In which I’m just going to go right ahead and say that maybe the reason women didn’t traditionally run universities was because everybody knew we’d start giving out PhDs in queer vegan comic blogging.

This is another anti-feminist rant. I know, I know, nobody cares. I get that. It’s fine. Listen, I know I’m a bossy, frequently abrasive little twerp, but this?

THIS is a motherfucking DOCTORAL THESIS:

Interviews? COMICS? HOW IS HAVING YOUR FRIENDS DRAW COMICS ANY SORT OF “DOCTORAL RESEARCH”?

Do I care about animal welfare? Fuck yeah, I absolutely do. I “came out” as vegetarian at 19 or 20, and am proud to have not eaten hundreds of entire beef cows, chickens, pigs, and goats in the decades since. Am I aware of the life cycle of the commercial milk cow? Yes, I am, and it’s crap, and don’t even get me started on the calves. But I’m also aware that people in those industries aren’t all brazen assholes, and that we’d have an awfully hard time producing dairy products at current volumes from low-yield, hand-pastured, hand-milked Imaginary Idyllic History cows.

Note how the author writes “twelve (12)”, as if there were a real danger that we, as readers, would be overwhelmed by THE ONLY NUMBER ON THE PAGE. Autoethnography sounds like a nifty science-y word… if you’re an idiot who thinks writing about your subjective feelings is some form of scientific research. It’s not. It’s a diary.

And I’d wager you did little to no historical research into vegetarianism, veganism, and the moral and ethical issue surrounding meat-eating, or, you know, actual ethics, let alone any past or present scientific research into diet and metabolism. If you’ve ever even heard of Jain Dharma, let alone possess an in-depth understanding of their philosophy and the ability to speak intelligently about the meaning of “harmlessness” and renunciation, I’d be pleased for you.

But I’m guessing you chose to turn your diary into comics because you didn’t, don’t, and haven’t.

I’m not anti-diary. I majored in English and I’m very interested in diaries, journals, experiences, inner voices, growth and change. And I’m not anti-blog, either. I’ve been blogging since you were in grade school, and there are some insightful-as-fuck pieces scattered in amongst the self-indulgent, whiny crap on this domain, and I wrote IT ALL.

I’m just pissed that I didn’t get a doctorate for it.

THE POTENTIAL USE OF COMICS IN RESEARCH.

I do not think “research” means what you think it means.

And what the fuck does queerness have to do with diet? I’LL TELL YOU. It informs your choices and causes you to avoid certain foods, increasing your chances of self-inflicted malnutrition, but it does not have any impact whatsoever on what nutrients you actually need to thrive. Digestion doesn’t give a FUCK about how you identify, because it’s an actual thing you could study if you weren’t trying to get a PhD in vegan comics blogs.

I’ve been letting my feelings inform my diet for a long time, way longer than you, so I’m an expert in this shit. I get it. The very concept, the very idea of animal suffering is nearly paralyzing. I remember feeling that way, too. It’s the normal tenderness of youth, for some of us. But with perspective there comes an understanding that everything suffers, everything dies, animal products have always been in our species’ diet, and nobody cares if you do or don’t have some cheese, and even you won’t care about such trivial shit when something truly transformative finally hits your life.

I have no issue, honestly, with people who want to study twee shit like gender theory, and hang out in their little enclaves. Knock yourselves out. But it is not academia. The person who wrote the captioned thesis is obviously not equipped to tell the difference between a feeling and a fact, and yet will believe they’re scientifically qualified when they receive a doctoral degree. Meanwhile, in truth, the one single skill they’ve learned is useless: how to torture the language of the diarist into some ersatz, technical-sounding, empty jargon. This is an absolute failure of education. In a decade, when that candidate realizes they don’t actually know anything, they’re going to be furious, and rightly so.

When a person leaves university they should know facts, actual facts, like how things work and where various things come from, and they should be equipped with the ability to learn more things. They should be able to effectively self-educate, to discern between hard and soft sciences, they should have an understanding of human and natural history, and they should be capable of problem-solving. A PhD in blogging is bullshit, and according to Based Mom we can thank third wave feminism for this cloistered, self-obsessed pseudo-scientific bullshit.

Academic feminism co-opted the language style of scientific papers in order to give their own “research” more gravitas and cachet, and all it did was teach a generation of students how to write impenetrable, unreadable crap. As a life-long reader and a regular writer, seeing so much noise in the signal, in an effort to emulate science, and, by extension, men, just bugs the shit out of me.

As an equality feminist from the 1970s, I am dismayed by this new craze. Women are not children. We are not fragile little birds who can’t cope with jokes, works of art, or controversial speakers. Trigger warnings and safe spaces are an infantilizing setback for feminism—and for women.”

– Christina Hoff Sommers, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute

Honestly, if this is what women-run education looks like? I’d rather put those horrible, oppressive white men, you know, the ones who gave us medicine and food preservation, back in charge.

Can you even? I mean, like, the logic is so circular it blows the mind.