They want to choose certain freedoms from the smorgasbord of liberal democracy and discard the rest

From The unfair sex - how feminism created a new class divide by Alison Wolf.

The UK is always more alert to the issue of class than commentators in the US.

It’s the same all over Europe and North America, where half of ‘Class 1’ jobs are held by women. Professional men work with and for them, just as they work with and for men. It may not be half-and-half at the very top, but in these integrated workplaces, an all-male meeting is a curious sight. These alpha women are the subject of my new book, The XX Factor, and there are lots of them: 20 million in Europe alone, and - rising.

And the other five-sixths of British women? They lead lives that are essentially female and surprisingly - traditional. Most women enter a very different labour market from the alpha females, one where most jobs are either dominated by women or dominated by men. Here gender still rules: hotel maids are female and street cleaners male; care assistants female and lorry drivers male; registered nurses female, electricians male.

Not only do most women work in occupations dominated by women, and in work groups that often lack a single male. They also do the most traditional of female tasks — but outsourced from the home to the workplace. This hollowing out of the home is one of the most striking features of modern life. People are being paid, in formal jobs, to do things that were once organised in our houses. The process went furthest, fastest, in Scandinavia: as a result, these pin-up countries for female equality have the most traditional–looking, sexually segregated labour markets in the western world.

But not at all levels. It is Scandinavian women who care for children, the sick, the old, as state employees. Meanwhile, at the top of the pyramid, like everywhere else in Europe, Scandinavian life is gender-mixed: alpha women, alpha men.

[snip]

It’s a new world, and a new set of inequalities. We agonise over the 1 per cent, but extreme financial privilege is nothing new. What is new, the seismic shift, involves a far larger group: the female elites, the top sixth. They are pulling away, and are leaving the rest of the ‘sisterhood’ behind.

Feminism is such a hydra-headed beast it is hardly meaningful to speak of it any longer as an ideology or even an agreed set of goals - there are the strict egalitarians where everyone is treated equally regardless of capabilities; there are those that focus on trying to achieve equality of outcome and are willing to sacrifice equality of treatment to achieve it; there are those that believe that there is a female way that is superior to that of males.

If it is no longer possible to meaningfully speak of feminism as if it were a singular idea, I do think it is fair to say that the ideals of feminism have wandered a meandering path in the Western world with many unintended consequences. Increasing inequality is a phenomenon in all OECD countries and despite Wolf's argument, I doubt that feminism has had all that great a differential effect on that trend.

But what is striking to me, and around which Wolf is skirting, is that so many of the flagship causes of contemporary feminism have been beneficial, really, only to the most elite segments of society and either are irrelevant or harmful to the bottom 60%. And yet no one mentions this class issue. True, there are the Charles Murray's of the world who attempt to bring attention to this (as in Coming Apart), but they are few and far between and usually gain no traction with the clerisy.

Pressuring companies to implement telework, job sharing, flex time, etc. are all beneficial things potentially mutually beneficial in their own right but all are only really particularly relevant to the office based, cognitive worker and not pertinent to the Wal-Mart greeter, shelf stocker, cashier, etc.

The relaxation of sexual mores and familial norms is in many ways a great gift of increased liberty to all citizens, but indisputably it is a gift which has been a boon only for the most privileged and a double-sided sword or worse for everyone else.

Perhaps it is simply a matter of relevancy and perspective. So many flagship issues mooted in newspaper editorials and pundit columns, to a pragmatist mind, invite a respectful "So what?" How many people does it affect, who are they, and why should others pay for it?

In the same edition of The Spectator in which Wolf's article appears, there is a column by Toby Young with this comment regarding some spat over a UK column regarding trans gendered people,

Their objection to Burchill’s piece was that, by rehashing various crude stereotypes about transsexuals (‘screaming mimis’, ‘bed-wetters in bad wigs’, etc), she was making it more likely that members of their community would be assaulted. In other words, they were positing a causal link between the appearance of something in the media and violent behaviour — exactly the same argument that the Christian film critic Michael Medved made in his 1992 book Hollywood vs America. They weren’t claiming there was any evidence of such a link. Rather, the mere possibility that Burchill’s article could result in an assault was reason enough to ban it.

[snip]

What surprised me about the attitude of the trans activists — not to mention gays and lesbians, many of whom are equally censorious about ‘offensive’ articles — is that they don’t see a link between freedom of expression and sexual freedom. Apparently it’s perfectly acceptable to deviate from various sexual norms, however upsetting some people find their behaviour, but completely verboten to dissent from the majority view of the metropolitan elite. Such double standards are weirdly similar to those of American Christian fundamentalists who would lay down their lives to defend the first amendment but oppose gay marriage. Like the trans activists, they want to choose certain freedoms from the smorgasbord of liberal democracy and discard the rest.

All of which is to say - it is a marvelously complicated world in which we struggle to hold ourselves accountable to the ideals of the enlightenment which have gifted us with so much liberty.