Feminism versus Happiness

From The Other McCain. Conclusions in Search of Evidence: Sex and the Modern Female Journalist

Has Feminism made women happy? Fulfilled? Do a web-search (I don't use Google if I can avoid it) to find out what the general consensus is. That will feed into the following.

Here’s a question that Carter Sherman might want to consider: What’s so wrong about sex being “heterosexual, married, and . . . procreative”? Or what is so precious about other kinds of sex that the threatened “loss of freedoms” is a societal crisis? While we’re asking questions that feminists never bother to ask, was life really so awful for women in “the 1950s, before the Sexual Revolution and second-wave feminism of the 1960s and ’70s”? Are women happier now that many of them have no hope of achieving that kind of suburban life?

Actually most people I know, male or female, are not happier than people were in the 1970s. I'm sure my friends were not a cross section of America, but the crime of the '80s and '90s was just getting going. Kennedy's rising tide was making life better for a lot of people. 50 years on a lot has gone wrong.

One important difference between Peggy Orenstein and Carter Sherman is that Orenstein, born in 1961, at least has some direct knowledge of what life was like for her parents “before the Sexual Revolution and second-wave feminism,” whereas for Sherman, born in 1993, this is all ancient history. And, because she is a feminist, certainly Sherman believes that the 1950s were a Dark Night of Fascist Oppression — Leave It to Beaver was Nazi propaganda directed by Leni Riefenstahl, with Ward Cleaver as Hitler, and his wife June in the role of Eva Braun. Carter Sherman expects young women to share her existential fear — what a dreadful thing it would be to “turn back the clock” to those days!

Not that there is much fear of that happening.