Dr. Helen Smith’s new book, Men on Strike is decidedly different, inasmuch as she argues that if men are checking out of society, it’s only because we are making rational decisions about changing incentives.

Let’s take marriage, for example, where higher-educated women seem to be having a harder and harder time finding men worthy (or willing) to tie the knot. “[T]he incentives to marry have changed for men,” explains Smith, “and they are no longer willing to risk so much more than in previous years to gain potentially less.”
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In the old days, Smith explains, a man might expect to be king of the castle. Now days, she says, he might be relegated to a “man cave” in the basement, and — if lucky — granted missionary position sex once a week. Or he becomes, as she told me, “some shlub, carrying around a flowered diaper bag.”