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Nov. 29, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
21:22
925 Why are women so unhappy? A modest theory...

A theory explaining the new statistics evidence of female unhappiness

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Hi there, it's the Libertarian Love Doctor.
Time to talk about the Ladies, it's Steph from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well. Why are men getting happier and women more miserable?
A very, very sad state of affairs, and because women are perhaps the most delicate and beautiful creatures in the known universe, I think it is incumbent upon all thinking and caring men To try and help women to become as happy as possible, because Lord knows, you can't be happier than your partner.
So, I wanted to talk for a few minutes, okay, maybe more than a few, about feminism, its after-facts, and some ways in which we could perhaps help the fairer sex get a fairer deal than they've been given so far, or that they've taken so far.
So... Let's start with the facts, shockingly enough, and then we will look at some interpretations, and hopefully we'll make some sense out of it.
So here's an anecdotal story, and we'll follow with some statistics.
It's not like Paul is a total write-off.
This is from Maclean's magazine, November 5, 2007.
It's like the Canadian version of Time.
Frozen. It's not like Paul is a total write-off.
He cleans up the yard, makes sure the bills get paid, does far more than his fair share of the laundry.
But when his common-law wife, Catriona, reflects on their relationship, how casually her 32-year-old spouse has thrown off the cares of the workaday world, a note of resentment creeps into her voice.
Sometimes I get jealous of his freedom.
Admits the 25-year-old public relations coordinator from Vancouver, he just doesn't get stressed ever, really.
I'm more uptight.
I worry about a lot of things.
Seven years ago, Paul quit a potentially lucrative job as a business consultant to try his hand at writing fiction, having decided there was more to life than climbing the corporate ladder.
Names of the couples in this story have been changed.
The dynamic of their relationship shifted accordingly.
Catriona is now the household breadwinner.
Paul is living an urban male's dream.
I've heard of that. When he isn't working on his novel, he spends his days listening to music, riding his mountain bike, or indulging in his growing interest in urban development.
Catriona, meanwhile, scarcely has time for the household chores or to attend the meetings of the charitable foundations she joined a few months back.
With a high-tempo career and commitments to do volunteer work two or three times a week, She certainly can't while away a night at the bar watching Vancouver Canucks games, as Paul has been doing with increasing frequency.
And while she doesn't consider herself miserable, Paul supports me a lot in my work, she says.
His general nonchalance clearly contributes to her anxiety.
While when he recently blew off an important appointment after a night of drinking with his brother, she fell into a black mood for days.
I'm not usually snarky, she says ruefully.
I realized later I was jealous or hostile or bitter that he didn't have to work and I did.
Adult females actually report lower levels of happiness now than before they streamed into the workplace in the 1970s.
And 80s, according to a study by two economists at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, which has been making waves in academia since it was published in September, Previous studies of rising stress among females tended to focus on the simple burden of time allocation, instead of choosing one or the other fully 73%.
73% of Canadian women raise children and go to work.
And numerous studies suggest women still bear the brunt of child-rearing and household duties even if they work.
Hence all the anxiety.
According to a TD Economist report released last September, as a wife's annual income rises to $100,000, her husband is more likely to share domestic chores or stay home altogether.
So, we'll just throw a few more facts out here.
TD Economics said that participation in the workforce of Canadian women aged 25 to 44 jumped from 50% 30 years ago, which would be 1977, 50% to nearly 82% in 2005.
In fully 28% of some 4.6 million couples surveyed, women had higher salaries than their husbands compared to 11% in the late 1960s.
A figure broadly reflected of similar trends across the Western world.
Education saw even more sweeping changes.
In 2004, 62% of all BAs in Canada were granted to women.
Even more impressive is the revolution at medical school.
The majority of students at 13 of Canada's 17 med students are women.
Female enrollment at the Université Laval Faculty of Medicine in Quebec City, female enrollment has hit 70% for the past two years after peaking at a record 80% in 2005.
Five other campuses last year, more than 60% of first-year medical students were women.
We found that, sorry, in this Wharton study, The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness, we found that in the 35 years in which women made the greatest progress, they got less happy.
Wilfrid said in an interview from Philadelphia, the big question is why?
