The Handmaid’s Tale describes a futuristic puritan patriarchy in which women have been stripped of their liberties and forced into service as child-bearers for the ruling class. A television adaptation was already in development when Trump was elected, but its arrival in the spring of 2017 felt tailor-made for the moment — and its imagery, especially those blood-red robes with their creepy, face-obscuring bonnets, was too instagrammable to resist. In June that year, the New York Times noted that Handmaid costumes had become de rigueur at protests against everything from Planned Parenthood funding cuts in Washington, D.C. to abortion restrictions in Ohio.

Meanwhile, Atwood was newly hailed as a modern-day Cassandra, one whose warnings we could no longer afford to ignore. As one Guardian columnist wrote, “The world of Offred, though still notionally a fiction, has migrated from creative construct to the realm of the thinkable.”

Atwood, it should be said, never quite bought into the vision of herself as the oracle of the Trump resistance. When pressed, her responses were invariably judicious — “We’re not living in Gilead yet, but there are Gilead-like symptoms going on”, she told one interviewer — though media coverage framed them as anything but. The most striking example of this is her New York Times retrospective on The Handmaid’s Tale, written in March 2017: the headline reads, “Margaret Atwood on What The Handmaid’s Tale Means in the Age of Trump”. The essay doesn’t mention him.

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And there were hints, always, that Atwood wasn’t quite as gung-ho for the new feminism as some pretended. In 2016, she was a signatory on a letter demanding accountability in the case of Stephen Galloway, a professor who was accused of sexual assault and fired without due process by the University of British Columbia. (A defamation suit by Galloway is ongoing in the Canadian courts.) Atwood’s 2018 essay about the matter became Twitter’s outrage du jour and caused the website Vox to downgrade Atwood’s status from “feminist icon” to “problematic fave”. Atwood’s response was a bone-dry tweet:

Taking a break from being Supreme Being Goddess, omniscient, omnipotent, and responsible for all ills. Sorry I have failed the world so far on gender equality. Maybe stop trying? Will be back later. (Next incarnation maybe.)

— Margaret E Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) January 14, 2018

Yet any qualms about Atwood’s ideological purity were eclipsed at the time by her usefulness to the movement. Simply put, people wanted to wear Handmaid’s Tale outfits in front of the Supreme Court more than they wanted to purge the author for being a little too agnostic on #MeToo.

But fast-forward to our present day: The Handmaid’s Tale has long since finished its four-season run on Hulu. The #MeToo movement is yesterday’s news. And that fervour for protecting women’s bodies — from government overreach and groping hands alike — has been increasingly replaced by a base-level discomfort with women’s bodies, not just as a discussion topic, but as a concept. By the time Atwood came under fire again, this time for retweeting an article observing the bizarre retreat of the word “woman” from the public sphere, the cultural tides had turned. The enemy in the Oval Office was gone; the feminist eye of Sauron turned inward.

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And for the same movement that once hailed Atwood as a prophet because she wrote so searingly about how women’s bodies and biology become the subject of oppression, now she was vaguely suspicious — for the exact same reason.

Atwood, as usual, is not interested in what you think of her — nor in placing herself into an ideological box that would make her easy to dismiss. Her new book of essays, Burning Questions, is ironically titled: the new feminism is desperate to know Atwood’s stance on gender ideology, but in interviews, Atwood has artfully refused to be pinned down. Those looking for an answer won’t find it here.

Still, it’s hard to imagine that she’s surprised by the turn the feminist movement has taken towards purging those women, and particularly women of a certain age, who won’t toe the line on its uptake of the latest in gender ideology. Insofar as Atwood can predict the future, it’s always been because she pays attention to the past. “I believed two things. (1) That if true believers say they’ll do a thing, when they get the chance they’ll do it. (2) Whoever says “It can’t happen here” is wrong. Anything can happen anywhere, given the right conditions, as history has demonstrated time and time again,” she writes, in the essay titled “Reflections on The Handmaid’s Tale“.

