I had a conversation this week with someone who was insisting that feminism had made women much happier than in the 1950s and 1960s. So, I thought it might be a good idea to go digging around for some data, and then blog about it so I could find it again. Well, I found some nice survey data from the 2022 American Family Survey. That’s not too long ago! Let’s see what it says.

This is from the New York Post.

First, just some interesting points about how feminism was sold to women:

In February, we will mark the 60th anniversary of Betty Friedan’s “Feminine Mystique.” But given the state of modern feminism, it’s hard to imagine there will be much celebration.

Friedan’s work, which revealed women’s lack of fulfillment as homemakers, laid out the goals of second-wave feminism. Now that women had achieved the right to vote, own property and get an education (the first wave), Friedan and her cohorts argued that women should pursue higher education and careers as a way of achieving personal satisfaction. Others, like Germaine Greer, wrote that the sexual repression of women prevented them from becoming personally fulfilled. But thanks to the pill and changing mores about sex outside of marriage, women could finally achieve the freedom and happiness that had been available to men for millennia.

So, I see a few problems that feminism is supposed to solve. 1) being a stay at home wife and mom isn’t as fulfilling as having a job and putting your kids in daycare and public schools. 2) it’s not fulfilling to have sex with one man who commits to you for life – that’s boring. You need to have sex with a lot of different men, just like the tall, hot, bad boys are doing.

So that’s the offer that most women accepted, and that’s the view of the most powerful people in our society. We have massive government spending on social programs like daycare and public schools in order to make this plan “work out” to make women happier.

Now let’s see the survey data:

The American Family Survey recently asked: “All things considered, has feminism benefited American families?”

Only a little more than half (58.6%) of respondents said yes. What’s interesting, though, is the people who said yes also tend to be among the least happy and fulfilled. In survey after survey, it turns out that people who espouse a secular worldview, people who identify as liberals, and people who never attend religious services report the lowest levels of personal satisfaction, but they also report the highest levels of support for feminist ideals. Indeed, as feminism’s influence has grown over the past half century, women have become less happy.

How did we get to this point where men are expected to do more housework and child care, and women exchange being wives and mothers for working outside the home, and giving their kids to strangers to raise?

[M]any feminists would have been happy to dispense with traditional marriage altogether. If that happened, and women still did want to bear children (something many feminists did not encourage), well, someone was still going to have to support them. And so feminist leaders also demanded more government support for women.

When I was in grad school, and had a pet parrot at home, I could barely stand to leave the house. I would call home during breaks, or from the lab after classes. It’s not natural for people to leave their kids alone with strangers. I didn’t even like leaving my parrot with my older brother to go to class. Didn’t trust anyone to look after him. So, I can’t imagine how fathers and mothers can be happy about leaving young children with “child care workers” or “public school teachers”. They can’t be trusted, and they don’t reflect my values. So I can’t imagine how women could be happy to be separated from their young children.

And here’s another problem – promiscuity stinks:

In 1963, Betty Friedan was writing about “the problem that had no name.” But women’s problems in the 21st century can absolutely be named. More often, they are trying to raise children on their own, which can be exhausting even with financial resources. They are sexually liberated, but that often means they are going from one relationship to another without any sense of financial security or emotional stability.

One of the reasons why I sailed through high school and college with my chastity intact was because I knew that I wouldn’t like going all the way with a girl, and then she would just leave and I would never see her again. So I have no idea women think this is wonderful. I know that they only have eyes for tall, hot bad boys, but I don’t think those men should be emulated. If it doesn’t work for women, then they shouldn’t do it.

Men and women aren’t as different than people think. Nobody likes leaving their young children with strangers. Nobody likes being intimate with a person, and then not being able to even talk to them again when you want to. No wonder women are miserable. And as I blogged about before, it’s the progressive women who have the highest rates of mental illness and use of medication. The ones who took feminism seriously are the ones who are least happy.

