@thelaplayboy @GoldmundUnleash why are women predisposed to be unhappy and tends to be their default go-to state? – How you deal with that
— JamesDelaney (@GorillaBourne) November 14, 2016
Do women seem more or less happy to you? It’s kind of hard to quantify/qualify what happiness means to men, but when it comes to women’s state of happiness or contentment I think most guys have a tendency to expect women’s experience of happiness to be measured on a similar scale to their own. From a strictly evo-psych / evo-bio perspective it’s important that any metric of happiness between the sexes be measured by first considering each’s innate psychological firmware and what contributes to men and women feeling a degree of happiness.
Because men and women rate their experiences differently per their own interpretations of what contribute to it happiness becomes a really subjective evaluation. As you might guess, what makes for a happy woman is not always what makes for a happy man. It’s a similar contrast to men and women’s differing concepts of love. Men tend to approach love from an idealistic perspective, and women base their emotional investments on opportunistic contexts. We’re conditioned from an early age to believe men and women share a mutual concept of love thanks to an ever-present presumption of egalitarian equalism between males and females, and this is where a lot of intersexual problems find their root.
Likewise, our egalitarian presumptions also condition men and women to believe that we share mutual concepts of what should and shouldn’t make either sex happy in a long term sense. In this case it is women who are largely misled by the equalist narrative. For more than sixty years women have been conditioned to believe they can meet their own idealistic goal of ‘having it all’ if they can only “empower” themselves into being Strong Independent Women®. Increasingly women are coming to the conclusion that this pro-woman life plan has been nothing but feel-good advertising, and now, after having invested their most productive years in this narrative they find that they are largely unhappy with the results its brought into their lives.
You see, equalism (the religion of feminism) would have women believe that what makes men happy must necessarily be what makes women happy – or would make them happy in the long term if only the “patriarchy” would allow women the same opportunities to experience it. If we are all blank-slate equals, what makes women and men happy must be mutually shared, thus men are encouraged to be women and craft their identities around feminine-primacy, but also, women must become men and craft their personas around the masculine ideals that bring men so much power, and by way of it happiness.
Yet in our modern western(izing) world we find that the equalist effort to socially engineer androgyny into society has had the opposite effect in engendering happiness in women. Article after article and study after study show that women’s perceived happiness is at an all-time low since researchers have been collecting data on it. Women are living longer lives and at no point in history have they enjoyed more access to the means of more success than in the now. Mainstream feminine-primacy sees that more women are college educated than men, while men fill our prisons at 12 times the rate of women, yet for all of this women express feeling less satisfied with the quality of, and happiness in, their lives.
American women are wealthier, healthier and better educated than they were 30 years ago. They’re more likely to work outside the home, and more likely to earn salaries comparable to men’s when they do. They can leave abusive marriages and sue sexist employers. They enjoy unprecedented control over their own fertility. On some fronts — graduation rates, life expectancy and even job security — men look increasingly like the second sex.
But all the achievements of the feminist era may have delivered women to greater unhappiness. In the 1960s, when Betty Friedan diagnosed her fellow wives and daughters as the victims of “the problem with no name,” American women reported themselves happier, on average, than did men. Today, that gender gap has reversed. Male happiness has inched up, and female happiness has dropped. In postfeminist America, men are happier than women.
And, as would be expected, women’s dissatisfaction with their lives is always traced back to uncooperative men and their reluctancy to make feminism the roaring success they just know it could be if men would simply accept their diminishing importance and superfluousness. What Today’s Woman has been sold is that the careerism, status seeking and ambitiousness that’s driven men to their sense of happiness-through-accomplishment (with all the prerequisite sacrifices needed to get there) is necessarily the same path to women’s sense of happiness and fulfillment.
But men and women are in fact different, and while the social experiment that is equalism continues to destroy lives by insisting they aren’t, women are coming to find (often too late in life to correct) that happiness for themselves comes as a result of satisfying needs that are innate to their nature as a female. As such, equalism and feminism fluidly redefine what “should be” happiness for men and women – men should always find fulfillment in making women happy in an ‘equalist’ utopia – yet that contentment for women will always be elusive and thus, a need to make men the culprits in that unending oppression of happiness comes into play.