And the social disposability of women who are past childbearing age and hence no longer serve any social purpose (the unspoken subtext: to men) is one of those time-and-time-again themes. From the 19th century medical consensus that menopausal women might as well die off, having outlived their usefulness, to the dearth of roles for women over 40 in Hollywood, to the shared (and oft-written-about) feeling among middle-aged women that they’ve somehow become invisible. And while feminism has long pushed back against the patriarchy that pushes older women into obscurity, it turns out we’re not above engaging in our own little litmus tests for the grande dames who won’t get with the times.

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Yesterday’s feminist heroes — the Atwoods, the Rowlings, the second-wavers writ large — are today subject to interrogation about where their loyalties lie. If they don’t pass the test, into the bin they go. The new feminist wields the word “terf” to the same end as the men’s rights activists who deem us “unfuckable”, hence useless: it’s a label designed to deem its wearer irrelevant, out of bounds, voiceless.

Seen from certain angles, there’s something peculiarly optimistic about all this, as if feminism has so thoroughly won the battle for women’s bodily autonomy that it need not be our primary concern. In fact, all this discussion of women and bodies is actually offensive and unnecessary and should no longer take place (or if it must, we should at least have the decency to leave the W-word out of it and say “people with cervixes” instead). There are echoes of the past here, too: in her notoriously negative review of The Handmaid’s Tale for the New York Times in 1986, Mary McCarthy declared the novel too dystopian to be believed, an alternate history of a culture war that had already been thoroughly won. “Even when I try, in the light of these palely lurid pages, to take the Moral Majority seriously, no shiver of recognition ensues”, she wrote.

Today’s insistence that feminism should pivot away from women’s bodies and toward inclusivity and diversity suggests that The Handmaid’s Tale has been deemed an irrelevant and impossible fiction once again — even as Roe v. Wade, the landmark US Supreme Court case that legalised abortion, is facing its most serious threat in decades. One gets the sense of an army wandering off its longtime battlefield in search of a new conflict, a giant MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner floating down to cover the few red-robed protesters still lingering at the front.

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Maybe that pivot is the right choice, or maybe not; as Atwood notes, “There is no such thing as being on the wrong side of history — if history means who’s in political power and who’s not, and who’s in intellectual fashion and who’s not, because history of that kind doesn’t have sides.”

But while we’ll have to wait for the benefit of hindsight before those purged from the movement emerge in the rear-view as either traitors or martyrs, we can consider one thing now: who benefits from this moment of intra-feminist conflict? Who is watching, hungrily, as we tear each other apart?

This is the kind of question Atwood doesn’t ordinarily shy away from answering, unconcerned as she is with which ideas are currently in vogue. Not only that, it’s one she has answered, in the essay titled, “Am I a Bad Feminist?” Written for The Globe and Mail in 2018 after she ran afoul of the #MeToo orthodoxy, it is reproduced in Burning Questions — but with a curious omission: one that seems to illuminate the limits of Atwood’s bravery when it comes to the changing landscape of feminism and the issues that put us at each other’s throats. Four years ago, when the dissident feminist’s topic was the excesses of #MeToo, the last paragraph of this essay included a barn-burner of a line:

“A war among women, as opposed to a war on women, is always pleasing to those who do not wish women well.”

But that was then, and this is now — in a world where the feminist movement is tearing itself apart not over sexual mores, but gender ideology. And in the version of this essay that appears in Atwood’s new book, that final warning has been left out.

The acceptance of pornography as part of everyday life, available freely and constantly via our private devices, was based on a compact that should always have been obviously implausible: that the media you consume will not change you in any way. That you can log out after orgasm touched only by yourself. And that anodyne outcome was considered possible even when the material being consumed was the most depraved imaginable.

A 2003 column by David Aaronovitch probably conveys a lot of my own thoughts about the subject at the time. Worries about the number of men accessing images of child sexual abuse were, he wrote, a “panic”. Such material was obviously harmful to the children depicted in it and should be prohibited on that basis, but it would be a mistake to automatically classify those men as paedophiles. They might, he conjectured, “be motivated as much by a strange curiosity as by a desire for arousal or release”.

