Thanks to reader Catherine for waking me up with a reminder that, as we all suspected he would, Douche-hat is going to give into the urge to use his NY Times column to hump his favorite theme, which is that women are a sick, weird subspecies of human that, while looking human, are simply too disgusting with their girl bits and overwhelming desires to be treated like human beings. This one is a real howler, because he posits that he’s a New Man, and that his misogyny is a fancy new kind of sexism that even feminists should love. No, I’m not joking.
But a new-model stigma shouldn’t (and couldn’t) look like the old sexism.
Nice try, bubs, but we know that you are committed to an extremely old-fashioned sexism, one that goes back millenia and treats women who have any kind of sexuality at all like they’re grotesque.
Douche-bag’s excuse for pretending that he’s going to show the stupid feminists how it’s really done—-and god, some man has to, and it can’t be a man who agrees that women are human beings, because such man is a brainwashed pussy who probably fucks eager women without throwing up in disgust, amiritefellas?—-is this paper that’s behind a pay wall claiming that men’s happiness has gone up since the 70s while women’s has gone down. Since every other number I’ve ever seen shows that people are happier with relationships since feminism—-and since women have enjoyed declining rates of rape, domestic violence, and depression since then—-I’m skeptical and would like to see this study. But barring the quite likely possibility that Douthat is being dishonest about its contents, it seems that the major reason women are unhappy is that they have so many kids to take care of, and if you add that to a full-time job, then you’re just plain stressed out. Particularly so if you’re an American and you don’t get to do things like take vacation or refuse to work unpaid overtime.
What’s funny is that Douthat accepts and refuses to accept this verdict. No, I’m not joking. He actually claims that men and women do the same amount of housework, so it can’t be that.
Again, maybe the happiness numbers are being tipped downward by a mounting female workload — the famous “second shift,” in which women continue to do the lion’s share of household chores even as they’re handed more and more workplace responsibility. It’s certainly possible — but as Wolfers and Stevenson point out, recent surveys actually show similar workload patterns for men and women over all.
Well, someone’s full of shit. That, or jacking the stats to say what they want it to say. Then again, if a woman works 40 hours a week on housework because she doesn’t have a paid job, but her husband works 40 hours a week at a job he loves where he gets paid, that could go a long way to explaining why they have different satisfaction levels. But I’m dying from laughter that Douthat is actually trying to sell this notion that American men largely come home from work and join their wives in cleaning and cooking and chasing children around at exactly the same levels. Not by any statistic I’ve ever seen.
If you believe that men and women log in the same number of work hours, and there’s a growing gap between them of happiness, then there’s only one explanation, I’m guessing: women are simps. I’m not even remotely surprised that Douthat thinks that your average housewife enjoyed a life of utter leisure, where the most she worked was by occasionally running a towel over something or straightening a pillow, and that the only price she paid for this life of leisure was subservience, which she enjoys, since women are actually members of the species Canis familaris. He says as much in his column.