Worst Case Scenario
Virtually every woman I’ve ever come into contact with in my lifetime shared a common mindset – each one subscribes to what I call the ‘worst case scenario’ mindset. I expect this from a mother or matronly relative, maybe even an overprotective sister, but to some degree all (and yes I mean all) women share a sense of risk aversion. That may not be in all aspects of a woman’s life, and certainly there are instances where this can be overridden – usually ones that imply an optimized Hypergamous opportunity – but I find that it’s part of women’s psychological firmware to obsessively want to mitigate risk of loss. Whether that’s risk of injury or resources or something that has a potential for providing her with security, the innate female subroutine is to play things safe.
In an age of mass media and instantaneous communication (women’s domain) this risk aversion gets combined with women’s primary, evolutionarily derived, need for a sustainable long term security and an existence-level sense of doubt. I’ve covered in prior posts about how Hypergamy is rooted in doubt and demands a constant reverifying of its being optimized in a man or a man with whom a woman has the potential of becoming intimate with. What results from this root level doubt and a hindbrain need for security is a continual preoccupation with the Worst Case Scenario.
Every possibility for the worst is thought through, contemplated and anticipated by women. There are very few women known for their genuine optimism or faith in a better outcome than what could possibly be the worst case. Yes, there are women who are saccharine motivational speakers, women’s ministry leaders and “make it a great day” believers in the magic powers of positivity, but even when it is genuine it comes as the result of wanting to mitigate the risks of the worst case scenario for their own (or women’s) lives.
As I wrote in Imagination, a man’s best tool in his Game toolbox is a woman’s imagination. That may be well for Game, but it also comes with the drawback of women’s imaginings of the worst possible thing that could ever happen. Throw women’s evolved sense of solipsism into this mix and it’s the worst possible thing that could happen, to her. On one hand, Dread is useful because of this innately female dynamic, but when you must contend with what amounts to a never ending battery of ‘what if’ doubts and reassurances then you begin to see the downside of that imagination. You begin to understand why women default to blaming men for not providing them with a sustainable happiness.
Women, being the life-bearing, nurture-giving sex with the most to lose in their investment in selecting a mate and gestating a child, have evolved to seek a sustainable security above all else – a security that guarantees her individuated happiness. That conventional, evolved sense of wellbeing used to be dependent upon the provisioning and the excitement that could only be provided by men. This is a subconscious expectation of women. Even women who subscribe to sexual fluidity often seek a similar security from their masculinized dominant partner.
Social Security
As a result of our equalist social narrative, women have been conditioned to believe that they can find this security and happiness in some untapped well they have hidden in their psyche if only they can be Strong and Independent enough to access it. In prior essays I’ve made the case that the ultimate goal of our feminine-primary social order has been to facilitate women’s optimizing Hypergamy by essentially outlawing men’s influence on that process. Every gender-based law that’s come into being since the time of the Sexual Revolution; from sexual consent, to what constitutes sexual harassment, to father’s (lack of) rights, to divorce settlement has been motivated by this deep seated female need for an enduring security. This was a security unique to men, but in an ‘equalist’ paradigm it is no longer required of, nor is it expected to be found in, men.
Yet for all of this handwringing, for all of the great efforts needed to legislate men’s direct or indirect financing of this security, and despite every social dispensation intended to empower women to provide this soul-gnawing need for security, women are still not happy.
The masterful Pook once said that the surest way to make a woman unhappy is to give them everything they want. I recently got into, yet again, another debate about the merits or non-merits of Choreplay and whether the idea of women getting hot for guys who do dishes was really a thing,…or not. This time the spin is that women will cheat on their husbands if they don’t do more chores.
As I was requoting myself for this debate I realized how long the Choreplay dilemma has been playing out – the first time I took it on was 2008. Men are deductive problem solvers. We want to make women happy as a means to getting sex, keeping the peace, sustaining intimacy, security, and just making a woman happy. The problem with that is that nothing a man can do will make a woman happy in the long term. In fact, just the whack-a-mole attempt to intentionally try to make a woman happy is itself a display women read as coming from a man who Just Doesn’t Get It.