I like to collect studies on my blog so that I can always find them when I get into a debate. One of the things I like to argue against is recreational premarital sex. It’s pretty hard to argue this with non-Christians if all you are going to do is quote the Bible. But you can make a pretty good case that will win you the argument from studies, and so I keep a nice collection of studies to use.

Here’s the report from The Federalist:

Oral contraceptives raise the risk of depression, according to a new international study that surveyed more than 264,000 women. Teenagers were at the highest risk, with a 130 percent higher risk of depression in women who started using birth control as adolescents, compared to a 92 percent higher risk among those who started as adults.

The study provides conclusive results to a growing body of research linking oral birth control with the use of anti-depressants, depression diagnoses, and depressive symptoms.

While adult users saw a decrease to more normal risk after using “the pill” for more than two years or getting off the pill, teenage users were still at increased risk even after stopping usage.

Very interesting. I clicked on the link to the study and made sure it was peer-reviewed. It was. So what do we learn from this?

Well, this is not the first time I am hearing about the emotional and mental problems with birth control pills. So, I think the lesson here is to definitely do your research first, so that you don’t get involved with things that will cause you problems later. The woman who told me about had tried to go on them, but she immediately noticed how much it changed her moods, and she went off them. I think it caused her some problems in her life, because she ended up taking 5 years to complete her degree, instead of the normal for. So, using these things could really cost you.

Now you might be wondering about other birth control methods, and the team that did this study has a plan for future work:

This study only examined combination birth control pills, but researchers plan to study other contraceptive options.

“In a future study, we plan to examine different formulations and methods of administration. Our ambition in comparing different contraceptive methods is to give women even more information to help them [m]ake well-informed decisions about their contraceptive options,” Johansson said.

The article also notes (with links, which I removed):

In other studies, birth control methods have also been linked to increased risk of heart attack and stroke, blood clots, breast cancer, and cervical cancer.

Despite significant evidence of risk, researchers still insist that birth control is safe to use…

Normally, I am pretty hard on women on this blog. I feel like they make way too many decisions by following the crowd, instead of thinking about what they want in the long-term, and then making decisions that are likely to get those results – whatever anyone else thinks. I think that women need to be smarter than that, and instead of forming their views by peer pressure, they need to form their views based on truth. And truth is not on the bottom shelf.

I see women getting taught all about sexual topics by public school teachers, entertainers, athletes, celebrities, etc. It makes no sense to me. These people are insulated from real life, for one reason or another. And then I see Planned Parenthood going into the schools and teaching children about birth control and sex. They make money by getting these kids to become sexual active and then pay them to get abortions. Young women cannot trust women their own age to know about studies. They can’t trust teachers with degrees in English. They can’t trust celebrities, entertainers and athletes – they probably cannot even read, much less read studies. Women have to do their own research and make their own plans that work for them.

Today women are being taught from preschool to college and beyond, that they need to use their “young years” to seek happiness by playing the field with tall, hot men who give them tingles. They are told to delay marriage (boring) and children (demanding) for as long as possible, in order to have no-commitment sex with the hottest men they can get. Somehow, having sex with a lot of hot men is thought to raise the value of the woman. It builds her self-esteem, or something. This is objectively stupid behavior. But this is why they jump all over birth control, because it helps them to do stupid things that they’ve been told to do. They don’t even know the long-term effects of the behavior they’re doing. It’s monkey-see, monkey-do. The blind leading the blind.

So, I think it’s good for us as grown-ups to point them towards the data that they should know about. They can certainly ignore it, and go with their feelings. But some of them will prefer to get the real truth about how the world works, and those are the ones we need to reach. They should at least have a choice to make.

By the way, I’m not saying that it’s a bad idea to give someone a Bible. I got one when I was young, and that worked for me. But for people who ask questions, you need to have the studies ready. Always be ready for anyone who asks you questions about why you believe what you believe.

There is so much that I would like to say about the video below. For me, it really captures what feminism has taught women about men and relationships. Traditional male roles are: protect, provide, lead on moral issues, lead on spiritual issues. Well, young college-educated single women are certainly interested in protection and provision, but they have zero interest in male leadership.

