Douthat contrasts the essays by Sandra Tsing Loh and Cristina Nehring about the end of their marriages with the frenzied (and potentially career-ending) passion of — sorry for this mental image! — Mark Sanford and John Ensign. Douthat says:

So which is the real America? Is it Tsing Loh's dystopia, where everyone "works" grimly on their relationships, and post-feminist husbands happily cook saffron-infused porcini risotto but rarely practice seduction on their wives? Or is it tabloid country: The land of Jon minus Kate, and governors who vanish to "hike the Appalachian Trail"...

Ah, those "post-feminist" husbands, who cook in lieu of "seducing" their wives (note to Douthat: many women would consider a man cooking saffron-infused porcini risotto a form of seduction). Because, naturally, it is more naturally the man's role to initiate sex and the woman's role to pretend, at least initially, that she doesn't want it.

But Douthat's not done with condemning all that sexual equality that feminism hath wrought!

But both do put their finger on a post-sexual revolution paradox - namely, that the same overclass that was once most invested in erotic experimentation ended up building the sturdiest walls against the passions it unleashed.

In other words, the wealthy and privileged women with jobs and such (i.e. feminists and, by extension, Democrats) are frigid ice queens once they get bored with porn and premarital sex, while passion is reserved for Real Americans who didn't buy into that feminism claptrap about equality in the first place!

Douthat's got your number, ladies — safe sex is boring! Risking pregnancy is exciting!

The difficult scramble up the meritocratic ladder tends to discourage wild passions and death-defying flings. For bright young overachievers, there's often a definite tameness to the way that collegiate "safe sex" segues into the upwardly-mobile security of "companionate marriages" - or, if you're feeling more cynical, "consumption partnerships."

Yes, unwanted pregnancy and being stuck in boring dead-end jobs is what more Americans need to encourage more passion in their relationships. (What is up with Douthat's seeming obsessive opposition to contraception, anyway? Is this just a rhetorical way to get the women who sleep with him to agree not to use condoms or something?)

By comparison, Douthat just loves how Real America conducts its personal life!

This tameness has beneficial social consequences: When it comes to divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births, Americans with graduate degrees are still living in the 1950s. It's the rest of the country that marries impulsively, divorces frequently, and bears a rising percentage of its children outside marriage.

Ok, so, let's make sure I understand this correctly. Feminism (and safe sex) make for boring relationships designed only for upward social mobility, which is good for society and bad for relationships; but sexual freedom has empowered the lower class to make poor decisions about marriage and having a bunch of unsafe sex that Douthat doesn't like in the first place? So, he likes feminism, but he hates it? Is feminism Douthat's mom and does he have an Oedipal complex?

Douthat's got a solution to the problem he's yet to define really well, but which seemingly boils down to the fact that smart, career-oriented women don't have enough wild sex (possibly with Ross Douthat) and dumb sluts have too much.

Our meritocrats could stand to leaven their careerism with a little more romantic excess. (Though such excess is more appropriate in the young, it should be emphasized, than in middle-aged essayists and parents.) But most Americans, particularly those of modest means, would benefit from greater caution and stability in their romantic entanglements.

So, if you're young, career-oriented and, um, female, you should try less hard to get to the top of your profession and try to fall obsessively in love — but only if you're young and, naturally, childless. If you're poor, though, keep it in your pants and that ring on your finger.

Or, I don't know: maybe people regardless of their economic class should attempt to live their lives without listening to Ross Douthat's expectation of what would make them happier?

The Way We Love Now [NY Times]

Earlier: Feminism Makes Women Unhappy, And Other Tall Tales

Otherwise, I don't really see what the papers' editors are thinking, between hiring neocon idiot Bill Kristol and then replacing him with slut-shaming, supposedly new-idea-having former Atlantic blogger Ross Douthat. Having already definitively determined that feminism makes women unhappy by reading one study abstract, today, Douthat turns his attention to late-term abortion.

You see, Douthat totally understands why late term abortions might be necessary, and the courage it took for Dr. George Tiller to continue performing this vital health service for women...he just thinks the late doctor was an amoral baby-killer who didn't understand God. As for all the women who have written testimonials about their experiences with late-term abortions, Mr. Douthat read them, and he thinks they're all assholes.