The majority of men (Betas) would like nothing more than to sustain a woman’s happiness. They’re taught that relationship are always ‘hard work’ and his work will ultimately never be good enough. Even the most dutiful Beta can’t make a woman happy, but their efforts become a process of him negotiating for a woman’s desire. Whether that’s earning the ‘happiness’ of his mother, his sister, his female co-worker or his wife, the effect is the same.
We’ve made women’s happiness a litmus test for how successful a man or his relationships are. The common refrain of a woman leaving a man due to her being “unhaaaaaapy” is almost a cliché in the manosphere now. But if it’s a cliché it’s because this is the go-to reasoning we’ve heard from pop-psychologists, marriage counselors and mommy bloggers for the 70%+ of divorces initiated by women. We are expected to put a premium on women’s sustained happiness in a feminine-primary social order. Women’s happiness has become the prime directive and the metric for a relationship’s success. Any concern for men’s happiness is either a sign of his weakness or his problematic misogyny.
From Perfecting the Fantasy:
Here’s a secret – there’s no such thing as contentment.
Being content implies that life is static; it’s not, and to be honest, how boring would that be anyway? Life consists of varying states of discontent: why else would you bother doing anything? But the good news is that it’s more fun and more beneficial to manage discontent than to endure contentment (which you can’t anyway since it’s transitory at best). The trick is to understand that there are 2 kinds of discontent – creative and destructive discontent. What you choose to do with that discontent makes all the difference in the world. You will only get what you’ve gotten if you keep doing what you’ve done. Don’t allow yourself to fall back into old destructive habits of dealing with discontent. Don’t bother with anti-depressants and self-help books when a good hard workout at the gym would serve you better.
The truth is I’m always discontent, but constructively so. The minute you can look yourself in the mirror and be happy with what you see you’re sunk. You can always improve, even after achieving things that were once very important and difficult to attain. Happiness is a state of being, it’s in the ‘doing’ not the ‘having done.’ It’s not about endlessly chasing your tail, it’s about being better than you were the day before.
I agree with Gorilla Patriot, women’s default is for unhappiness, but I’d qualify this by saying it’s more of a predisposition of discontent. That is to say there is no real neutral disposition for a woman. Even in a state of indifference, a woman’s conditioned expectation from men will always originate from a preconception of disappointment. The worst case scenario is what is subconsciously planned for to the point that, even a man whom a woman loves and trusts, a woman’s first expectation from him is failure.
A lot of this comes from a lifetime of having male role models portrayed as default failures, social ignoramuses or just ridiculous because of their maleness. Women have had an endless education that only their unique femaleness can solve men’s problems of maleness, and they solve it in spite of themselves. Women are quite literally taught to expect failure, discontentment and unhappiness from men from a very early age.
The great tragedy of this ‘education’ is that it teaches women to empower themselves to find some life satisfaction as a result of their independence from men, but yet they can’t get around the want to find happiness with men. This teaching seeks to create some equalist semblance of happiness based on what men define for themselves as happiness.
They’re taught that a real enduring security is somehow possible in an intrinsically unsafe and chaotic world. So they limit men, they mandate laws and social mores to mitigate the risks that men, in their idealism, would naturally be drawn to take. They keep the kids safe, tell them to walk on one side of the sidewalk, tell them not to jump on the bed, tell them not to ride a bike without a helmet and knee and arm pads, and to prepare for the most damaging possibility imaginable. And men, who’ve always been bigger, more dangerous children to them, must comply with this risk aversion by law or by shame.
Women are unhappy because they expect unhappiness. They’ve been taught that the security they sought in men was a weakness; one they need to compensate for. They were conditioned to feel shame for that need, that masculine comfort, even when they know security is never going to be guaranteed in the best of possible cases. They’re unhappy because they were taught that men’s happiness is better than women’s happiness and that’s the path they ought to follow no matter the sacrifice, no matter the damage to the family. They were taught that feminist pride and equalist hubris were a better substitute for a family – they believed the lie that they would just be ‘happy captives’.