A line is quietly drawn here: on the one side you have the “genuine paedophiles” whose interest in sexual images of children reflects their authentic interest in sex with children, and on the other you have the “strangely curious” who will never present an in-person risk. Implicit is the idea that there is something essential and stable in the individual’s nature which controls their relationship to pornography. Your sexuality pre-exists and overrides your media exposure. In other words, nobody becomes a nonce because of the internet.

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To think this way felt knowing, authoritative. The world was full of seamy horrors, but I was equal to comprehending them — and not liable to be shocked into overreaction. To recall that way of thinking now is to feel naive, unworldly. Exposure to extreme material reformulates desires, and desires can become actions.

Talking to the Guardian this year, Michael Sheath of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation (a charity which aims to prevent potential child abusers from becoming actual ones) explained the relationship of cause and effect like this: “Of course most people can watch extreme porn and walk away, but I don’t see those people. What we are seeing on a daily basis is the conflation of easy access to hardcore and deviant pornography, and an interest in child molestation. The link is unambiguous.” There’s a consensus among professional organisations that lockdown has heightened the risks by intensifying immersion in online existence.

Why was this so hard to see coming? By the end of the twentieth century, society had reached a broad accommodation with pornography in its print and video forms. Even if you didn’t use it personally, you probably owed something to it in your everyday life: pornography had driven the adoption of VHS, cable TV and the internet. Its online iteration would be a revolution in convenience but nothing else. To be against it wasn’t just to be a miserable dried-up prude, it was to have turned away from everything modernity had to offer.

When Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, she put anti-porn feminists in the authoritarian camp, happily building bonfires of smut that would light the way for Gilead. The narrator Offred’s mother is one of the book burners, and she takes her daughter with her. In one of Offred’s memories, a friend of her mother’s gives her a magazine to add to the pyre:

“It had a pretty woman on it, with no clothes on, hanging from the ceiling by a chain wound around her hands. I looked at it with interest. It didn’t frighten me. I thought she was swinging, like Tarzan from a vine, on the TV.
“Don’t let her see it, said my mother. Here, she said to me, toss it in, quick.
“I threw the magazine into the flames. It riffled open in the wind of its burning; big flakes of paper came loose, sailed into the air, still on fire, parts of women’s bodies, turning to black ash in the air, before my eyes.”

In this scene, the symbolic violence to women is done not by porn, but by the destruction of porn. And Offred’s exposure to it does her no harm at all: she sees a woman bound for male pleasure, and imagines her as the hero of an adventure story. That resilience is a quiet and total riposte to her mother’s entire politics.

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It seems strange to me now that a novelist should argue, effectively, that culture has no influence. And perhaps even stranger for a political writer to have believed it — someone whose life is spent in the work of persuasion, whose business is using words to change the way people think. But I believed it too. Twenty years ago, I thought that whatever the internet might do to porn, the porn would do nothing significant to us.

***

It’s hard to be a liberal. Free speech can be a dangerous thing. So can sex. Andrea Dworkin — one of the anti-porn feminists Offred’s mother would have read — understood that men use sex as a vehicle for domination precisely because they fear the vulnerability it engenders. As she wrote in her 1987 book Intercourse:

“Sexual intercourse is not intrinsically banal, though pop-culture magazines like Esquire and Cosmopolitan would suggest that it is. It is intense, often desperate. The internal landscape is violent upheaval, a wild and ultimately cruel disregard of human individuality, a brazen, high-strung wanting that is absolute and imperishable, not attached to personality, no respecter of boundaries; ending not in sexual climax but in a human tragedy of failed relationships, vengeful bitterness in an aftermath of sexual heat, personality corroded by too much endurance of undesired, habitual intercourse, conflict, a wearing away of vitality in the numbness finally of habit or compulsion or the loneliness of separation. The experience of fucking changes people, so that they are often lost to each other and slowly they are lost to human hope. The pain of having been exposed, so naked, leads to hiding, self-protection, building barricades, emotional and physical alienation or violent retaliation against anyone who gets too close.”

