The Intercollegiate Review has been running a six-part symposium entitled, “Sex and the Polis: Perspectives on Marriage, Family, and Sexual Ethics.”

The series ends on a rather low note…for women, by addressing the myth that the sexual revolution has been good for them.

Granted, happiness is a personal, imponderable thing. But if the sexual revolution has really made women as happy as feminists say, a few elementary questions beg to be answered.

Why do the pages of our tonier magazines brim with mournful titles like “The Case for Settling” and “The End of Men”? Why do websites run by and for women focus so much on men who won’t grow up, and ooze such despair about relations between the sexes?

Why do so many accomplished women simply give up these days and decide to have children on their own, sometimes using anonymous sperm donors, thus creating the world’s first purposely fatherless children? What of the fact, widely reported, that over a quarter of American women are on some kind of mental-health medication for anxiety and depression and related problems?

Or how about what’s known in sociology as “the paradox of declining female happiness”? Using 35 years of data from the General Social Survey, two Wharton School economists, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, made the case in 2009 that women’s happiness appeared to be declining over time despite their advances in the work force and education. This was true not only in the United States, but across Western societies, they documented.

The reason this seemed a “paradox,” they noted, was that these same years of declining happiness occurred right alongside social changes like better education and access to contraception. Though the researchers were careful not to draw conclusions from their data, isn’t reasonable to think that at least some of that discontent comes from the feeling that the grass is greener elsewhere—a feeling made plausible by the sexual revolution?

However one looks at the situation, it seems difficult to argue that the results of the revolution have been a slam-dunk for women’s happiness – and we haven’t even asked about what’s meanwhile happened to men, whose post-revolutionary incarnations obviously have a great deal to do with women’s satisfaction too.

It’s always hard to disentangle the weeds from the plants in such a large field. But if the sexual revolution has made women so happy, we can at least ask what it would look like for them to be unhappy. A broader inquiry might yield some results worth thinking about — in contrast to shortsighted political theatrics over a supposed “war” that only distracts attention from where it’s needed most, on real human beings.