In Jennifer Senior's New York Magazine piece on recent research into the joylessness of parenting, Senior recalls a time when her beloved 2-year-old son dismantled a wooden garage then proceeded to chuck the wooden planks at her head, leading Senior to turn to booze. But does it make her happy?

Signs point to no! According to Senior, "a wide variety of academic research shows that parents are not happier than their childless peers, and in many cases are less so." Duh, right? While joyless parenting may constitute a newfangled field of research, that whole joyless motherhood thing has been racking up its share of anecdotal evidence for quite some time. In the Atlantic, Sady Doyle recounts 60 years of its horrors: Simone de Beauvoir's observation that "the child is merely harassing and bothersome"; Adrienne Rich's assertion that children cause "the most exquisite suffering"; Mary McCarthy's fictional mother feeling that, "to her shame, [the baby] was a piece of hospital property that had been dumped on her and abandoned—they would never come to take him away."

Feeling soulless yet? What this edition of Sexist Beatdown needs is a couple of fancy-free non-parents who have not yet been trampled by the misery of child-rearing! So join Sady of Tiger Beatdown and I as we discuss the Stockholm syndrome of baby-making, the luxuries of upper-class depression, and the quiet despair we are told we will forever regret not having!

SADY: Hello, fellow non-parent! Enjoying your non-parental non-miserable lifestyle yet? Because I sure am!

AMANDA: God, I am too. I plan on enjoying it until I have children too late in life, at which point memories of my blissful childless years will only contribute to my ultimate unhappiness.

SADY: If only we were all having children immediately after leaving our parents' homes! Surely this would alleviate our misery. Also, it would help if we were not so rich and successful. This makes it harder for us, unlike the lower classes and immigrants, who simply take these bodily matters of procreation in stride. POOR PEOPLE: Not at all subject to undue stress in the matter of having kids!

AMANDA: Indeed. It is so very taxing to have the time to dote over our own happiness.

SADY: The thing is, I don't think that the news that raising children can be stressful IS NEWS. Like 74% of second-wave feminists were talking about how grueling it is to raise children, and/or to have that as your primary responsibility.

AMANDA: Haha. And now that it's shared, people are suddenly all like, "Should we even be doing this?"

SADY: Right? Like, "wow. It turns out this is HARD. Who knew?

AMANDA: "Who" indeed! I do find these studies of happiness interesting, but I find it strange that people are looking for some sort of definitive answer from them: Like, Everyone procreate! Or, Condoms!

SADY: Right. I mean: "Happiness Studies," in and of itself, which I hear is actually a growing field, is strange. We can measure what makes people happy or unhappy, but ultimately I guess I'm with Senior on this point: Are we questioning what role "happiness" plays in our life choices? I mean, I have recently come to feel that I might not want kids, but this has to do with the fact that I am (a) poor, and (b) high-strung. I can't get a dog without Googling care instructions obsessively and researching what sort of terrible ailments might wind up killing it. But was "happiness" what people had children for, ever, anyway? Maybe the issue isn't that "parenting has changed"—because it seems to have changed most fundamentally in terms of who has to do it—but that we EXPECT "happiness" from popping one out in a way we didn't use to.

AMANDA: Right. I think the happiness part is some new-agey conception of raising children. It's important to remember that joy aside, the fact is that now a lot of people get to choose whether they have children or not, and if so, when. And so it becomes much more of a quality-of-life question than a biological-necessity one. And so I think it's fair to expect that you do the thing that you think will make you the happiest. But there's also a lot of fear-mongering about that, because of that whole ovary-loss thing. So people are like, "If you don't have kids now, you will never be happy and you'll regret it for the rest of your life!" And people on the other end are like, "Once you pop it out, there's no turning back! Life-ruiner!" When, actually, I bet that a lot of people could find meaningful, happy lives doing either of those things.

SADY: Yeah. I mean, women are so, so frequently scared out of, like, LIVING, or doing anything other than having children ASAP, because they're told that their fertility is evaporating and they'll be unhappy forever if they don't have babies. And I think it's worth noting that a ton of the parents interviewed, who were speaking most directly about being unhappy and frustrated, were women. Men in that article were mostly "experts," even if they were also fathers.