And she knew that exposure to pornography changes people too, because she had undergone it herself. Her analysis of the pornographic classic The Story of O, from her 1974 book Woman Hating, contains a brief but striking aside: “O is particularly compelling for me because I once believed it to be what its defenders claim — the mystical revelation of the true, eternal, and sacral destiny of women.” O’s sexual apotheosis comes when she asks her lover for permission to kill herself, finally becoming the nothing she was born to be.

The fact that Dworkin was speaking from experience when she spoke about porn is inconvenient for pornography’s defenders, whose usual defensive strategy is to say that anyone who criticises it must be speaking from fear and repression. Don’t like what you’ve seen? Then you simply haven’t seen enough. When the singer Billie Eilish described recently about how her consumption of porn from the age of eleven had, among other things, distorted her idea of what “normal” female genitals look like, one female adult performer responded with disappointment that the “vulva diversity” in porn was being overlooked.

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But no one actually paying attention to what Eilish said could genuinely think her problems would be resolved by more porn. “I think it really destroyed my brain,” she explained. “I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn… I would just watch abusive BDSM… it led to problems where, you know, the first few times I had sex I was not saying no to things that were not good. And it’s because I thought that that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to.”

It’s something Eilish has talked about before, but one of the things that made it so impressive this time was where she said it: in an interview with Howard Stern. Throughout his career as a shock jock, Stern has proudly stood for the crassest in free speech. (A typical Stern stunt: in 2014, the blogger Perez Hilton fingered one of Stern’s male writers live on air.) Before the internet, he was one of the main forces in creating crossover stars from the adult industry. An invite onto his show was a way to break into the mainstream.

Not that his support necessarily translated into respect for those who worked in the industry. When the performer Sasha Grey (famous for her extreme BDSM scenes, in which she was choked, punched and slapped) accused Stern of being a “closet racist” in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2009, he didn’t just defend his own honour, he attacked hers: “What a genius… Please. Just tell me how much cock you can suck and how far you can swallow a hot dog.” But he liked porn, and helped create a society where porn was the norm.

And yet, confronted with Eilish’s story, his response was absolute agreement. “When I was little, the only thing you had was, like, a New York Times girdle ad… The first time I had sex, I had no clue what the fuck I was doing. There was a certain innocence about it. And I often say, if I had porn when I was a kid, I mean, I would run around spanking people thinking that this was what they would like.”

What he says here is a betrayal of the underlying fantasy of porn. Porn deals, of course, in many different fantasies — fantasies of what women are like and what men are like, different kinks and fetishes — but underlying all of that is a fantasy of inert sex. Sex that, however physically demanding, only reveals and does not change the people involved.

In the same interview in which she insulted Stern (an interview which was, it should be remembered, a shop window for her work and persona as much as a genuine revelation of herself), Grey delivered a perfect articulation of that fantasy. “I am a pervert,” she told the journalist, rejecting the idea that women enter porn because of trauma. “If I am working out any issues through porn, it’s anger at society for not being open about sex.” She claimed her interest in BDSM dated to her childhood — that what she showed in porn was her authentic, inherent self, and that whatever she did was in the service of her own desire to get off.

At least one person who had worked with her expressed scepticism about this. A producer quoted in the article said that he thought her “extreme presence” was a calculated means to raise her profile. Certainly, all the incentives aligned to make extremity work for her: as the “dirtiest girl in the world” (to quote the title of the Rolling Stone interview) she won mainstream attention and breakthrough roles, including the lead part in Steven Soderbergh’s movie The Girlfriend Experience.

Sex is not a solo activity, and her partner in this case was not another person but a whole industry. Whatever interests and inclinations she arrived with, only some of them were valuable enough to be encouraged.

