Just as with the British dating scene itself, our reality shows struggle to take the search for love particularly seriously. We prefer to titter and infer than earnestly and explicitly push it all to its limits. On Love Island, it is enough to consecrate your affinity by becoming girlfriend and boyfriend. Not so in America. In the land that invented modern dating and most of the romantic trappings that surround it, the quest for love is still a serious and rather formal business.

On TV, it also tends to be a pretty conservative business, where traditional ideas of marriage and family — and the gender roles to go with them — hold firm. Nearly 20 years after the original US marriage show The Bachelor first aired, American ingenuity unleashed to the world Netflix’s Love Is Blind, which saw pairs blind date their way to marriage proposals, talking through walls from respective isolation booths about their yearning for commitment and love and family. A number of them stressed their Christianity.

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But as they continue to capitalise on the enduring hankering to say ‘I do’, American dating shows seem to also be cottoning onto, and even taking seriously, a reality that has long been lurking below the gloss of sugar-coated, youth-drenched romance: a steadily rising number of women pushing 40 are single, look fantastic, and want to start a family, with a man as a desired but optional partner in the enterprise. Love is Blind rejected the idea that — pace The Bachelor, The Bachelorette and Love Island — only women in their 20s are worth offering up for love on TV by giving us the spectacle of Jessica, 34, wrestling with whether to tie the knot with a man 10 years her junior and infinitely less successful than her.

But now there’s Fox’s Labor of Love (a UK airdate is expected soon) which is both deeply conservative at its core and — amazingly — properly radical in its practice. Indeed, in refuting the mouldy but persistent cultural idea that women over 40 are dried-up goods romantically and reproductively, I’d call it something of a feminist masterpiece.

The premise is that 15 men in their 30s and early 40s compete to be chosen as sperm donor, co-parent and — if all goes well — husband by the programmes’s star, one 41-year-old Kristy Katzmann. Through a variety of ‘drills’, which include responding to a grizzly bear at a campfire and hosting a kids’ party, the men demonstrate their instincts as potential fathers and partners.

There’s nothing flashily politically radical about this show: it progresses with staid civility, plenty of scented candles and glasses of red wine, with traditional values firmly in place. And yet in taking a single woman over 40 seriously as a potential mother and attractive wife, it is revolutionary.

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For despite the advance of feminism since the 1970s, ideas about women, age, fertility and sexual appeal have remained strangely rigid. At nearly 38, I cannot count the number of times well-meaning people from all walks of life have told me about the many cliff-edges my fertility faces — at 30, at 35, at 37 and of course at 40. Fertility certainly declines in the course of our 30s, but not in the simplistic cliff-edges and sudden perilous wastages women are warned of; indeed much of the science of cliff-edges has been based on outdated studies (including a French study from the18th century). Few advance the flipside to older motherhood: true readiness, more self-knowledge, more money and know-how, better skills for coping with challenges.

Which is why it was so refreshing and soothing to watch Kristy in action: measured, polite, kindly, and serene with the authority of an older woman’s self-knowledge. It is a pleasure to watch her and presenter Kristin Davis, 55 (Charlotte on Sex and the City), an unmarried adoptive mother of two, calmly navigate Kristy’s options. Kristy is uninterested in garish shows of masculine bravado, or temper, or selfishness; she naturally and genuinely prioritises feelings of friendship over lust. The scene in which she dismisses the hunkiest suitor Alan, a writer from South Africa, for his subtle but significant tendency to put the other men before her, was impressive. As she noted: “20-year old Kristy would be chasing Alan,” but 41-year old Kristy wants something else.

For once, the idea of male fertility decline over age is taken seriously too. The programme is amazingly progressive (and accurate) in focusing on the fitness of sperm rather than of eggs. As soon as the suitors walk in they are asked to produce sperm samples to be counted and ranked. Kristy, after all, has gone to some trouble to preserve her own fertility, and will want to make sure any prospective father has the goods to follow through too, particularly in an age of declining sperm viability. Throughout the programme, too, there is rightful reference to the men’s ‘biological man clock’.

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Perhaps what I liked most was that Labor of Love does not ask us to laugh at Kristy’s pickiness. On the contrary it is presented not as a prompt to think ‘no wonder she’s single and childless at 41’ but as commendable and wise realism. For as one gets older, the task of finding someone to partner with is more and more complex. It is particularly complex for women, who are better educated on average than men, and, particularly if they have not taken time out for childrearing, may be more successful too.

It is by now well documented that it is hard for women to find single men in their own age bracket who are both equally successful and supportive of her career. The pool shrinks further for women in their late 30s and early 40s since their male peers are more likely to pursue younger women — Kristy-aged women are seen as either too old to have babies or desperate for them. It is a tricky bottleneck. As Kristy says to Kristin over one elimination session: “suddenly I was in my late 30s [after a divorce] and it felt dark”. She sheds some tears as she makes this admission: I felt a surge of sympathy.

And there’s more radical realism from Labor of Love: having frozen her eggs, if none of the men end up suiting Kristy, she will go it alone. A husband would be nice, but as Kristy and an increasing number of single women know, he is not an essential part of the dream. The US fertility industry will be worth $15.4bn by 2023, up from $7bn in 2017. Pitted against each other, the competing ideologies of romance and motherhood tussle hard, with motherhood increasingly winning out, and so looking like empowerment with it.

