Americans have long fetishized this ultra-competitive version of happiness — from roguish cowboys to Wall Street's Gordon Gekkoa. The go-it-alone philosophy glorifies individual desires above collective goals. "It has been men who've been able to think about their identities in that outward-looking way, and it's been on women to be the support system," Filipovic summarizes. "So now we're living in a world that has seen First, Second, and Third wave feminism, where women are much more individually feminist, and we have more feminist cultural and social norms, but we still have financial and political systems that are set up according to this very outdated way of looking at the world. So it's within that system that women are trying to pursue pleasure and pursue happiness, and hitting, inevitably, a lot of walls, because it wasn't set up for us."