***

Sometimes it seems there’s a conspiracy between the people who make porn and the people who don’t actually watch much porn to maintain the fiction of harmlessness. For the former, the idea of porn as a vast and effective subterranean propaganda network is a threat to their bottom line; for the latter, it’s a threat to their sense of security in the world. But the people who use it know otherwise, even if they don’t often admit it publicly.

The horror filmmaker David Cronenberg is not anyone’s idea of an anti-porn feminist, not least because his films are insistently, gruesomely pornographic. My favourite of them is Videodrome from 1982. It’s the story of a cable TV executive called Max Renn, played by James Woods, who is searching for something genuinely hardcore to give his small channel the competitive edge. When he stumbles across a scrambled broadcast called Videodrome which shows highly convincing scenes of women being bound, beaten and killed, he’s transfixed.

As Max tries to learn more about these strange films, he is warned that he’s messing with something dangerous: “It can programme you. It can play you like a video player,” murmurs one of the many shadowy people he meets. It contains coded signals that cause Max to hallucinate and, eventually, to undergo physical changes. In the film’s most disgusting, and brilliant, scene, a vaginal opening develops in Max’s abdomen into which a writhing, pulsating video cassette is inserted by one of the Videodrome operatives.

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Whichever way you turn it, the symbolism of this is unambiguous when it comes to the politics of media consumption. You could neutralise it by arguing that it’s a satire on alarmism about the corrupting influence of media, but if the film is satirising anything it seems to be Max’s platitudinous justifications for the sex and violence he traffics in. He talks about “catharsis” and “outlets” and “providing a social good”; he ends up trapped helplessly in fantasies that leach into his real life.

Porn here isn’t just something you watch. It’s something that acts on the viewer, that transforms him in the most literal way. It’s a more sinister vision of what porn does than the one implied by Cronenberg’s contemporary and fellow Canadian Atwood in Handmaid’s; it is nearer by far to the analysis Dworkin puts forward. And, as with Dworkin, it’s born from a frank acquaintance with the complications of his own sexuality and the influences at work on it.

“I’m not Max,” Cronenberg stressed in the book Cronenberg on Cronenberg, but “that isn’t to say I haven’t noticed that I’m attracted to images of sexual violence, and wonder what that means about myself.” Videodrome is, obviously, about the institutional shifts of video and cable TV, not about the then-non-existent internet. But the way Max chances on Videodrome, rather than seeks it out, and the way it’s stripped of all marks of who made it and where it came from, makes it extraordinarily prescient about the way porn sites would reshape consumption.

Now extreme porn is so pervasive that whenever it’s implicated in some terrible crime, the easy way to dismiss the link is to say — well, everyone watches it, so there’s no significance if violent criminals do it too. This is a cop-out. Media does not exert influence absolutely or in the same way on everyone, but we accept that racist media can engender racism and sexist media can engender sexism. Why should an exemption be erected for erections?

“People who say ‘Revolution now’ and aren’t worried by it are foolish,” said Cronenberg (also in Cronenberg on Cronenberg). “The lesson of history — early, middle, late — is that revolution brings with it death, pain, anguish and disease: often nothing positive to replace what was destroyed.” We are two decades now into revolution in media that was also a revolution in sex, and there is no room left for naivety about what that means.

Before Wayne Couzens committed the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard this year, he watched extreme porn. While the double murderer and mortuary employee David Fuller was committing routine necrophilia against the corpses in his care, he was also recording his offences and adding them to a meticulously maintained library of the most horrific pornography, his trial heard this year.

And regular men choke regular women because they’ve seen it in porn, while regular women accept regular violence as sex, because that’s what they’ve learned to masturbate to. The desire, the fantasy and the act create a self-inciting feedback loop. In what Dworkin called the skinlessness of sex, participants are vulnerable, penetrable.

Whatever your sex is, porn can fuck you.

