The Happiness Question: A Conversation

I have a confession to make: I am a happy woman.

Career-wise, as I have admitted below, my life is less than successful. Financially speaking, I am circling the drain. But in terms of simple, minute-by minute, silly joy, I have nothing whatsoever to complain about.

It would be an oversimplification to say that I am happy because I am in a stable relationship with someone wonderful, who suits me. It would be an equal oversimplification to blame my happiness on having a wonderful little girl, when for most of my life I honestly didn't believe I'd ever have children.

But I do think there is something to be said about every human being's profound need for connection--deep, stable, and unbreakable--and my little family provides that. I lacked it for so long that just the simple fact of its existence is like a long drink of cold water after a marathon.

I bring this up because of a small flap about a recent Ross Douthat column about women, happiness and the lack of it, in which he brings up statistics which suggest that women are less happy these days then formerly, and suggests that more stigmatizing ought to make them happier:

They should also be able to agree that the steady advance of single motherhood threatens the interests and happiness of women. Here the public-policy options are limited; some kind of social stigma is a necessity. But a new-model stigma shouldn’t (and couldn’t) look like the old sexism. There’s no necessary reason why feminists and cultural conservatives can’t join forces — in the same way that they made common cause during the pornography wars of the 1980s — behind a social revolution that ostracizes serial baby-daddies and trophy-wife collectors as thoroughly as the “fallen women” of a more patriarchal age.

Actually, I'm all for ostracizing serial baby-daddies and trophy-wife collectors, but I'm with Ross--it will never happen. Not because modern society won't accept 'sexual stigma,' as he tut-tuts, but simply because high-testosterone, high-earning males will always invoke placation before ostracism. It's hard-wired into our brains and our culture. We're going to have to undergo a few more millennia of evolution before that changes.

But enough of my opinion! The reason this post is entitled 'A Conversation' is that I'm proposing just that. My time is fragmented these days; I can't fit all my thoughts into a single post, nor a post into a single day. So I pose you this question: are you happy? Why or why not? What do you think of Ross's article, and the subject it discusses? Let's take it from there.

Why Pretty Lady Is Not A Computer Scientist

Pretty Lady cannot answer for Women in General, of course. But her personal answer to the question posed by today's NYTimes is very simple: Because she does not wish to be a computer scientist.

She established this lack of interest in computer science at the age of fifteen, when Daddy brought home a state-of-the-art Apple and allowed her to Roam Free. She fearlessly approached the machine and wrote a simple program which made a small green ball bounce back and forth across the screen; then she altered this program to make the ball bounce around and around the screen. Then she was done.

Her primary objection to the science of computer programming was its literal, inane, tedious linearity. Computers are not intuitive. They are not holistic. They require everything to be Spelled Out in a most tiresomely redundant manner. Programming is rather like teaching autistic children, except without any of the poetry, pathos, variety, or endearing personality quirks. One takes a Step in a certain direction; then one is required to enumerate every single infinitesimal obvious point from origin to conclusion, before embarking upon another linear, obvious Step. It is boring beyond belief.

Simply, Pretty Lady found that the exercise of programming only required the services of roughly two percent of her brain capacity; the rest of her mind, meanwhile, nearly exploded with restlessness and understimulation. Activities which adequately engage her particular mind tend to be multi-textured, multi-leveled, multi-sensory, multi-functional, and varied. Computer programming, in contrast, reminds her of Spalding Gray's description of a day without cocktail hour: "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA, AAAAAAAAAAAAAA, AAAAAAAAAAAA__Bed."

It should be made exceptionally clear that Pretty Lady was not in any way discouraged from becoming a computer scientist, either by Family, Academia, Society, or overwhelming fear of becoming a psychosexual leper. She was not plagued by Insecurity or Self-Doubt. She had no lingering suspicions that she was not intellectually up to the task. The sole reason that she eliminated computer science from her roster of potential careers was her strong personal disinclination to pursue it.

Pretty Lady does not wish to beat a dead horse, but after several decades of living on the planet as an intelligent woman, and from intimate acquaintance with many hundreds of other intelligent women, she more than suspects that there are more intelligent women who share her aversion to the dictates of computer science than those who embrace it. She knows far, far greater numbers of men who do not mind being cloistered in a tiny cubicle for twelve to sixteen hours per day, pursuing a single arcane logical trajectory, than women who would choose to endure this type of intellectual, aesthetic and relational constriction.

Thus, the implications of the title of the above-linked NYTimes article rather offend her. Women are not necessarily being driven from computer science, like so many cattle. There is an even chance that we are voluntarily choosing to avoid it, for the very good reason that we would much rather do just about anything else.

