The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness

What could topple the most stubborn roadblocks is a feminism and a politics that reorient themselves away from simple equality and toward happiness and pleasure.

Of course women can’t flourish in a system that needs us as support pillars for someone else’s building. We’re here to prop it up, not to live in it. This is not a place that was built for us to thrive.

Our political and cultural priorities aren’t about making life more enjoyable but about getting ahead, attaining bigger and better things, “having it all.” But the system is rigged: Men have long been able to “have it all” because of free female labor.

Our identities are too often defined by our relationships to other people—wife, mother, daughter—and prominent politicians defend women’s rights by describing us relationally to men.

The answer isn’t to simply try to be better at the limited tasks set before us. The answer is to ask, What would we make if we had all the tools? What do we want?

it became clear, quickly, that a lot of the problems feminists continue to take on are rooted in a deep hostility toward and suspicion of unfettered female pleasure, happiness, and independence.

No one has ever suggested it is her right to be happy. Instead, she hears she should be appreciative, and maybe a little bit sorry for availing herself of help.

If we focus on what makes women’s lives happier, healthier, better, more fulfilling, and more pleasurable, many other progressive goals will naturally follow, and we will have a new language with which to frame and advocate for issues of fundamental fairness and egalitarianism.

Across the board, women are on a gerbil wheel, running to catch up—to their own expectations, to outside ideals, to men—and never quite making it.