And you have to work really hard to not see the answer to this.
You have to be a well-trained, a well-trained puppet of the state intellectual to not see the very simple reason for increased unhappiness.
Nearly twice as many women as men will develop depression-related disorders at some point in their lives than the numbers are growing, and so on and so on.
I think that's really all we need.
Oh no, one more thing I wanted to talk about.
Fully 55% of the doctors and dentists in Canada are now women, up from 43% in 1987.
Women make up more than half the business and financial professionals in this country, and there was something else around 30% of managers are women, and so on.
Anyway, so I think that we can get that as women have become more successful in the workforce, have participated more in the workforce, they have become paradoxically less happy, as it would seem.
They're less happy now than they were in the 1970s, and not by a small margin of error, but by a significant degree.
Now, is this because women are perverse, and you give them exactly what they want, and then they become unhappy, and so on?
I mean, you could come up with all the misogynistic nonsense in the world.
About why women have become less happy over the last 30 or 40 years, but to me, the answer is relatively simple, and it could be because I am in fact relatively simple, or it could be because it's right.
We shall see as we plough on.
If you've ever read, and I would strongly suggest that you do, it's a very interesting book, although the man himself was quite mad, if you've ever read George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, He has a section in it where he talks about how all the sociologists and theoreticians in the world have this theory about why the tramps move from city to city, because this is the story of him joining a tramp's life for, I think, about two years in Paris and London, becoming a plonger in Paris.
And he says there are all these theories about why the tramps move from place to place.
Maybe they're nomadic, maybe they're gypsy-like, maybe they have a restlessness, maybe they have a desire for new stimuli, this, this, this and this.
All these amazingly complex theories are put forward as to why the tramps move from city to city.
And he said, well, this is all quite retarded, fundamentally.
The reason that tramps move from city to city is that they're forced to, because if you stay for more than one or two days in the same shelter in the same city, you get thrown in jail as a vagrant.
So, the reason that people do what they do is because they're forced to do what they do, and it takes an enormously overdeveloped brain to miss the simple and obvious fact that most people do what they do because they are, in fact, compelled to do it.
But, of course, nobody likes to talk about the compulsion that is inherent in the modern state of society, and in all state of societies throughout history, because when you see the gun in the room, You actually have to do something about the gun in the room, and people would rather get paid to pretend there's no gun in the room and talk about murky,
weird, strange... I mean, even this article has, like, well, you know, maybe women have irrational expectations, and they have this irrational exuberance, and whereas they wouldn't get into meetings before, now they're in meetings, but they're ignored a little bit, which makes them more angry, and it's just like, you people, you people... If I were prone to migraines, I would have 12.
I mean, you have to just work very hard to avoid the fact that women are forced into the workforce.
So let's go over a brief history of 20th century feminism so that you can understand at least where I'm coming from and let me know if you agree or not.
So... Clearly, women wanted equal political power to men, and they were granted this starting from the late 19th century through to, I guess, the 70s or so in some of the Mediterranean countries.
It was 1920, I think, in America that women, except Native Americans, got the right to vote, and so on.
So women saw the political power that men had.
And wanted that very same political power.
And then when they got that very same political power, you saw very quickly a rise or an expansion in the welfare state.
Because when you look at the concerns that women had or have even now to a large degree, it has a lot to do with fears of illness, robbing the husband of the family income, fears of unemployment, robbing the family income, concern for elderly parents and their health care and so on.
And so, of course, after women get the vote, in many countries what you see is an expansion of the welfare state, or in some cases the creation of a welfare state, to deal with these particular concerns.
So, you see that old age pensions come into play, you see that unemployment insurance comes into play.
Of course, state education has been around forever, which is also convenient for women because it gives a place for them to send their kids during the day.
You see old age pensions because, of course, women having to care for the elderly is a significant thing.
You see the rise of socialized medicine for those who are particularly vulnerable.
And so you get the women's concerns.
They're not about free trade, you know, frankly.
I mean, they weren't exactly educated in economics in 1920 or 1930.
The women's concerns are around immediate amelioration of immediate economic risks and so on.
And so this is what the government provides.