They help explain why Tiller thought he was doing the Lord's work, even though that work involved destroying something that we wouldn't hesitate to call a baby if we saw it struggling for life in a hospital bed.

And let's not forget the amoral part: Douthat's been listening to the very people who advocated violence against Tiller, his patients, his staff and the clinic, and so he knows that Tiller was just willy-nilly performing late term abortions on perfectly healthy fetuses and mothers all the time. How does he know? Because the anti-abortion movement told him and the state government, over and over again, to try to get Tiller jailed.

But his critics were convinced that he performed them not only in truly desperate situations, but in many other cases as well. Over the years, they cobbled together a considerable amount of evidence - drawn from the state's abortion statistics, from Tiller's own comments, and from a 2006 investigation - suggesting that Tiller abused the state's mental-health exemption to justify late-term abortions in almost any situation.

This evidence is persuasive, but not dispositive. We may never know how many of George Tiller's abortions were performed on healthy mothers and healthy fetuses.

Well, I mean, the courts found it "dispositive," which is why on what few charges the anti-abortion movement managed to gin up against him, Tiller was acquitted. But, by all means, lets continue to smear Tiller as an amoral baby-killer. It'll help strengthen Douthat's argument!

Douthat also understands why, having read the real stories of women who endured the sorts of pregnancies that needfully ended in late term terminations, why pro-choice types think abortions should remain legal. He just thinks we're wrong, i.e. causing needless social strife and even violence. I mean, most abortions are elective, Douthat says! (And even most late-term ones, he additionally asserts without evidence!)

The same is true of the more than 100,000 abortions that are performed after the first trimester: Very few involve medical complications of any kind. Even the now-outlawed "partial-birth" procedure, which abortion-rights supporters initially argued was only employed in the direst of dire situations, turned out to be used primarily for purely elective abortions.

Now that last bit is a careful bit of language on Douthat's part. Because, in reality, there's no evidence even in the Slate article that Douthat links to that the abortions were elective; the best that the article's author Franklin Foer can muster is that the procedure known as "intact dilation and extraction" was "safer and more convenient" than alternative methods (because, really, why would you want to use the method least likely to cause the death of the mother?) and that two newspapers concluded, after speaking to a couple doctors, that second-trimester intact dilation and extractions were "mostly" performed on poor women who were unable to get into a practitioner in time for a first trimester abortion — which doesn't necessarily make them "elective."

Douthat then sets up his pro-choice strawman to knock down: as far as he's concerned, pro-choicers people deny that a fetus has a "claim to life" — i.e., is already a human being — and that's why we don't care whether a fetus is healthy or the mother was simply too lazy to use birth control. And in our zeal to protect the right of every woman to make the best choices for her (and, yes, in some cases, the fetus she is carrying), it's our fault that we've made abortion politics so controversial.

If anything, by enshrining a near-absolute right to abortion in the Constitution, the pro-choice side has ensured that the hard cases are more controversial than they otherwise would be. One reason there's so much fierce argument about the latest of late-term abortions - Should there be a health exemption? A fetal deformity exemption? How broad should those exemptions be? - is that Americans aren't permitted to debate anything else. Under current law, if you want to restrict abortion, post-viability procedures are the only kind you're allowed to even regulate.

In other words, since Roe v. Wade protects women's right to any abortion pre-viability, the "debate" over late term abortions — as epitomized in Douthat's own column by one George Tiller — is so "fierce" because poor anti-abortion activists have nothing else to fight about. Apparently, Douthat has missed the efforts by South Dakota to make abortion illegal, the efforts by Colorado to pass a personhood amendment, the efforts activists in states like Mississippi to drive all clinics out of business (thus, eliminating abortion in the state) through over-regulation and all the other various things anti-abortion activists are actively doing to overturn Roe v. Wade in addition to fueling hate-filled and violent rhetoric against all abortion providers, including late-term providers like George Tiller.

Douthat's final argument is — I swear — that pro-choice people who want to prevent violence against abortion providers should simply accept the end of Roe v. Wade and allow states to make abortion illegal. I wish I was kidding.

