Dave Sim's blogandmail #371 (September 17th, 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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OKAY, IT'S "OH, NO! NOT JEFF SMITH AGAIN"

WEEK HERE ON THE BLOG & MAIL

TAKING A CLOSER LOOK AT HIS 1999

TRILOGY TOUR INTERVIEW AND

SEEKING AUGURIES IN ITS ENTRAILS

[I also think it's interesting – in the same way a multi-car pile-up traffic accident can be said to be interesting -- that the Marxist-feminists who exert an absolute tyranny in the comic book field and who, politically, pride themselves on deploring violence of any kind, immediately and universally leapt to Jeff Smith's side – as all of you reading this, I assume, are about to do if you haven't already -- when, if you take Jeff's version of events in the COMICS JOURNAL at face value, we were discussing a number of weirdly humorous facts that have resulted from the feminization of society – spending thousands of dollars to clean all the oil off of a killer whale's lunch, being a good example -- and Jeff, out of a clear blue sky, suddenly told me to shut up and threatened to take me outside and deck me. What kind of a way is that for a theoretically civilized human being to behave towards someone he is having a disagreement with? It's an actual question but since the odds are that whoever is reading this is a Marxist-feminist no, I don't really expect an answer. Just your usual high altitude intellectual tour de force which consists of going quiet and sullen and blocking out whatever was just being discussed] [Yes, like you're doing now] [What Jeff's manufactured after-the-fact Tall Tale really did for me, as someone who is only interested in reality, was to escalate the level of weirdness attached to the incident, the initial weirdness being Jeff suddenly and explosively reacting to a simple observation on my part and insisting that we have to stop talking about this NOW and the subsequent weirdness being Jeff feeling compelled to add, years after the fact, a threat of physical violence to his already bizarre and excessive emotional reaction to a simple conversation] [to repeat: What are you so upset about?]

[Okay, now that none of you are paying attention again, here is Jeff's version of what I wrote in READS. If you were fair-minded people – which I know you aren't, but let's pretend that some of you are – here is a living example of how Jeff Smith wouldn't know the truth if it came up and bit him on the ass:][and because you're Marxist-feminists and won't look up what I actually wrote so as to maintain your eight-year delusion that Jeff was telling the truth and is therefore Good and Dave Sim was lying and is therefore Evil, I am pleased to repeat what I actually wrote immediately after Jeff's version. Oh, you're more than welcome:]

SMITH: He wrote about it in CEREBUS #186. But in his version, instead of me threatening to give him a fat lip, he has me fawning and begging him not to reveal the true evil secrets of women in front of Vijaya. [Scared voice] "Dave, stop giving away the secrets of the universe! Please! Stop giving them away! I'll get in trouble with Vijaya!" And Vijaya is portrayed like a scheming Mata Hari, when really she was just angry and bored. [Laughter]

Okay this is actually what I wrote:

`Oh, NO! No way. Uh-uh.' Jeff Smith is shaking his head violently from side to side. He has lunged forward in his seat, his hands waving in the air, as if shooing away a large insect. All of his movements are agitated. At the other end of the couch, his wife sits, her feet tucked beneath her, calmly smoking a Marlboro Light. Her features are inscrutable.

Viktor Davis takes another sip of his beer.

`You'd agree that Death is Male?" he asks.

`Yes"

`You'd agree that Birth is Female?'

`Yes"

`Which one is winning?'

`No. No, no way. It's just not true.' He stares straight ahead for a moment or two and then looks at Viktor Davis. `I just don't think that way, man. I just can't see that at all.'

Vijaya grinds out her cigarette in a small glass ashtray.

At Jeff's insistence, the discussion ends. They agree to disagree. Viktor Davis isn't certain what the disagreement is, but clearly an impasse has been reached.

They begin to discuss animation instead.

[For the two or three Marxist-feminists still reading at this point – I know, I don't believe anyone is still reading at this point either, but let's pretend that some of you are still playing along with our home version of the game and you don't have access to a dictionary] [Well, obviously you have access to a dictionary, but you're Marxist-feminists. You aren't going to go and look up a word if it means that it will prove another Marxist-feminist to be full of hot air:]

inscrutable – not readily investigated, interpreted or understood: MYSTERIOUS (i.e. "God, thy judgements are inscrutable" Robert Browning)

There is no pejorative connotation for the word inscrutable. It was the most apt adjective I could find to describe Vijaya's complete non-reaction. She didn't look angry and she didn't look bored. Jeff looked angry. Vijaya was completely blank. That was what I found remarkable. Jeff is going ballistic over…I don't know what, considering that we both agreed that Birth was Female and Death was Male and the former is, factually, exceeding the latter by a wide margin… and Vijaya isn't going ballistic with him but also doesn't say, "Jeff, calm down. What are you getting so excited about? We're just talking." If there was something to get extremely upset about, why isn't Vijaya getting upset? And if there's nothing to get extremely upset about, why isn't Vijaya more concerned about Jeff's erratic behaviour?

[It's an interesting basis for speculation – again, for another time, again, I'm sticking strictly to the facts here -- to wonder at the psychological transference that Jeff's unconscious mind obviously engaged in: translating what I actually said into what his unconscious mind had decided he needed to believe that I had said. Where did he get the "fawning and begging" thing from? Where did he get the "giving away the secrets of the universe" thing from? The "true evil secrets of women" thing from? The "getting in trouble with Vijaya" thing from? None of those are in there, not even remotely. I'm not, as you all know, big on psychiatry to say the least. To me, it's simple demonic possession. Unclean spirits. But, for those of you who do believe in psychiatry, what do you make of this bizarre and excessive form of transference? Where, psychologically speaking, do you suppose it comes from?]

[The important thing from a Marxist-feminist standpoint is that it worked like a charm. Frank Miller went on record as saying that he too would find it intolerable if a guest in his house had insulted Lynn. My universal pariah status – which continues to this day -- was assured. My question, in "Dear Jeff Smith": "How did I insult Vijaya?" was ignored, both by Jeff and by the comic-book field in general. I'll ask it again, "How did I insult Vijaya?" No response. Exactly.]

Tomorrow: Okay, back to reality…

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COMING SOON! DAVE SIM IN DIALOGUE WITH GARY GROTH – A BLOG & MAIL SPECIAL!

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