Watching clips of women squealing over shoes and sheets — and getting orgasmic over orange juice — you start to wonder how advertisers got the idea that women respond to these over-the-top portrayals. It's almost like looking at some of the weird "Oldies But Goodies" we post: The ads seem laughably out-of-touch. Should we blame decades of fashion magazines and celebrity worship for promoting consumerist ideals and shopping-as-a-woman's-hobby propaganda? Maybe. But. According to Haskins, we should "Stop asking dumb questions like, 'Is Congress using us as a pawn in the healthcare debate?' and start asking, 'Are my boobs jealous of my butt?" Remember ladies: "Happiness is just one purchase away."

Target Women: "Happiness Is Just One Purchase Away" [Salon]
Sarah Haskins in Target Women: Lessons 2009Sarah Haskins in Target Women: Lessons 2009 [Current]

According to U.S. News & World Report, two new studies show that people associate anger with male faces and happiness with female ones. When subjects were shown androgynous faces that looked angry, they were more likely to identify them as male. But if the faces looked happy or fearful, people were more likely to label them as female. And in another experiment, subjects were slower to identify faces as female if the faces looked pissed off. Says psychologist Ursula Hess, "The present research shows that the association between anger and men and happiness and women is so strong that it can influence the decisions about the gender of another person when that person is viewed briefly."

In another study, researchers gave women testosterone pills and studied how they played a cooperation-based game. The game involved giving one woman $10 and instructing her to choose an amount to offer her partner. If the partner turned down the offer, neither got money. Women who received testosterone were no less generous than their peers — unless they were told they'd gotten the hormone. Those who knew they'd gotten testosterone "stood out with their conspicuously unfair offers," wrote the study authors. Lead author Ernst Fehr says that when asked about how they thought testosterone would affect them, the subjects said things like, "Oh, testosterone would make me more egotistic, more risk-taking and more aggressive." In other words, they thought testosterone would make them drive a harder bargain, and so they did just that, even though the testosterone alone might have had no effect.

What's interesting about these studies is that they show how deeply ingrained our perceptions of masculinity and femininity are — and, in the case of the bargaining study, how these perceptions may be even stronger than reality. Are women actually happier than men? Are men more angry? Probably not — but we may be socialized to express these emotions more freely, with the result that they become associated with gender. The result looks a lot like a feedback loop: girls are told it's not feminine to get mad, so they avoid making mad faces, and so people begin to think that anger is for men, and the cycle begins all over again. Similarly, if women learn that aggression is "male," they may not behave aggressively (except when hopped up on testosterone), further reinforcing this stereotype. The finding that this stereotype outstrips the actual effects of testosterone underscores the fact that gender differences are problematic, and that we shouldn't be too quick to assume that any difference in behavior has a biological basis. As Michael Naef, co-author of the testosterone study, says, "In a society where qualities and manners of behavior are increasingly traced to biological causes...this should make us sit up and take notice."

Are Angry Women More Like Men? [U.S. News & World Report]
Women On Testosterone Only Think They're Macho [New Scientist]
Testosterone "Prompts Fair Play, Not Aggression" [Reuters]

