Ever seen those 1950s adverts preying on the dire need for housewives to ensure their spouse’s collars were whiter than sparkling white? “He wears the cleanest shirts in town!” declares blonde frau, tweaking her gratified beau’s bow tie. That sorta thing.

On a parallel theme, but rather more recently, sociologist Kate Fox in her seminal study Watching the English, reported a hapless husband returning from the supermarket toting a bottle of ketchup when he’d been despatched to buy tomatoes. His excuse – “it’s got tomatoes in it” – fell on stony ground.

Cue 2010 and a paradigm shift. Call it Girl Power, call it Women on Top, call it whatever you want, but there is a distinct trend for blokes to be the homemaker – more concerned with bargain blackberries than bargaining via their BlackBerrys – and leaving it to their spouse to bring home the metaphoric bacon.

Ian Orsman and Sue Phillips are just such a couple. A former physiotherapist, he rouses their two daughters for breakfast in the wee hours, performs the school run, nips down to the local supermarket in Richmond, London, wrestles with domestic chores and makes sure supper is ready on the table, while his wife – Chief Executive Officer of Synovate Censydiam – concentrates on earning the dosh to finance the family.

“Financially, the decision was no-brainer – I had my own business so it made sense for Ian to give up physio,” says Sue.

Ian responds: “I love what I do, but I do miss engaging with other adults. I’m on my own a lot of the day, so I find myself talking to inanimate objects, like Pauline Collins in Shirley Valentine.

“In Singapore, where we lived for a while, the expression for someone like me was Trailing Spouse, which I thought was horrible. I prefer Stay At Home Dad.”

When not chatting to his Dyson, Ian trains for triathlons, and is also at the forefront of family purchases. He does the laundry, so that him choosing what sort of washing powder to buy is sheer logic. And here’s the rub-a-dub-dub. Marketing managers the world over are logging on to the idea of Home Alone Dads, and the fact that they are the ones most likely to flash the plastic when it comes to replacing the fridge or switching brands of washing up liquid. Hence Sony’s launch last year (2009) of its DigiDad project, teaming up with “Daddy Bloggers” and lending them Sony products to capture family experiences. And in turn capture a significant emerging market.

Sony was certainly following up a hot lead. One of its DigiDads, long-time blogger and media producer C C Chapman of Milford, Massachusetts, said that writing about children or family attracted the most attention. Perhaps Sony marketers worked out that sex sells, but the ultimate by-product of sex sells even better.

Are there any housewives out there still obsessed with clean collars? Or any male ditzy enough to confuse a South American fruit with a North American condiment? Try Yahoo Answers if you’re not sure.