Turns out Mark Liberman of Language Log, before whom (eek, or is it who?!?! :-)) I often non-literally bow, had a more quantitatively sophisticated take on Ross Douthat’s New York Times misogyny than I did in my post. Leiberman says (emphasis mine.)

This is exactly what happened the last time that the Stevenson-Wolfers work was touted in the NYT: many if not most readers took generic statements about “men” and “women” to characterize general properties of the groups, or at least of most members of the groups, whereas the effect under discussion is a shift of a few percentage points, mostly accomplished by shifting the opinions of around 5 women in a hundred from “very happy” to “pretty happy”.

He said it here.

A five percent difference is small enough that if you were to overlap the graphs the difference would be roughly the size of the free edge of a well-trimmed fingernail.

Not much at all with which to hang all of feminism on, but a lovely metaphor for anti-feminism’s frantic clawing against progress.

It gets worse, by the way. As Lieberman elegantly puts it

The best way to describe this, I think, would be to say something like:

In the early 70s, women self-reported their happiness at levels somewhat higher than men did. Specifically, 5.1% more of the women reported themselves “Very happy”, while 1.5% fewer reported themselves “Not too happy”.

30-odd years later, in the mid 00s, women’s self-reported happiness was closer to men’s, though it was still slightly higher. 1.4% more of the women reported themselves “Very happy”, while 0.1% fewer reported themselves “Not too happy”.

As a description of these facts, Douthat’s assertion that “In postfeminist America, men are happier than women” is, at best, bizarrely off base.

And it gets even more worse! From previous reports I’d gotten the impression the research covered the period from publication of Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique and so in my previous post I listed only earlier conservative bugaboos that Douthat could have blamed for the general decline in reported happiness had he chosen to be merely conservative instead of fractiously anti-feminist (over fractional differences no less.) Leiberman says the reporting period goes to 1972 so to this list from the early 1960s

• introduction of The Pill
• Brown vs. Board of Education
• prohibition of (forced) prayer in school
• the British Invasion (Beatles, Stones, etc.)
• industrial competition from Japan and other Asian nations
• civil rights agitation
• voting rights
• discovery of LSD by the counterculture

• the Miranda Rights decision

add the following from the 1970s and 1980s

• “stagflation
• vegetarianism
• the emergence of A-rab oil
• A-rab oil embargoes and resulting gas-price increases
• Earth day
• Pollution controls on cars
• Banning DDT
• The movie Deep Throat
• The rise of Cosmopolitan magazine (maybe not, like Douthat Cosmo is deeply anti-feminist)
• Publication of The Joy of Sex, The Happy Hooker, The Sensuous Woman, Fear of Flying, and anything by Nancy Friday.
• The introduction of the vibrator
• The mainstreaming of pornography
• The cancellation of Gunsmoke
• The death of John Wayne
• Watergate

• etc.

But no, while lesser right-wingers would have contented themselves with any or all of those possible reasons, Douthat lasered in on feminism as the only possible cause of what he wants us to see as women’s decline in happiness since 1972.

And by the way he really must specifically dislike feminism because to make his point he had to specifically disregard the nearly equal (ooh, that word!) decline in men’s happiness to do so.

But we already knew that.