•  According to an independent group in Britain, the number of abortions performed on fetuses with Down syndrome has been greatly underrepresented. They claim that doctors, in attempts to protect their patients from further pain, have been classifying abortions performed on fetuses with Down as "social abortions." • Excerpts of Anne Frank's diary were censored out of a school textbook in Lebanon after Hezbollah's Al-Manar television channel ran a report claiming the book promotes Zionism. MP Hussein Hajj Hassan said, "These respected, established schools are teaching the so-called tragedy this girl lived, and yet they are ashamed to teach the tragedy of the Lebanese people, the tragedy of the Palestinian people... the tragedy of the people of the south under the hands of Zionist occupation." • A new study has found that there is a significant gender-based pay gap among US faculty. "Our findings show that women who wish to challenge pay gaps at their own institution need to systematically and quantitatively approach the situation, especially during a time of economic downturn," said the author of the study. •  David Swain has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for the murder of his wife in 1999. Swain was scuba diving in the Caribbean with his wife Shelley Tyre when something went wrong and Tyre was killed. Although local authorities found no evidence of wrongdoing, a British Virgin Islands judge has ruled differently. • Female cancer or multiple sclerosis patients are six times more likely than male patients to be separated or divorced soon after their diagnosis. Researchers said men may leave a sick spouse because they're more hesitant than women to commit to being a caretaker. • Six years ago, Stephen Weston heard about a woman who had been prosecuted for not wearing her seat belt correctly while pregnant. For many women, the cross-body belt is uncomfortable, so Weston decided to solve the problem by developing an alternative belt for expecting mothers. The shoulder harness seat belt will hit the market in 2010. • The New York Times reports on the rising number of female officers in the Iraqi police force. While women were long discouraged from higher positions, many have come to realize that there are certain benefits to having female officers. "Everyone says men are able to do everything, but that's not true," said Lieutenant Farah Hameed. "In investigations, especially with women, women use their compassion with victims to get them to answer questions clearly." •  A recent study shows that yo-yo dieting may be more like drug addiction than previously believed. Researchers put a group of rats on "diet-cycles," and they found that after going without food, the rats suffered anxiety, and the deprivation effected the same stress symptom that kicks in during drug withdrawal. • Women are getting involved in Mexican drug trafficking in greater numbers and many are being jailed or killed. More women are becoming addicts, turning to dealing as a better alternative to prostitution, or being forced to smuggle drugs through military checkpoints by male family members. •  Prosecutors have offered former astronaut Lisa Nowak a plea deal. Nowak is accused of stalking and assaulting Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman, who was dating Nowak's ex-boyfriend. •  Wanna be happy for the rest of your life? Move West, young woman. Apparently, people are happiest in the Mountain states and on the West Coast, due mainly to the high concentration of wealth, education, and tolerance. • While experts believe that postpartum depression is still severely under-reported, there are several new programs that offer support and aid to women suffering from PPD. UNC has a particularly good program, which features a small postpartum inpatient unit. • In the next 10 years women are expected to become the majority of unionized workers, according to a report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "When you have a majority of women in the labor movement, issues like work-family balance, paid sick days and paid parental leave become more important," said economist John Schmitt. • "Weight-watchers everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief. Contrary to their image as slim models of restraint, French women, it seems, really do get fat," begins this article, on rising obesity rates in France. It's a good thing Mireille Guilano has a new shtick. • Some are calling for the website celebrityaddressaerial.com to be shut down after it was revealed that the people who allegedly robbed Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Orlando Bloom, used the site to gather information on their targets. The site, which lists the addresses and aerial photos of hundreds of celebrity homes, contains information that could be found on sites like TMZ and Google Maps in a more easily searchable format. • A new fiction genre described as "Beatrix Potter meets the Kray Brothers" or "Pulp Fiction meets Wind in the Willows" involves animals, or even dinosaurs, in gritty detective stories. • In an interview with a British journalist who says she dreamed of being a Playboy Bunny as a child, Hugh Hefner says, "My younger brother and I were raised in a home in Chicago with no real affection; we knew we were loved, but there was no display of affection. I think that my quest for romantic love and the adventure of romantic love was filling the space that was left because I didn't get the affection when I was young." • In this security video a woman on a Boston subway platform who appears drunk falls onto the tracks. People wave at an oncoming train to stop, the driver breaks, and the car comes to a stop inches away from killing her. •

Judson speculates that saying "eeee" makes you "start to smile" (that's apparently why we say "cheese" in photographs), and the act of smiling can make us happy, saying words with "e" sounds might make us happy as well. And other sounds can produce different feelings. Judson describes a study that found "that if you read aloud a passage full of vowels that make you scowl - the German vowel sound ü, for example - you're likely to find yourself in a worse mood than if you read a story similar in content but without any instances of ü. Similarly, saying ü over and over again generates more feelings of ill will than repeating a or o."

So do languages with more a than ü for happier speakers? Certainly Italians, with all their -a and -o endings, are said to be garrulous and fun-loving, Germans more dour. But these are just stereotypes, and as someone whose second language is, um, Latin, I'm not qualified to judge the happy-making potential of any spoken tongue besides English. Perhaps bilingual commenters can help me out with this — do you find that you're jollier in one language than another? Relatedly, are some words funnier or sadder than others, irrespective of their meaning? I know a lot of people who find "oi" sounds gross, as in "moist" and "ointment." And I'm in agreement with Judson that "e" sounds are kind of funny — try saying "beekeeper" a bunch of times. But I'm not sure I can think of any words that evoke sorrow, except, with its low moan of an ending, "sorrow" itself.

