This Father's Day: Are Dads Necessary?

In a word, yes.

But you wouldn't know it from most aspects of our popular culture.

This Father's Day look around at how dads are portrayed in television and movies. They're usually witless, abusive, effeminate, psycho, or all of the above. As a father myself I plead guilty to the occasional witless moment. The other stuff. Uh, no.

Two television series, both of which I like, are cases in point: Malcolm in the Middle and Modern Family. Widely distributed in reruns, both shows feature a bumbling fey dad guided by the obligatory tough and intelligent mom.

Hal in Malcolm, played by Bryan Cranston, is hilarious. The competitive disco skating episode is classic. But if you switched gender roles and mom was portrayed as the fool the usual suspects would grab for their smelling salts and shriek to high heaven.

And Phil Dunphy on Modern Family, played by Ty Burrell? Again, very funny character. But his testosterone level generally conforms to the remaining number of Joe Biden’s brain cells. That is, not much.

Look, I'm not trying to be a Ward Cleaver acolyte (though there are worse things), but to think males have not been consistently denigrated now for decades is ignoring the issue by some flight of fancy into feminist Barbieland. Two words make the point: toxic masculinity.

Glossing over the real life examples of toxic femininity that pervade politics, culture, and academia, the term toxic masculinity has become an all purpose cudgel to beat men over the head.

These are, of course, the same type of men who invented most of modern technology, stopped Nazis and Communists from taking over the world, and whose participation is necessary to create human life. Sure, we're far from perfect. But shouldn't we catch a bit of a break? According to our reigning cultural lords, nahhhhhh...

Portrayed as dads, businessmen, military types, and most anything else, fathers and males in general come off as warm and cuddly in a Heinrich Himmler sort of way. They are automatically sexist and pruriently harass sundry women at the drop of a hat. Naturally, if we still had a proper society where men wore hats, baseball caps don't count past 12 years of age, then the dropped item would be a trilby, homburg, or at worst a fedora. But, I digress.

So this upcoming Sunday, take dad out for a steak the size of a manhole cover. Barbecue will sub in a pinch. Let him smoke a decent cigar within shouting distance of the living room. Indulge a Band of Brothers marathon by cable or DVD. Pour him three fingers of a whiskey of his choice, though at his age he should probably only have one and he should sip on that.

It's the least you can do for your technology, your freedom, and your very existence on the planet. Cheers!