I thought of this recently because a new book, “The Alpha Woman Meets Her Match” by Sonya Rhodes, is making the media rounds with its highly clickable message: strong, career-driven women will be happiest with a “beta” male. As the book jacket reads, “Challenging gender stereotypes associated with the terms Alpha and Beta, [Rhodes] advises the Alpha woman to look past the overly competitive, domineering Alpha male for a man who is not threatened by her strengths but is communicative, responsible, and collaborative. Just as Alpha women aren’t demanding bitches, Beta men aren’t passive wimps.” My discomfort with these labels notwithstanding, I’d go a step further: So-called beta males are great, period.

Now, to be clear, I’m not talking about sad-sack, ineffectual, layabout “omegas,” a type that became popular in Hollywood in the wake of the recession, as Jessica Grose pointed out at the time in Slate. “The omega male is not experiencing the tired trope of the midlife crisis,” she wrote. “A midlife crisis implies agency, a man who has the job and the family and chooses to reject it. The omega male doesn’t have the power to reject anything — he’s the one who has been brushed off. He’s generally unemployed, and his romantic relationships are in shambles — he’s either single or, if he’s married, not happy about it.”

I’m talking about men who lead with emotional intelligence, openness, sensitivity and understanding. Men whose masculinity and sexuality aren’t threatened by equality with women. Men who make great fathers. Men who pick up the spatula from time to time. Men who know where the vacuum cleaner is. Men who are not repelled by talk about feelings. Men who do not need to pound their chests about every damn thing. Men who have even read a feminist text or contemplated their privilege. Men who aren’t defined by traditional expectations of their gender.

Having written publicly about my personal life as a feminist, I have occasionally attracted the ire of men’s rights activists. They have pontificated about my husband’s beta qualities — namely that he must be a pussy to put up with my feminism or the fact that I’ve ever had partners before him. They’ve even proposed taking bets on how long before I cheat on him. In their minds, I am an alpha bitch (never mind that I took Rhodes’ quiz and ranked 52 percent “high beta”) who takes advantage of her poor beta man. Because, caveman times, evolutionary psychology — or something. This is how insecure their “alpha” masculinity is.