A Language Of Smiles [NYT]

Kanazawa's thesis about "modern" feminism is that it seeks to deny any and all differences between women and men, a thesis he indicates is demonstrated by the phrase, "Feminism is the radical notion that women are men." Um, actually, the axiom is — as any actual proponent of modern feminism knows — this:

Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.

But, you know, there's no reason to learn anything about what modern feminism seeks to accomplish before indicting it, right?

First, Kanazawa argues that feminism seeks to deny biological differences, which he then argues are stacked in favor of women anyway.

However, in the only two biologically meaningful measures of welfare – longevity and reproductive success – women are and have always been slightly better off than men. In every human society, women live longer than men, and more women attain some reproductive success; many more men end their lives as total reproductive losers, having left no genetic offspring.

Does he provide a citation that more men then women end up with no biological offspring? Of course not! Evidence is for scientists!

Kanazawa also hilariously argues that men are the weaker sex.

It is also not true that women are the "weaker sex." Pinker documents the fact that boys are much more fragile, both physically and psychologically, than girls and hence require greater medical and psychiatric care. Men succumb to a larger number of diseases in much greater numbers than women do throughout their lives. The greater susceptibility of boys and men to diseases explains why more boys die in childhood and fail to reach sexual maturity and why men's average life expectancy is shorter than women's. This, incidentally, is the reason why slightly more boys than girls are born – 105 boys to 100 girls – so that there will be roughly 100 boys to 100 girls when they reach puberty.

Hmm, I recall reading that the leading cause of death among infants and kids — and particularly among boys — are accidents... and, well, I see that's still the case.

Kanazawa's next argument, such as it is, is that men are just in control of everything because they have to be in order to get laid. The world, in effect, revolves around women's ability to provide access to their sexual and reproductive organs.

It is true that, in all human societies, men largely control all the money, politics, and prestige. They do, because they have to, in order to impress women. Women don't control these resources, because they don't have to. What do women control? Men. As I mention in an earlier post, any reasonably attractive young woman exercises as much power over men as the male ruler of the world does over women.

Is it just me or is Kanazawa starting to sound a little bitter?

Kanazawa — like Ross Douthat before him — asserts that feminism is just making women unhappy. Of course, he's just rehashing the talking points from the same study at Douthat did without reading it or bothering to understand what it really says but — again — why would a scientist want to read science papers when he can just rely on an abstract to make a point that feminism has forced women to content with divorce and single parenthood when we were ever so much happier being barefoot and pregnant?

Anyway, Dr. Kanazawa — whose upcoming book is apparently about how smart guys don't get laid — is just trying to do women a service, as long as they make sure they don't age, consider themselves his equal or want gender equity in the work place. That's just immoral and unnecessary.

Why Modern Feminism Is Illogical, Unnecessary, And Evil [Psychology Today]

Related: Cheris Kramarae [Wikiquote]
Child Health [CDC]
Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa [London School of Economics]

Earlier: Feminism Makes Women Unhappy, And Other Tall Tales

Some of this study, reported by the Telegraph makes a certain kind of sense. Women in their late 20s are more likely to have secure jobs and steady incomes than those in their late teens or early 20s. This is also apparently when "their hair looks the best, body shape is at its peak and confidence is at an all-time high." Wait, what?

The study looked at surveys of 4,000 women aged 25-65 and pinpointed times when participants reported being happiest at their jobs (29), content with their relationships (30), most financially confident (33), and having the best sex (28). They also found that women feel they age more quickly than men, which probably has something to do with our strange cultural tendency to view hot older women as some sort of hilarious anomaly (MILFs or Cougars, anyone?).

A spokesperson for Clairol Perfect 10 states that: "Reaching and surpassing your twenties no longer triggers the downward spiral of your looks and self-confidence." As ridiculous as this statement sounds, this is sadly, something many of us have heard before. I was recently speaking with a male acquaintance when he decided to share his opinions on female attractiveness. "Women peak at 18," he said. "You will never be as hot as you were at 18." As much as I wish he was alone in his ideals, in a culture that fetishizes youth and girlishness, it is unsurprising to hear that others (including Clairol, pre-study) think like this.