Her protagonist picks blue, and is initially delighted, having been told all her life that motherhood is an intolerable burden. Only later does the girl wonder if that’s true, as she looks at another blue ticket plucker:

“She seemed truly happy. Her skin was smooth, her clothes seemed expensive. I wondered what she might do afterwards with her day, where she worked, what her house was like, whether she was bound to anyone or anything, whether she was thankful for her freedom.”

Separated from their white ticket counterparts, blue tickets live in a world where there is no family of any kind. They spend their time partying, hooking up with unattached men, and pursuing demanding careers, assured that they should be “thankful” for their very specific kind of freedom. A freedom from the responsibility and limitations imposed by parenthood, and particularly motherhood. It is a kind of freedom that was almost unknown to our ancestors, but is increasingly the norm in the modern West.

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Mackintosh, 31, does not have children. Nor do roughly 40% of her peers. Some of those women will go on to have children over the next decade or so, but many will not. This fate has not been assigned randomly by the state, as in Mackintosh’s novel, but is, instead, the result of much messier forms of social change — the effects of which have been accumulating over time.

Around 18% of women in England and Wales born in 1972 reached the end of their childbearing years not having had children, compared with only 10% of women born in 1945. Millennials are projected to continue the trend. As of 2019, the total fertility rate in England and Wales is at a historic low of 1.7, and the Covid-19 crisis may lower that still further. All in all, it is quite plausible that at least 1 in 4 people of my generation will not be having children.

Financial insecurity and rising property prices are often cited as reasons for this, and there is no doubt that millennials are not only worse off than their parents’ generation, but also acutely aware of it. I used to agree with the argument that, as one young writer put it, “[y]oung people still need to get onto the first rung on the housing ladder to get onto the wedding ladder and the kids ladder … and that pushes any dreams of 2.4 children well into the distance.” In other words: it’s the economy, stupid.

But I’m not so sure now that the numbers stack up. There is a near-perfect correlation between a nation’s GDP and its fertility rate: globally, poor people have more children, not fewer. The same holds true in this country, since even as the total fertility rate has declined, poorer Britons have continued to have more children on average than their wealthier counterparts, and tend to start their families younger too. Poverty does not preclude childbearing — in fact, it seems to do the opposite.

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An income-rich, asset-poor millennial friend once insisted that she couldn’t possibly afford children; she later reconsidered, recognising that she could, but it would mean buying a house outside London, having fewer holidays, eating out less often — all in all, making sacrifices that she wasn’t prepared to make, at least not in her twenties. The issue isn’t how much money today’s young people actually have, but how they prioritise their spending.

The reality is that declining fertility is not a phenomenon affecting every section of society evenly. When we talk about falling rates of childbearing across the Western world, what we’re really talking about is falling rates of childbearing among graduates.

Danny Dorling, professor of human geography at Sheffield University, describes the sharp distinction:

“Society has split into two groups. One group, of women graduates, clustered particularly in London and the commuter belt, is having children very late and the rest are having them at much the same age as their mothers and their grandmothers did.”

This first group of highly educated people, both male and female, is also the group most likely not to have children at all. In contrast, working-class people are more likely to hold on to traditional family values that include a disapproval of voluntary childlessness. In our society, blue tickets are not picked by lottery, but they’re not exactly randomly selected either: there are strong demographic forces at play, with class being the most important one.

So why are graduates choosing not to have kids? Some environmental activists celebrate the decline in birth rates and so-called “BirthStrikers” reject parenthood in order not to further burden an already over-burdened planet. I do know twenty-somethings who are fervent enough in their political beliefs that they have signed anti-natalist pledges, but a vanishingly small number of people actually choose to have children, or not have children, based on such abstract concerns.

I simply don’t believe most of my peers who say that they’re choosing to be childless out of fear for the climate. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, for instance, have committed to having only two children in a display of environmentalist piety, but have made no commitment to reducing their air travel or the number of homes they own. Appealing to the health of the planet is a socially acceptable explanation for reduced childbearing, but not a candid one.