And then, of course, the feminists who are mostly socialists, right?
As I wrote in a book once, feminism is just socialism with tits for the most part.
But the feminists who are socialists don't talk about reducing government power, the government power that Keeps women out of the workforce.
What they talk about is, you know, the ERA and proactive quota-based systems for getting women into the workforce and so on.
So they use the power of the state, they use the power of the gun to deal with their immediate economic concerns and also to deal with The question of how to get into the workforce.
Now, for the first generation or two of women, this is fantastic.
I mean, the state is basically a mechanism where you get to drink like a fish and your children get the hangover, right?
So it really delays the biofeedback of the corruption and violence that is being created in the core of the social network.
So what happens is, of course, women get all of this, quote, free money, right, in terms of unemployment insurance and welfare and old age pensions and socialized medicine for various groups.
and then they get into particularly more lucrative jobs than they may have otherwise, as they sort of rising tide would go more naturally.
They get all of these great goodies.
They get massive amounts of subsidies.
I mean, basically, the government pays lobby groups to increase government spending.
I mean, it's like a cancer investing in itself with a tumor.
And so what happens is, I mean, these women's groups come out of the socialist tradition that was imported as a significant infection in America from the Second World War in the post-war period.
Of course, you get an enormous number of people going through this education as a result of the GI Bill after the Second World War.
After going to fight socialism in Germany and, I guess, fascism in Italy and Japan, the infection of socialist ideology is brought back into the United States, into the universities, because of all of the intellectuals who fled the results, as I've mentioned before, who fled the results.
Of their socialist theories in Europe.
And so you get a huge amount of people getting exposed to this kind of socialism after the Second World War, and then you can see sort of half a generation later, a generation later in the 60s, this all boils up as a rebellion against the existing order in a purely socialist manner.
I mean, there was no, at least not that I've ever seen, other than a few crazy commune hippie-type anarchists, like communitarians and so on, collective anarcho-syndicalists and so on.
You get a huge boiling up of socialist mania, of using the state to solve all problems, of a derision for the state in terms of its capacity to wage war on others, and a massive support for the capacity of the state to wage war on domestic citizens for the sake of good public programs and virtue, and you get the great society under LBJ and so on.
And so what happens is, women's groups get a huge amount of money, they publish an enormous amount of money, their education was subsidized, and now gets funding, and all these organizations get a massive amount of state funding, and of course what they do, since they're getting money from the state, is naturally they advocate for an increase and an expansion in state programs.
That's what... The farmers' lobby does not lobby for a reduction in agricultural subsidies, right?
And so the feminist groups that were funded by the government, which is most of them, were advocated a massive increase in spending and social programs on women's issues, right?
So what happened? Well, they get a huge amount of money, and this is all paid for initially through public debt, right?
I mean, no politician raises taxes immediately to pay for the programs that he's offering.
I mean, that would be inconceivable, because then you can't bribe people.
I mean, if I say, well, I'm going to give you $100 and I need to take $150 from you to do so, it doesn't seem so good, right?
But basically, if I say, well, I'm going to give you $100 and then your children will have to pay $150 or $300 or your children's children in some abstract way that I never talk about, it seems like free money, right?
So, of course, everybody stampedes into these government programs because it's just free money, it's goodies, women are getting all of this free stuff.
And then what happens? Well, I mean, sorry, my nose is a little itchy.
Consider this, right? Consider that you are a chicken.
You're a chicken and you're very into laying your eggs.
And the farmer takes from your chicken clutch a thousand eggs a week.
And you say, you know, man, cranking out these eggs is really exhausting.
What we need to do is double our egg production.
Because once we double our egg production, We will then only have to work half as hard, right?
So if we can get these chickens to lay two eggs instead of one, then the farmer will get his thousand eggs a week, and then he'll let us not have to worry about laying eggs for the other three and a half days.
Well, of course, this would be a completely mad scheme.
scheme.
We can all predict exactly what would happen with the chicken coop, which is that as soon as you double the egg production, the farmer is now overjoyed to have 2,000 eggs a week, and he's not going to let you rest at all.
He's not going to say, oh, well, I've achieved my 1,000 eggs by middle of Wednesday, so take the rest of the week off.
