Yikes, advertising is turning me into a deviant.

If you were to walk into my house on any given night around 7 p.m., you might find my wife engaged in an activity so provocative and perverse, regulators banned it from British advertising: washing the dinner dishes.

According to the headline in Britain’s Daily Mail, “Traditional mums and hopeless dads are banned from adverts by watchdog: Commercials based on 'harmful' gender stereotypes will vanish from screens.”

Forget for a moment that on any given night, I’m at least as likely to be washing the dishes. When my wife picks up the Brillo, it’s one of those “harmful stereotypes [that] can restrict the choices, aspirations and opportunities of children, young people and adults.”

My life is destroying the minds of young people.

Dishes aren’t the only objects of perversity in my house. Consider what goes on between me, my wife and a jar of Hellman’s: I open the refrigerator and can’t find it. My wife moves the milk, retrieves the jar from the back of the fridge and hands it to me.

There I am. A hopeless dad, playing “a part in unequal gender outcomes, with costs for individuals, the economy and society.”

It wasn’t always that way.

Advertising and the law of unintended consequences.

Before there was a hopeless husband, there was the hapless housewife. In advertising’s bad old days, authoritative men (often in the form of announcer voiceovers) rescued women from all kinds of commercial problems. Everything from static cling to Tuesday night’s dinner.

When women challenged the stereotype, advertisers listened. But the commercials still needed drama. Tension. Some human being with a problem to solve. The stereotype of the hopeless husband is an unintended consequence. I imagine that he caught on because he was funny and he worked in the marketplace.

Now British regulators want to kill him, along with “traditional mums.”

And the consequences of these new bans will be...

Laughably, the rules won’t outright ban men or women from all stereotypical activities. It’s “subject to context and content considerations.” In other words, the whim of the regulator who reviews your commercial.

You can show men grappling with housework or women taking care of kids, as long as you can prove that they’re not perpetuating a stereotype. Any logician will tell you that it’s impossible to prove that kind of negative.

Advertisers will of course invent workarounds. I’m neither talented nor prophetic enough to know what they’ll try or what will catch on. But I wonder how will women who take care of their homes and families, even in shared responsibility, feel in a world where the mass media suggests they’re not supposed to? How will men feel about grappling with a vacuum cleaner when mass media suggests every man is competent and capable of housework?

Social engineering through advertising.

If that’s what consumer’s want, it’s one thing. The hapless housewife died because women rejected her and advertisers listened. Here, governments and regulators are forbidding depictions of accepted norms and behaviors.

In this Brave New World that British regulators are creating, moms don’t do dishes and dads always know where the mayo is. Anything else, including my happily normal and boring existence, means I'm now a deviant.

How do I tell my family?