Self magazine (“You At Your Best”) runs an annual Healthiest Cities list and, in the latest, the megalopolis of Los Angeles/Long Beach placed dead last in what’s arguably the only category that matters: happiness.

Gary, Indiana, is the unhealthiest. The worst eaters live in West Virginia and Ashland, Kentucky. The least sexually healthy women are in Oklahoma City. The worst place to have a baby is in Texas, of course (McAllen-Edinburgh). Women are most likely to die in a car accident in Montana (moose-related, we’d guess), get mugged in Memphis, to smoke in Vegas (smoking hot!), and be shapeless heavy-breathers in West Virginia and Kentucky.

But you can live with bad diet, bad sex and bad babies, you can know you’re likelier than most to die of cigarettes, collisions and cardiac arrest and still consider yourself happy. What’s wrong with us—and, more specifically, our womenfolk—that we’re so miserable?

And is it bad that being told we’re miserable makes us miserable?

The Self list opens with a picture of a basket-bearing woman in red capris. She’s eating a red apple in front of a red flower car—and what would make a woman happier?

Lots, apparently. Because we’ve got apples, flowers, baskets, pants and red, too. But Self tells us they examined data on suicides, depression and the like from the Centers for Disease Control (Atlanta, No. 47 overall), and then talked with women in each city to check out the results of their number crunching.

And the women of Long Beach, when they could reach the phone to talk, could only complain.

“Obviously, there are very happy women in every city,” says Self features editor Sara Austin, who spoke to us from New York City, which ranks No. 8 overall.

But even Austin was surprised by our poor performance.

“Cities with better weather tend to rank higher,” she says, so it’s “striking” that “the lowest depression rates are in cities like [No. 1] Minneapolis.”

And not just that snowbound Siberia of the American Middle West, but No. 2 Nashville; Fargo (Fargo!), North Dakota; Des Moines, and Washington, D.C.

The Midwest cities we understand: out there on the prairie you make your own happiness or you die seeking shelter from howling wind inside the warm carcass of a recently slain buffalo. But D.C.? All that comes to mind is Henry Kissinger’s claim that power is an aphrodisiac.

Austin could see no geographic pattern in the Unhappiest Places on Earth—behind Long Beach were, in order, Bakersfield; Gary, Indiana; Stockton, California; and the Inland Empire of Riverside and San Bernardino. But we can discern something like a pattern: except for Gary—which, well, hell, that’s in Indiana—it confirms Self ’s findings in interviews with at least some Long Beach and LA women: we live in our cars. And we’re not happy about it.

Happy cities are organized around leisure time and volunteerism, neighborhood and the company of others, Austin says. Some Southern California women told Self that traffic—average commute time: one hour—made them desperate if not also housewives. “You can spend a lot of time alone and in traffic,” one woman said. “There is less opportunity for impromptu meetings or striking up a conversation.”

Traffic accounts for another poor grade—our last-place finish in air quality. Our “major ports and refineries, not to mention roughly 6 million vehicles traversing LA county roads” produce what Self calls “LA’s infamous smog.”

Cars: they’ll kill us faster than flab.

Austin cites another factor that squeezes the life out of Southern California’s women: body consciousness.

“The pressure to be thin and young-looking is sometimes unrealistic,” Austin told us. “If I felt like I had to look as young and thin as Keri Russell on the cover of Self, I’d be unhappy too.”

It’s sort of ironic, then, that Self magazine’s cover line for this issue is “Keri Russell on life with baby (check out those abs!).”

So, the women of Long Beach and Los Angeles are unhappy. On the other hand, we ranked 32 overall on the list of 100 cities. Suck on that, Miami (No. 39)!

[ADDED LATER: Check out this link to Jezebel in which she considers the life of an LA Woman vis-a-vis the movie Knocked Up.]

Tags: body image, Des Moines, Fargo, fashion, happiness, Henry Kissinger, is it our fault?, Keri Russell, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Nashville, pants, Self magazine, self-image, sex, traffic, Washington D.C., women