He's going to say, this is fantastic.
I now have twice the eggs, so I'm going to, you know, this is I'm going to expand, and I'm going to grow, and so on, right?
And this, of course, is what happened with the entry of women into the workforce.
When women were home, government power and government growth was limited by the tax base of working men.
But when women went into the workforce, government growth was no longer limited by having half the population not working, to put it in general terms.
So as soon as you get twice the livestock, you get twice the milk, you get twice the eggs.
And of course, basically the metaphor is if the farmer uses eggs as collateral to take out massive loans, you can see that basically doubling production is going to enslave the chickens even more.
And the same thing, of course, has happened to women.
Women have gone flooding into the workforce.
Fantastic! I mean, who would ever want to take anything away from women?
They're wonderful, they're equals, they're magnificent.
They're superior to men in many ways, just as men are superior to women in other ways.
We are a yin and a yang.
We fit together in more than the physical way, in a wonderful way.
But women go stampeding into the workforce, which is wonderful, and all that happens is tax revenues basically double.
And what happens when tax revenue basically doubles is that the government grows enormously.
And then what happens is the women who formerly had a choice to go into the workforce or not now do not have a choice about whether to go into the workforce or not.
And we wonder why they're unhappy.
It's because they're all forced into the workforce.
Whether they want to be there or not, basically, if you want to have any kind of reasonable lifestyle, you have to have two people working these days.
Taxes are so enormously high.
And it's not just like income tax.
It's every form of tax. Everything you touch is massively taxed.
So whereas in the 1950s, you could support a sort of three-bedroom house We're in a comfortable suburban neighborhood on one middle-class income salary.
Now, you simply can't afford that at all.
You'd be lucky to get a rental apartment on one middle-income salary after taxes and be able to survive with two kids.
I mean, it's all impossible.
So, what's happened is that the women who had the choice at one point to stay home, which a lot of women want to do and want to love their kids and raise their kids and at least have that choice, right?
At least for the first five to seven years before the kids go off to school...
Well, now those women are forced herded into the workforce, and they are given maternity leave, at least here in Canada, of up to a year, but it's a pretty pitiful amount of money, right?
So you never get back what you pay in taxes.
I mean, there would be no profit for the government if you did that.
So, I mean, to me, it's not that complicated.
Again, I may be missing something important, lacking anything other than the most minuscule man boobs.
But it seems to me that if you force people into the workforce and you basically reduce their life to a massive series of stressors in terms of rushing to get somewhere on time, rushing to get home, rushing to get your children here, the soccer mom phenomenon, women don't enjoy that.
I mean, who would? Who would?
If you want to have children, you don't want to sit there and leave them at 7.30 in the morning at a nanny or in daycare, go to work, get home at 6, 6.30 at night, spend time with them doing homework, eating dinner, and then put them to bed.
That is an exhausting and miserable lifestyle, and nobody's going to enjoy that.
Nobody's going to have any particular kind of fun with that, and you've got to go back to work.
And it's not because you want to.
If women won the lottery, which is what would happen in a free society, most of them would choose to stay home with their children, at least while their children are young.
That's kind of why you have children, right?
Nobody buys a pet and then says, well, I'm going to store it at a neighbor's place and all I'm going to do is take it for a walk and clean up after it when it craps on the sidewalk, right?
That's not why people get pets and that's not why people have children, to spend an hour or an hour and a half with them a day and a stressed out time with them on weekends.
But this is what people have been forced into, particularly women have been forced into.
Their parents, their mothers, so to speak, charged after the state and accepted the fruits of violence, and now the price is being paid by their daughters, who have fewer possibilities than their mothers ever did, and worse lives than their mothers ever did.
This is why I say when you pursue solutions based on violence, the result is always disastrous.
And, of course, this is something that is going to cause enormous repercussions in the future because the instability of the parenting that is being inflicted on the children, because the women are so stressed and busy, is going to have enormous problems down the road as these children go up and get into relationships of their own.
As I say over and over again, you can take it from any angle you want.
You can take it from any direction you want.
Whenever you use a gun to get what you want, the result is always a multi-generational disaster.
Thank you so much for watching.
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