Dave Sim's blogandmail #455 (December 10th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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.

_____________________________________________________

Continuing my refutation of Asa Maria Larsson's attempt to refute the first of the Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast.


I don't think that actual wives and actual mothers (who look at your program without Marxist blinders on and see it for the, please forgive my frankness, transparently false, impractical, heartless and wilfully ignorant way to rear children that it self-evidently is) qualify as "women who base their entire identity on being irreplaceable". Personally, I take the side of mothers who see themselves as mothers first and foremost and whose idea of "replaceable" or "irreplaceable" (as you've raised the issue here) centers on…well, death…as the only context in which the former situation would be deemed to be operative.


That is, for actual wives and actual mothers, the fact of their maternity overrides all other concerns. "In what context could I envision my being replaced as the mother of my children?" Death is the only one they could think of. That is, "if I die, someone will have to take over my 24/7 supervisory capacity over my children's welfare" rather than the Marxist-feminist view of "Really, it doesn't matter who fills in for me, for how long or in what context. I'll hand off my kids to anyone in The Village and walk away without giving my kids a second thought. There's nothing special about me. Anyone on my Approved Villager list will be the same for my kids".


ACTUAL mothers have a much higher (and, I dare say, more sensible and fact-based) regard for motherhood than that.


I assume by your saying that children want "happy, contented parents" that what you are indirectly referring to is Marxist-feminist emotional blackmail which is the natural result of maternity that begins with baby-dumping and takes the rearing of offspring by others as a given. That is, if your children make the mistake of disagreeing with your Marxist-feminist ideology, your core belief that a fly-by-night mother who doesn't really care who she foists her kids off on (within certain "Villager" limits) is just as good as a full-time mother, then you will be (most emphatically and demonstrably if my own mother was anything to go by) "not happy and not content" and your children will be held accountable by you and, as a result, will have to suffer the consequences implicit in their being the root cause of your "not happiness" and "not contentment".


Is it possible to have them discuss this with your husband (assuming you still have a husband)? They might lack the sophistication to understand the depth of the implied Marxist feminist threat (being, you know, just youngsters) and, through long experience, I'm sure he'll be able to counsel them in the direction of outright capitulation to you in all particulars as the only viable option.


"Take a look at `home-schooled' children, then look me in the eye and say that all children should stay home with their mothers."


Well, it's certainly a nice try. Changing the subject from full-time supervisory mothers to home schooling, I mean. I don't think we're quite there YET, Asa, but as much as I think there is a lot wanting in home schooling I think inside of this decade it is going to be preferable to the Marxist-feminist brainwashing that your team has replaced our education system with.


You know Marxist feminism didn't start this way. The early suffragettes for the most part didn't share the modern view that being a homemaker was irrelevant or a series of tasks that could be delegated to strangers and near strangers with no appreciable negative effect. The National Post printed two lengthy excerpts from THE PERSONS CASE: THE ORIGINS AND LEGACY OF THE FIGHT FOR LEGAL PERSONHOOD by Robert J. Sharpe and Patricia I. McMahon (University of Toronto Press 2007) about the (ultimately successful) campaign by five women to have women qualify for appointment to the Senate here in Canada (yes, I do read such articles: the longer the title usually the more likely it is going to reveal something about Marxist-feminism that it didn't intend to)


They advocated the legal equality of men and women but they did not seek to obliterate gender roles. The female role was defined by motherhood, childrearing, and ensuring a happy home life…In 1915, when Nellie McClung wrote to advance the cause of suffrage, she did so from the perspective of a maternal feminist explaining "every normal woman desires children." Similarly Henrietta Edwards described motherhood as "God's greatest gift" and saw a mother as "a co-worker with God in a way no man can ever be." Irene Parlby, too, believed that women had a political role to play in securing better conditions for children, better education, and better public health, but that when a woman was deciding whether to "desert her home for politics…one's children should always come first." Parlby also believed that "only a limited number of women have qualities which will prove useful" in politics. Most women, she declared, could and should limit themselves to their domestic duties.