When these two ideas intersect—your 20s are the best time ever and you will never be as hot as you were as a teen—it creates a paradox of obnoxious clichés that make it impossible for women to win. I am either too old to be really attractive, or years away from my happiest time. But we can take heart in the fact that this study is peddling a load of crap. The idea that someone "peaks" and then slowly declines is a dangerous one, which sets us all up for failure, for it is impossible to recognize this mythical "peak moment" until it has passed us by. Clairol follows their statement about the sad decline of women in their 20s with this: "And a little time put aside in hectic schedules for self-pampering and the odd beauty product can help keep you feeling young and looking your best." And we can only look our best, and obviously be our happiest, if we use Clairol products. Psychologist Corinne Sweet also weighs in, with this interesting tidbit:

"Having a good hair day is essential to success both at work and in love, as many women still feel their hair is their crowning glory. Considering it was found that women have six bad hair days a month, anything women can rely on to improve their hair at home, in the minimum of time with guaranteed results can mean a huge lift in well-being, confidence and self-esteem. This can help women feel they are in the driving seat in their lives, despite the challenging times of modern life and always being on the go."

So our hair is what make us really happy, and if we can find the right products to help us tame the wild mane, than we will be forever in control? If it looks like an ad, and quacks like an ad, then maybe it is little more than a cleverly disguised ad.

Women 'Happiest At 28' [Telegraph]

As handily deconstructed by Megan last week, the Times's Ross Douthat thinks "women's happiness" is a great excuse for shaming various groups of people. According to the conservative columnist, the rise of single motherhood has made women unhappy, and as a cure we need "a new-model stigma [...] that ostracizes serial baby-daddies and trophy-wife collectors as thoroughly as the "fallen women" of a more patriarchal age." Because nothing makes ladies jollier than stigmatizing others! For the Daily Mail, women's happiness is an excuse to quote anti-working-mother advocate Erin Pizzey ("The hard-won freedom of choice has imprisoned women. I just see an exhausted generation trying to do it all.") and a total idiot ("You've got real democracy and there really are no glass ceilings, despite the fact that some of you moan about it all the time.")

Women's happiness is an ideological football for conservative pundits, but what is it for actual women? Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, authors of the study "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," which inspired both Douthat and the Mail, purport to have found that women are less happy, both absolutely and relative to men, than they were 35 years ago. They measured happiness by asking the question, "Taken all together, how would you say things are these days, would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?" They also asked subjects about "their satisfaction with a number of aspects of their life such as their marriage, their health, their financial situation, and their job." Stevenson and Wolfers write:

Although the validity of these measures remains a somewhat open question, a variety of evidence points to a robust correlation between answers to subjective wellbeing questions and more objective measures of personal well-being. For example, answers to subjective well-being questions have been shown to be correlated with physical evidence of affect such as smiling, laughing, heart rate measures, sociability, and electrical activity in the brain (Diener, 1984). Measures of individual happiness or life satisfaction are also correlated with other subjective assessments of well-being such as independent evaluations by friends, self-reported health, sleep quality, and personality (Diener, Lucas, and Scollon, 2006; Kahnman and Krueger, 2006).

So basically, if you say you're happy, you also seem happy to other people, whether those people are your friends or doctors measuring your heart rate. But this constellation of factors — your self-reported happiness, your "sociability," how often you laugh — doesn't necessarily measure whether or not you're leading a good life. Nor does your answer to the question "would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?" necessarily capture all the nuances of a fulfilling, worthwhile sojourn on this planet.

Whenever I go through a stressful time, I end up reading a lot about happiness. Most recently, I've been looking at Gretchen Rubin's Slate blog, The Happiness Project. The blog has a lot of good, practical tips — like breaking your routine and remembering what you loved as a child — but it's also calming because it presents happiness as something concrete you can work toward using relatively simple techniques.

