I am on holidays in Italy, where I have spent most of the week eating, sunbathing and pretending I won’t have to orchestrate a move to the other side of the world a few days after we get back.
I mentioned this to a nice woman I met from Scotland, while we stood on the beach watching our children reconstruct the Burj Al Arab in sand. She told me that she had friends who recently moved to Sydney on a short-term work contract. They hated it, she told me. “They didn’t make any friends.”
Then she leaned in closer and added, by way of explanation: “He is a stay-at-home dad.”
I must have looked perplexed, because she went on: “Well, they’re a bit odd, aren’t they? You know,” she gestured in the air, “all that long hair and hemp.”
I know a few stay-at-home dads, not one of whom has dubious hair or a penchant for breathable fabrics.
Like the stay-at-home mothers I know, what unites them has nothing to do with how they dress or wear their hair. Instead, what they have in common – maybe all they have in common – is the fact that, through a series of carefully considered life choices, happy accidents or economic misadventures, they've ended up being the one standing in the rain at the school gate; the one on hand on weekdays to administer the sun screen, the Calpol and the hugs. They're the one in their relationship most likely to know why Team Umizoomi is a superior form of entertainment to Barney or to be able, to their shame, to recite all the words to One Direction's What Makes You Beautiful.
Personally, I happen to think they’re heroes. Not because they’re doing a job that women have done for generations without plaudit, but because they do it in spite of the snide remarks and the mockery and the general air of bewilderment it generates.
Of course, I didn't tell her any of this – like all the best retorts, I rehearsed it in my head after I had walked away. I may even have forgotten the conversation except that a day or so later, I came across a short interview in the Observer with the American writer Katie Roiphe. In it, she said: "Are women going to be attracted to the stay-at-home dad? I'm not so sure."
Am I missing something? I mean, what could possibly attract any sane woman to a man who is willing to support her career, raise their children, manage the household they share, and turn out the odd edible meal in the process?
Now that pigeonholing women on the basis of whether we have careers or children or both or neither is on the verge of becoming unacceptable, I fear we may be about to start doing precisely that to men. Actually, I strongly suspect it’s already under way.
The stay-at-home dads I know – and I can’t help noticing they still number much fewer than we’d been promised by now – never had any trouble making friends in the pre-primary carer phase of their lives. But now they’re having a hard time breaking into the school gate clique, and find themselves the odd-one-out at mother-and-baby groups.
The truth seems to be that for all we encourage women to shirk the prescribed gender stereotypes, we are distinctly less enthused when it’s men who show an interest in breaking the mould.
Meanwhile, suggesting that women may not be attracted to stay-at-home dads makes just about as much sense as the view that “men don’t like career girls”. Yes, there may be people out there who define attractiveness by what’s on a CV, but as a predictor of future happiness, I’d rather take a punt on qualities such as kindness, mutual respect and the kind of confidence it takes to turn your back on notions about masculinity bred into you since childhood.
I'm with the Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg on this. She urges women to choose their partners wisely, and men to stop regarding looking after their children as babysitting.
Sandberg’s vision of “a truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes” may be a long way off.
But if we’re ever going to evolve into a society where caring roles are genuinely valued, we need more than a few trailblazing men to become stay-at-home dads.
So let’s stop belittling them with remarks about hemp and haircuts. And as for their attractiveness – give me a stay-at-home-dad over a chest-thumping Master of the Universe any day.