The Vagaries of Economic Opportunity -or-How Things Actually Are

Ladies. Pretty Lady is particularly addressing you today, because she more than suspects that what she is about to say goes counter to your upbringing, your deep intuition, and your sense of Right and Wrong. This is not entirely your fault; however, these erroneous intuitions must be addressed, because they are shooting all of us in the foot.

To wit, as Will Wilkinson explains, equality of opportunity based upon things like Merit, Discipline, Intelligence, and Being A Good Girl is an unobtainable pipe dream. The real determiner of opportunity is social networking:

First, what little I know of economic sociology tells me that access to economic opportunities is deeply network-relative.

Take two college grads of similar intelligence and discipline, Anne and Betty. Anne’s best friend has a brother who just started a small technology company. He figures Anne would be a phenomenal project manager, and it turns out to be true. The company has a huge IPO and Anne ends up a rich executive in what turns out to be a glamorous firm. Betty doesn’t happen to know anyone whose brother runs a promising start-up. Does she have anything approaching an chance equal to Anne’s to get something like Anne’s highly desirable position? Obviously not. But how could she.

Second, desirable positions aren’t just boxes out there waiting to be filled. They are created, sometimes by the people who occupy them. And they may depend on contingencies of technology.

Persons in positions of Economic Dominance--i.e., men--have known these facts for millennia. People like Cleopatra and Hillary Clinton also have an excellent grasp of them. It is those of us talented, intelligent, disciplined, moral persons, who disdain to make Unfair Advantage of our nepotistic connections and personal charms, who end up perennially screwed. Or else, and simultaneously, we end up screwing each other, innocently or not.

For Pretty Lady has been in many situations where her best friend had a brother, an ex-boyfriend, an employer, a dealer, a collector, or a grandmother, who was starting a small company, an art magazine, a gallery, or an art collection, and her best friend, for reasons best known to herself, diffidently chose not to mention Pretty Lady's name, talent, intelligence, or discipline in the presence of this person. This demure behavior may go under the heading of Ethics, Tact, Courtesy, Fairness, or any number of other things, but over the years Pretty Lady has come up with another blanket heading for it. That heading is "Being a Passive-Aggressive A**hole."

Because there are Perfect Utopias, and then there are Facts. In a Perfect Utopia, one would submit one's cover letter, résumé, portfolio, statement of intent, and grade point average to a neutral committee, and one would be issued a congenial, well-paid job and a gallery exhibition in return. In the Real World, however, this never, ever happens. One can expect total indifference to one's economic survival from the vast majority of neutral committees; when one's friends exhibit this same indifference, to the extent of wilfully closing all doors of opportunity in one's face, one's friends are not one's friends any longer. They are Decorative Luxuries.

This is not to say that one should recommend a friend for an opportunity for which they are clearly unqualified. These situations come under the heading of "Sticky, Awkward Problems", and should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. As ladies, our minds are constantly alive to the social horrors inherent in these situations, which is perhaps why we so frequently wish to avoid all possibility of ever getting into one, by drawing a firm boundary between Business and Friendship.

But we must be aware that when we draw that line, we are also in danger of condemning our friends, our daughters and ourselves to generations of economic dependency, subservience and obscurity. We are far better off employing our natural social and networking abilities as though our very survival, and not just our parties, depended upon them.

Postscript: It now occurs to Pretty Lady that Social Class may have a lot to do with this. Working class women have never had the luxury of pretending that they don't have to work for a living; thus they are much more forthright about the relationship between Connections and Solvency. Thus, tacky working class women openly stab other women in the back, while the decent ones over-promote their friends to the point of embarrassment. It is upper-middle-class women, largely, whose tactful diffidence threatens to turn our careers into so much wallpaper.

The Equal Opportunity Orgasm

Sigh.

Pretty Lady has tried, repeatedly, to pass the buck on this issue. But it seems, judging by the response to recent postings, that a large number of you have been ignoring her frequent, broad hints about reading Dan Savage. So it seems as though the responsibility falls upon her weary shoulders once again.

Gentlemen, I must ask you this. Is your wife or lady friend frequently out of sorts? Is she grumpy, querulous, impatient, nit-picky, and seemingly absent much of the time? Does she nag? If the answer is 'yes; all too often,' bear this in mind when I ask this next question.

Do you know what a clitoris is?

More than that, do you know how to find it, and what to do with it once you get there?

Gentlemen, these are not unrelated issues. Women, you say, are Mysterious. They go so far as to be Unfathomable at times. They are not direct; they do not say what they mean. They hint, they elide, they say that nothing is wrong. The gentlemen find this frustrating; they get annoyed. In return they call the ladies 'frigid.' They complain that women are not interested in sex; they become downcast, and sometimes seek external company.

