Patriarchaic

The other day MsP asked why Siri had to be female. I didn't say so at the time, because I'm easily distracted, but I imagine it is something to do with the fact that many men (if no longer the majority consumers of iPhones, I would be willing to guess still the majority producers) still see women as providing their 'support' role. Traditionally this 'support' role has meant feeding, clothing and organising the life of a man, so that he can do pretty much what he likes and designate it as important. Obviously the 'pretty much what he likes' bit was not quite so free and easy when jobs involved greater manual labour, but since the middle class emerged and the vast majority of jobs became devoid of any kind of manual labour, men have had to pretend that their 'work' is in some way special in order to sustain the system of surrogate mothering that they appear to expect from the opposite sex. I am not saying that men are alone in perpetuating their infantile state: too many women support it too, perhaps fearful that telling men to grow up will brand them as man-haters - or any of the other childish epithets men ascribe to people who don't let them get their own way. However trying to blame women for the failings of men is exactly the kind of feeble excuse men hide behind.
There appear to have been a number of articles and even books recently that stitch together isolated incidents of discrimination by women against men and some observations about the impact that increasing sexual equality has had on the areas of life that men used to be able to rely on (not having to wash up, not having to help with the children, not being prosecuted for beating their wives, etc.) in an attempt to show that the pendulum has swung too far the other way. So just to clarify, they're saying that a shift towards a slightly more equal society has led to discrimination against men. Although, reading between the lines I think they might just be whinging that taking a bit of responsibility for one's life and one's actions is hard. Didums. For want of a better phrase, the only response I can find is 'man up!' And I don't mean 'man up' in the sense of 'do something spectacularly dangerous and/or stupid and, if you survive, brag about it afterwards'.
Unfortunately the people presented as male role models are all too often the kinds of people who can only celebrate their success due to some spectacular gamble having paid off. With hindsight it is easy too see their recklessness as strategy because it paid off. The countless other people who have pursued such 'strategies' and failed/died in the process don't get to write history and so do not appear on our radar. Men have therefore assumed that recklessness is the key to a fulfilling life and for centuries have been playing a kind of Darwinian lottery based on this assumption. I'm not saying that we should live a life devoid of risk - life is a series of calculated risks - I am simply saying that the (largely male) attitude to measuring risk and return should be reconsidered. Financial products always state that past performance is no indicator of future performance, yet the men who run those products take the exact opposite approach to risk: considering that a risk that has paid off in the past must therefore do so again, and to think otherwise would be in some way 'un-manly'. The implicit complaint is that mitigating risk by exercising due caution is boring. The only response to this I can think of is 'grow up'.
This is, of course, unlikely. Every generation since X has systematically failed to grow up, hence why we spend most of our spare time at festivals, or in the pub, or playing computer games, or at least we would if our responsibilities didn't get in the way. Many men tend to associate such responsibilities with their partners, and so the lingua franca of such men when away from their partners becomes utterly objectionable. Phrases such as "night off from the missus" or "free pass" portray the other (usually female) partner as undesirable and reinforce the gender roles as a direct male/female child/parent dichotomy. This is not healthy, either for the relationship or the general wellbeing of society. It creates schizophrenic behavior in that these infantile men, who effectively only behave when with their wife/mother substitute, yearn to get away and misbehave.
As usual, I am not solely an impartial observer of this condition: I have on occasion been guilty of using MsP as a kind of pressure valve for my worst excesses, knowing that her reason will eventually assert itself. By doing so, I inevitably paint her as the 'boring' one, creating resentment on her part and adding an element of dysfunction into our relationship. I am genuinely trying to mitigate this behavior by setting my own boundaries and sticking to them. Most importantly, I need to remember that this doesn't make me boring. Just an adult.