Well, we can see how that turned out. I think it is only sensible to recognize that feminism – a woman competing on equal footing with a man without Marxist-feminist skewing of standards and de-levelling of the playing field and therefore being more necessary to the workforce in a man's job than in being a wife and mother -- is an exceptional circumstance. No woman under any circumstances should be ruled ineligible for any job simply because of her gender so long as she is able to fulfill the tasks involved (that is, standards should not be eroded in order to achieve gender parity). That's only common sense. As a society, we don't want to take the chance of missing out on a Mme. Marie Curie because we have carved in stone that ONLY men can be nuclear scientists. That, too, is only common sense and a hard lesson hard won but now accepted as a universal truth. Even by me. You'll get no argument out of me on that score, you never did and you never will. Everyone should be allowed to compete for any job they are qualified for and the job should go to the best candidate.


But saying that we should guard zealously against any chance of the next Mme. Curie not being given her due is a very different thing from saying that half of all nuclear scientists should be women. That's ludicrous and demonstrably untrue: and -- just looking statistically at the high end of the maths and sciences where women are completely absent even though, thanks to Marxist-feminist "affirmative" action, they far outnumber men in first year university -- is as far from common sense as you can get (but is, in fact, the core reason that Lawrence Summers was hounded from his office as president of Harvard by the Marxist-feminist mob – and all he did was to allude to the self-evident and inescapable fact) .


Make no mistake about it, it is possible to effect such a wholesale inversion and it is a protected free will choice. I will defend to the death the right of all women, everywhere, to abandon their homes (er "homes") and go out and numerically dominate every field, discipline, profession, human enterprise and institution in the world. I will defend to the death their right to eradicate cooking and all domestic enterprises as having anything to do with women and to institute whatever Stalinist subterfuges they deem likely or necessary for them to succeed in eradicating any trace of genuine maternal sensitivity and any and all genuine wifely attributes from all women in their vicinity, from their daughters and their granddaughters and their great grand-daughters in the name of ideological Marxist-feminist party purity. We're pretty much all of the way there already, anyway, so it's no big concession on my part.


What I can't do, and what women can't do and what our courts and legislatures and schools and universities and all the queen's horses and all the queen's men can't do


is to make that a good idea.


It can be imposed by cunning and shunning and vilification and implied threats and is being and has been imposed by exactly those Stalinist methods, but it can't be made workable and, most particularly, it can't be made workable in female frames of reference. If you want all of those things to happen you have to – and whether you admit it or not, you pretty much already have chosen to -- sacrifice happy lifelong marriages, genuine families and genuine homes on that altar and to that ideology. It's either/or. Happy marriages, genuine families and genuine homes work one way. Interchangeable genders, ostensible families and ersatz homes work another way.


If you are one thing, you are not and can never be the other. If you are the other you are not and can never be the one thing. The one mode of thought and being seeks the eradication of the other mode of thought and being. I think the following item from The National Post makes the case eloquently:


"Choice of `Wise Mother' for Korean banknote angers women's groups" (Nov, 6)


Shin Saimdang, whose nickname is `Wise Mother' is known for raising Yi I, a famed 16th-century Confucian scholar and having a deft hand in painting. She will grace the new 50,000-won note when it debuts in early 2009, the Bank of Korea said. But women's groups say her selection bolsters the idea mothers should stay home and devote their lives to their children's education (sic). "Although women nowadays are highly capable and educated, the idea of `wise mother and good wife' holds them down," said Kwon Hee-jung, secretary general of the women's rights group, IF.


Either/or. Either Shin Saimdang is a good idea and women choose that to be the basis of womanhood in our – or, in this case, South Korean -- civilization (with a certain number of feministic exceptions) or Shin Saimdang is a bad idea and needs to be eradicated in the name of the greater Marxist-feminist good (with all women sharing Shin Saimdang's philosophy either capitulating to and adopting Marxist-feminism or being cowed into submission and silence through intimidation, shunning, vilification and implied threats). But, it's the woman collectively and individually who have to choose.


Okay. One Impossible Thing Down, Fourteen More to Go.





___________________________________________________

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

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

Looking for a place to purchase Cerebus phonebooks? You can do so online through Win-Mill Productions -- producers of Following Cerebus. Convenient payment with PayPal:

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

Or ask your local retailer to order them for you through Diamond Comics distributors.