First, here is the video:

So, this is a young, college-educated, progressive woman. She looks to be about 29 years old. She’s probably been having a lot of fun in bars and night clubs, hooking up with hot guys and running up student loans for worthless non-STEM degrees. But 29 is the age when many young feminist women start to notice that their friends are getting married, and so they feel that it’s time for them to “keep up” with their friends by also getting married.

The woman in the video doesn’t want a man in order to help him with any of his problems. She doesn’t want a man because she likes the way he leads her or makes decisions. She wants to get married because she wants to help herself to what a husband offers. Specifically, she wants to help herself to money, ability to repair a car, ability to renovate a house, vacations, travel, social respectability, social status, etc. That’s what she wants. She doesn’t want obligations to a man or obligations to children. She wants what a man and children to benefit her.

So, what this woman in the video is really asking for is two of the four traditional male roles. She wants a man to do protecting and providing. But she has no interest in a man who has firm views on morality or religion. She wants a sperm-donor, an ATM, and a handyman. But she doesn’t want a man who is going to tell her to do anything for God, or for him, or for the kids. No interest at all in a man who will want to lead the family in a Bible study, or protest sex-selection abortions.  Religion and morality are disgusting to her – they’re brakes on her selfish pursuit of happiness. She likes men who let her make decisions, and who blame others when she is at fault. If babies get in the way of her career, he should approve of her killing them. If two men want to raise a motherless child bought from a surrogate, he should approve of that, too. She wants a man who will put his own kids in daycare and public schools so she can buy a Coach handbag and go on vacation in Barbados. Too bad for the kids. That’s what she wants in a man – “don’t judge”.

But the real key point in this story for me is how this woman expects a secular left man to respect moral obligations. A secular left man thinks that the universe is an accident, that human beings evolved from slime, and that humans have no free will.  Atheists don’t believe that God holds people accountable for their moral decisions. They think that morality is just a set of conventions that vary by time and place. On atheism, there are no moral absolutes, just conventions that vary by time and place. And atheists only follow those conventions if following them makes them feel good or look good to others during their lifetimes. They support transing kids because they want their college professor or their boss to like them. Who cares about what happens to those kids?

On atheism, morality is just agreeing with the people you want to like you. It’s not about taking self-sacrificial stands to protect the weak. Survival of the fittest. That’s what atheists believe in. And this woman thinks that she is going to find a man who will have moral obligations towards her when those obligations go against his self-interest. She doesn’t want any obligations to him, but she wants him to have lots of moral obligations to her. Absolutely insane.

She also thinks that a man who agrees with her on adult-first, kids-last policies is going to sign up for a lifelong, faithful, marriage commitment. These days, it’s hard to get even a good man to agree to take risks with feminist false accusations on college campuses, feminist divorce courts and feminist “me too” workplaces. But why would a man who has a secular leftist worldview want to sacrifice his own interests for such a risky enterprise? Today, only men have obligations. Women are always the victims of someone else. In any disagreement between a man and a woman, the man is always guilty, and the woman is always the victim. The whole society is set up to relieve her of any accountability for her actions. All the costs must be paid by men. Why would a secular leftist man – who has ZERO rational foundation for morality – get legally obligated to a woman who holds that much power over him?

The woman in the video probably thinks that when it comes to marriage, men will just marry when they are impressed with a woman’s appearance, and go crazy from being “in love”. That’s why secular left women spend so much money on their appearance – not just for make-up or clothes, but on manicures, pedicures, and cosmetic surgery, too. Only stupid men marry secular left women because they are “in love” with her fake appearance.

If the woman in the video is expecting a man to commit to her for life, and be faithful, and be a good father, then she’s going to have to 1) resign herself to male leadership – because that’s what good men want, and 2) upgrade her religious and moral views to match those of a good man. Otherwise, her situation is hopeless. Good men don’t get married to secular left feminists. As more young women adopt feminism, you can expect to see the marriage rate decline.