The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [0]
WHY WHAT WE THINK IS RIGHT IS WRONG
A History of What Really Makes Us Happy
JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT
To my husband, John;
our son, Max;
and our daughter, Jessie Leo.
In happiness I could not have predicted.
Contents
Get Happy: Myths of the Modern Mind
Wisdom
1 Know Yourself
2 Control Your Desires
3 Take What’s Yours
4 Remember Death
Drugs
5 What Makes a Good Drug Bad
6 Cocaine and Opium
7 Religion and Revelation
8 Drugs Today: Music and Solace
Money
9 Happily Ever After
10 Shopping in Abundance
11 What Money Stole
12 How We Buy Back What Money Stole
Bodies
13 Eating
14 Exercise
15 Sex
16 Treatments
Celebration
17 Greek Festival
18 Medieval Carnival
19 Today’s News and Vigils
20 Weddings, Sports, Pop Culture, and Parades
Conclusion: The Triumph of Experience
Acknowledgments
Notes
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Get Happy
Myths of the Modern Mind
In the four hundred years from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, women wore corsets to shape their figures. At first the ideal was to have a flat-front, cylindrical shape; later the ideal was a gentle hourglass, big at the breasts and hips, and smoothly slanting in toward a small waist. Corsets also helped support the heavy dresses that women wore in this period, which often included bustles at the hips and rear end, scaffolding out a hugely exaggerated frame. If the fabric creased anywhere, it hurt, causing too much pressure in one place, so corset makers put in structural elements to keep the pressure distributed across the whole torso. These were stays, made from steel, whalebone, or ivory. Corsets were always snug enough to be supportive, but in the nineteenth century the fashion of tight-lacing began, giving women a shape that looked like an actual hourglass. With tight-lacing beginning in puberty, a woman’s ribs grew compressed, forcing her lungs, liver, and heart to be displaced and squeezed, and her intestines could barely move enough to function. The pressure on women’s lungs caused a lot more fainting than might otherwise have occurred, and there were occasions of serious organ damage—even of prolapsed uterus, where the pressure forces the uterus down into the vagina.
Today we wear soft cotton shirts and pants, and women get support for their breasts from other supple materials designed for comfort. But the same woman who pities the corseted girls of the past may very well go to the gym five times a week to do a hundred sit-ups on a Swiss ball and an hour of aerobics. Most likely she is exacting about her diet, eats foods that have been stripped of various life-sustaining elements, and thus keeps her body fat to a minimum. The whalebone ribbing is gone from just beneath her dress, but now her own ribs show through the cloth! A modern woman may wear a breast-enhancing bra, or even have surgery to install what amounts to bulbous bustles just beneath the skin of her bosom. She may damage her body in her exertions—knees and wrists seem particularly vulnerable—and she may lose control of the dieting and find herself unable to eat normal meals and maintain health, particularly reproductive function. Also note that though it was hard to fail at wearing a corset, many women today fail at their body goals, spend massive amounts of money on half-used gym memberships and diet programs, and, worst of all, feel tortured by their failure. Indeed, other people will judge a woman with a slim body to be happier than the woman “trapped” in her fat.
So who is crazier, the culture that had women bind their bodies, or us? Even when both of these practices are carried out in moderation, does it make more sense for us to expect women to come in various sizes but to squeeze them all into the same shape, from the outside, or does it make more sense for the culture to accept various shapes but idealize the lack of body fat, forcing people to exert all sorts of internal pressures on themselves? We have a commonly held belief today