AMANDA: Right, I think there is some stat in there that women are on the whole less happy. Which, you know, probably has something to do with that whole "shared parenting" thing not being completely shared, and the general added expectations placed on mothers. One of my favorite parts of the story was the suggestion that you "always regret the things you didn't do, not the things you did do." Like, why does the "thing I do" have to be having babies? There are plenty of things I won't be doing if I end up having kids.

SADY: Haha, yeah. "I will never regret not having children, when I die because my child threw boards at me and one of them had a nail in it and it punctured my skull and killed me." But I'm also wondering if being told that children are the KEY TO HAPPINESS (if you are a woman) has to do with the disappointment (among women) that children don't auto-fulfill you? I mean, Simone de Beauvoir talked about this. Her whole deal was that women are told having children will fulfill them, and then it doesn't, and then they hate their children. Her solution: Make something else in your life more important than getting pregnant?

AMANDA: But there's nothing more important than hating your kids! If you never do that, you will regret it for the rest of your life!

SADY: It's true. You'll never regret hating your kids as much as you'll regret not hating them. It is fun to think about fathers in all this, though. I mean, I like to imagine they're at least MARGINALLY more involved in dealing with the poop and the breaking things and the eighteen years of college prep these kids are all being put through now.

AMANDA: Right. The story did mention that the most unhappy parents of all were those who were the non-custodial parent (mostly fathers). So having a kid and not raising it? Depressed for life. Having a kid and raising it too much? Also depressed—single parents and moms in general were less happy. Solution: Move to Norway?

SADY: Right. I, predictably, DID enjoy the part where they were all like, "maybe if we had state-sponsored child care?" "Also, longer maternity leave helps?" Like: All of these things that feminists are advocating FOR WOMEN would actually make parents' lives easier, in the long run. OR, you could just live a life of heedless wanton non-impregnated self-satisfaction. Until you die, and there is no-one who will visit you at the nursing home. Except for that one robot seal thing.

AMANDA: Right. I mean, is that the whole point of it? That someone will be there to care when I die? That seems to be the last-ditch explanation when I press people on why this is necessary. I'm guessing it's more like a Stockholm syndrome thing.

SADY: Yeah. Probably. We love our tiny oppressors!

AMANDA: The baby captors stole our happiness! Join us!

Photo via Smithsonian Institution

* Human centipede: It's a thing. A horrible, horrible thing.

* "Pretty women pose health risks." Burn them. Buuuurn them! Wait, actually, they just stress out heterosexual guys who are trying to finish a really important game of Sudoku.

* Brown University is being sued by a former student who claims he wasn't afforded a proper investigation after being accused of rape. SAFER Campus on why schools must strictly adhere to their own sexual assault policies, for the benefit of both victim and accused:

I have no idea why in this particular case Brown decided to disregard their procedure (the article suggests perhaps because the complainant’s father was a Brown alum and donor) but they did a serious disservice to all their students in doing so. While we usually focus on the rights of the survivor, it’s also imperative to uphold the rights of the accused, both because it’s absolutely important to protect individual students and because when you disregard the rights of the accused to add fuel to the fire of those who want to paint campus rape hearings as unfair witch hunts.

* On Femocracy: Why the media gets rape wrong—legal concerns, boys clubs, and a lack of training.

* Scarleteen launches a series for queer teens of color.

* On Tiger Beatdown, Sady Doyle conducts a Mother's Day chat with her mom, who is a super awesome feminist lady who was put on a "death list" by the Klan:

SADY: . . . OK: Can you tell me some awesome Journalism Stories, please? Because I always tell people that you home-schooled me as a teen (WHICH YOU DID) and now you are home-J-schooling me as an adult. But mostly I just like the stories! So let us revisit a time in the swinging ’70s, when the smooth sounds of folk-rock were everywhere, and you were listening to a LOT OF STEVIE NICKS and also a journalist. Go!

KAREN: Mississippi was still a mess. And every day felt important when you were a liberal white journalist in rural Mississippi. The Klan began a small resurgence about the time that Mississippi began to reinstitute compulsory education. (When the federal government ordered the schools integrated, Mississippi revoked all mandatory education laws so the white kids wouldn’t “have” to go to school with black children. This was getting fixed when I was there.) The Klan members wanted to be interviewed with their hoods on, and I refused to do so. They supposedly put me on a “death list,” but they did take off their hoods. It turned out they were all just factory workers that no one knew. And then the Klan treasurer stole all their money, and the Klan dissolved.

