David Brooks: What Price Happiness? (Hint: Ladies, Keep Your Man!)

I haven’t played kick the can–where can means the New York Times–for a while, mostly because it’s too easy: the stolid Grey Lady’s inability to cover issues beyond it’s narrow frame of all the news white, middle-class, male America finds worthy to think about is a cliche at this point. I mean, for goodness sake, their lead writer on women’s rights is a dude! (Not to knock Nick Kristoff–keep up the good work!–but still.)

Truth be told, I only scan the headlines and drop in to read Krugman and Rich when they’re up. I don’t usually bother to read the rest of the columnists, and certainly not perpetual anal-cranial inversion artist Ross Douthat or David “Bobo” Brooks, master of somehow finding the tone your clueless, warm-n-fuzzy conservative uncle might strike–somewhere between concern trolling and reminding you that if you just wore lipstick more often, you’d find a nice fella.

But every now and then, I drop in on what he says, either because I’ve been referred there or because for some reason the headline writer is earning her or his pay this week by getting me to read something I ordinarily wouldn’t. Take today’s headline: The Bullock Trade. (It actually is “The Sandra Bullock Trade,” but it was truncated in the little upper-righthand corner area the Times puts it’s op-ed links.) Now, I was intrigued, both by the possibility that Brooks was branching out–bullocks could mean anything from modern Hindu religion to the sacrifices of the ancient Minoans–or by seeing what behavior by Ms. Bullock Brooks was disapproving of.

Because I’ve read him before, and I knew that there was no way he’d be in favor of her doing anything except marrying a Republican Senator.

But whoo boy, was this a piece of work:

Two things happened to Sandra Bullock this month. First, she won an Academy Award for best actress. Then came the news reports claiming that her husband is an adulterous jerk. So the philosophic question of the day is: Would you take that as a deal? Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow?

On the one hand, an Academy Award is nothing to sneeze at. Bullock has earned the admiration of her peers in a way very few experience. She’ll make more money for years to come. She may even live longer. Research by Donald A. Redelmeier and Sheldon M. Singh has found that, on average, Oscar winners live nearly four years longer than nominees that don’t win.

Nonetheless, if you had to take more than three seconds to think about this question, you are absolutely crazy. Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.

There’s more, lots more, about money not buying happiness and his normal brand of clueless white-privilege classism that Liss at Shakesville does a good job of covering. So I’m going to stick to the purely feminist angles on this remarkable piece of pundicrappiness. (Feminism. Yeah, I still do that here.)

Let’s start with the most glaringly obvious part of this column: it’s about a woman. The only example that Brooks could come up with for his thesis–professional accomplishment does not mean as much for your happiness as wedded bliss–was a woman. In fact, there are no other human examples in the article, just vague assertions that there is “data” about “happiness” and some stuff about how poor countries become rapidly happier when they get un-poor but not much happier when they get rich.

Now, maybe there wasn’t any “data” before. Maybe it’s Brooks trying to be “hip” by making references to pop stars that the kids might know. But it’s rather stunning that the only example he could find was a woman with a relatively short marriage that isn’t even over yet. Not any of the several politicians–Sanford, Ensign, and let’s be bipartisan and bring in Edwards–for whom his thesis might be even better made since these politicians had actual power. But no. Because messing around in a marriage is traditionally how guys keep happy, amiritedooods. Having a faithful marriage is something only the womenfolk need to worry about.

Of course, left unaddressed in this fun piece of Freakonomics-style pseudoscience is the very real possibility that some people are happier either by staying single or getting out of a marriage. Like, say, Jenny Sanford or…me. My marriage had its moments, but ultimately it made me miserable and I am much, much happier out of it. And it would take a heck of a relationship to tempt me back into marriage at this point.

And let’s not forget something: this “choice” or “trade” Brooks is proposing? It’s not one Sandra Bullock made. He’s presenting it as if she made a swap: win the Oscar but lose her marriage. Now, I found her Oscar win to be predictable but undeserved, so maybe she made a bargain with somebody. But it wasn’t with Jesse James. In fact, of course, neither of the things in the “trade” were under her control: Sandra Bullock didn’t vote herself in as Oscar winner, and Jesse James made the decision to cheat on her.

And that is the dark heart of Brooks little exercise in Concern Trolling, misogynistic chewy center that he probably couldn’t see if you gave him a flashlight and a magnifying glass. His column only makes sense if you frame it within the bounds of traditional sexism: that a happy marriage is what every woman wants, that an unhappy marriage is her fault, that a woman cannot have both professional and domestic success. Take those away, and he has no lede: just a collection of platitudes backed by some “statistics” that neither he nor his editor thought enough of to actually link to.

Because come on. I don’t remember similar columns about Ryan O’Neal or Jack Nicholson, or the implication that their contentious and unhappy marriages were the price of their success.