The thing is, this view of happiness is kind of reductive. It's absolutely true that there are basic things you can do to make yourself feel better about your life, and I do believe that Stevenson and Wolfers's question measures something. But what it measures is just a slice of a person's total experience of herself and the world. It's an important place, sure, and interesting to think about, but we can't evaluate women's lives, feminism, or society based on it alone. It's obviously ridiculous to call for a new social stigma based on the results of one study, but it's also wrong to base too much public policy — or even too much of your evaluation of your own life — on a single measurement of it. I believe happiness is important, but I also know that some of my fondest memories are from times when I felt like absolute shit. A full life contains sorrow and fear and anger and uncertainty, and when we feel these things, we shouldn't assume that either feminism or we ourselves have failed.

Liberated And Unhappy [New York Times]
Women Are More Unhappy Despite 40 Years Of Feminism, Claims Study [Daily Mail]
The Happiness Project [Slate]
Headlines, Headlines, Headlines [The F Word]
The Paradox Of Declining Female Happiness [Full Paper]

Earlier: Feminism Makes Women Unhappy, And Other Tall Tales
Man Declares That The Glass Ceiling No Longer Exists

Well, drinking is a part of it, according to Japanese Professor Takeshi Tanigawa of Ehime University Graduate School of Medicine: "Drinking responsibly with a good friend makes you feel happy and healthy.'' However, there is also something about the singing itself that makes people happy, as Tanigawa explains, "singers use deep breathing, which is good for the nervous system. After singing, they usually receive applause. It is a good kind of social support, and helps in the face of adverse occasions or stressful events.'' Singing also improves posture, reduces stress and lowers blood pressure, and sends "feel-good" endorphins to the brain. All good reasons to bust out the old hairbrush/microphone now and start practicing for American Idol auditions. Or karaoke night. [Telegraph]

Say your flabby ass is getting you down. Turn to swimsuit model Marisa Miller's detachable workout cards (Cosmo is Self now)! Her moves are apparently best performed while standing Photoshopped in front of an ocean — and with skin airbrushed to the texture of latex. But what if your friends suck or (God, no!) you're single? That's easy — you should change your life, but not too much. Maybe you could grocery shop on weekends in order to meet men. Or just "stop to take a breath midday" (ah yes, breathing). "The changes you make," say Cosmo editors, "could improve other areas of your life . . . including ones you didn't even realize needed an upgrade." It's true! I slept with my feet on the pillow last night, and today the world economic crisis is totally gone. Who knew that was even bothering me?

Walker, who also gave a reading yesterday in honor of the inauguration, said:

I would advise you to remember that you did not create the disaster that the world is experiencing, and you alone are not responsible for bringing the world back to balance. A primary responsibility that you do have, however, is to cultivate happiness in your own life. To make a schedule that permits sufficient time of rest and play with your gorgeous wife and lovely daughters. Not to mention your brave and precious grandmother.* And so on. One gathers that your family is large. We are used to seeing men in the White House become juiceless and as white-haired as the building; we notice their wives and children looking strained and stressed. They soon have smiles so lacking in joy that they remind us of scissors. This is no way to lead. Nor does your family deserve this fate. One way of thinking about all this is: it is so bad now that there is no excuse not to relax. From your happy, relaxed state, you can model real success, which is only what so many people in the world really want. They may buy endless cars and houses and furs and gobble up all the attention and space they can manage, but this is because it is not clear to them yet that success is truly an inside job. That it is within the reach of almost everyone.

Whether or not success is an "inside job," we can all agree that nobody wants to see Sasha and Malia sad. [Newsweek]

One quarter of women who wear a size 14 (equivalent to a U.S. size 12) said they were extremely happy with their lives, more than any other dress size, according to a study by Special K. Women who are a U.K. size 24 are the least happy, but the survey found that happiness did not correlate to size, as the fourth least happy size was a 6. Though 12, 14, and 16, were among the happiest sizes, of the 3,000 women surveyed, 48 percent still said they were not happy with their weight. [The Telegraph]

The study, which was originally taken as the Framingham Heart Study in Massachusetts, compiles data taken between 1983 and 2003, wherein 4,739 subjects were asked to report on their emotional states three times per year. Their "social contacts" were also asked similar questions, which gave researchers the ability to map out the effects of happiness along a social network spectrum. The study shows a cluster-like effect taking place around the happiest people in every social group: people tend to be drawn to the happiest among us, and their happiness ripples to the outer layers of a social group, touching each member as it goes.