If abortion were returned to the democratic process, this landscape would change dramatically. Arguments about whether and how to restrict abortions in the second trimester - as many advanced democracies already do – would replace protests over the scope of third-trimester medical exemptions.

The result would be laws with more respect for human life, a culture less inflamed by a small number of tragic cases - and a political debate, God willing, unmarred by crimes like George Tiller's murder.

To sum up: if we just roll over, accept the end of abortion access, and let them teach us about respect for human life, they won't kill any more abortion providers. Good to know whose hands Douthat thinks Tiller's blood is really on.

Not All Abortions Are Equal [NY Times]

Related: Bill Kristol Spews, America Heaves [Wonkette]
Faerie Tales And TheModern Neo-Con [Wonkette]
Fear Of Reese Witherspoon Look-Alikes On the Pill [Brad DeLong]
Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class And Save The American Dream [Amazon]
Ross Douthat [The Atlantic]
Abortion Apostate [Slate]
Antiabortion Efforts Move To The State Level [Washington Post]

Earlier: Feminism Makes Women Unhappy, And Other Tall Tales

As handily deconstructed by Megan last week, the Times's Ross Douthat thinks "women's happiness" is a great excuse for shaming various groups of people. According to the conservative columnist, the rise of single motherhood has made women unhappy, and as a cure we need "a new-model stigma [...] that ostracizes serial baby-daddies and trophy-wife collectors as thoroughly as the "fallen women" of a more patriarchal age." Because nothing makes ladies jollier than stigmatizing others! For the Daily Mail, women's happiness is an excuse to quote anti-working-mother advocate Erin Pizzey ("The hard-won freedom of choice has imprisoned women. I just see an exhausted generation trying to do it all.") and a total idiot ("You've got real democracy and there really are no glass ceilings, despite the fact that some of you moan about it all the time.")

Women's happiness is an ideological football for conservative pundits, but what is it for actual women? Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, authors of the study "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," which inspired both Douthat and the Mail, purport to have found that women are less happy, both absolutely and relative to men, than they were 35 years ago. They measured happiness by asking the question, "Taken all together, how would you say things are these days, would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?" They also asked subjects about "their satisfaction with a number of aspects of their life such as their marriage, their health, their financial situation, and their job." Stevenson and Wolfers write:

Although the validity of these measures remains a somewhat open question, a variety of evidence points to a robust correlation between answers to subjective wellbeing questions and more objective measures of personal well-being. For example, answers to subjective well-being questions have been shown to be correlated with physical evidence of affect such as smiling, laughing, heart rate measures, sociability, and electrical activity in the brain (Diener, 1984). Measures of individual happiness or life satisfaction are also correlated with other subjective assessments of well-being such as independent evaluations by friends, self-reported health, sleep quality, and personality (Diener, Lucas, and Scollon, 2006; Kahnman and Krueger, 2006).

So basically, if you say you're happy, you also seem happy to other people, whether those people are your friends or doctors measuring your heart rate. But this constellation of factors — your self-reported happiness, your "sociability," how often you laugh — doesn't necessarily measure whether or not you're leading a good life. Nor does your answer to the question "would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?" necessarily capture all the nuances of a fulfilling, worthwhile sojourn on this planet.

Whenever I go through a stressful time, I end up reading a lot about happiness. Most recently, I've been looking at Gretchen Rubin's Slate blog, The Happiness Project. The blog has a lot of good, practical tips — like breaking your routine and remembering what you loved as a child — but it's also calming because it presents happiness as something concrete you can work toward using relatively simple techniques.

The thing is, this view of happiness is kind of reductive. It's absolutely true that there are basic things you can do to make yourself feel better about your life, and I do believe that Stevenson and Wolfers's question measures something. But what it measures is just a slice of a person's total experience of herself and the world. It's an important place, sure, and interesting to think about, but we can't evaluate women's lives, feminism, or society based on it alone. It's obviously ridiculous to call for a new social stigma based on the results of one study, but it's also wrong to base too much public policy — or even too much of your evaluation of your own life — on a single measurement of it. I believe happiness is important, but I also know that some of my fondest memories are from times when I felt like absolute shit. A full life contains sorrow and fear and anger and uncertainty, and when we feel these things, we shouldn't assume that either feminism or we ourselves have failed.

