Dave Sim's blogandmail #228 (April 27th, 2007)

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Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast That Make You a Good Feminist

1. A mother who works a full-time job and delegates to strangers the raising of her children eight hours a day, five days a week does just as good a job as a mother who hand-rears her children full time.

2. It makes great sense for the government to pay 10 to 15,000 dollars a year to fund a daycare space for a child so its mother - who pays perhaps 2,000 dollars in taxes - can be a contributing member of society.

3. A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus than does the father of that fetus.

4. So long as a woman makes a decision after consulting with her doctor, she is incapable of making an unethical choice.

5. A car with two steering wheels, two gas pedals and two brakes drives more efficiently than a car with one steering wheel, one gas pedal and one brake which is why marriage should always be an equal partnership.

6. It is absolutely necessary for women to be allowed to join or participate fully in any gathering place for men, just as it is absolutely necessary that there be women only environments from which men are excluded.

7. Because it involves taking jobs away from men and giving them to women, affirmative action makes for a fairer and more just society.

8. It is important to have lower physical standards for women firepersons and women policepersons so that, one day, half of all firepersons and policepersons will be women, thus more effectively protecting the safety of the public.

9. Affirmative action at colleges and universities needs to be maintained now that more women than men are being enrolled, in order to keep from giving men an unfair advantage academically.

10. Having ensured that there is no environment for men where women don't belong (see no.6) it is important to have zero tolerance of any expression or action which any woman might regard as sexist to ensure greater freedom for everyone.

11. Only in a society which maintains a level of 95% of alimony and child support being paid by men to women can men and women be considered as equals.

12. An airline stewardess who earned $20,000 a year at the time that she married a baseball player earning $6 million a year is entitled, in the event of a divorce, to $3 million for each year of the marriage and probably more.

13. A man's opinions on how to rear and/or raise a child are invalid because he is not the child's mother. However, his financial obligation is greater because no woman gets pregnant by herself.

14. Disagreeing with any of these statements makes you anti-woman and/or a misogynist.

15. Legislature Seats must be allocated to women and women must be allowed to bypass the democratic winnowing process in order to guarantee female representation and, thereby, make democracy fairer.

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This kind of ties in with what I was talking about yesterday: the fact that there are larger doings at stake most of the time that, to me, make individual human personalities largely if not completely meaningless. Jeff Tundis' faxed response to my last major 25th of the month "Feminists Get a Free Ride in Our Society" is next up in the pile, dated February 28 and actually faxed from his workplace. I had questioned his assertion that he "picks his battles" and asked what battles he thought were as important or more important than holding men and women to the same standards instead of always letting women off the hook. He replied something along the lines that he didn't see my dredging up old business with the Friends of Lulu as being worthwhile in terms of positive net effects or even potentially happy outcomes. It's an interesting way of looking at it: What good can this possibly do? What good result can this lead to?


But to me that was evasive, centering as it did on the fact that it made personalities and their emotional reactions more important than the larger ideas that are theoretically the underpinnings of civilized society. If pointing out that something is wrong makes someone unhappy, to me it's more important that the wrong be pointed out in the (however distant) hope that it might be made right either immediately, soon, or a hundred years from now depending on the level of intransigence opposing the observation. "Happy" and "unhappy" are minor side issues when you take it as a given (as I do) that accurate perception is always going to make you happier in the long term and inaccurate perception is always going to make you unhappier in the long term and that the reverse holds true in the short term.


Anyway, seeing that someone as intelligent as Jeff was capable of turning my argument sideways and skewing it so as to make happiness more important than right behaviour was what led me to ask him to include The Fourteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast in each of the Blog & Mails. "If you're all going to ignore reality, I'll at least make sure that it's right there in front of you on a daily basis WHILE you ignore it and presumably that will make you, to one degree or another, unhappy, but maybe you will at least understand what I'm saying a little more clearly: i.e. It is more important for accurate perception to be given a fighting chance (however remote) of making a comeback in our society than to be concerned about x number of people being made unhappy on a daily basis." Put another way, unhappiness in and of itself isn't as important as the reason for that unhappiness. In this case: the daily enunciation of some of the inherent falsehoods which underpin feminism makes feminists unhappy because it makes the falsehoods more difficult to maintain and makes it less likely that feminists can continue to dominate society and to overrule common sense indefinitely as they have been doing up until now. But, to me that is obviously a good thing. The less likely I can make it that irrationality and inherent falsehood can continue to be maintained as the governing principles of our society indefinitely, then the better off our society is going to be in the long run even though that implies the inevitability of profound, short-term unhappiness for a large segment of our society. The larger point, it seems to me, is that we are now running society on the basis that there is nothing more unacceptable, nothing that demands greater redress and, in general, no greater crisis in our society than a woman being made to be unhappy. Anything that makes a woman unhappy (or angry) needs to be changed or amended so that the woman becomes happy. It's the reason that women who kidnap their own children in the midst of a custody dispute are always dealt with leniently, as are women who kill their own children (which women do exponentially more frequently than men). Clearly a woman who kidnaps her children is an unhappy woman. The problem isn't the kidnapping, the problem is her unhappiness. What we have to do is find out what made her so unhappy that she felt compelled to kidnap her children (probably a judge's ruling giving the father access to them) and eliminate it is so that she will be made happy instead of unhappy. The problem isn't that she killed her children, the problem is that she's unhappy. What we have to do is find out what made her unhappy (probably her husband) and eliminate it so she will be made happy instead of unhappy.


At the very least, by posting the Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast on a daily basis I can make the point that This Is What All of You Either a) Destroyed My Career Over or b) Stood By and Let Others Destroy My Career Over. Up until now, that has been refuted by a sentiment that probably best expresses itself as: "Well, we destroyed your career because what you were saying made women unhappy and there is no larger or more unforgivable wrong in our society than making a woman or women in general unhappy." But, obviously, the larger point is that what I'm saying makes women unhappy because it points out where women are wrong and where women are taking society in fifteen wrong directions and that they can't refute that these are Impossible Things to Believe. It's a clear case of "killing the messenger". And that's wrong. Right? Are we not at least all in agreement that "killing the messenger" or "destroying the messenger's career" because we don't like the messenger's message—even though the message is just an irrefutable fact—is wrong?


Deafening silence.


I used slavery as an analogy: something that was deemed for centuries to be inevitable and an inherent good or at least a necessary evil and that it requires both courage and outside support if an inherent wrong is going to be undone. In his reply Jeff said, "However, if you are going to reference Lincoln…" Well, I wasn't referencing Abraham Lincoln. I was clearly talking about that first individual who had the guts to stand up in his place in the British Parliament and say "I think slavery is wrong" and that was a long time before Abraham Lincoln and it certainly wasn't in the United States. And I can pretty much guarantee that however primitive we might seen the context as being, at least no one was sitting there thinking, "But, if you end slavery, you're going to make women who have slaves for their maids and ladies-in-waiting and governesses and nurses unhappy."


Okay. Short post today. With the time left over why don't you all scroll back up to the Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast and effortlessly refute them one after the other as a means of indicating to yourselves that destroying Dave Sim's career was The Right Thing To Do and not an example of "killing the messenger."

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