* Writing in the Awl's Sex Offender week series, Sady Doyle goes long on Rivers Cuomo and why he (and his cute glasses) have messed you up "forever."

* In an attempt to disprove the allegation that teabaggers employed racial slurs against black members of Congress at a rally, Andrew Beibart has agreed to donate $100,000 to the United Negro College Fund if anyone can produce "video and audio evidence that this occurred." Somehow, none of the accused racists attending this rally have stepped forward to donate a bunch of money to this organization. Hmm!

* Is Dita Von Teese a feminist? The answer is complicated, according to this interview with the burlesque performer:

Hmmm. Well, it’s a question that’s posed to me quite often and it’s frustrating, because if you look at the definition of what it means to be a feminist, it’s to have the same rights as a man. If someone tells me that I cannot create, produce, direct these shows and star in them, that that should be for a man should do, then that doesn’t really jive with feminist ideals. It’s kind of an argument I hate even addressing because I think it’s just a stupid thing to ask. I’m sorry, but you know, I get asked it all the time! I’m, like, how can I be anti-feminist if I’m pro-woman and all my fans are women, so if you say it’s anti-feminist and you come to my show, or you come to one of my book signings, and it’s 80 percent women, how do you explain that means being an anti-feminist? A lot of women look to me as someone who is embracing her sexual power and confidence and trying to explain you don’t have to fit into the media’s mainstream image of “sexy.” I feel like the only time someone should call me “anti-feminist” is if they don’t understand what I do and who my fans are and what I’m standing up for. . . It’s not a word I don’t really like to address, you know? It’s not even that I want to call myself that, I just sort of go, “Oooooh!” It’s an eyeballer roller. (Laughs) You know what I mean? It’s like, oh man, it’s a weird question. The word “feminist” is so broad.

* Melissa McEwan tells Dr. Drew to shut up.

* Kate Harding takes down Peter Beinart's campaign to put a "mom" on the Supreme Court, in order to provide a role model for girls who want to snag one of the unlikeliest positions in American government, and also make babies. First point: There's already a mom on the Supreme Court!

Photo via State Library and Archives of Florida

In this week's YouTube video chat, Dr. Laura Schlessinger addresses an unnatural new development of modern life: stay-at-home dads. What are the possible psychological effects of this strange permutation of the traditional child-rearing arrangement? A listener writes in Thinking of the Children:

If a mom works, and the dad stays home with the children, does this have any psychological effect on the kids, with respect to their relationships later in life? You talk a lot about stay-at-home-moms, but I don't recall hearing much about what happens when the roles are reversed. Is it better for boys if the dad stays home or does it matter?

Dr. Laura, for her part, is far more concerned with Thinking Of the Wives:

This is one which gets very sensitive, because in general—that means there are exceptions everywhere, OK—when the moms are working, and the dads are at home, the moms, the women, the wives, tend to change their feelings somewhat about their husbands. They tend not to see them as the heroes. The warrior. The man. The caretaker. The provider. The protector. And those feelings are really very significant. And I have found over the years that there often is more marital strife when the roles are reserved. Whether you're a feminist or not, whether you like it or not, them's just the facts.

You see, when a woman wanders outside her natural role as child-rearer and housekeeper and enters into the dangerous world of the male warrior heroes, she's liable to start getting some Ideas. Ideas like, "Despite what I've been told, my feeble female brain can perform tasks outside of raising babies." Ideas like, "This is the 'work' my husband has been self-importantly occupying himself with for all these years? All these people do is dick around and watch YouTube videos." Ideas like, "Now that I'm getting paid for all the work I do, perhaps I shouldn't have settled for that loveless marriage after all."

But never fear: As long as women agree to leave the home without applying their critical thinking skills, the kids will be all right:

Now: it often works very well. And when it works very well—OK, when it works very well it's good for the kids, when it doesn't work very well, it's not good for the kids. The point is not, are the rolls reversed and is that good for the children? The point is, are the parents RHHHHGGG about it? Is dad being treated with less respect? Is mom coming home sort of bitter that she's not with the kids, and feeling like since she earns the money, she's the boss? If there is this kind of negativity and dissention, that hurts the kids.

