Dave Sim's blogandmail #380 (September 26th, 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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Margaret also takes issue with my assertion "It's very possible that someone doing a cerebusfangirl website is one of the few things that kept me out of jail for the last few years" saying "I doubt my website is that well known to accomplish that task." Skipping ahead to her 23 June letter:

Jeff Tundis made a good point. The point Jeff mentioned was that whenever someone searches online for CEREBUS and/or Dave Sim information on the Internet, my website is one of the top "hits" that comes up. So, while I don't view my website as a huge traffic generating website in comparison to other websites, it is a large one for CEREBUS-related information. So I stand corrected and your point does stand. My apologies.

No apologies necessary. All three of us are guessing. There is very, very limited information available on what feminism is actually doing although I think I'm safe in saying that feminism has, to date, 100% rock solid, no questions asked, totalitarian control of the debate. We have the one Larry Summers anecdote of a prominent person daring to question feminism and getting crushed like an insect. Little flurry of discussion and then everyone agrees that justice was served and it's time to move on. That's not a lot to go on as to HOW this is being accomplished but it certainly points in the direction of a lot going on behind the scenes. i.e. Crush them like insects but keep it out of the papers.

The Sixteen Impossible Things have been kicking around for a few years now and, frankly, they point in the direction of women being "differently abled". If the genders were actually equal, you would not need these "counterbalancing" societal mechanisms in order to even things up. Men and women would go into marriage with what they had and when they left they would take only what they brought in. Men pay alimony. 95% of alimony. But, you'll notice that there's no movement afoot to provide men with government assistance in paying alimony. Oh, hey, buddy, you're losing more than half your paycheque here. That's not right. We better petition the government to compensate men for any part of their paycheque they're paying in alimony that exceeds, say, 25%.

No. Why? Because that's not men's nature. Men don't go crying to the policeman or the judge or the government to kiss the boo-boo and make it all better. Men ARE strong, men ARE independent. Men just sit there and go: Well, looks like I have my work cut out for me. And they find a way to make more money. If the genders were equal, women would do the same thing. Well, that marriage didn't work out. I'm forty years old, I have no marketable skills and I've got two kids to pay half the upkeep on. Looks like I have my work cut out for me. The fact that we expect the guy to give the ex-wife half of his stuff and half of his paycheque indicates just how delusional the concept of gender equality is.

I suspect fewer men are being crushed like insects by feminism as new generations of women are coming along who are questioning the whole idea of feminism. Not in a "back to Father Knows Best" way but in a basic, "a lot of this stuff just doesn't make any sense and is consequently indefensible" way. And I would maintain that not all of the crushing that has taken place has been overt or anything you could put your finger on or indict anyone for. Women are awfully good at that, starting with their high school cliques. Nothing you can put your finger on, nothing you could indict anyone for, but flat-out malicious sadism for all that. And I suspect for a period of time, until quite recently, you needed to have a woman prominently in your corner to keep from getting crushed in just that way. Particularly if you had the reputation of being a womanizer, you weren't married, hadn't been married for a quarter of a century and showed no inclination to get married in the future, your female typesetter had quit, your female proof-reader had quit, your last two female secretaries had quit. At that point I was pretty much down to Margaret. And what does she do? She gets a Cerebus tattoo and starts covering the Internet with Cerebus material and calls herself, quite plainly, cerebusfangirl. That's why I thanked her as profusely as I did June 21 and why I do so here. As I said then, I'm sure she's paid a price for her perfidy. To which Margaret replied:

Any price I've paid for it is greatly made up by what I've gotten from CEREBUS and your essays over the years as far as educational and entertainment purposes. There are other women readers out there, and a few on the YahooGroup that occasionally "de-lurk" to contribute something meaningful to the discussion at hand. They most assuredly would vouch for you, though I cannot speak to their reasons for not doing so as I have done, other than perhaps they have a life outside the Internet :)

Well, okay. But the fact of the matter is that they didn't say anything and they don't say anything. Standing up to the popular girls' clique in high school is really no different from standing up to feminist totalitarianism. You have to actually do it: Out loud. For it to have any meaning. Thinking to yourself "I'm very cross with those girls for what they're doing" and keeping it to yourself doesn't improve the situation and certainly doesn't stop the behaviour. I appreciate (I'm sure one of your occasional de-lurking examples) Elizabeth Bardawill's support for my work, but when she tries to tell me that I'm not the Pariah King of Comics, someone else is, "that's all over with" as if that's the same thing as speaking out against my being made the Pariah King of Comics and is the same as vocally deploring the treatment I've been subjected to…well, come on, Margaret, the difference is night and day. Still, I'm glad that you feel that you've come out even or even a little ahead on the deal.

Concluding her June 21 letter, in answer to David Johnson's wondering aloud if he had scared her off with an e-mail suggesting that he would use a possible Cerebus Legacy/Dave Sim & Gerhard Awareness Group "as a springboard to promote Christianity" Margaret first pointed out that her own views on God are very private, so, respecting that, I won't quote what she had to say on the subject. She then goes on to explain:

I'd rather have a Cerebus Legacy Group or a Dave Sim & Gerhard Awareness Group for promoting CEREBUS, your essays and your other works. Those essays include whatever you've written, from "Tangent" to the Notes from the President. I don't see that as promoting Christianity, but promoting your work. Let the people read the books, the essays, and make up their own minds what to think. Some will no doubt come to the same conclusions you did in LATTER DAYS and in issue #289/290 and others might not.

As a possible member of such a Foundation (or group), I wouldn't actively promote Christianity, I would put your works out there for others to read and discover and as I say, let the people decide for themselves. Which is what I attempt to do with my website: I've "published" on the web your essays from "Tangent" to "Islam, My Islam" (requested by David Carrington of my old post, Fort Monroe). Hopefully people will come across them via the different search engines and links and read them, digest them and think about them. It is the least I could hope to do with the website.

That and sell more CEREBUS phonebooks.

Well, yes and as long as we're on the subject, it would seem to me very strange for anyone to try to promote my views as being exclusively Judaic or Christian or Islamic. At the same time, I can't specifically tell people not to do it. If something that I've written makes David Johnson think that it has made him a better Christian and he thinks it might work for other Christians, and he can "get past" the fact that I don't believe Jesus was God's son, well, that's pretty much up to David Johnson to decide. But I can state categorically that I have never knowingly leaned toward any one of the three faiths at the expense of the other two. In fact, I think that's part of our jobs here on earth is to find a way to accommodate and balance all three faiths within us.

Tomorrow: Margaret's June 10 letter re: the CEREBUS Fan Club

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

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REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
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