I looked up the word 'feckless' in the dictionary this morning because, according to those helpful people at Netmums, us dads are too often unfairly labelled as such.
Think peanut-brained Homer Simpson, any hopeless lead character in a soap opera and, my favourite, the wonderfully bemused and put-upon dad in Outnumbered.
Apparently, the 'routine misrepresentation' of fathers as useless in the media is far removed from how we are in real life. If women were treated in this way, so the Netmums research helpfully tells us, they'd be screaming 'discrimination' from the rooftops.
Hmm...the routine misrepresentation... So I dusted off the dictionary. Feckless is defined as, variously, weak, irresponsible, ineffectual, lazy, showing lack of care and consequences, and the instigator of hasty and irresponsible actions.
Well thanks for the vote of confidence mums from the net but you see I'm quite proud of my fecklessness. Do you not realise that, in fact, most men wear it as a badge of honour?
I honestly don't care if the sheets are immaculately ironed, anyway we changed them last week do we have to do it again? If I can have a Friday night takeaway instead of defrosting some chicken I am blissfully content. If the children's shoes are scuffed every morning, well, so what, they're only going to get scuffed again even after some boot polish and elbow grease. My hair is untidy for a reason, I like it that way and if you clear up my CDs I won't know where they are. There is loads of room in the fridge for my various beers and your revolting yogurts, just squeeze it all up a bit.
The bills get paid at the last minute - big deal, I want to hold on to my money as long as I can, but at least they get paid. OK, the new 48-inch TV dwarfs everything else in the living room but, come on, now we can watch Star Wars as if we're in the cinema. And I promise - I promise - to hang the painting your mother bought us for our anniversary on the weekend. I promise. If I can find the hammer among the detritus in the shed that I will also clean out at some point, maybe this weekend. I promise.
I am a man and I am feckless. Good. I do not need some anally-organised, OCD, paranoid, stressed, fretful, control freak mums telling me that to be called feckless is deeply harmful and an unpleasant discrimination.
I like the fact that Homer Simpson is incompetent and neglectful yet somehow saves the day and is eventually worshipped by his family. That his 3 indispensable rules to get through life - 'Cover for me', 'It was like that when I got here', 'Good idea boss,' - are entirely sensible.
I admire the father in Outnumbered whose career is self-imploding whilst he manages, somewhat shambolically, to amuse the children (and thus strengthen the family bonds) on the living room sofa each night.
If you really want feckless, then what about Don Draper - and we all want to be him or sleep with him. Irresponsible coupling, bourbon-induced laziness, nonchalant selfishness. What's wrong with that? Do such portrayals of men equate to discrimination, Netmums?
Of course they don't. We like being like this. And let's face it, if we weren't you wouldn't be able to moan about us. And you'd hate that.