It helps to look at it this way: the happiest person in your crew is the Sun, you could say, and you and your friends are the rest of the solar system. The most unhappy person would be the recently-demoted Pluto, covered in ice and hiding in relative darkness. Yet still: the sun's rays touch Pluto, much like the happiness of your happiest friend spreads a bit of happiness to your most unhappy friend. Or, as Alice Park of Time reports: "If you're happy, you increase the chance of joy in your close friend by 25%; a friend of that friend enjoys a 10% increased chance. And that friend's friend has a 5.6% higher chance."

Like all things contagious, proximity plays a big part in the spread of happiness. As Park notes, "A next-door neighbor enjoys a 34% increased chance of happiness by living near a happy person, but a friend who lives across town is less affected." So while you and your immediate circle of friends may have a large impact on one another's happiness, your friend from 4 states away may not feel the effects of your moods as much.

How do you feel about this study? Do you find yourself drawn to happy people? And do you feel happier after having been near them? Though misery is said to love company, the study actually shows that unhappiness is less contagious than happiness, so perhaps even for the kids living on sad ol' Pluto, we're all looking for a bit of sunshine in our lives, where ever we can find it.

Happiness Is Contagious, New Study Shows [Chicago Tribune]
Laugh And The World Laughs Too: Happiness Is Contagious [Time]

The as-yet-untitled Solondz film that Paris has a role in is reportedly a "part sequel, part variation" on Happiness, and also stars Allison Janney, Charlotte Rampling, and Ciaran Hinds. The movie is also "a dramatic comedy about family against the backdrop of a war." So what kind of things will the notoriously perverse Solondz make Paris do? A poll, if you will.

Am I missing anything? Do you think perhaps Paris will defile a prosthetic limb, as this is a war movie? Obviously, we're open to other creepy/comedic speculations.

The Paris Hilton Interview [Village Voice]
Paris Hilton In Todd Solondz's Next [Hollywood Reporter]

One, societal expectations which imply that having children is an innately joyful endeavor. In fact, parents are often afraid to admit when they're unhappy because "it runs so counter to our cultural beliefs that children make you happy," Simon notes in an interview with NPR. And two, there aren't as many support networks in place for parents as there used to be.

Newsweek's Lorraine Ali says, "The majority of American parents now work outside the home, have less support from extended family and face a deteriorating education and health-care system, so raising children has not only become more complicated—it has become more expensive." But honestly, these sociological studies of "happiness" always feel essentially empty to me. Because what is happiness and how is it quantifiable in any real way? It's not surprising that people who are so easily swayed by societal expectations that they have children they don't really want are unhappy; but who's to say that they wouldn't have followed other damaging "societal expectations" as they're clearly so out of touch with what they want and who they are?

It's setting yourself up for disaster if you expect any life event to make you instantaneously, cartoonishly happy. But I can tell you this: I was hanging out with my mother a few months ago. We were perched on an escalator and she kept staring at our reflection in the mirrored walls adjacent to the moving staircase. She went silent for a second, and then said to me, "Sometimes the love you have for your children is so overwhelming that you are dumbstruck by it."

Having Kids Makes You Happy [Newsweek]
Studies Show Kids May Not Be 'Bundles of Joy' [NPR]

After a certain point, the marginal utility of extra money on a micro level is going to be almost nil because you'll just be keeping up with the Joneses and buying more crap and remaking yourself to try and externally approximate happiness or what you looked like when you were happy once without actually doing anything about being happy. It holds true on a macro-level, too. But, because this is marginally an article about economics, the economist in me would like to point out that there are government policies (other than increasing GDP) that can make a difference in a country's subjective happiness levels "such as maintaining stable families and friendly communities, reducing joblessness, providing adequate health care, and guaranteeing more personal freedom." But we don't like to do that because we're a nation of bootstrappers and DIYers and we're not a welfare state so, hooray for increasing GDP and getting ourselves happy on our own.

By the way, on a completely unrelated note, Americans spent more than the GDP of Bolivia on plastic surgery last year alone ($13.2 billion). In a more unrelated note, sales of antidepressents in 2006 in the U.S. were $20.6 billion. I'm not sure that our plans to find happiness in money or consumption are working, but whatever. I'm sure Priscilla can tell us. She looks happy enough.

