Dave Sim's blogandmail #457 (December 12th, 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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Debating daycare with Asa Maria Larsson, Feminist and CEREBUS Fan. I clipped the following article from the National Post a while back.


"Baby Pays If Leave Too Brief: Study" Sorry, I haven't got a date on this one.


Dr. Rebecca Sherlock (I couldn't make that up) a neonatology specialist at the BC Children's and Women's Health Centre at the University of British Columbia found in her study recently published in Early Human Development:


The less time a new mother stays off the job, the more likely her child's motor and social development will be impaired…The analysis of federal survey data underlines the importance of government-funded maternity leaves but does not mean mothers should avoid work outside the home.


Sorry to interrupt. It doesn't, actually, "underline the importance of government-funded maternity leaves", what it indicates is the impossibility of government-funded maternity leaves: there just isn't enough money – even in oil-rich and overtaxed Alberta and Sad Sack overtaxed Ontario -- to pay for the length of maternity leave indicated as being necessary by the study. When you live in a Marxist country like Canada, Asa, you learn to read these things pretty closely because even the most conservative reporters – having long ago capitulated to Marxist-feminism – learn to skew their articles in Impossible Thing directions. Here let me show you what I mean:


"The results could be used from a public health or policy perspective to say, `We need to fund women to stay at home longer with their kids,'" [Dr. Rebecca Sherlock] said. "I hope that what wouldn't be drawn from my conclusions is that all women should just drop their jobs and stay home…When I found what I found, I thought, `Oh, God, I hope this isn't used by some ultra-conservative politician."


See what I mean about how I couldn't make any of this up? Her concern isn't for the health of the babies and the delusional Marxist-feminist belief construct jeopardizing the health of those babies, what she's concerned about is that an ultra-conservative politician might take note of her findings and (as us heartless ultra-conservatives are wont to do) use it to set policy based on factual data rather than Marxist-feminist delusions: to institute pediatric policy based on the health of babies rather than the delusional wishful thinking of their Marxist-feminist mothers. I know, we're absolute fiends that way.


Wait a minute it gets better:


The less time the mother spent off work, the more likely the child would have a developmental impairment – meaning their motor or social skills were clearly below where they should be at that age. The chance of impairment dropped by 3% with each extra month of leave. There was no link to development impairments for mothers who took at least 24 months off, the study found.


I could have told them that. As it says in the Koran a child is not weaned until he (or she) is two years old. God invented babies, so He should know, right? So the facts are there: early childhood development is not a "baby dumping" thing. It requires the full-time attentions of the mother for two years. Pretty straightforward, right? Not in Marxist Canada it isn't:


Dr. Sherlock had just had two children or her own, took relatively little time off work afterward and expected research to confirm that the length of maternity leave has no bearing on childhood development.


She said she was so surprised by the findings that she rechecked the statistical analysis several times to be sure the results were sound.


The study's conclusions would seem to fit, however, with most of what is known about the importance of early childhood development, and the role of parents in stimulating and nurturing children, said Dr. Fraser Mustard (no, I didn't make that one up, either) one of Canada's leading experts in the field. In fact, as a consultant to the South Australia state government, he is urging the jurisdiction to provide paid parental leave of 18 months – six months longer than in Canada – and allow one parent to take a day off a week until their child reaches age three.


See, there's Marxist-feminist logic and reason at its finest. If the statistics show that the only healthy way for a baby to grow up is to have full-time attention for two years, well, right away you know that what you need to do is change the rules so mothers can have a year and a half off (up from whatever it is now). I left my pocket calculator in my other pants, but just doing a little ciphering in my head, I think you still come up six months short. A full year short in Canada. I mean, even leaving aside what it's going to cost the Australian and Canadian tax payers to pay a mother's salary for a year and a half and a year respectively for no actual work., I think we are definitely in Houston? We have a problem territory here. Dr. Sherlock shouldn't have worried that my gender would dare to puncture her delusions, though, even with the health of babies at stake:


"Parents are the best input," said Dr. Mustard, founder of the Council for Early Childhood Development. "If you understand the biology of brain development, yes, parental leave makes sense."


"No," replied Dave Sim of the Anti-Baby Dumping Coalition. "What it means is that full-time parenting for two years makes sense. Or parental leave for two years if you want to stick the taxpayers with the bill. Anything less than two years and what you are doing is ignoring the facts because they are at odds with your delusional `thinking'" The next part I could have called an audible on the field:


[Dr. Mustard] said it is still important, though, that women have the opportunity to pursue careers if they want, both for their sakes and that of society.


And if the motor and social skills of children have to suffer AND if the taxpayers have to fork over eighteen months worth of an already inflated government salary for no work in order to minimize but not alleviate that condition, well, as your team will hasten to assure us that's a small price to be paid for baby-dumping mothers to maintain their high self-esteem.


Dr. Sherlock said she believes it is important that women have a choice to work or not, freedom that will affect their happiness in the family environment.


Happier mother, unhealthier baby. Make sense to me.


She laments, though, that she could afford only THREE (emphasis mine) months of maternity leave with her first child, while training as a paediatrician, and two months with her second while undergoing sub-specialty training in neonatology.


"In pediatrics…we're here to help families and children, and yet I took three months off for my own," she said. "It's a bit ironic."


It's certainly a bit something, Dr. Sherlock. "Ironic" isn't the word that I'm looking for, I don't think. But it's certainly a bit something.


Tomorrow: Karen Selick (who studied economics before she studied law, and commends it to her legal colleagues)





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