Reform UK’s Danny Kruger this week called for a resetting of Britain’s “totally unregulated sexual economy” in order to combat declining birth rates. The response from the Labour Party was quick and damning: “From taxing childless women more, to bemoaning women in higher education, to abolishing the Equality Act and protections from discrimination in the workplace, you’d be forgiven for thinking this is something out of The Handmaid’s Tale.”

For a real-life Handmaid’s Tale, Afghanistan under the Taliban might be a more obvious choice. Even so, some concern is far from unreasonable.

Bemoaning the introduction of non-fault divorce, Kruger apparently wants a return to the past. Women ought to be worried. When a sexual economy is “regulated”, in whose favour has this tended to work? Whose bodies and choices have been most subject to “regulation”? As a Generation-X woman, the first feminism I learned wasn’t from books or lectures, but instead from witnessing the “regulation” which kept women of my grandmother’s generation tied to men who did not follow the same rules they set for their wives. Without independence, it wasn’t as though the wives could do anything about it.

Kruger claims he is “not interested in your love life, or anything about your personal life”, just in making it easier “to settle down with one person to have children”. Yet he must understand that what is being asked of women here is not the same as what is asked of men. Indeed, if you want to bind couples for life, maybe you should care more about personal lives; regulating how a man behaves is surely more important than ensuring a woman cannot leave him, should that behaviour be poor.

Nonetheless, not everything Kruger claims can be brushed off as nostalgia for a more patriarchal era. He mentions family — along with community and country — providing “meaning and identity and security and a sense of belonging” for Britons. “I think that’s where this country is now going,” he says, “away from a doctrine of total liberal individualism.”

Kruger might be surprised to learn that many feminists would favour a move away from “total liberal individualism”, and indeed always have. For all that there is a tendency to characterise feminism by its most liberal and identitarian iterations, there is a long history of feminists being interested in care ethics, dependency and maternity. The difference is that rather than yearn for a behind-closed-doors “regulation of the sexual economy”, it addresses the failure of liberal individualism in much broader terms, not least as a failure of patriarchy itself.

As Katrine Marçal argued in 2015’s Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?, “the job market is still largely defined by the idea that humans are bodiless, sexless, profit-seeking individuals without family or context”. Women, she wrote, “can choose between being one of these, or being their opposite: the invisible and self-sacrificing one who is needed to balance the equation”. Kruger, who authored the 2021 Care Commitment report, understands the problem of denying dependency, yet his only solution is to add more patriarchy. But as sociologist Kathleen Lynch has pointed out, “creating a care-centric society requires a radical ideological shift from the deep-rooted individualism of liberal thinking, intellectually, culturally and politically” — not just sexually.

This is why any challenge to the Reform UK position needs more than Handmaid’s Tale comparisons. In its most extreme manifestations, “progressive” politics has thrown the baby out with the bathwater, suggesting that if women wish to be considered full human beings, we must pretend reproductive biology is irrelevant and all relational ties, even to our own children, can be dipped in and out of. When lasting human attachments are cast as regressive, you create an opportunity for those who repackage old-style sexism as care. Voters need to know these are not the only choices available. Positive endorsement of connection is just as important as criticism of patriarchal control.

There are no doubt some men who long for their own personal Gilead. Let’s not let them speak for anyone who wants stable families and relationships. There are, and always have been, better alternatives.

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Victoria Smith is a writer and creator of the Glosswitch newsletter.

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