Tag Archives: Happiness

Of orgasms, oxytocin, and myths of misery: UPDATED

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My friend Monica sent me a link to this MSNBC story: Post-coital blues plague a third of young women. Based on a very small sample of 200 young Australians, researchers at the Queensland Institute of Technology found that 1 in 3 women had felt post-intercourse melancholy at least once, and 1 in 10 experienced it regularly.

It’s easy to point out the obvious problem with the study: the sample is very small, for instance, and the focus on intercourse to the exclusion of other forms of sexual activity is problematic. But the real impact of these studies is in how the mainstream media report them, and the danger here is that a small and relatively inconclusive project can get framed as “sex makes women sad.”

One of the cleverest techniques used by the religious right in recent years has been the deliberate co-opting of feminist language. One of the standard tropes used by many savvy social conservatives is that women have been misled by the language of feminist liberation. By downplaying women’s “natural” drive to bond monogamously with one man, by maligning women’s central role as nurturers, we feminists have (wittingly or no) led countless millions to unhappiness. Conservative theories of natural law and sexual complementarianism are depressing to read, but when one does read them, one learns that women are inclined to profound unhappiness when they pursue pleasure for its own sake rather than relationship. And by emphasizing women’s sexual, economic, and educational liberation — rather than their God-given role as wives and mothers — we have seduced women away from the source of their true fulfillment. From Kay Hymowitz to Phyllis Schlafly to Christina Hoff-Summers, a cottage industry of right-wing pundits has sprung up to drive home the point that pleasure-seeking feminism just makes women miserable.

But they don’t just drive home this message in op-eds and books. They drive it home in abstinence-only education. A student of mine told me that she was taught in a church youth group that masturbation would leave women depressed.

We were told (by a volunteer pastor who had some church-sponsored pamphlets) that when we orgasm, women’s brains release oxytocin, which is the ‘bonding hormone’. It’s meant to bond us with someone who will be with us for life. But if we orgasm by ourselves, our brains will flood us with feelings of loneliness. We were told that women who masturbate usually cry themselves to sleep. Masturbation made boys into sex addicts, my youth pastor said; it made girls clinically depressed.

I’ve asked her for a copy of the pamphlet, and she’s working on it. But I’m asking more out of curiosity than the need for proof. I’ve heard this sort of pseudo-scientific hooey before. And I wish that more young people could laugh it off for the lie it is.

The bit about lonely women masturbating in their beds and crying themselves to sleep has become a pop-culture joke; see this (work-safe) e-card and even this weird Goth video. A good friend of ours, poking fun at the cultural expectations about single women’s unhappiness, told us that she was headed home for the evening one Saturday. “Gonna watch reruns of Glee, pig out on ice cream, pull out the vibrator, and then cry myself to sleep. What single gals do these days, dontcha know?” She wasn’t serious — but she was using humor to jab at the cultural myth we have about the connection between sexuality and female melancholy,a myth reinforced by studies like this new Australian offering.

Both men and women can be sad after sex for any number of reasons. Thinking from my own experience, I’ve been sad after sex because the sex was disappointing; because I knew that I’d soon have to put my clothes on and go home and I didn’t want to leave; because I’d just had sex with someone I wasn’t supposed to and the guilt rushed in after the orgasm; because I was sleeping with someone with whom sex was the only good thing we had; because what had been intended to be make-up sex hadn’t erased the real hurt. I could go on. Lots of sexually experienced people of all genders can identify with that, I’m sure. It’s hardly a uniquely female phenomenon. Continue reading →

On the now-notorious happiness gap

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I’m in New York, getting ready to take the train up to Providence later today; giving my presentation on consent and male weakness at Brown University tomorrow evening.

There’s a very worthy discussion at Feministe about this Maureen Dowd piece in Saturday’s Times on the question of why, since the early 1970s, women’s happiness seems to have declined while men’s seems to have increased. Gracie and Jillian offer some good responses and analysis.

Assuming the data on happiness (from the General Social Survey) is correct, social conservatives might make hay with this by suggesting that women are suffering the consequences of too much liberation. That conclusion is dampened somewhat by the interesting tidbit that having children increased rather than decreased the likelihood that a woman would report being unhappy. To believe the anti-feminist pop media, it is childlessness that leads aging women to despair; the data suggests exactly the opposite. But as Dowd and her commenters are all aware, it’s difficult to attribute the “joy gap” to any one cause.

Let me suggest two things: first, more than a few men underreport their own unhappiness. Most American males are raised with the “big boys don’t cry” ethos. For a great many adult men, admitting to despair or angst is a form of “crying”; to complain (particularly to a stranger, like a researcher) is a display of weakness. Time and progress have not entirely eradicated the “self-made man” myth from the American psyche; the self-made man is, almost by definition, relentlessly optimistic. Despair and depression are much more likely to be interpreted by men as evidence of personal failure, as proof that one “can’t hack it” in the tough but opportunity-filled real world. The rise in reported male happiness may be evidence that that myth is — blessedly — losing its hold on some men. But it also is equally likely that men are still less likely than women to report unhappiness; one need only look at video games and action movies to see that heroic stoicism is still very much a masculine virtue. Thus when boys and men say “It’s all good”, we do well to probe a bit deeper.

Secondly, women’s unhappiness is surely tied at least in part to the “second shift” phenomenon. The feminist movement has succeeded in opening up new professional opportunities for women, particularly middle and upper-middle class women. Though we have not yet hit the longed-for full parity, women’s wages are much closer to those of their male counterparts than they were thirty or forty years ago. Far more women are working full-time for wages. Many of these women are wives and mothers, and all of the evidence suggests that men’s willingness to work inside the home hasn’t kept pace with women’s willingness and opportunity to work outside the home. In many dual-career families in which both partners put in equal hours in the workplace, the wife still does the lion’s share of the housework as well. Men’s willingness to take on traditionally female roles has, not surprisingly, lagged behind women’s willingness to take on traditional male roles. And as a result, far too many women are utterly exhausted from working what Arlie Hochschild famously called the Second Shift.

Happiness isn’t rocket science, but it is, for so many, elusive. “The noblest and pleasantest of things”, according to Aristotle, happiness comes from a sense of purpose, a set of meaningful relationships, a sense of being valued, an opportunity to have and to share pleasure. But happiness is neither easy nor obligatory, and this study gives us much with which to wrestle and upon which to reflect.