Happy to be women today in the UK

[mrsmuddlepies]

I posted about this on the Chat forum but no one responded and I think it is a significant piece of research.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37600771
The level of satisfaction with being a woman in the UK today is higher than it has ever been, a huge increase on that of 50 years ago and much higher than that of male satisfaction with being men today.
A cause for celebration?

"Do away with the whole idea of masculine and feminine all together"

Works for me.

Is the contention that Feminazis are in charge of the health service and diagnostic guidelines, pear? As I'm not sure that is the case.

Yy scallops. It's not surprising happiness has increased with those environmental factors. I also think other things like minimum wage will have improved things for both men and women but as this is comparing women now with women then, IIRC, it will come into play.

Does anyone else think that these surveys were also very middle-class? Especially in 1947. Working class women have always worked.

scallops great post

Minimum wage is a really good one YonicProbe (love your nn).

It is increasingly dangerous to minimise the needs of one sex/ gender against the needs of the other group. I am aware that now in the UK there is a real preference for baby girls as opposed to baby boys (not the case obviously worl wide. A colleague now pregnant with her first baby admitted she wanted a daughter more than a baby. She absolutely had no desire to parent a boy. There was a thread on here recently where a mother to be was considering a later abortion because she had just found out she was pregnant with a boy.
To promote one sex over another is dangerous and there are posters on this thread who are doing just that. I think it would be sad to see sex selective abortions beginning to happen in the West ( as you get in India and China with baby girls.) because there is so much negativity promoted about men and boys.

"Finally it is totally offensive to refer to female suicide attempts as "a cry for help". Women are less likely to use violent means to attempt suicide, so chances of it being unsuccessful are higher. It's awful to insinuate that a lower success rate means these women were somehow not serious in their attempt"

This.
I am sick of everything turning into a competition of who kills themself the most, with regular women who fail in their attempts left at the bottom of the pile.

Buffy

Thanks for responding.

Yes - there does seem to be an obsession with oppression olympics amongst young people these days. "think you have it bad as a woman - try being a man !" is pretty much it in a nutshell. I find this depressing as it's there is constant noise of competing statistics and anecdotes put out that the other side will immediately dispute.

Saying that society needs to be changed, and that behaviour needs to be egressively (see what i did there) modelled and controlled from a young age - according to some view of what society "should be like" is a hugely controversial view. Why should someone be taught to be emotionally expressive ? Why is not being emotionally expressive bad ? Violence and aggression are as natural or as unnatural as any other human behaviour ?

Politically it's unlikely that this level of societal intervention is going to go down well especially with the apparent rise of the new right in the US (I don't know what Im talking about really there so don't expend too much brain power debunking the existence of a "new right" in the US - it might just be propaganda). But it's a very leftist view of things, so I can see why it's annoying to others.

"To promote one sex over another is dangerous and there are posters on this thread who are doing just that. "

No, there aren't.

HTH.

"A colleague now pregnant with her first baby admitted she wanted a daughter more than a baby."

And my great aunt, mother of three boys and a girl, said throughout her life that she preferred boys to girls. To her young female relatives, daughters, grand daughters etc.

Anecdote is not data.

Things have got worse for men in some ways. But those aren't caused by improvements in women's rights. It's not a zero sum game, and it's not the job of feminists to resolve those issues.

Buffy

You're right, you did not say aggressively controlled. But controlled is what I took you to mean by "interrupting the process of socialisation". Perhaps I got that wrong ?

Re the rest of your last post, I'm not aware of anyone defending a position where you cannot take part in your field of interest because "random" men want to perv over you and shag you all the time and exploit you in other ways ? Could i ask you for a quote where anyone has ever said this ? Stating that there are imagined men who do hold this view is silly, if you maybe have a specific one in mind. Perhaps you feel that is the position some people have which is fair enough. Perhaps I'm just not understanding why you feel you cannot take part in your field. I haven't ever met a man who expresses the opinion that women can't be engineers/whatever because they should be looking after the house. They are far more likely to express the opinion that women receive favourable treatment e.g. quotas and the like - but I see that people are generally good at perceiving imagined prejudice against themselves.

Any political movement which starts out with the premise that society is broken and that the way we need to fix it is by encouraging a set of behaviours said political movement sees as desirable, particularly when those behaviours apply exclusively to the behaviour of members of one sex but are identified by the other, I mean, it is bound to be regarded as controversial. And as soon as it makes any progress it will be blamed for causing other problems. Which I think is what the OP is trying to do.

It's good that adult women are happier. There has been massive progress for women over the last 100 years and I agree that it should be celebrated.
On a lower note there was a survey recently that showed teenage girls are less happy than they used to be. I worry that we are letting them down .

I agree that high suicide rates for men are not linked to the happiness of women. It's not a seesaw with women up and men down.

It's just a time-bound version of "women elsewhere have it harder, you know, why don't you feminists ever stop whinging?", really isn't it? "Women elsewhen had it harder..."

Just as the relationship board is about relationships that are going wrong, and doesn't ever feature people wanking on about how happy they are, so the feminism board is more about discussion of things that still aren't right. It's entirely natural, because it's quite hard to to continually go, "Yay! I can vote!", or "Hurrah! Still so pleased I can take out a credit agreement in my own name", or "Woot! Marital rape's illegal!". They're all great achievements, and yes we have come a long way, but political movements look forward, not back. And the board would be godawfully dull.

Buffy

I didn't understand this bit :

Why does a random male's desire to regard me as a sexual object that he can subjugate and exploit trump this?

But is there something else you think I don't understand ? I'm not playing any game although I gather you get a number of trolls in this section. Tell me to foff, I'm a man and this is the feminist section. I'm aware of a growing "feminism has gone too far" reaction at the moment, but I get that from the guardian comments section and the like, although my mother in law recently said "I feel so sorry for men these days". Anyway, that's what initially made me read these threads, but I'm not pretending to be qualified to speak about it or anything.

So you don't actually want to talk about celebrating women's progress at all then, mrsmuddlepies.

Imagine my surprise.

You want us to shut up about women's issues because we have it better than we had it 70 years ago and now focus our attention on men's issues. The only person promoting one sex over another is you.

Again, I ask, what are men doing about the issues you've highlighted?

I don't want anyone to 'shut up'. Your words not mine! I think it is you that is trying to 'shut people up'.
Discussion about issues to do with women today being happy to be female rather than male, seemed like a good topic. You, however, refer to 'shutting up' posters. You appear to be trying hard to control my views and opinions. To be so controlling on a discussion forum seems mighty unfair of you. Perhaps you need to think carefully about the purpose of these discussion boards?