It is Sunday, the weather is truly lousy, and I have a pot roast in the oven. Yes, I can cook. Fairly well, thank you. Both of the sons can cook. Quite well. We have lived in a male only home for quite a while and we still do.

There are choices for men, if you have sufficient income or charisma to get a mate. And for women, if you marry an upper middle class man or are from that. However, you need to generate a certain income to pay a mortgage — even if, like me, you live in a town where starter houses are around 200K.

And if you don’t have that, you lose a lot of choices. Feminism and women’s studies assume that all have those choices. They do not. They are limited to the upper and upper middle class.

Thus, while men are still as bound to bring home the bacon as they were before feminism, women have much greater freedom to either adopt modern or traditional roles.

At least upper-middle and upper class women do. For lower and lower-middle class women, working isn’t some empowering option, it’s a requirement. Whereas prior to the two-income household norm a janitor could support a family on a single income, today it’s damn near impossible. If a working-class woman wants any sort of financial stability for her children, she has to work.

Furthermore, although the women’s empowerment crowd often crows about “women’s choices,” behind that lies the terrifying prospect that left to their own devices, a lot of women would in fact just stay home with the kids. If it turned out that most women actually liked traditional roles, that would mean that the entire Feminine Mystique is a pile of fecal matter.

So we continually find ourselves faced with crises like the lack of women in STEM fields. We’re not to consider the possibility that women don’t actually want that sort of job (including the writers at Jezebel with liberal arts degrees). Instead, we’ve got to use government funds to encourage them to go into such fields (site at link funded by UK taxpayers) and accuse STEM employers and managers of sexism if they don’t have enough successful female employees.

Nevertheless, I’d stack a capable woman’s chances of being a successful microbiologist up against a man’s hope to be a happy househusband any day

Yeah, right. I think pathology, including microbiology, is a good specialty for women doctors because it is office hours and family friendly. There are successful female microbiologists. Quite a lot of them. There are less successful female surgeons because the hours are incompatible with being a mother.

But then, academics only consider the apex. Karen Straughan says this better than this academic can on his day off. But she explains why I blog on the papers I read.

I’m sorry, but I’m appalled by what’s been going on in academia since the late 1970s regarding feminism. Murray Straus, who passed away just last month, published the first studies showing the true picture of intimate partner violence back in 1979. Despite his findings being replicated hundreds of times across cultures, 15 years later, the US government signed a faulty model of IPV into law at the federal level, based on feminist “theory” and lobbied for by the same feminists who engaged in blacklisting, career sabotage, threats, shunning and intimidation of Dr. Straus and his colleagues and grad students, in a successful effort to suppress any evidence that IPV isn’t caused by “patriarchy”. We are still using that model at every level of legal and policy response, despite the fact that it is not an accurate reflection of reality. Men–and worse, children–are just collateral damage in the systematic institutionalization of an ideology.

You’re a goddamn academic. I’m a frigging waitress with three kids and a high school diploma, trying to do this work in an environment where 80% of the research is behind paywalls worth a day’s groceries per paper. And somehow I know more than you do about what feminism is and says, and how wrong and dishonest it is?

And all you can say is, “well, thanks for your point of view.”

Yeah, you’re welcome. Enjoy your ivory tower. The rest of us will be, as ever, living in reality.

Liberal academia, you see, has a role. It is to preserve the class system. Compare Ms Straughan with Ms Trump. Ms Trump — who has a flawed but caring and rich Dad — can party through college and then get a job. Has lawyers, money and guns to defend her if things go wrong. Ms Straughan has no guns because she lives in Canada. She has no money, and thus no lawyers. For her, degrees matter, and the cost of a degree is considerable: she does not have the bank of Dad to fund it.

Outside North America, there are vocational degrees. I know: I have one of them. You do not need to do four years to enter graduate school to study medicine or law or pharmacy or nursing. There is a one year intermediate — and when I went through you could be selected from school because we used to have robust academic examinations before the education graduates ruined them.

Son two is going through this at present, son one is in a vocational degree. Men should do that or an apprenticeship.

And I tell women to do apprenticeships and vocational degrees. Not the liberal arts. Unless you have a trust fund.

Because feminism is a luxury those who work can not afford. Our society cannot afford it.

And I expect, as the depression bites harder, that feminism will implode, along with the schools that promote it, even in the richest countries. This has happened already in the poorer portions of the OECD. Because those who are barely middle income cannot afford to be stupid.