
What women don't want, Eberstadt concludes, is the world we've now got — one "where men act like stereotypical women, and retreat from a real marriage into a fantasy life via pornography (rather than Harlequin novels), and where women conversely act like stereotypical men, taking the lead in leaving their marriages and firing angry charges on the way out of frustration and withheld sex."

Hot stuff. Read it here.

10/05 09:10 AMShare