Ross Douthat Cares About Your "Emotional Well-Being"

Remember how fun it was when Ross Douthat got down to the business of telling us liberated lady folk why feminism has made us all unhappy sufferers of gender-neutral ennui? Yeah, I enjoyed that, too.

Well, he's back, and this time he's pontificating on how recent Science tells us how our "emotional well-being" is all tied up in something called "sexual stability." I think somebody needs to sit Ross down and have a conversation about how correlation does not automatically imply causation. But I digress.

Ross really wants you to know that there are only three types of sex:

1. Monogamous sex within a legal marriage
2. "...pre-marital, in the sense that it involves monogamous couples on a path that might lead to matrimony one day"
3. "...casual and promiscuous, or just premature and ill considered."

Yep, that's it. Gay or lesbians? Guess you have to fall into the third, seeing as how you're legally barred from the first two. Gals with a casual sex partner with whom you have a mutually responsible arrangement? That's just some stupid liberal myth (and has been completely disproved by Hollywood anyway). Of course you want a wedding ring, you just don't know it yet (and if you don't, read this article about why you're secretly unhappy again).

There's not much I can really say about Douthat, mostly because he's so ridiculously pedestrian. Other, more talented writers, have already pinned female unhappiness on feminism, and they at least appear to know something about the history of the women's movement. The problem is that this guy writes for The New York Times. All the news that's fit to print, my ass.