Are “men on strike”?

That’s the claim of the new book by Helen Smith.

I have in mind to use this blog to share some of what I’m reading and what I think of it, and this book was a significant disappointment.

The largest irritant was how little original research there was in the book. “Write a book” has long been on my bucket list — not the Great American Novel, but a serious treatment of the retirement crisis, with an international perspective — but I am well aware that writing requires skill in researching (including access to data) and the well-honed ability to write in depth, as well as a significant investment in time. I may indeed have the time, after retirement, or at least after the kids don’t require quite as much homework supervision and chauffeuring, but I hope that at that point, Congress would have acted on the issue already!

Anyway, if it were really possible to write a book with as little research as this book contains, I’d jump at the chance, but I imagine that, as with many such books, it was her name recognition that got this book published (and I’m not sure how known she is in her own right vs. as the wife of a major conservative blogger).

But wow! She talks about interviewing men who frequent the gym — and talked to two!, one of whom gives her the answers she wants only after she asked leading questions. Oh, and she talks to two men at a bar. But the bulk of her “research” consists of comments she received to questions she posed on her blog, and substantial references to material from a couple books on the topic that preceded hers, as well as unsubstantiated assertions by “men’s rights” activists.

So it was really hard to get past this to evaluate the content of the book, however sparse, but the basis thesis is that men, who are choosing not to marry and not to attend college, are “on strike” in response to the ways they’re ill-treated by society and the law.

It’s true that there’s some unfairness out there. As far as sexual relationships for unmarried men are concerned, the tables have been turned. Instead of women worrying that having sex could lead to pregnancy and “ruin,” any woman who is OK with abortion is fully free to have sex as much as she wants without fear of consequences (because no one, male or female, seems to worry about STDs) — but men do bear the risk of paying 18 years of child support for a single night of sex, or even, in one bizarre cases, from oral sex with a condom which the woman later retrieved. And instead of women worrying that drunken flirting could put them at risk of rape, it’s men’s drunken sex that puts them at risk of a rape accusation for consentual sex.

And men are attending college in declining numbers, relative to women, and, once there, can be, if they’re unlucky, subjected to harassment of the “all men are rapists” student orientation variety, or find themselves in classes in which a professor promotes an anti-male viewpoint.

But are declining marriage rates evidence of a “marriage strike” by men? Her disgruntled commenters say they won’t marry lest they lose everything in a divorce, and some say they stay away from relationships entirely, being perfectly happy with porn — but this is a pretty self-selected group.

In any case, to the extent that men are decreasingly likely to say in surveys that getting married is important to them (and are less likely to say so than women), it’s not at all clear that Smith’s notion of a “strike” — refusing to marry because of the injustices of the child support and divorce system — is a suitable explanation.

Likewise, are declining college attendance numbers for men really a sign of discomfort with the “feminization” of the education system? Or are some men who are only marginally college material in the first place now recognizing that fact, and turning to the skilled trades and similar occupations?

And are the failures of men from impoverished backgrounds really due to being “on strike” or due to a whole constellation of issues and pathologies?

In introducing the book, Smith complains that other books of the “what’s wrong with men” genre do so from a woman’s perspective: “how can we fix men so they’ll be good husbands and fathers again instead of playing video games in the basement?” But her “men on strike” device isn’t any better, in trying to lump together a number of issues for the sake of a clean thesis for her book.

(Side comment:  I had said previously that one of my goals was to improve my writing style — and one of my deficits is that I have a hard time coming to any final conclusions.  I just sort of peter out. . . )