Dave Sim's blogandmail #233 (May 2nd, 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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Thanks Dave.


Well, my good friend Dave has generously offered me some space to plug a side-project of mine and I'm happy to abuse his generosity. There is absolutely no Cerebus content in this post and it has (almost) nothing to do with Dave so consider yourself forewarned.


For most people, the name Malcolm X is radioactive. Outside of the black community, he is generally perceived to have been an anti-semitic black supremacist who got what he deserved. Malcolm X would not be surprised by (and in fact predicted) this perception. For those completely unfamiliar with his story, the wikipedia entry on Malcolm X is fair and provides a decent introduction to the man and his life. I also have quite a bit of footage on youtube, so look for Malcolm X on that site to see the man in action.


(For film junkies, Spike Lee's movie takes a few liberties but is, in my opinion, a reasonably accurate and entertaining account of his life. Far better is Arnold Perl's 1972 documentary "Malcolm X" which consists almost entirely of actual news footage and is included on the DVD of Spike Lee's film. (A PBS documentary "Make it Plain" is also good, but spends far too much time interviewing people who knew Malcolm X rather than showing footage of the man himself.))


For several years, I've been scouring the tubes of the internet looking for as much Malcolm X material I could find, strictly out of personal interest. Over the years, I've managed to find about 40 hours of speeches and 12 hours of video footage. Eventually, I compiled all the material I could find on a DVD for anybody who is interested and that's what I'm here to plug. You can order the DVD that I've compiled on my blogspot page for the low, low price of only $19.99:


http://malcolmxfiles.blogspot.com/


The primary purpose of this project is not to make money but to spread the message of a man I believe had a remarkable insight into both the political situation of the United States and the entire planet. Few people would argue that Muslims are having a profound effect on the way we see the world, something that Malcolm X accurately predicted over thirty years ago.


I do find two interesting (although quite superficial) parallels between Malcolm X and Dave. The following is going to be too much of a stretch for most people, but I find it interesting anyway. Both of them were essentially drug-using, womanizing atheists who eventually turned to Islam which in turn "cleaned them up." Now Dave was just a run-of-the-mill drug-using, womanizing atheist whereas Malcolm X was a pimp, a drug-dealer and he ran numbers for a living. In Dave's parlance, they lived their lives as "zeros" until they turned to God via Islam and chose to be "ones."


Second of all, I see a similarity between Malcolm X's vilification for his analysis of the race problem and the vilification of Sim for his analysis of gender issues. I think Malcolm X was completely right in his analysis of the race problem, but white people simply did not want to be told the truth—that they had viciously treated black people as subhumans for four hundred years. He tried to teach black people the importance of economic and political independence and the importance of self-determination. He believed that black people had essentially been brainwashed into trying to be white.


Similarly, I think Dave is right that men have largely been brainwashed into being feminists and that they are largely being subjugated (or rather, subjugating themselves) to the whims of women. Again, I think that people don't want to hear what Dave has to say and are blaming the messenger. However, I think Dave gives a clear, honest assessment of the gender situation "without that old sweet talk."


Hey, I said the comparisons were superficial.


Well, that's it. Thanks again Dave.

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