“I have three jobs in this house: open jars, reach things up high, and kill bugs. Knowing where we keep things is not my job.”

That’s an actual sentence I uttered while trying to find the corpse of the wasp I’d killed in my daughter’s room last night, which I believed had fallen behind her dresser.

At least, I’m pretty sure I killed it. Never did find the body.

I’m reminded of this because of this Wall Street Journal review of a Michael Lewis (whoever that is) book: “Home Game.” The gist: dads as hapless weaklings, whose families (and feminism) treat them like the worthless wimps they are.

An excerpt of the review:

“At some point in the last few decades, the American male sat down at the negotiating table with the American female and — let us be frank — got fleeced,” he writes.

The poor sucker agreed to take on responsibility for all sorts of menial tasks — tasks that his own father was barely aware of — and received nothing in return. If he was hoping for some gratitude, he was mistaken. According to Mr. Lewis: “Women may smile at a man pushing a baby stroller, but it is with the gentle condescension of a high officer of an army toward a village that surrendered without a fight.”

Oh. Please. Not more of this crap.

I’m not entirely sure whether the reviewer (Toby Young) is agreeing with Lewis’ premise or simply describing the book. Looks more like the former, to which I say: oh, please. Not more of this crap.

Hey, every now and then, I can relate. But only now and then. We all feel inadequate and powerless sometimes. And sometimes we think we’re the best thing ever. Both feelings are wrong, so how come nobody writes a book about how modern-day Dads are so super-awesome?

And how come this crap is in the Wall Street Journal? Are the editors there – the male ones, I mean – sitting down when they pee these days?

I put my own occasional sense of domestic inadequacy down to my hour-long-each-way commute to my full-time-plus job and my wife’s mostly-full-time-Mom-ness. Of course she’s going to have authority around the house. I want her to have authority around the house. And sometimes I put my foot down, too, even though she doesn’t agree. All of this is done in the spirit of we’re in this together, so we’d better be able to handle a little friction now and then.

We have four kids, people. If we can’t present a united front, they’ll tear us to shreds.

And then I read in the WSJ: “the American male is a pitiful creature.”

Hey, man, you know what? Screw you.

Any father, any man, any person who matches these descriptions is, simply, a person who doesn’t respect himself enough to demand that others respect him. And by that, I don’t mean striking the “I’ll never be hungry again” pose in the kitchen, or standing on a deck chair with “union” written on a piece of cardboard. I mean simply having the basic sense of self-worth that lets the people around you know, simply by the way you act, that you should be taken seriously.

If you don’t have that, well, maybe society is to blame. Luckily, you’re just the kind of person who would blame society for it.

But if this is epidemic in the U.S. today, as the review suggests, then I am blind. I don’t see it.

And one more thing: why, I’ll ask again, is this crap in the Wall Street Journal – usually a reliably conservative nationwide newspaper? Oh, those big bad feminists are picking on the poor helpless men! Those poor men just don’t know what to do!

Excuse me while I go throw up. And then excuse me from any movement seeking to make adult men out to be another class of victims.

If any publication should be rolling its metaphorical eyes derisively at this kind of crap, it’s the WSJ. Instead, in order to take a swipe at feminism and modern-day political correctness, they advance exactly that men-as-victims theme.

Bad newspaper. No cookie.

Found all that via Dr. Helen, by the way.