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No, I see two plausible ways of explaining the rise of the elite blue tickets, neither of which involve climate change or financial insecurity.

The first possible explanation is linked to the fact that sometimes affluence reveals differences within populations that were always there, but used to be invisible. Variation in appetite, for instance, is indiscernible in an environment of food scarcity, since the greedy and the abstemious are equally limited in how much they can eat. It’s only in an affluent society like ours that the abundant availability of cheap calories allows such traits to surface, with some people — but only some people — becoming obese as a result.

Perhaps, like appetite, a longing for parenthood is a visceral thing and you either have it or you don’t. Perhaps in the past there was always some proportion of people who had no interest in childbearing, but had little choice in the matter, particularly if they were women.

We know that voluntary childlessness is linked to personality, which is highly heritable, so there might always be a chunk of people who, given the option, would prefer not to have children. And now, with contraception, and feminism, and the decline of religion, and all of the other factors that have turned our world upside down, that option is newly available to people with the education and means to choose their own path. “Not every woman goes gooey at the sight of a toddler taking their first step,” insists one young writer, “there are others who quite simply do not want kids. Ever.” And isn’t that their prerogative?

This personality-based explanation seems plausible enough, but I wonder if there may be an additional ideological explanation for why rising childlessness is affecting only one section of Western society — perhaps not coincidentally, the same section of society that has most fiercely embraced a liberal individualism that dominates in today’s universities.

Let’s be honest — children are hard work. They scream, they complain, they make a mess. They limit your leisure time, your sex life, your travel, and your socialising. In our economic system, children limit earning potential because they limit mobility and flexibility, especially for mothers (the gender pay gap is actually a maternity pay gap). All in all, kids limit freedom.

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If you subscribe to an ideology that privileges freedom above all else, then why on earth would you want children? It is a sure-fire way to sabotage your beauty, your leisure time, and your ability to buy high-status consumables: the things that matter most according to an ideology that prizes immediate and visible success and enjoyment over everything else. Children do offer pleasures, but they are complicated, costly, and delayed. So if you are a liberal individualist and you don’t find within yourself a visceral longing for parenthood, then the solution is simple: opt out.

The most energetically liberal baby boomers succeeded in eroding the stigma associated with voluntary childlessness, thus granting greater social freedom to later generations who have been born into a world in which choosing to be childless is — for the first time ever — relatively normal. Hence the gradual dwindling of childbearing in the decades since the 1960s — from 10% childlessness, to 18%, to (maybe) 25% or more. This is a cumulative social change, not a sudden one.

People used to have children because of tradition, or religion, or social pressure, or just because they couldn’t access contraception. But, unlike their working-class peers, most of today’s graduates are not subject to these pressures any more and so for them the decision to try for children is based on only one question: do you like kids?

Looked at from this perspective, it’s no surprise that so many young graduates are choosing to be childless. It is a perfectly defensible decision in our ideological environment, and any costs will be paid down the track, or perhaps not at all, at least at the individual level.

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Birth rates are difficult from a policy perspective, since they are simultaneously of profound national importance, and also profoundly personal. On the one hand, we have environmentalists urging us to have fewer children. On the other, economists warn of a looming demographic crisis if birth rates keep falling. At the centre of the drama are all of us, with our hotly contested bodies.

Will a generation of blue tickets change their minds, as Sophie Mackintosh’s protagonist does? Will they conclude that actually not being “bound to anyone or anything” is not the life they want? Some might, only to find themselves coming up hard against age-related infertility; others might be quite happy to live without children. It remains to be seen what our society might look like as voluntary childlessness is increasingly normalised — maybe even, one day, becoming the majority choice.

It’s quite possible that it might not matter. We could yet find a way of solving environmental and economic problems without fiddling with birth rates, and it may be that a population that spends less time on childrearing will have more time to spend on other valuable pursuits. But it’s worth remembering that speculative fiction — from The Handmaid’s Tale to Children of Men — is consistently gloomy about what happens to a society in which babies are in short supply.