Liberated And Unhappy [New York Times]
Women Are More Unhappy Despite 40 Years Of Feminism, Claims Study [Daily Mail]
The Happiness Project [Slate]
Headlines, Headlines, Headlines [The F Word]
The Paradox Of Declining Female Happiness [Full Paper]

Earlier: Feminism Makes Women Unhappy, And Other Tall Tales
Man Declares That The Glass Ceiling No Longer Exists

Although, I suppose we should give Douthat a break. It is a 45-page academic paper comprised of nearly 40 years worth of data subjected to regression analysis and filled with statistical and sociological jargon. It's so much easier to just read the abstract and then judge the ongoing battle for social equity as ultimately harmful for women! That abstract states:

By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative wellbeing is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men.

From that, Douthat extrapolates this:

But all the achievements of the feminist era may have delivered women to greater unhappiness.

It's the new Feminine Mystique! Only, you know, not.

The authors do, however, offer explanations more plausible than Douthat's idea that the attainment of something approaching gender equality makes us poor dames so unhappy. (Douthat would only have had to read to page 4!)

For example, if happiness is assessed relative to outcomes for one's reference group, then greater equality may have led more women to compare their outcomes to those of the men around them. In turn, women might find their relative position lower than when their reference group included only women. This change in the reference group may make women worse off or it may simply represent a change in their reporting behavior. An alternative form of reference dependent preferences relates well-being to whether or not expectations are met. If the women's movement raised women's expectations faster than society was able to meet them, they would be more likely to be disappointed by their actual experienced lives.

In other words, if we come into the world — work, domestic, social — expecting equality and then don't get it — which many of us don't — and we start comparing ourselves to men, of course we're going to be pissed. It's the old bait-and-switch, and who the fuck likes that?

The authors add:

The second possibility is that broad social shifts such as those brought on by the changing role of women in society fundamentally alter what measures of subjective well-being are capturing. Over time it is likely that women are aggregating satisfaction over an increasingly larger domain set. For example, life satisfaction may have previously meant "satisfaction at home" and has increasingly come to mean some combination of "satisfaction at home" and "satisfaction at work". This averaging over many domains may lead to falling average satisfaction if it is difficult to achieve the same degree of satisfaction in multiple domains.

In other words, when women had no reasonable expectation of being able to achieve happiness at work (due to lack of jobs or proscribed labor market possibilities), they didn't count their expected-dissatisfaction at work as part of whether they considered themselves happy and, once the possibility of being happy is there (regardless of whether the equality to achieve it is translated into practice), they count their dissatisfaction as part of their overall happiness. I guess I sort of fail to see where that's such a terrible thing, but, then again, I'm not Harvard-educated.

In addition, Douthat ignores this little gem about what the phrase "subjective happiness" means in practice.

However, it should be noted that subjective well-being is both a function of the individual's personality and his or her reaction to life events. As such, correlations between life outcomes and happiness may not be causal. For example, one reason that married people report substantially greater happiness than unmarried people in a cross-section is because happy people are more likely than unhappy people to marry (Stevenson and Wolfers, 2007)

The authors also note that self-reported happiness correlates with social expectations of when one ought to be happy.

Self-reports of happiness have also been shown to be correlated in the expected direction with changes in life circumstances. For example, an individual's subjective well-being typically rises with marriage and income growth and falls while going through a divorce.

In other words, if ones thinks one is supposed to be happy (or unhappy), one reports that, making subjective well-being both a measure of what one thinks one ought to feel and what one actually feels. I'll leave it to other people to extrapolate whether or not there might be reasons that women would be more likely feel they're supposed to not be happy when they are, or why men might be more likely to report being happy when they legitimately aren't.

Or, quite frankly, women might have been lying all along.

It has been recognized that an individual's assessment of their well-being may reflect the social desirability of responses and Kahneman (1999) argues that people in good circumstances may be hedonically better off than people in worse circumstances, yet they may require more to declare themselves happy. In the context of the findings presented in this paper, women may now feel more comfortable being honest about their true happiness and have thus deflated their previously inflated responses. Or, as in Kahneman's example, the increased opportunities available to women may have increased what women require to declare themselves happy.

