Dave Sim's blogandmail #453 (December 8th, 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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Daycare "Mom" versus Homemaker Mom: Round Two (DING!)


In our present context, I think mothers being cooped up in their mini-castles (we have "advanced' to the era of the McMansion) with their children owes more to female safety paranoia having become the new normal than it does to anything my team ever came up with or ever would come up with. Children for the most part are no longer allowed to play out-of-doors unsupervised anywhere out of the eyesight of fretful, fearful Mom. I think the Dads have capitulated on the point (as Dads have been conceding all points since 1970, misguidedly believing that capitulation will mean peace and quiet) and I think it has meant that children are now, unfortunately, being reared against the backdrop of their mother's sociopathic, xenophobic and paranoid psyches (which qualities, I think, are unfailingly going to dominate any society where feminism supersedes masculinity as it has in our own).


The "play date", as an example, is a newly coined Marxist-feminist term which is euphemistic for smuggling children from secure sanctuary to secure sanctuary in locked motorized vehicles there to play with a specific mom-approved playmate for a specific period of time (0400 hours to 0530, as an example). The concept itself didn't exist until a few years ago which is why we didn't have a universally agreed upon term for it until a few years ago: that is, until sociopathic, xenophobic and paranoid psyches became pre-eminent. When men called the shots the moment children were mobile they were expected to a) play outside and b) stay out of trouble in whatever there was of their free time once their schoolwork was done. Fear of Dad being then the norm, for the most part that was what children did: played outside and stayed out of trouble. For the first time in a decade, walking back from Sobey's with my groceries, I saw four children playing together outside with no adult in evidence. It was only in seeing that that I realized it had been a good decade since the last time I had seen it.


No, what I'm discussing is a 24/7 supervisory capacity on the part of mothers where the mother, except in exceptional circumstances, is in residence. Children should play outside and stay out of trouble and be aware that Mom is Home and that Dad's authority extends through Mom to assure that everything is done the way it's supposed to be done. If you are a child and you plan or choose to get into trouble, make sure to be careful about it and be prepared to suffer the consequences if misbehaviour comes to light. This (I don't think it should even need to be pointed out, but evidently it does) is the way children learn, by having physical and behavioural parameters set which are wide enough to allow them to learn by trial-and-error and to test the boundaries of their own God-given free will and to experience reward, consequence and repercussion but narrow enough to keep them from the more extreme forms of decision-making more appropriate to an adult.


As an example, I think the child should walk to school unsupervised, not be driven there, cooped up in a car with Mom (it's your team, Asa, females and feminized males that came up with secure locked vehicle transportation as the new normal for relocating children from one geographic location to another within easy walking distance. Trust me, such a thing would never have occurred to my team. "I walked to school. My kid will walk to school"). The child, once mobile and relatively autonomous should play in the child's neighbourhood within specific boundaries larger than mother's visual focal range but smaller than say the Greater Metropolitan Area in which the family resides. And should do so with implicit but not omnipresent supervision


(i.e. mother is always at home. Mother is a homemaker. If the child falls and skins his or her knee, he or she should have a home to run crying to to get a bandage put on and be reasonably confident that mother will be there 24/7. My view is that this is sensible: more sensible than a cellphone so the child can call his or her mother at work and – assuming she isn't in a meeting -- ask how to put a bandage on him or herself. Children need to be trained to the idea of home as a practical reality by experiencing it AS a practical reality with the mother at its epicentre: "home", not as a euphemism for a building occupied by family members between the hours of 6 pm and bedtime, sleeping hours, and for an hour or so in the morning before everyone departs to their appointed places of business or schooling leaving the domicile empty for eight or nine hours, but as an environment occupied by Wife and Mother except in exceptional circumstances pretty much 24/7. The Wife and Mother Makes the Home and is the one who spends the most time there and is, consequently, the core of our civilization. The Husband and Father works to make the home possible, providing the material resources in the form of currency which the Wife and Mother exchanges for material goods that go into making a Home out of a house. Good husbands and good fathers work to provide those material resources. The end is the home, the job, the office is simply the means. It is a fundamental misapprehension on the part of Marxist-feminists to perceive a job as an end in itself and to, from that, infer that two jobs are better than one. If the mother bird and father bird are both out foraging, the nest and the baby birds are not long for this world. The father bird forages for the sake of the nest, the mother bird and the baby birds, not because foraging is more fun than rearing baby birds, but because foraging is what he does, what he is suited to, as the rearing of the baby birds is what the mother bird does, what she is suited to. This isn't "sexism in nature" this is "nature" – what we are, what we all are.


