Oh great, Reform’s fascinating men have yet more thrilling opinions about women

I don’t usually listen to the controversial philosopher Jordan Peterson, a man whose opinion I usually disregard on the grounds that you simply cannot trust someone with multiple ways of naming himself. Nor have I paid much attention to the former academic Matthew Goodwin, now Reform UK’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election.

But it turns out they’ve had quite a lot to say about women like me. In an unearthed podcast doing the rounds, not least because Goodwin is now one step away from being in parliament, the two gentlemen can be heard having a chin-stroking discussion claiming that problems in higher education stem from “childless women”. Fetch the ducking stool, forthwith.

It turns out that women are awful because they are having children when they’re “too old” and ruining university by “feminising” it (this seems to simply mean “being there at all”). It’s not clear what is meant by too old. Perhaps a Rolling Stone or Robert De Niro can tell us? Anyway, these two towering intellects claim that universities are hotbeds of “politically correct authoritarianism” because they are full of “females” with a “female temperament,” as opposed to simply being “full of students”, as the entire Marius/Enjolras subplot of Les Misérables has demonstrated for 163 years.

To nobody’s surprise, given the way we have seen how powerful men talk about women in the Epstein files, their plan to fix society is simply to remove women altogether (much like the world of men’s podcasting). And earlier this week, The Independent wrote about one of Goodwin’s blog posts from 2023 in which he argued for that old chestnut of taxing childless people more highly (and single people living alone are already charged 25 per cent more council tax than the equivalent for a couple). Some men really will do anything to avoid improving the quality of childcare in this country.

And here he is on the matter at hand: “We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis, many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on,” says Goodwin, smoothly gliding over the fact many women actively enjoy their careers and that, finally being allowed to have them, are understandably not keen to give them up. Still less so when childcare is unaffordable and finding a stable place to live as an adult, let alone in which to raise a family, can feel borderline impossible.

Nor are men keen to start families at a moment when, surprise surprise, they too are focused on growing their own careers. Unless Dr Jordan B Peterson and Goodwin mean that it is significantly older men who are to acquire a young wife, much like a housekeeper or a personal trainer, to raise a brood for them?

It has long appeared to me that men like these exist to monetise outrage and to harness anger for their own gain. This, after all, is what so-called rage-baiting is all about. In a perfect world, I simply wouldn’t give it the oxygen.

But as Reform’s soaring poll numbers refuse to wilt, it is becoming ever more urgent to pay close attention to the world philosophy people like Goodwin subscribe to. After all, we are a decade into what happens when men with this cynical attitude gain access to real power and swerve the consequences.

As a woman – and a childless one at that – I don’t pay much mind to what these fools say. But many, many other people do. And that is something that worries me intensely.