In other words, are you still treating mom like a woman (with less respect), and dad like a man (the boss)? You're good to go. But once mom starts to get empowered by her new position—or dad starts feeling emasculated—it's back to the kitchen with her.

The holiday season is upon us, which means that you are gradually sinking into a pit of hopeless despair, if you are a woman. According to the Daily Mail's steady holiday diet of personal essays detailing women's lack of holiday cheer, Christmas time can bring only embarrassment and ruin upon society's females. (To men and children, Christmas time brings presents, as is appropriate).

Perhaps I am too young, and have not yet been broken by all the unreasonable expectations heaped upon women during the holidays, but—Christmas is not that bad, seriously. It can be a little bit of a pain in the ass, it doesn't always deliver the warmth and happiness it promises, but it's certainly not cause for debilitating loneliness or the haunting feelings of inadequacy. Is it possible we're overthinking this, ladies?

POSSIBLE VARIATIONS ON FEMALE HOLIDAY SADNESS:

SAD HOLIDAY FEMALE #1: The aging single woman with 17 cats.

Feel her pain: Liz Jones sees major holidays as a reflection of her worth as a woman. Around Christmas time, even television newscasts and grocery store lines can send Jones into a sobbing fit. "Everywhere you look, you are reminded you are a pariah, that you have failed to even dampen life's litmus test of happiness," writes Jones, who is single with 17 cats. "Everywhere you look at this time of year, those of us who live alone are deemed wanting. The inevitable footage on the TV news of traffic jams on the motorways makes me wail: 'Why is no one driving to see me, laden with parcels and food hampers?'"

Get happy: Liz Jones is sad, and you are too! Jones takes comfort in the fact that at least women who are married with children despise Christmas, as well. "I have 17 cats, all of whom worship at the altar of St Michael, my sheepdog. There will be sheep nestled like something from a nativity play, horses breathing steam with icicles in their manes," Jones writes about her Christmas plans out in the countryside. "And lonely as I may be, the thought of doing just that will, I'm sure, make many women, who are desperately trying to make everything perfect for a family who remain resolutely ungrateful, turn an appropriately festive shade of red and green."

Listen, big props to anyone who will admit to owning 17 cats in a major newspaper, but don't think you're living out every woman's unrequited fantasy just because you're herding cats instead of kids. There are some women in the world who do not descend into a pattern of self-loathing each December, and dragging them down to your level will not make you any happier. Just be content that being the proud owner of 17 cats is what you want to do with your life.

—

SAD HOLIDAY FEMALE #2: (Practically) married with children.

Feel her pain: Alexandra Shulman—career woman, mother, girlfriend, Christmas tree decorator—resents Christmas because it tests all of her feminine wiles. "Christmas wouldn't exist if it weren't for womankind. It's modern women's keenness to pressurise ourselves into exhausting over-achievement that make possible the festive season as we know it," Shulman writes. "Perfect gifts, imaginative wrapping, tasteful trees, beautiful decorations, impeccable food, happy families, a glamorous outfit and thoughtfully annotated Christmas cards are just a few of the goals women set out to achieve."

You know, whenever I list out the goals of women, as a gender, "imaginative wrapping" never seems to make it into the top 10. Perhaps some women have aspirations beyond holiday homemaking? Why, yes they do! Having careers, for example! And perhaps this confusing set of goals explains why they are so fucking sad at Christmas!

"The point is that many of the demands that women feel compelled to fulfil are placed on us by ourselves," Shulman wries. "The reality is that as more of us are balancing the schizophrenic lives of career women and carers, wage slaves and employers, that list has grown accordingly. We may well be able to have it all, but increasingly the question is becoming: can we actually do it all?"

Get happy: This has always struck me as an unconvincing argument for the utter unhappiness of all women: The problem is that we women just love to do everything, but there aren't enough hours in the day to fit in all of the things we love to do. I don't see having an over-interesting career and a too-satisfying home life as a very compelling problem, actually. How about this for a problem: Women don't love to do everything, and we wish our significant others and children would pick up some of our imaginative wrapping duties so we could go to work in the month of December?

—

SAD HOLIDAY FEMALE #3: The nervous wreck.

