Unhappiness and Women - Isn't It Subjective?

"No matter how objective you want, or try, to be, every issue you see will be subjective. You carry with you all that has made you the person you are, your gender included."

So said the professor in my journalism class back at university. In other words, what and who you are will influence how you view a situation. That definitely includes life experiences, good and bad.

So it is with happiness, a topic which is much in the news now. Last year, with his articles on women's diminishing happiness, Marcus Buckingham created quite a stir. The media commented extensively on what he had written in articles and spoken about on news shows. Happiness or the lack thereof was in the air.

And while I feel that any discussion about changing a person's life from negative to positive, (male or female), is conducive to attaining happiness, with all due to respect to Mr. Buckingham, I think he's coming at it strictly from a male's point of view. That point of view is slightly skewed to who and what they are and it isn't female. Ask any woman how she views life and how her male partner views it and you will come up with some very different ideas and attitudes about happiness. It has nothing to do with intelligence and being practical and everything to do with viewpoint.

I would never say that a Marcus Buckingham or a Dr. Phil don't give out excellent advice, they do. But, and there's a tremendous but here, no matter how hard they may try to feel what a woman is feeling and seeing, they can't, not completely. Their advice is male-oriented. Good, excellent, top of the line, but still coming from a man's perspective.

As a woman, my subjectively female theory is that women are no less happy now than past generations were. For my book, I interviewed over 100 women. They ranged in age from those in their 20s to those in their 60s, from all walks of life, from all strata of society. Not being happy had no age or social limit. The 14 stories in the book prove that unequivocally. The only differences between women of past generations and those of 2010 are advances in education and opportunities.

Still, maybe even with all our advances and advantages in life, we still haven't found the right mix of what will provide the right feeling for us that says we can allow ourselves to be happy.

And then too, what is happiness or unhappiness? Isn't it really simply that subjective personal perspective my professor talked about? Don't we carry the many parts that make us who we are, including our sex, all our lives and make determinations of what's what by those factors? My idea of happiness may not be another woman's, or man's, idea of it. Your idea of misery may be just a bad day for someone else. You see, subjective!

I'm sure that Marcus Buckingham has only the best interests of his clients at heart and truly believes he knows how to help them. But his perspective is still that of a male and, as much as I love the helpful, compassionate men in my life, they are seeing the world differently than I and the women in my life do.

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Comments

[ElsaNeal]

07:55 PM on 03/27/2010

I agree that our perspectives are subjective, on happiness/unhappiness in particular. I found an interesting discussion on whether a male to female transgender or transsexual person could be considered to have a female perspective, and the answer was "No"; that person still has the perspective of being treated as a boy/man up until a certain point and therefore a different perspective to women who have always been known as girls/women. Society treats men and women differently.

[Kristen Houghton]

08:10 AM on 03/28/2010

Elsa, this is an excellent comment. As advanced and sophisticated as we believe our society to be in 2010, it does still tend to treat men and women differently. And, again while we can learn from those with different experiences and ideas, we will see things tinged with our own experiences, gender included.

[Zoe Brain]

08:19 AM on 03/28/2010

But a French-Canadian girl from Montreal is treated very differently from a Cajun girl in Lousiana. And both are treated very differently from a girl in rural Bangladesh, or a slave girl in Mauretania.

When people say "socialised as women", they automatically assume "socialised as Middle Class American White Women".

The evidence is that trans women have feminised neurology: they've never seen the world through male eyes, or a boy's perspective. They think, feel, even smell and hear differently from boys, and the same as girls.

No, they're not socialised as women if their cohort - unless the transition very young. But they're not socialised as men either. And the social differences between men and women in US white middle class society pale into insignificance compared to the social differences between US WASP women and Somalian women.

[Kristen Houghton]

01:32 PM on 03/28/2010

Thank you for your comment Zoe. It is certainly food for thought on the topic of gender and societal perceptions.

[Jboz63]

11:07 PM on 03/26/2010

i think you raise an interesting question--but on the other hand, is it also too limiting? I mean, can you make the case that you can only be treated--or taught or advised or lead or goverened or understood--by someone who looks just like you in terms of gender, age social class, race, religion or lack thereof, sexual orientation, education, country of origin? Can you make the case that only someone who mirrors you is competent? Is that hypothetical person always the best on available? See what I mean? It is a tough thing to consider--it starts out seeming ok--bonding and solidarity and identity, but kind of leads to a yucky conclusion of boxing us in or reducing us all to our components--our gender, or our ethnicity or our social class. I think it is good you bring it up, because i think it is good for us all to think about this issue.

[Kristen Houghton]

10:45 AM on 03/27/2010

Many thanks for your insight Jboz63. While everything may be viewed subjectively that doesn't preclude the great knowledge about life from other sources that is offered to us. We can learn so much from others who do see life experiences differently than we do.

[Christine Maingard]

08:38 PM on 03/26/2010

Recently I overheard a dinner conversation where a young woman was asked what she wanted to do with her life. "Nothing special", she said, "I just want to be happy..." What followed was an almost uncomfortable silence around the table as if no one knew what to make of such an answer. It was as if 'wanting happiness' was neither the kind of reply people expected nor did they know how to respond. How is it then, I wondered, that we all seem to chase after attaining a state of happiness, but that at the same time another's aspiration for happiness and contentment makes us feel lost for words? The more we hear and read about this topic, the less we seem to know what true happiness really means.

I love Henry David Thoreau's words: "Happiness is like a butterfly: The more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder". So perhaps true happiness will come when we stop searching for it in all the wrong places, when we appreciate the small things in life, when we are authentic and when we feel compassionate towards others. Isn't true happiness about being in synergy with ourselves and the world around us and experiencing a quiet joy of simply BEING?

Dr Christine Maingard, Author of "Think Less, Be More" - http://www.thinklessbemore.com

[Kristen Houghton]

09:31 AM on 03/27/2010

Many thanks Dr. Christine!
When I graduated college, my aunt asked me what I truly wanted to be. After a lengthy discourse from me on what I wanted to do with the rest of my life my aunt smiled and said, "You didn't mention wanting to be happy. That in itself is a worthy goal and one only you can fulfill." She was so right!