Are men on strike?

Is this how men are reacting to the implementation of feminist policies and feminist views of marriage? That's the impression that I got from reading a few recent articles.

Anyways, here's a bit of a recent Globe and Mail article:

I’ve no idea how the new world order will play out. Ms. Rosin thinks more men will eventually catch on and find their places in it. Meantime, there’s one scene I can’t get out of my mind. It’s a village in the hills of Thailand that my husband and I visited a few years ago. The women did all the work – the child rearing, the farming, the cooking, the wood and water gathering, the long trek to town to sell their vegetables. The men sat around discussing politics and smoking opium. They didn’t seem terribly miserable; I guess they’d gotten used to it.

... and from the Wall Street Journal:

Ms. Rosin makes us face the uncomfortable evidence that many men are engaging in a sit-down strike. In macho cultures, such as those of Spain, men import poorer, more traditional women from other countries to marry. In Japan, Ms. Rosin reports, men are causing something of a national crisis because of their indifference to dating, marrying and even having sex.

Here in America, many men have dialed down their ambitions, and not simply in response to a loss of job opportunities. Although three-fourths of the jobs lost in the recent recession were in fields that are overwhelmingly male (including construction, manufacturing and finance), the same number of new ones emerged in health fields, service industries and teaching. Yet surprisingly few men are entering these areas or seeking the education they would need to do so. "Our vast and struggling middle class, where the disparities between men and women are the greatest," writes Ms. Rosin, "is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the workforce and home, and as women make all the decisions."

The result, Ms. Rosin painstakingly shows, is virtually a reversal of the psychological landscape of the 1960s and 1970s. Then, men wondered why they should give up freedom and sex for marriage, child care and the burden of financial responsibility; now it is women asking that question. Then, men complained of clinging, freeloading wives; now Ms. Rosin hears repeatedly from women that, in the words of one executive, women should "be very careful about marrying freeloading, bloodsucking parasites." Then, it was women who tamped down their aspirations, knowing the objective unlikelihood of attaining them; now it's the men who have "fear of success" and a "why bother?" attitude. Then, if women had casual sex it was to keep the guy happy; now many have casual sex for their own pleasure and to keep from being derailed from their career goals with something "serious."

MGTOW - standing for Men Going Their Own Way - is the acronym you might hear associated with the idea from time to time. Other than references to the Japanese "herbivore" movement, these few recent articles are the first times that I've encountered this in the mainstream press.

Given the current state of family and labour law - producing a society in which women report greater career ambitions and men are more afraid of undesired pregnancy - such male antipathy towards hard work (both in terms of relationships and the labour force) seems somewhat inevitable. It also seems likely to lead to dissatisfaction amongst the female population, and some of this increasing unhappiness has already been documented.