I wasn't disappointed by the New York Times Magazine cover story by Lisa Belkin on "The Opt-Out Revolution." That's not entirely true. I was disappointed by the story, but there's plenty to blog about in there. It's a lose-win. Kind of like the World Series.

The story is not about at-home dads ... it's about high-powered women who choose to chuck their Ivy League grad degrees and their six-figure salaries to stay home. Here's a sample line that sets the tone: "There is nothing wrong with money or power. But they come at a high price. And lately when women talk about success they use words like satisfaction, balance and sanity." The story isn't untrue or overblown, from what I can tell, but it manages to leave the biggest question that I have about the phenomenon unanswered: why is this being seen in women? What does gender have to do with it? Do men not want "balance and sanity"?

The nice women Beklin quotes tend to see men and women as different creatures. One goes so far as to proclaim "'It's all in the MRI.'", suggesting that there's stuff going on the brains of women that isn't going on the brains of men. Of course, as far as I know -- and I would be very interested to stand corrected -- there is no such MRI study (a point Belkin seems to concede). When Belkin turns to anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy to bolster that point, Hrdy issues a stern warning: "'... to turn that into dogma -- women are caring, men are not, or men should have power, women should not, that's dangerous and false.'" And with that, Hrdy is vanishes from the piece, which goes on to blithely trumpet that "dangerous" dogma.

The real shame is that the question of why career-track moms are fleeing the workforce so much faster than career-track dads is a very real, very important question. Maybe biology does play a role. There are social pressure, too, and family dynamics and a hundred other subtle things. Teasing them all out would have made for a bombshell of a piece. But it's easier, I support, to leave those bits alone and just interview a bunch of fellow Princeton grads.

At the very tail end of the piece, Belkin tries to argue that this emerging domesticity is a good thing for dads, arguing that the 18 percent rise in at-home dad rates over the past decade was made possible by the movement of women out of the workforce and into the home. "Men are being freed to act like women," she writes. That argument is not complete bunk, but it wildly overstates at-home motherhood as the reason for the at-home dad increase. (There is another stat -- which I hadn't seen before -- showing that 46 percent of Ernst and Young family leaves were taken by men. That is a figure that I will look into.)

In short, the piece seemed to ram home the old-fashioned party line: women are happier at home. But I'm happy at home too. And so are the guys in my dads playground, the Ivy League grads, the ex-lawyers, the former hotshot political operatives. Is there something wrong with our MRIs? Belkin leaves me wondering.