And this is not rocket science. In my opinion, you will never have good wives and good husbands and good mothers and good fathers so long as you treat the home as a part-time family environment or "just a building with a mortgage I never have time to dust or vacuum".


If you do, as we have and consequently as we are seeing now with the exponential rise in the divorce rate and single parent households, each successive generation will get trained out of the very concept of Home as Societal Norm and into the concept of Disconnected Individuality as Societal Norm. Once the mother bird chooses foraging because it is more fun and gratifying than rearing her young, the nest as a concept ceases to exist.


Don't get me wrong, Disconnected Individuality is a protected free will choice that everyone is free, by the grace of God and by the statutes and laws of our civilization to choose or not choose – and which everyone is choosing – and I will defend to the death the right of anyone to choose it. I've chosen it myself over any construct where a woman would be involved so long as Marxist-feminism holds totalitarian sway in your team's camp. But what I am saying is that I don't think the evidence supports that it is the best way to conduct society and what I am saying is that I think there are inescapable consequences and inevitable long-term societal and familial net effects of making that choice and the swift eradication of the concept of "home" from our society's collective perception is foremost among them.)


By saying that you are examining the situation "historically and on a global scale" I assume that what you are doing is championing Hilary Rodham Clinton's It Takes A Village philosophy. That is, if we all pitch in and help rear the children communally (as, purportedly, happened in villages back in the good old days when feministic giantesses trod the earth) we will soon live in a Marxist-feminist utopia. As I've written previously, the problem I see with this philosophy is that it requires running not only at odds with the societal currents we are actually experiencing but in the diametric opposite direction to them: to wit, turning all of our cities into villages, our towns into villages, our suburbs into villages even as the actual dynamic is in the other direction with our suburbs becoming more like cities, our villages becoming more like cities and our towns becoming more like cities: all marked by dispassionate and disconnected individuality which (core conundrum) your team has unleashed upon society.


Your team collectively and all members of your team individually are certainly welcome to assemble "support groups" composed of unpaid labour upon which you can rely in rearing your children for you if you can a) talk them into it and b) maintain the structure.


That's really the concept behind "play dates". I'll foist my children on you Monday and Wednesday and you'll foist your children on me Tuesday and Thursday. If you have an important staff meeting on Wednesday, I'll foist them on my parents next week, instead of you, or my sister or my neighbour. My larger point has always been that children know when they are being reared lovingly and carefully and when they are being handed off like a football because their existence is, on a regular basis, inconvenient to their mothers' chosen mode of living. Whatever else that does, I think I'm safe in saying that does not engender the concept of "home". That engenders the concept of "effective juggling". What you are teaching your children is that love, centrally and implicitly, involves juggling the people you love and finding someone to substitute for you in their lives.


Here, look at the good caretaker (sic) I found for you for today (after an hour of frantic phoning and scraping the bottom of the barrel). See how much I love you?


What I think it does in fact is to generate a sensibility that as long as everyone agrees to believe that "people juggling" is the same as or as good as maternal love and care then "disconnect as lifestyle" is fully sanctioned and begins to proliferate. Result? Divorce is a new societal norm instead of an anecdotal exception. Caring for someone and being there with them or chronically disconnecting from them and making them someone else's problem are made co-equivalent and we are now all living in Alice's Wonderland where up is down, back is forth, white is black and so on and the maintenance of that mythological construct hinges on universal portrayal. As long as we all keep smiling, "people juggling" and "love" are the same just as mothers and fathers are the same and men and women are the same.


Tomorrow: Stretching a point, but I think this qualifies for continuing right into the Sunday Edition





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