Happiness Is ... [Portfolio]
Americans Putting Up The Dough For Plastic Surgery [Houston Chronicle]

Earlier: Are You Sick Of Ladies On TV Looking Jacked Up?

Anyway, so the "evidence" cited by Dr. Pam that all single women of a certain age (mine) are unhappy is that they come into her office and tell her they are. They're denying biology! They're denying thousands of years of civilization and 30+ years of socialization that couplehood is the only way to go! And, less obviously to the Not Good Doctor, they're sitting in the chair of a judgmental and uninsightful therapist whose goal is to help them get coupled with someone so they can be happy.

What's really going on behind that confident demeanour [of a single woman that declares herself to be happy]and fulfilled exterior is crushing loneliness and desperation.
Single women become adept at playing the isn't-life-grand game.
They have to do it around men so they don't appear desperate.

One thing that Pam misses is that by relying on her patients — who are seeing a therapist because they are unhappy, great self-selection in your unbiased sample, Pam — she's talking to women who are actually unhappy about it, but that doesn't mean the rest of us are. And, um, to a woman, they all admit that they spend a great deal of time and energy pretending not to be unhappy because to admit to their actual feelings would be too humiliating. So rather then, I don't know, talking to these women about how to openly express their actual feelings to people they care about, or counseling them that constantly feeling like "a fraud" and "putting on a facade" isn't emotionally healthy, she helps them get boyfriends. That's obviously the solution to your life's problems, and God knows, entering into a relationship when you have so much trouble acknowledging your feelings and expressing them to the people that care about you is totes a good idea.

As far as I'm concerned, there's a reason the phrase "settling down" contains the word "settling," and that reason has a hell of a lot to do with the divorce rate. There's this social drum beat to marry, marry, marry that I think many women (and men) mistake for their supposed biological clock, and so they run off and pick the most likely candidate and off to the Grown Up Races they go. You know what really sucks? What makes a woman really, really, really unhappy? A fucked up relationship. I've found that you can actually be lonelier in an unhappy relationship with someone than being single.

And I'm single, and I'm not unhappy about it. I'm single because last year I ended a 4-year relationship in which I was so deeply unhappy and so deeply unfulfilled that I'd actually sunk into a deep depression that required therapy. Did getting out of that relationship suck? Yes. I spent as much time crying in my wine after it was over as I did before it ended. Am I "happy" now? I am no longer desperately unhappy and, for someone who suffers from depression, that's a pretty decent start. I am happy to not be miserably coupled. Do I regret being single? Not at all. I'm not defensive about my status, or my age, I'm not inwardly seething at weddings except when there's no more booze to be had (or none to be found) and, in fact, I'm planning on strapping on some extremely cute shoes in September to serve as a bridesmaid in my younger sister's wedding and to flirt with the photographer my mom's told me is extremely attractive and single. And I won't have a date, and I'll be happy about it, because someone needs to flirt with cute wedding photographers and I hear boyfriends frown on that.

Forget This Tosh About 'Freemales' - Single Women Who Say They Are Happy Are Lying [Daily Mail]

Depression (as I see it, at least) causes apathy in the face of this unease, lethargy approaching total paralysis, an inability to feel much of anything one way or another. In contrast, melancholia generates a deep feeling in regard to this same anxiety, a turbulence of heart that results in an active questioning of the status quo, a perpetual longing to create new ways of being and seeing.

The American dream of happiness might be a nightmare. What passes for bliss could well be a dystopia of flaccid grins. Our passion for felicity hints at an ominous hatred for all that grows and thrives and then dies. I'd hate for us to awaken one morning and regret what we've done in the name of untroubled enjoyment. I'd hate for us to crawl out of our beds and walk out into a country denuded of gorgeous lonely roads and the grandeur of desolate hotels, of half-cracked geniuses and their frantic poems. I'd hate for us to come to consciousness when it's too late to live.

And calling a shrink. And maybe getting a job in marketing.

The Secret To Happiness: It's In Iceland [Economist]
In Praise Of Melancholia [ChronicleReview]