Not surprisingly, Douthat ignores the fact that the study shows that the subjective happiness of African-American women is actually much higher than that of African-American men.

An important exception is that this phenomenon has not occurred similarly across racial groups. African-American women have become happier over this period in parallel with rising happiness among African-American men, implying little change in their gender happiness gap. This rise in African-American women's happiness has occurred as part of an overall rise in the happiness of blacks, a rise that has eliminated two-thirds of the black-white happiness gap (Stevenson and Wolfers, 2008b).

Douthat actually deliberately ignores this, stating in his piece:

But this can't be the only explanation, since the trend toward greater female discontent cuts across lines of class and race. A working-class Hispanic woman is far more likely to be a single mother than her white and wealthy counterpart, yet the male-female happiness gap holds in East Hampton and East L.A. alike.

Actually, no, it doesn't show that at all — particularly because the authors had no data on self-identified Hispanics prior to 2000 and were forced to make some pretty hinky extrapolations to come up with the conclusion Douthat cites as established fact. But to admit that would cut against Douthat's thesis which is — to those who rememberwhat Douthat thinks about "sluts" — unsurprising. Douthat thinks that women are unhappy because society doesn't do enough slut-shaming!

[Feminists and conservatives] should also be able to agree that the steady advance of single motherhood threatens the interests and happiness of women. Here the public-policy options are limited; some kind of social stigma is a necessity. But a new-model stigma shouldn't (and couldn't) look like the old sexism. There's no necessary reason why feminists and cultural conservatives can't join forces - in the same way that they made common cause during the pornography wars of the 1980s - behind a social revolution that ostracizes serial baby-daddies and trophy-wife collectors as thoroughly as the "fallen women" of a more patriarchal age.

No reason, of course, save the fact that contemporary America doesn't seem willing to accept sexual stigma, period.

Right, the problem with single motherhood is that it — on its own — makes women unhappy and they're not remotely unhappy because, unlike in, say, Europe, there aren't enough social structures or government services to mitigate the difficulties of achieving professional success and responsible single-parenting. Nope! If we just slut-shamed women (and, to Douthat's credit, some men) more, then they'd have fewer children out of wedlock and would totally be happier! Except for the women who have children outside of matrimonial bounds, who would be slut-shamed for irresponsibly having sex, an ironic statement from a guy who prefers to sleep with women not on birth control. There's no word on whether women who are single parents after a divorce would also be shamed for having driven off their husbands.

But, even further to that, the authors of the study specifically investigated the potential for single motherhood being the cause of the decline in female happiness, and disproved it.

Along with the decline in marriage has come a rise in single parenthood, both through growth in out-of-wedlock births and through divorce. Thus, we disaggregate the fertility results to consider trends in happiness separately among single parents and married parents, and, to account for the duel burden of working parents, between employed parents and non-employed parents. Once again, we see similar trends in happiness across these groups, casting doubt on the hypothesis that trends in marriage and divorce, single parenthood, or work-family balance are at the root of the happiness declines among women.

And, just for good measure, let's throw in what women have to say about what they think they've gained from the feminist movement (page 25):

Moreover, women believe that their lives are better; in recent polls asking about changes in the status of women over the past 25 or 50 years, around four in five adults state that the overall status of women in the U.S. has gotten better (and the remaining respondents break two-for-one towards "stayed the same" over "worse"). Additionally, the 1999 Virginia Slims Poll found that 72% of women believe that "women having more choices in society today gives women more opportunities to be happy" while only 39% thought that having more choices "makes life more complicated for women." Finally, women today are more likely than men to believe that their opportunities to succeed exceed those of their parents.

Ah, Douthat. But there are other reasons, besides intellectual laziness, ideological blinders, an utter failing to understand any nuance in female sexuality and a 10-year case of blueballs not to blame him for having failed to parse the research he cites as a reason for society to get behind him on the slut-shaming bandwagon. I mean, there must be, because the New York Times gave him a column!

The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness [University of Pennsylvania]
Liberated And Unhappy [NY Times]

Related: Yes, This Was Published In A Major Newspaper In The Year 2009 [Pandagon]
Fear of Reese Witherspoon Look-Alikes On The Pill [Brad DeLong]