Dave Sim's blogandmail #263 (June 1st, 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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BEFORE WE GET TO "ALL THE SEX THAT WENT ON DURING THE COURSE" (OOPS LOST YOU TO THE SCROLL BAR ALREADY – PLEASE TRY TO REMEMBER COLLECTED LETTERS 2 IS OUT ON WEDNESDAY, DIAMOND ORDER CODE MAR073054) (I HATE SITTING HERE IN THE HEADLINE SPOT TALKING TO MYSELF)

"And all the sex that went on during the course! And it was against the rules! Most of them were married, too, but they didn't care. The infantry guys banged pretty much every female in the course over the six weeks. They'd break every rule that was placed in front of them. There was a whole fleet of characters who were kicked out of the course for cheating. One of the requirements for graduating is Land Navigation, which they've really dumbed down – it used to be done in the forest over hills but it's been changed to city streets, most likely because there would be a higher passing rate. And the points we'd have to find are seen easily enough, as they're large orange stakes. So three girls (surprise!) went out with a Global Positioning Device and loaded into their computers every single possible point that might be on the test, covering the entire post (Ft. Knox, KY). They proceeded to share their information with other cheaters in their class. They were found out, and something like 5 females (the prettier ones, too, alas) and 2 guys were booted. Stupid! So, we went out and had to do the test in the forest anyway, in this incredible storm. But, yeah, there's absolutely no one else I'd want guarding my back in the combat zone than the guys I met during that course."

Well, obviously, I see adultery as dishonourable conduct and long for the days that it would be grounds for courts martial. However, in a Feminist Age like ours where harlotry is a human right, I understand that they would have to be turning a blind eye to it to one degree or another. It's one of the reasons that I think a "men-only" military makes sense. If you let women in then you are setting up a distracting, pointless and self-destructive competition (i.e. courtship) alongside the job that the men are theoretically there to do. However, I'd be surprised if there was as much sex going on as you heard given that most of these guys would be in their early twenties and guys in their twenties talk a good game but they aren't nearly the effortless goal-scorers they paint themselves as being. A lot of them beg and plead for it and when they get it and the story is later told, it was the girl who was begging and pleading.

In civilian life, this is collectively stupid since it means women all have bad experiences with how what transpires behind closed doors gets described later on to their detriment and that makes them much warier of men in general than they would otherwise be inclined to be. There are a lot of so-called nice guys who portray themselves as sincere friends to women but if they get what they're looking for turn right around and make it into a notch on their bedpost. It's the real answer to why women are attracted to a—holes but are resistant to nice guys. Most of the guys that nice guys consider to be a—holes know enough not to broadcast their "conquests" so they get more conquests as a result. The nice guy who is earnestly telling her how wonderful she is and feigning rapt attention at every word that issues from her mouth can usually be counted on to blab the gory details to a stranger within twelve hours of his "victory".

Jules Feiffer did a great strip on this subject years ago, with one guy talking to another about how he's through with going out because of how dishonest it is. He then goes on to relate this amazing wet dream of a one-night stand and concludes "And through all that, do you know what I was thinking the whole time?" "WHAT? WHAT?" his friend clamours to know. "`Wait'll I tell the fellas.'" he confesses.

In military life, well, I just think it puts Officer and a Gentleman into quotation marks which is unfortunate because honour is something that can't be faked and modified in men any more than it can be in women. I have no problem with women in the military if they're passing all the same tests that the men are. A 200-pound female Marine who is all muscle from head to toe and can lift every weight her male compatriots can – including her male compatriots: one of the core principles of the fighting man is that he can carry any other guy in his unit out of a combat situation if the other guy is wounded. NO exceptions -- no problem at all. But having women in the military just for the sake of having women in the military strikes me as wrong-headed since they then fit on a sliding scale from fighting-men-of-the-opposite-gender to over-glorified camp followers (basically whorish women who have a thing for military guys) with every twisted and deviant permutation in between – all of them destructive of military discipline -- that you can come up with. I think any military man who was being honest with himself would agree that although "men only" seems like a tougher row to hoe, in the long run it will produce a better military. And, as the Fifteen Impossible Things suggests, eroding standards just to have more policepersons and firepersons…and soldierpersons…is seriously misguided to the point of impossibility.

"I'm expecting to go before the promotion board within the next couple of months to become a sergeant. I'm excited. The frustrating thing about my job though, is that I can't talk about what I do! I've become more involved lately in some of the more interesting projects run through my office, which of course I can't talk about. It puts a bit of a pinch on any political discussion I'd hope to have with you."

That's okay. It was this paragraph that suggested to me that the earlier parts of your letter were "OK For Civilian Use" or at least up for general discussion. I'm really and sincerely not interested in hearing any secrets, civilian or military, since I then feel compelled to talk about them. When it comes to In Person conversations, if someone tells me something is a secret and then proceeds to tell me what it is, I seem to have an internal personal screening mechanism in place. A half hour later I couldn't tell you what they said to me. The only thing I'll remember is that they told me it was a secret.

Tomorrow: Geopolitical Nitty-Gritty with David Carrington
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