roseanne
Roseanne Barr
Roseanne Barr is back. After 20 years, she's back on the screen with her loud mouth, her blue-collar humour, the same couch, same sister, husband and kids.

They're older, and ­Donald Trump is in the White House, but not much else has changed.

And Roseanne's television resurrection couldn't have come at a better time. Plenty are keen to hear more from the woman who mercilessly mocked the snooty sisterhood in her first iteration as "America's bourgeois nightmare".

Speaking to John Lahr for his profile of her in The New Yorker in July 1995, Barr aimed both barrels at Hollywood women such as Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon and Jodie Foster, saying they were "talented but f..kin' deluded".

"They don't have any subtext to anything they say. They're all just upset about salaries, or something that feminism was 25 years ago," she said. "They're rewarded for making the women's movement appear to be lost in time. And they don't even know it.

"I want them to shut the f..k and get out of the way of real women that are doing something.

"I'd like to see 'em go down to goddamn South Central and talk to those women."

Her razor-sharp diagnosis of feminism applies today with even more force. Which may explain why much of red America watched her rebooted working-class dialogue with America when it debuted just over a fortnight ago.

Meghan McCain, daughter of Republican senator John McCain, tried to explain the appeal to the left-liberal hosts of ABC's morning chat: "You can't underestimate the fact that she's a Trump supporter in the show," said McCain.

"She's talking about jobs and the economy and how her family almost lost her house and President Trump was actually talking about jobs. That's something you don't see on television. Most of the time we see how Trump supporters have horns and they're horrible and they're ruining the country.

"It's interesting to see that ­Roseanne scored the highest in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Kansas City, Missouri. That's red America watching."

Hollywood Reporter said New York, rated as the top TV market in the country, didn't make the top 20 markets for Roseanne. Los Angeles, the second top market, didn't rank in the top 30.

In the same week that ­Roseanne reappeared, Hollywood received another dressing down from a different quarter. In an open letter, hundreds of mostly ­female restaurant workers told a bunch of swanky Hollywood actresses to butt out of their lives.

This came in response to a previous letter, penned a week earlier, by 16 actresses including Sarah Jessica Parker, Jane Fonda, Reese Witherspoon and Ashley Judd, to New York governor Andrew Cuomo imploring him to abolish the state's tipping culture and implement a higher minimum wage.

"Relying on tips creates a more permissive work environment where customers feel entitled to abuse women in exchange for 'service'," they wrote.

Four thousand kilometres from Hollywood, women who mostly work in New York restaurants fired back some advice.

"To the celebrity women who recently criticised the full-service restaurant industry, from over 500 women and men who work in it: Thank you for your concern. But we don't need your help, and we're not asking to be saved," they wrote.

"You've been misled that we earn less than minimum wage, and that we're somehow helpless victims of sexual harassment.

"We get to offer our opinions on your movies; you get to offer opinions on the food we serve, and our service. What you don't have the right to do is dictate how we are paid. Servers and bartenders have never been paid the 'same' as everyone else, and we are OK with that. We are paid based on our sales and service; we're guaranteed minimum wage, and our tips let us earn much more than that.

"Bad behaviour happens in every industry - Hollywood celebrities should know better than most that sexual harassment happens everywhere. The people who are pushing for this change in the restaurant industry are exploiting the isolated stories of people that have suffered injustices, and making it out to be the industry's or the tipping system's fault. That is just not true.

"We're servers and bartenders by choice, just like you chose to be actresses. The industry gives us flexibility, and the tipping system gives us opportunity to earn great money with less than full time hours.

"We respect your profession, and now it's time for you to respect ours."

The letter is the latest exhibit in feminism's snooty class war, the one Barr railed against two decades ago. And the sisterhood has ramped up that war, most recently using the #MeToo campaign to lay claim to saving poor, working-class women not just from lecherous men but from themselves, too. The unforgivable cost of this middle-class conceit has been to take jobs from working-class women.

Consider the jobs thrown on the pyre of impropriety in the #MeToo movement. Grid girls? Gone. Walk-on girls at darts competitions? Gone too.

More jobs were lost when a few journalists from the Financial Times went undercover to work as "hostesses" at a posh and un-PC charity dinner in London in January. Through the filter of their Victorian-era prudery, these intrepid journalists "exposed" a drunken and bawdy annual event that has been going for 33 years and raised more than $35 million for a children's hospital.

A week later the event was cancelled permanently, extinguishing more than 100 jobs for young women more than happy to wear sexy black underwear to earn 250 quid for the night.

