Girls are More Desirable, Less Happy

<p>Mickey Kaus linked to <a href="http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2364183/posts">this one</a>:</p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; line-height: normal; "><p>Gender disappointment is not an official psychiatric diagnosis. It’s an Internet-era label, an appellation coined by women who are bitterly unhappy about their baby’s gender and who can’t get over it, even after their child is born. It’s also a subculture, or, as Lewis says, a club. There are books on GD (Altered Dreams: Living With Gender Disappointment), herbal tonics and tablets intended to influence a child’s sex, and a handful of fertility specialists who have no qualms about taking all the guesswork out of baby making. “Why not?” asks Jeffery Steinberg, MD, an Encino, California–based reproductive endocrinologist who specializes in the use of in vitro fertilization for sex selection. “We’re not producing monsters; we’re producing healthy babies.”</p> <p>Much of the talk on the GD message boards revolves around sex selection methods, ranging from various folk remedies to sperm-sorting and spinning methods (MicroSort, Ericsson) to the holy grail: in vitro fertilization with preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), a technique in which a doctor determines the gender of the embryos and transfers only those that fit the parents’ request. The most popular at-home option is the Shettles method, named after the doctor who developed it and involving the exquisite timing of intercourse relative to ovulation. You’ll also see lots of homegrown recipes for conceiving daughters that turn sex into a kind of kinky mad-science experiment: “Have your [partner] give you a ‘sample.’ Catch it in a cup or condom. Add warm lime. Do not warm lime in microwave—warm in hot sink. Then layer egg white (with a pH of 9 to 9.9) on top. You then incubate it for an hour…and insert it into yourself with medical syringe. Lay with hips raised.”</p> <p>Some women go as far as to label their own boys as “failed sways” or “Shettles Opposites.” The mother of little Caleb, writing on In-Gender, wants it known that her apple-cheeked son is “living as a MicroSort statistic”: He is the unexpected result of a 92.9 percent girl sort probability that doctors gave her. The mom of three-year-old Isaac and two-year-old Isaiah, who’s expecting another boy on December 15, has put a frowny-face icon next to her due date. “I hate my life,” she writes. “My family is complete in reality but not in my heart.” She is considering giving all three of her boys up for adoption: “I want to give them to someone who can actually love them.”</p> <p>It’s easy to dismiss the GD crowd as a bunch of heartless nutcakes. Yet it’s undeniable that a kind of free-floating girl lust has entered the public consciousness.</p> <p>I experienced it myself several years ago. I loved having a boy. But each time I visited my sister, I found myself drifting through my nieces’ rooms, mooning over the high-perched canopy beds and dollhouses and Lip Smackers lined up like little toy soldiers: Watermelon, Grape Crush, Berry Peach.</p> <p>On impulse, I bought my three-year-old son an expensive Swedish dollhouse, so clean-lined and modern that it could pass for unisex. He removed the furniture, turned it on its side, and found a way of connecting the bed to the armoire and the armoire to the sideboard. “Look, Mom,” he said. “A train.”</p> <p>When I got pregnant for the second time, I really thought I’d be fine with another boy. I tried to picture two little imps playing on the beach in matching Vilbrequin swim trunks. When the doctor’s office called with the results of my amniocentesis, I was drinking root beer and eating takeout pad thai. “It’s a girl,” they said, and I put down my soda with a thud; I went to Whole Foods and stocked up on fresh veggies, brown rice, and an organic probiotic drink called Berry Green. I felt a sudden surge of tender protectiveness. I felt electrified. It turns out I wasn’t alone in fervently desiring a girl: Seventyone percent of American families who use MicroSort—which is still in clinical trials—want a daughter. The Ericsson method that Lewis used is actually more effective for selecting a boy: about 80 percent, compared with only 74 percent for a girl. But the ratio of girl-to-boy requests is as high as two to one at licensed clinics. “The era of wanting a first-born male is gone, not to return,” founder Ronald Ericsson, MD, has said.</p> <p>What’s behind the modern-day girl fetish? One explanation: Women envision a brighter future for their daughters than they do for their sons. Boys are practically the underdogs these days, having fallen behind girls on nearly every measure of academic achievement, from college attendance to high school graduation rates. According to books such as The War Against Boys and Boys Adrift, they are in danger of becoming, as Christina Hoff Sommers has written, “tomorrow’s second sex.”