I hauled the ironing board out of the closet the other day, and heading down the hall past my son’s room I decided to make a joke.

“Hey,” I said, trying to distract him from Mass Effect Halo Galaxy Land or something, “did you ever see one of these before?”

And that’s the only attempt at domestic humor you’re going to get from me today. I’m fed up with stereotypes, the persistence of snotty vision that boxes up men as incompetent in activities of daily living, with the underwear on the floor and the reluctance to clean anything and the inability, really, to function without that second X chromosome around to pick up afterwards. I’m tired of it, tired of people who perpetuate this sort of casual sexism in the name of fairness or funny business.

And full disclosure: I am, and have been for a long time, one of those people. But no more.

My wife left town last week, as she usually does in the summer. And every summer, it seems, I drag my software out from underneath the dirty laundry and write a column about our male-only household, how we survive on pizza and marathon movie sessions, how we start shopping for plasma TVs, how we slide down the evolutionary ladder until we bump into Paleolithic Man, grunting and hunting for cheese and cheese-like material.

I write about all of our cute male behaviors, such as spending an entire week conversing only in quotes from “The Matrix.” I write about how we feel free to drink from cartons and leave the seat up and throw towels on the floor after our showers, except showers? An afterthought, and maybe not all that necessary during Greek Week in this house.

And, finally, how we have to spend the last day frantically polishing walls, repainting entire rooms, removing a couple of dead rodents and of course opening every window in the place, just to cover our tracks as men. Oh, what pathetic creatures, such slobs and so helpless without the ladies.

So listen up: I iron.

I iron my shirts, once a week. Some of them get wrinkled in the laundry, which I also do once a week. And my son does his laundry, although he’s not so big on the ironing.

Those working bacteria incubators known as bathrooms? I clean those. My son runs the vacuum cleaner twice a week at least. Floors are mopped, sinks are scrubbed, meals are prepared, bills are paid, checkbooks are balanced, bread is baked and grass is most definitely cut by men in this family. So there.

And while I’m continuing with my fairness doctrine, my wife is a very busy woman, juggling three different jobs in a fragile economy, on the road a lot, while I work at home and usually lift nothing heavier than a stray quotation mark. She’s also one of those creative intellectual types, always studying and learning and not all that interested in mindless work. I, on the other hand, enjoy this sort of thing, the more mindless the better (and for good reason).

The truth is, stereotypes are fun for the occasional joke but not worth much in the marketplace of real people. Lots of men get along fine without women, and women certainly can live full, rich, exciting and peaceful lives without men. Relationships are varied and complicated, and they encompass a lot of different people. I’m not exceptional or an iconoclast; I’m just a guy. A guy who likes to iron. And bake.

So I baked cookies this wifeless week, on a whim, trying out a new recipe. I’m not a fan of cookies usually, since they tend to be full of unnecessary goodness and contain calories no middle-aged man needs, and also come in a convenient shape and size for quick consumption. But I was in a mood, so I baked six big chocolate chip cookies, 5 inches in diameter, and left them on a rack to cool.

And came back a few minutes later to find one left, and my son with chipmunk cheeks and chocolate covering his face, and this is where I defeat the purpose of this entire column.

“This,” he said, sort of muffled, “is not what it looks like.”

It was exactly what it looked like, though, and as it turns out what we’ve been missing this past week isn’t a stereotypical woman, but a specific one. The one who keeps the music playing, makes us laugh, cheers us up when we’re blue and loves us the way we are. The one who gives us advice and serves as a rudder, sometimes, to help us manage our more compulsive sides, to tell us when a shower might be good and when five cookies are four too many. We miss her, and we have a lonely house this week.

We also have a new TV.

What? We needed one.