I feel for fathers.  I do.  I know they're lazy bums.  They don't do their share around the house.  You gotta nag 'em not to throw their dirty underwear on the floor, never mind doing the laundry.  You gotta keep asking them to make sure the seat's up when they take a whiz, and then to make sure it's down when they've finished (I live in a house full of women these days, and it's got so confusing for me, I just piss in the sink now). 

But the one day a year we've set aside to celebrate dad's contribution, however you want to look at it — in sperm count, extra income, comic relief — the newspapers use as an excuse to lecture them on how they could always do more.

Check out the Mother's Day cover of the Times Sunday Magazine this year:


Here's the one for today:


That's a rollicking "Happy Father's Day!" if I ever saw one. 

Let's just all try and remember that we've come very far very fast from our primate cousins, for whom infanticide at the hand of the dominant male is not at all uncommon.  I'm not saying we should look at that as our baseline, but let's back up a bit and try and see where we came from before we bang dad over the head for sticking it out.  I mean, with all this nagging, it's a wonder he's not off hunting mastodons every weekend with the boys.

The ThirdPath movement discussed in the Times Magazine article is obviously a quantum leap forward in hetero evolution, although they're still light years behind gay and lesbian parents, who have been completely liberated from traditional gender roles in the home and can afford wet nurses and nannies to do the real work anyway. 

The secret's out, though.  As one of the husbands in the article notes, equality is a lot easier when you can balance it on the backs of the working class, and "outsource chores," presumably to women who go home to their families after cleaning up after yours, but then, unfortunately, they have no one to outsource their chores to.

There are other problems, participants in ThirdPath acknowledge, with watching the clock a little too closely. As one of the women in the article says: “The question should not be, Is it all exactly equal, but, What is best for all of us as a group right now?  If we decided it’s really important that we are 50-50 on everything, we would work on that. If we decide it’s really important that we be close to family, then we work on that.”

I'm all for everybody pulling their weight around the house.  Lord knows, I've discovered here that it takes a village to clean a bathroom.  But let the poor slob alone on his special day.  It may look like he's not doing much, but actually he's swimming pretty hard against the evolutionary current.