In The H-Spot, Filipovic argues that the main obstacle standing in-between women and happiness is a rigged system. And we see women face financial consequences for doing that.What do women want? The same thing men were promised in the Declaration of Independence: happiness, or at least the freedom to pursue it.įor women, though, pursuing happiness is a complicated endeavor, and if you head out into America and talk to women one-on-one, as Jill Filipovic has done, you'll see that happiness is indelibly shaped by the constraints of gender, the expectations of feminine sacrifice, and the myriad ways that womanhood itself differs along lines of race, class, location, and identity. That to me is a pretty good encapsulation of a woman putting herself and her own needs and desires for fair compensation ahead of somebody else’s comfort. But one of the reasons women don’t negotiate for more money is because when they do they’re perceived as pushy and aggressive and unlikable and they’re penalized for it.

There’s been a lot of great studies that say that women don’t negotiate for more money and therefore they get paid less. When women break that mold it can have really negative consequences. It’s almost an inability to get up in the morning and think ‘OK what is it that I want?’ It’s not just internal either, there’s this cultural expectation that women will do this.

I think what you see is that women are pushed into putting others before themselves, in terms of their sex lives, in terms of their relationships ― whether that’s a romantic relationship or a parental relationship or even a friendship ― I think it’s just ingrained in us. And not just to say here’s the problem, but to at least attempt to make a real moral case for the good of female happiness. So when I put those pieces of it together, it seemed like a ripe argument to make. There seems to be a real value in this hostility to women having good lives. It made me wonder: what does real hostility to female happiness and female pleasure look like? Everything from access to birth control and abortion rights, which seems really vested in this cultural disdain for the idea of women having sex for pleasure, to a lot of the advice that young women get about how to avoid rape, which is essentially saying don’t go out and have fun. The more that I reported on feminist issues, it became clear that a lot of what I was writing about underlined the bad experiences women have so many of the ways in which our lives are made to be less good than they could be.

What prompted you to write a book about the intersections of feminism and women’s happiness? What she learned about women, happiness and feminism while writing The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit Of Happiness might surprise you. Filipovic spoke with HuffPost to expand on that response and answer more questions about the intersections of happiness and feminism.

The H-Spot by Jill Filipovic