Dave Sim's blogandmail #402 (October 18th, 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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One of the books that Peter Birkemoe picked out for me at The Beguiling as being a sturdy package that would bear up under a lot of handling is an oversized joint publication of Fantagraphics Books and Coconino Press called GANGES. Evidently it's the fifth book of the "Ignatz" collection edited and produced by Igort. The story and art is copyrighted 2006 by Kevin Huizenga. Usually I'm not big on the "slight anecdote" approach to comics, but this is actually pretty good and I was glad I ended up buying it for another reason entirely. Check it out at www.usscatastrophe.com

Letter from Jeff Lageson dated August 2.

"Dave…

"First of all I want you to know that I have gone on the record (for what it is worth) as someone who is both critical of your public stances and yet supportive of you personally and professionally. As a staunch believer in – and supporter of – creative freedom I think you and I both know the two things can be separated. If only…

"So…I am also enclosing a print out of my blog entry on the subject of supporting you and a photocopy of a frame I made for a pencil drawing you once sent me as a CEREBUS reader…I make the frames from beach wood and glass found at the Picnic Point Beach in Edmonds that is very near my apartment. In your letter sending me the pencils you indicated I could do with them what I may and so I have framed a couple of them and put them on display…



"The impetus for writing you and the blog entry noted above is that I had forwarded some of your stuff to a woman I know who I figured would not like them very much. She didn't. When I pointed out that the pencils on the wall were also yours, we had an interesting discussion about "supporting" artists that you do not agree with, etc."

Well, much obliged Jeff. You can check out what he wrote at http://shotgunprose.blogspot.com/2007/08/artist-you-have-personal-issues-with.html. Tom Cruise, Charlton Heston, Bono and me. Yes, it's interesting to me that you put the quotation marks around "supporting" since it seems to cut to the heart of the debate. That is I think you would see yourself as "supporting" Dave Sim whereas your feminist friend would see you as Supporting Dave Sim. "Get with the program" in other words. It seems to me to be "of a piece" with their high school shunning/girl's clique mechanism. In order to work, it has to be universal. If you shun the excluded girl all afternoon at school but then sneak over to her house to help her with her homework, well, you're not "getting with the program". You have to literally behave as if someone doesn't exist if they don't share your opinions or if they hold opinions of their own in order to measure up to what feminists see as their own high standards of absolute exclusivity.

It would be like me deciding I won't buy Chester's next book (he'll probably give me a free one) because it advocates using prostitutes and because Chester will be using at least some of the money I use to buy the book to pay a prostitute. Like you I would see that as "supporting" Chet's prostitution habit. The amount of money I would be contributing would be negligible (it might rent a couple of pubic hairs for two or three minutes) when compared with the value in seeing a philosophy espoused (I will assume) effectively with which I fundamentally disagree. The same reason that I'm glad that Gary Groth will be interviewing Chet from Gary's extreme leftist position. An extreme leftist and a libertarian discussing prostitution. I certainly don't see prostitution as edifying, but I definitely see the fleshing out of it (if you'll pardon the expression) as a subject of contention between those two political philosophies as at least potentially edifying, particularly since I'm neither a libertarian nor an extreme leftist.

I really don't think women are built to think of things that way and, no offence, but I think that's the core problem with feminism.

When you try to discuss an idea as an idea -- as separate from how that idea makes you "feel" -- I really think women draw a complete blank and just sit there trying to figure out how to hurt you emotionally because, as far as they're concerned, you're hurting them emotionally by not "getting with the program". If you Support Prostitution and they don't then they consider you a misogynist. If you're interested in reading the views of an intelligent person who Supports Prostitution then they still consider you a misogynist. The only thing they seem to endorse is Completely Ignoring and/or Publicly Vilifying anything they don't approve of. Attention is Approval. See, to me, Attention is Enlightenment. Approval, if it comes, comes later after all of the pro's and con's have been hashed over in my own mind. For women that's "You think too much." I can understand them holding that view. If men ever choose to go back to "thinking too much" (I assume we've always thought too much from where women sit) – reading the Fifteen Impossible Things and actually thinking about what they say about the mythology of gender interchangeability – then feminism is doomed.

The feminist approach seems to swerve into ridiculous areas where, as an example, I suspect that they think I should be publicly identified as not being a feminist and that waitresses should be allowed to choose not to serve me in restaurants and, if possible, NO one would be allowed to sell me food. The rationale being that if you sell Dave Sim food, you're Supporting him. Starve him and eventually he'll get hungry enough so that he'll turn into a feminist. Or else. It really is just cold-blooded Stalinism shorn of façade and pretence. Mob rule hiding behind a mask of self-righteousness, in turn hiding behind a mask of The Greater Good of All (which, behind all of the masks, is actually just feminist totalitarian tyranny). It's one of the reasons that I caution people about feminism and try to convey exactly how malignant and sadistic these people are and how extreme their viewpoints are. If you think you can appease people like that by disassociating yourself from Dave Sim, I think you're sadly mistaken.

Anyway, I appreciate you saying something publicly, Jeff. That's one in a row.



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REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
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If you wish to contact Dave Sim, you can mail a letter (he does NOT receive emails) to:

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P.O. Box 1674
Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2

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