Having recently read both Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique and Josh Hawley’s Manhood I’m now convinced I must find a way to write my own sociological blockbuster. I’d start like this, the way Hawley and Friedan do:
“Everywhere I go, in every town and city and village, people come up to me and say [my thesis].”
It’s so persuasive! Eric, 31, said my thesis. Janeane, 28, a petite brunette, said my thesis. My thesis! It’s singing from every radio and every stadium stage and every TikTok, like an earworm, like “Flowers” or “I Did Something Bad.” Dale Carnegie said, “There is no sweeter sound to one's ear than the sound of one’s own name.” Sweeter still to the ear? The sound of one’s own thesis.
Some examples. Everywhere Josh Hawley went in the 2010s, every town and village and city, high and low, men came up to him and said, “I lack purpose.” (Hawley’s book has his remedy: Own libs.)
Everywhere Friedan went in the 1950s, women came up to her and said, “I’m obscurely dissatisfied.” (Friedan’s remedy: Smash patriarchy.)
Both Hawley and Friedan—I promise, the yoking is incidental, one’s a psycho and the other a feminist godhead, I know that—also cite spongy statistics about mood disorders among their target population, including rates of (self-reported) depression and rates of death by suicide. True to their genre, they use these numbers to bolster [their theses] and propose [their remedies].
But can you really derive any widespread phenomenon from fluctuations in suicide and depression statistics? Does too much porn cause existential sorrows (Hawley)—or too much floor-waxing (Friedan)? Too little vitamin C, too much unemployment, too few social services, too many guns, not enough church, not enough affordable housing?
Can we at least imagine a world where a rise in self-reported low moods suggests something good, like emotional openness?
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