Feel her pain: This year, Janet Street-Porter files a story about how a tangled mess of Christmas tree "fairy lights"—and the holiday's other nuisances—always manage to leave her sobbing, "drunk, and binge-eating." "Fairy lights as we know them were invented by a bloke (obviously) in the 20th century at around the same time as women started to claim a few rights beyond the vote and the right to be the person who always did the washing-up and the shopping," Street-Porter writes. "The minute we started to demand equal pay and better jobs, they invented fairy lights, the one thing that can reduce any highly intelligent woman normally capable of multi-tasking at an advanced level, to a crying, snivelling wreck."

Get happy: Porter's essay falls under the Bridget Jones tradition of women making self-deprecating British humor out of what utter messes they are. Street-Porter, like all these other women writing for the Daily Mail, is exaggerating her unhappiness for laughs, obviously, and I get that. But, hey! Wouldn't it be funny if just one Christmas, one of these women commissioned to write a hilarious essay about how they are big, awful failures at being women, instead found, like, a new joke? Wouldn't it be great if one of these women managed to write a piece that didn't revolve around the fact that Christmas time converts all women into drunk, depressed, lonely, crying, helpless, overeating, thankless cat ladies? No? Okay, fine. Jesus Christ.

—

SAD HOLIDAY FEMALE #4: The perpetually sad woman.

Feel her pain: Liz Jones, in her second story about why she hates Christmas so much, complains that it is the expectation that women be happy around Christmas that makes her so unhappy around Christmas. "But most of all at this time of year I hate the pressure to have a good time, to be all cheerful and festive," she writes. "'What are you doing on the Big Day?' people keep asking me, throwing my singleton status into sharp relief. 'What am I, 12 years old?' I want to bark."

Get happy: I don't think being happy is an aspect of the Liz Jones experience.

—

SAD HOLIDAY FEMALE #5: Married to Toby Young.

Feel her pain: Toby Young loves Christmas. He celebrates the holiday by uncorking a bottle of Champagne, inviting over 20 of his closest family members, then sitting back as his wife serves up "roast turkey, plenty of stuffing, roast potatoes, parsnips, Brussels sprouts and lashings of gravy . . . Christmas pudding with brandy butter, more champagne, then an orgy of cracker-pulling." Then, Toby Young receives presents.

Toby Young's wife hates Christmas, obviously. "The reality is that he appears from goodness knows where just as the doorbell rings for the first time, chirpily inquiring whether there is anything he can do," Caroline Young files in her retort to Toby's Christmas cheer. "Like most households in Britain, it is down to me, the wife, to do the work involved with creating Christmas . . . I only have to buy the presents, wrap the presents, write and post the cards, decorate the house, do the food shopping, roast the turkey, prepare four different vegetables, make the bread sauce, the vegetarian gravy, the meat gravy, two stuffings, the cranberry sauce, the Christmas pudding—and put a partridge in a pear tree."

Get happy: I'd like to say that airing your grievances against your husband in the newspaper might help you get happy this Christmas, but I'm betting that Toby Young put Caroline up to participating in this absurdly gendered column in the Daily Mail, as well. Because it's not like Caroline already has enough to do this Christmas! I'm not sure what Caroline can do to pull this one out, except maybe marry a man who doesn't delight in watching as your relationship unfolds along the lines of a bad situational comedy?

Photo via George Eastman House, Flickr Commons

No. NO Not again. Not another "Mr Mom" reference!

Maybe this shit could fly in 1983. I wouldn't know, because at that point, my own Mr. Mom and my regular female Mom hadn't gotten together to shared-parent me yet. But at this point, New York Times—-stop. JUST STOP.

You've informed us that despite the "Mr. Mom" idea you have helped to propagate, "Dads" still outnumber Mr. Moms ("Mr. Mom Aside, Dads at Work Are Still the Norm").

You've asked the eternal question: "But Can Mr. Mom Tie a Ponytail?"

You've even called the guy who wrote in to debunk the idea that only women can be proper parents a "Mr. Mom" ("Mr. Mom Fights Back")! I can't believe you did that, you fucking jerks!

Thankfully, we already have a suitable replacement word for "Mr. Mom." It's called "Dad."

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"I heard a child ask her, 'What's the difference between icing and off-sides,'" reveals one. "She didn't know."