hatchet-job

The remarkable thing about Steve Doughty's otherwise fairly unremarkable anti-feminist hatchet job of Dr Katherine Rake is the fear of choice.

Doughty tries his best to present Dr Rake as a radical (she wants to "revolutionise" lives!), somehow hypocritical (she's married!), an insufficiently feminine woman (she has short hair like 70s feminists!) and willing to work with gay people (ZOMGZOMG THE GAYS!). He also fabricates one outright lie - the notion that wanting to support greater equality in relationships means she refuses to help "ordinary families" or "parents as they are."

This points to the underlying rhetorical device: to pretend that creating greater choice and freedom in the way we live our lives is the same thing as forcing people to change their lives - that, for example, to open mother and toddler groups to stay-at-home fathers is the equivalent of demanding that all men should stay home and look after their children. So the story leads with

..Dr Katherine Rake, who wants to see men bring up babies

and tries to pretend that this is some kind of blanket policy where men will uniformly take over duties of care and - as in the words of centre-right think-tank Centre for Policy Studies - her agenda is "more about reversing sex roles than helping parents."

And that's without touching the (fairly insulting) ridiculousness of suggesting that many men wouldn't be interested in having more of a role in their children's lives.