Prosperity gives people better choices. It cannot give them happiness. That depends on the people themselves.

From Feminism Is In Trouble by Naomi Schaefer Riley. Riley is a good writer and I am usually pretty comfortable with most her arguments. In this instance she is reading a mountain of materials which I would never touch. I am grateful to her for foraging amongst the dross to find some insights.

So feminism’s fourth wave now comes at a time when the two centuries of effort to ensure equal treatment under the law and equal rights under the law for women have been fulfilled. Women in America in 2019 have the right to vote, own property, get an equal education (with equal access to sports teams), the same jobs as men, and at the same rate of pay (when controlling for time on the job). Male violence against women is no longer tolerated, whether by strangers, boyfriends, husbands, or fathers. Men have undergone profound psychic changes to help reorganize society to accommodate the needs of women.

[snip]

Though the chatter of radical feminists seems to be growing—because the Internet makes all things radical seem larger than they are—this wave does not seem to have the same hold on the imaginations of ordinary women that previous waves did. The day-to-day lives of women and men do seem more equal than ever. Get married, stay single, live with a partner or partners. Have kids young or wait till you’re 45 or don’t have them at all. Work longer hours or stay home. Go back to school. Take time off. Travel the world. Whatever.

[snip]

Feminists today lament all the “hidden” work that women have to do to make a family run. Even if they have full-time jobs, American wives are still more likely to be the ones responsible for making dentist appointments and getting end-of-year gifts for teachers and making playdates and finding the right schools and making friends with the mommies. (Unmentioned, of course, is that men tend to have their own hidden responsibilities related to other kinds of household management.)

[snip]

The oppressive “hidden work” narrative is everywhere. It starts even before the kids are born, as demonstrated in a recent article in Fast Company titled “I thought we had an equal partnership—until I planned our wedding.”

“For many brides, the wedding process feels like yet another way women are saddled with the lion’s share of unpaid labor,” the article explains. As one woman tells the reporter: Her husband does laundry and chores around the house, but when it comes to taking calls from wedding vendors at the office, well, he is falling down on the job. Another complains, “There were so many decisions to be made. Just help me make some of them—care a little about the flowers!”

If “care a little about the flowers” is the rallying cry of fourth-wave feminism, the movement is in more trouble than Fleishman. The idea that men don’t have to think about the things women think about—but should!—is at the heart of feminism’s complaints today. It is at once a silly and impossible demand. It requires that we not only reorient society to accommodate all of women’s desires but that we rewire men’s brains to share all of women’s concerns.

[snip]

The accusations by women against the other half of the population simply broaden and become harder to quantify. Women have to do more “emotional labor” than men, these advocates complain. Articles like “Why Women Are Still Doing More Emotional Labor in Relationships Than Men” and “Why Women Are Tired: The Price of Unpaid Emotional Labor” abound. But how are we to measure emotional labor? Would everything fall apart if women didn’t do it? And how are we sure men aren’t doing it?

Today’s feminists are also professional mind-readers, to judge by their recent pronouncements. Men, Tamblyn writes, “don’t think about the ramifications of things they have said or done because they’ve never had to.” Women, by contrast, “are raised to doubt first and decide last.” How Tamblyn knows what goes on in the minds of most women or most men, she doesn’t say.

[snip]

Fourth-wave feminists are living through a period in which feminist dreams have become reality. And they are finding that reality unpleasant. They were sold a false bill of goods. It was a fantasy that if they did what they were supposed to do—get good grades, become successful in journalism or business, like Libby and Rachel—everything else would fall into place. But real life doesn’t work that way for anybody. You have an important powerful job that pays a lot of money? You’re not going to be able to spend a lot of time with your kids. You have crazy ambition? You’re going to feel like an impostor and be filled with anxiety about performance. And, evidently, if you’re a woman, you’re going to fantasize that men don’t have exactly these same problems, even when they do.

As Fleishman Is in Trouble reveals, both honestly and inadvertently, elite women in 2019 exhibit a kind of paranoia—they are convinced that even when women seem to have gotten exactly what they want, men still have it better.

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. Feminism may have delivered greater freedom for women, but it has never delivered greater happiness. In fact, longitudinal surveys suggest that women are less satisfied with their lives today than they were a few decades ago.

I would far rather spend ten minutes reading Riley than the hours it would take to read all those books so bloated with a miasma of misery.