The failure to grasp the full gamut of women's choices is the ideological stink bomb at the centre of modern feminism. It is a corruption of its history and those early feminists who put freedom at the core of the feminism cause.

Today, women's rights have become about the right of bossy middle-class women to dictate to working-class women what kinds of jobs they should have and how they should be paid.

Long gone are lofty notions of women's liberation.

Take the constant feminist grievance over pay gaps. How often does one of the many discrimination divas mention the fact many women choose to take time out of their career to raise children understanding the trade-off with career? That they do it because motherhood is one of life's great privileges, in all its messy, wondrous, frustrating and exquisite ways? Alas, in the discrimination playbook, raising children is mentioned only in the context of being a dreadful drag on a career and pay trajectory.

Under the handy banner of "gender equity" The Sydney Morning Herald last week cited a recent report by the Australian Institute of Family Studies that found only a small rise in the number of fathers at home, from 4.2 per cent in 2011 to 4.6 per cent in 2016.

Sure enough, one academic, ­Elizabeth Hill, was featured telling us this was "a shocking reminder of how far Australia has to go in generating the conditions of an equitable work/care regime". She complained about a "gender-segmented labour market, a stubborn gender pay gap, inflexible care infrastructure that together underwrite traditional ideas about who works and who cares".

In the same report, another gender professor complains that we have "stalled completely on progressing gender equity in Australia". Not one of these educated women, not the academics or the journalist, thought it relevant to explore whether women's choices might even partly explain these figures. And this determined ­silence around recognising the reality of some women's preference to care for their children points to an ideology more obsessed with utopian notions of equity than women's freedom, let alone children.

Indeed, according to a growing number of snobby middle-class women who think they know what other women want, "equity" has become decidedly doctrinaire: everyone must be equal even when they don't want to be.

In a similar vein, feminist ideologues get huffy when the BBC's long-running University Challenge quiz show is full of nerdy male students. Diversity officers demand that all-male teams be forbidden. Quotas must be introduced, they say. None consider the bleeding obvious that, as host Jeremy Paxman suggested, maybe "like football or darts, more males than females care about quizzing".

"All we're asking for is 50-50," said Nicole ­Kidman recently, citing a 2016 report for the Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University that found only 7 per cent of filmmakers in 2016 were women. The blind pursuit of 50-50 gender representation in all the fancy jobs has, as English commentator Brendan O'Neill pointed out recently, become a middle-class protection racket. None of the women demanding equality in movie-making, on quiz shows, in parliament or in boardrooms demand a 50-50 split when it comes to toilet cleaners or garbos.

A few weeks ago, Brazilian magazine EPOCA contacted feminist iconoclast Camille Paglia for comment about the rise of psychologist and cultural superstar Jordan Peterson. The questions, describing Peterson as right wing and citing a clueless New York Review of Books article about the Canadian psychologist, drew a sharp response from Paglia: "To reduce his work to simplistic political formulas shows exactly what is wrong with thought in the Western world today,'' she wrote.

"Of course, postmodernists attack Peterson because he dares to speak of nature - as I do in my own work.

"The refusal to acknowledge the power of nature has become a mental illness among intellectuals and academics today. Biology exists - it cannot be erased by politically correct zealots. Our obligation is to seek the truth about sex and gender, no matter where our search leads."

As for The New York Review of Books, it has ignored Paglia's work for 28 years because her ideas are "far beyond the limited scope of pretentious Manhattan editors". It was no surprise, said Paglia, that they "cannot understand a single thing about Jordan Peterson".

The same intellectual constraints have turned feminism into a shallow exercise of confirmation bias rather than an exploration of truth about women's choices and privilege. Western feminists who complain the most about discrimination in the workplace are usually the most fortunate women in the history of humanity. They are highly educated, have been indulged by gender quotas and special treatment - think Julia Gil­lard in politics and the plethora of complaining women at the Bar - yet they are likely to be fans of the silly white male privilege mantra.

The added joke of intersectional feminism confirms the perversion of feminism. Under a ridiculous term from academe that is meant to speak to diversity and inclusion, the sisterhood has shrunk into an even smaller and snootier clique.

Differences in colour and sexuality and class are all very welcome, so long as middle-class women get to tell other women what to do and what to think.

When the worst kind of historical patriarchy has been replaced with an equally belittling modern-day matriarchy, feminism is crying out for a rebellion. And, on that score, more women telling the snooty sisterhood to butt out is a fine start.