</p> <p>“The way society is now—I feel there’s a preference for girls,” says Linda Heithaus, a marine biologist from Hollywood, Florida, who has two sons and is contemplating doing IVF/PGD in the hope of getting a girl. “They can do everything a boy can do, plus you can dress them up. It’s almost like, to fit in, you need to have one.” Girls, in other words, are boys plus. They can play sports and have careers, and you can dress them in pink and take them to tea at the American Girl café. What’s not to like?</p></span><p><span style="font-family: Times, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: medium; line-height: normal; ">Others link the yearning to women’s belief that they’ll have a richer lifelong relationship with a daughter than a son. “Families are raised differently these days,” says Kathleen Rein, a New York psychiatrist who specializes in postpartum disorders. “It’s much more isolating to be a mother. You don’t have your mom and grandmother next door. Women want girls because they want that close female bond they’re not getting in other parts of their life.”</span> </p></blockquote> <p>This is odd because studies show that women are becoming less happy than men:</p> <blockquote><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px; "></span></p><p>This intriguing — if unsettling — finding is part of a larger story: there appears to be a growing happiness gap between men and women.</p> <p>Two new research papers, using very different methods, have both come to this conclusion. <a href="http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/betseys/index.asp?referrer=http%3A//www.google.com/search%3Fclient%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den%26q%3Dbetsey+stevenson%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8" title="Betsey Stevenson" style="color: #004276; text-decoration: underline; ">Betsey Stevenson</a> and <a href="http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/jwolfers/index.shtml" title="Justin Wolfers" style="color: #004276; text-decoration: underline; ">Justin Wolfers</a>, economists at the <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_pennsylvania/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about University of Pennsylvania" style="color: #004276; text-decoration: underline; ">University of Pennsylvania</a> (and a couple), have looked at the traditional happiness data, in which people are simply asked how satisfied they are with their overall lives. In the early 1970s, women reported being slightly happier than men. Today, the two have <a href="http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/betseys/papers/Paradox%20of%20declining%20female%20happiness.pdf" title="switched places" style="color: #004276; text-decoration: underline; ">switched places</a>.</p> <p>Mr. Krueger, analyzing time-use studies over the last four decades, <a href="http://www3.brookings.edu/es/commentary/journals/bpea_macro/forum/200709Krueger.pdf" title="findings" style="color: #004276; text-decoration: underline; ">has found</a> an even starker pattern. Since the 1960s, men have gradually cut back on activities they find unpleasant. They now work less and relax more.</p> <p>Over the same span, women have replaced housework with paid work — and, as a result, are spending almost as much time doing things they don’t enjoy as in the past. Forty years ago, a typical woman spent about 23 hours a week in an activity considered unpleasant, or 40 more minutes than a typical man. Today, with men working less, the gap is 90 minutes.</p> <p>These trends are reminiscent of the idea of “<a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE2DA1E3AF936A15755C0A96F948260" title="the second shift" style="color: #004276; text-decoration: underline; ">the second shift</a>,” the name of a 1989 book by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild, arguing that modern women effectively had to hold down two jobs. The first shift was at the office, and the second at home.</p> <p>But researchers who have looked at time-use data say the second-shift theory misses an important detail. Women are not actually working more than they were 30 or 40 years ago. They are instead doing different kinds of work. They’re spending more time on paid work and less on cleaning and cooking.</p> <p>What has changed — and what seems to be the most likely explanation for the happiness trends — is that women now have a much longer to-do list than they once did (including helping their aging parents). They can’t possibly get it all done, and many end up feeling as if they are somehow falling short.</p> <p>Mr. Krueger’s data, for instance, shows that the average time devoted to dusting has fallen significantly in recent decades. There haven’t been any dust-related technological breakthroughs, so houses are probably just dirtier than they used to be. I imagine that the new American dustiness affects women’s happiness more than men’s.</p><p></p></blockquote> <p>Or maybe it's not odd. Parents keep wanting the less happy gender. The things that make parents want children of one gender don't make that gender happier.</p>