Boys, This Is Not So. Listen closely. You may not like what I have to say; you may actively resist it at first. The female orgasm is not a mysterious impossibility; it may be elusive, but it is highly attainable. It also has nothing to do with that bastard Freud.

There is a profound difference, gentlemen, between Turning a Lady On and Getting a Lady Off. The former can be achieved in any number of ways; by playing lead guitar, by catching the winning pass, by backing her against a wall and biting the base of her throat. The latter can usually only be achieved in a single way; by direct, gentle, repetitive, soft, patient flicking sensations on her clitoris.

What drives us stark raving bonkers is when you continually accomplish the former and fall down upon the latter. There is absolutely nothing worse than when a darkly handsome, growly-voiced gentleman backs you confidently over a car hood and commences fingering your panties. He slings you over his shoulder, carries you up two flights of stairs and casts you wantonly upon the futon, unbuttoning your blouse with his teeth. He tongues your nipples and glides his hands all over your shuddering frame, caressing you knowingly in any number of impertinent places. He hammers a row of insistent kisses from your chin to your panty line, stripping away the last shred of fragile silk between himself and your tender skin. He teases, he probes, he overrides your last vestiges of common sense and claims you utterly.

Then he bangs you senseless, rolls over with a sigh of satisfaction and falls asleep.

Boys, I have heard many of you complain about the female tendency to threaten castration, when miffed over personal or political issues. This sort of scenario, I believe, is at the root of this tendency.

Sexual frustration makes women insane. It makes us want to simultaneously burst into tears, dismember a feather pillow and tear the gentleman's hair out. Since we love the gentleman, since we are Relational, we do not do so. We merely become distant, placatory, and passive-aggressive. Can you blame us?

Well, of course you can. This is why Pretty Lady has taken it upon herself to override Freud, and re-educate all the lovely gentlemen of her acquaintance.

The clitoris, dear gentleman, is a small button of exquisite sensitivity, located Front and Center. It can be located by fingering a lady gently, while intently observing her demeanor. The moment she sighs, relaxes, arches her back and rolls her eyes up in her head, you have found it.

Once there, patience is key. You have all the time in the world to lazily caress, explore, strip, probe, nibble, tongue, and roam freely over her sensate skin. A woman's entire body is an erogenous zone. She will lie quiescent and blissfully compliant as long as you are rubbing her back, stroking her hair, sucking her earlobes and twiddling her nipples. But you must come back to the clitoris, and back, and back, and back. All other is in vain, else.

When the moment has arrived to bring your lady to a decided climax, you must be serious, you must be solemn. Juvenile remarks, extraneous slurping noises, negative criticism and needlessly vulgar comments are Right Out. Just because your gonads kicked in when you were thirteen years old, does NOT mean that acting like a thirteen-year-old is sexy. A large part of a woman's erotic temperament is psychological, and you can wilt a sultry female mood quicker than an iris out of water, by reminding her of awful Ronnie Clements from the eighth grade. So cut it out.

No, you must be strong, you must be confident, you must be assertive. You must arrange the lady on her back and make languid, intent circles in the place you have cleverly discovered, while gazing deeply into her eyes. Deliberately, you plant a firm kiss on her navel, and work your way southward. You locate your target and make an experimental probe with your tongue. When she gasps, moans, wriggles convulsively and closes her eyes, continue performing the action which produced this result. Do not stop.

I cannot tell you how important it is that you do not stop.

If you have any experience with playing the bassoon, this will come excessively in handy. Flick. Trill. Tremolo. Maintain a steady, light rhythm. Do not worry about being boring. This is the one occasion when you may repeat yourself ad infinitum and the lady will never even think of complaining.

Flick. Flick. Flick. Do not stop. Do not stop until the lady has gone beyond gasping; until she has gone beyond the ability to verbalize. Do not stop until she has been thrashing from side to side in a frenzy for uncountable seconds, until her body suddenly goes rigid and perfectly still, until she heaves a gargantuan sigh of release and heavenly visitation, and great harmonic tremors go surging through her core. Do not stop even then; do not stop until she cries, brokenly, "Stop! Stop! Stop!"

Then you may slow down. You may broaden your range, you may become creative, you may become gently humorous once again. You may pet your lady.

You may, then, bang her as much as you please; from the front, side, back, against a wall, over a car hood, in any of a hundred tantric positions. She will not be placating you; she will not be concealing any smouldering resentment, she will not ever hint at castration. She may even have another orgasm or two.

But if you repeatedly, selfishly neglect to perform this simple set of actions, you will have no-one to blame but yourself when, full of remorse, you call your ex-lover drunkenly at two in the morning and beg for another chance. She will then declare, with cold indifference, "Why should I bother? YOU never did."