Wolf’s fate has been recorded across the broadsheet media. It all started to unravel for her in the worst way possible – in a live on-air radio interview. In May she appeared with the author and BBC radio host Matthew Sweet, and during that polite exchange Sweet pointed out that there was a major error in the book of Wolf’s which they were discussing.

Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love was based on a PhD thesis that Wolf had written in 2015 and largely centred on the poet John Addington Symonds. It was Wolf’s contention that the gay poet had the risk of execution hanging over his head in Victorian England. To prove this Wolf claimed that she had identified “dozens and dozens” of gay men of the era who had been executed — a punishment which was believed to have ceased for the crime of sodomy many years before.

In their discussion Sweet pointed out that Wolf had made a major if understandable error. The men in whose cases the words “death recorded” was listed were not in fact executed (as Wolf had assumed) but were trials in which the judge had actually abstained from pronouncing a death sentence.

What is more, Wolf appeared to think that charges of “sodomy” related to the modern understanding of the term whereas in the era about which she was writing the term referred also to child abuse. Meaning that one of the cases the author highlighted was not in fact (as she said) that of a 14-year-old executed in 1859 for the crime of sodomy, but a man convicted (and not executed) for performing an indecent act on a six-year-old.

Needless to say, this is the stuff of authorial nightmares. And doubtless there will be some accounting at Wolf’s publishers over how such elementary mistakes were able to slip by unquestioned.

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The problem, though, is that Wolf’s error is not a one-off, but part of a pattern of shoddy research in a career spanning nearly three decades. Her first book, The Beauty Myth (1991) was marred by a number of problems. One was the undeniable having-it-both-ways by which Wolf simultaneously lamented the imposition of certain societal norms of attractiveness while not exactly presenting her worst side, nor failing to benefit from that happy chance.

The more serious problem with the book, however, was the shoddy research for which she immediately became known. Wolf infamously claimed that 150,000 women were dying from anorexia-related eating disorders each year in America. As the writer Christina Hoff Sommers subsequently showed (in her 1995 book Who Stole Feminism?), the actual figure had been exaggerated several hundred times over by Wolf, and the actual figure was between 100 and 400.

The strand of slackness soon merged, as it so often does, with the paranoid style. In 2007 she was one of those American writers who honestly seemed to believe that George W Bush was, in his last days in office, not looking forward to retirement and a quieter life but was in fact preparing to govern forever.  In a book titled The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot Wolf suggested that the then President and his team were enacting the playbook that dictators had used throughout the twentieth century.

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Among Wolf’s claims were that the Bush administration was in the process of coercing not only the media but also American academia to their dastardly plans. As anybody with even the slightest knowledge of either institution would know, if the Bush administration ever had sought to coerce the entirety of the US media and Academy then it was — against some competition — the least successful effort of that administration.

In her book, as well as a long piece in The Guardian summing up that book’s arguments, Wolf made nods to reality, but then hid them as fast as she could. For instance we read: “It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat….” Etc etc. But soon even that “of course-ery” became lost. Even though George Bush miraculously stood down and allowed Barack Obama to enter the Oval Office, Wolf’s warnings of an imminent fascist coup in America continued unabated.

By this stage Wolf had tumbled the whole way down the Gore Vidal trail along which so many bright American men and women go as they start to believe that they are living in a proto-fascist state; one that is especially intent on misleading and suppressing figures like themselves at the vanguard of the resistance. As Wolf publicly stumbled along this well-trodden path she even began to engage in that “I’m only asking questions” form of conspiracy theory that vague and lazy people have such a habit of falling into.

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In 2012 Wolf threw herself feet first into the Occupy Wall Street Movement, apparently in the hope that here was the way to stop the imminent coup. But the fact that Occupy fell apart was simply more evidence of the fascist nature of the American state. In The Guardian (yet again) she maintained that the US government were conspiring with the American banks to impose a “totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent”.

It got uglier. By 2014 she began suggesting that the carefully packaged beheading videos which the terrorist group ISIS was then releasing on a weekly basis were not what they seemed; indeed Wolf began declaring that these videos were in fact “staged” by the American government.

So far down this Alex Jones-ian path did Wolf go that she even went on shamefully to suggest that both the victims of these terrible acts and their families were in fact actors. In the inevitable criticism elicited by her inhumane comments Wolf fell back on the old conspiracist claim that she was “only asking questions”, because isn’t this what journalists are meant to do and so on.

Perhaps Wolf took the time off to do her PhD at Oxford in the middle of this decade because it had all got a bit too much for her; after all, one must suppose that warning about a fascism that never emerges would take a toll on anyone. And so Wolf went back to university and back to basics. The problem – as the pulping of her latest book shows – is that the basics of Wolf’s work are sloppy and error-ridden while the developed work is not so good, relying merely on paranoia and delusion.

Perhaps at some point the two styles will merge and we will be able to read of how the Bush and Obama administrations deliberately smuggled errors into the archives on John Addington Symonds in order to sabotage their valiant critic. I for one shall look forward to the next book.