Dave Sim's blogandmail #459 (December 14th, 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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Earlier in her article, Karen Selick notes:


"Firms should be able to question applicants about their intended lifestyles and their ability to withstand the rigours of Bay Street. Do you expect to have children? Who will be looking after them while you're trapped downtown at midnight? Can your health stand the stress without giving you a heart attack or cancer?...


"…Unfortunately questions like these are forbidden, both under the rules of professional conduct and the human rights codes. So the mismatches, the personal discomfort and the waste of money continue."


I'm glad Karen Selick brought that up because it raises what is, for me, a key component of the Marxist-feminist delusion which is the extension of "human rights" to include complete misrepresentation of intent. Women applying for a government job have the "human right" not to have the question of a potential pregnancy and the impact on their job performance by child care raised in their job interview. To do so, according to the Marxist-feminist delusion, violates a woman's "right to privacy".


But they also deem themselves to have the right to apply for a job under false pretences, to apply for a job that they know is going to require them to work 60 to 70 hours a week knowing that they plan to get pregnant in the next couple of weeks and that they will then be entitled to a full year's maternity leave while someone else has to be hired and trained to do that same job which job the substitute person can't actually have (except temporarily). The job is deemed to be the inviolate possession of the person who did it for two weeks and got pregnant and a temporary position for the person who filled it for a year.


Common sense, as a result, would dictate that you hire people who can't get pregnant, that is, men (or women who are past child-bearing age). They can still be unreliable but they aren't going to cost the taxpayer for two training periods and two full-time salaries for a year for one job. But, of course, because we inhabit the Marxist-feminist delusion, just pointing that out is deemed to be misogynistic and sexist when all it really is is simple math and common sense.


The Marxist-feminist delusion option costs roughly twice as much as the common sense second option. The Marxist-feminist delusion option only make sense if you start with the Marxist-feminist delusion "given" that the "necessity" to have half of all jobs filled by women supersedes any other consideration including basic economics and common sense. Paying two people to do one job is viewed as a practical necessity or converting a huge amount of square footage at a place of business into a daycare center and hiring childcare professionals (Asa's "good teachers taking care of them rather than bored, brutish employees") is viewed as a practical necessity or, as Impossible Thing #2 holds, investing tens of thousands of dollars in government funded daycare to create a "fundamental human right" daycare space for the child of a mother who is paying a small fraction of that amount in taxes is deemed to be a practical necessity and not a recipe for budgetary and fiscal disaster.


This delusion is deeply rooted in our society. Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin's original paper presented to the Canadian Bar Association states overtly that law firms still retain


An Edwardian male-dominated model, where the professional was expected to work long hours and give 100% devotion to his career.


As Karen Selick points out


My own assessment of life in a Bay Street firm is very similar to Madame Justice McLachlin's – which is why I have never worked for one. However, unlike the Chief Justice, I'm content to let them toil on in their self-imposed wretchedness, rather than trying to overhaul them so they'll be more to my taste [Karen Selick works for a small Belleville, Ontario law firm]


Selick's position moves in the direction of common sense, but it is still founded on the deeply rooted delusion in our society, originating in Marxist-feminism that there is something fundamentally wrong with working long hours and giving 100% devotion to your career, that what is needed is an overhaul of society so that most if not all of its employment functions on the basis of intentional and structurally implied half-assed effort.


It holds that we need to all be structuring our lives and aspiring to the delusional Marxist-feminist "having it all" – satisfying and fulfilling marriages, satisfying and fulfilling family lives, satisfying and fulfilling jobs, satisfied and fulfilled kids. Selick takes it as a given that the top lawyer in Ontario (whoever that might be and whatever Bay Street firm might employ him) lives in "self-imposed wretchedness". I'm no big fan of the legal profession but I do think the advancement of civilization depends in large part on those individuals who have 100% devotion to their careers. If I went to a heart surgeon I would prefer him to be a 100% devoted heart surgeon and not a part-time or hobbyist heart surgeon.


Of course I infer "100% job performance" quite differently from the Chief Justice and Karen Selick in that I assume that those individuals have some sort of life, probably a marriage and probably parenthood outside of their legal careers. But I also infer that they are more likely to be making case law that will shape the future of our civilization than Karen Selick who has escaped what she deems to be "self-imposed wretchedness" by making her legal career into something between a hobby and a facet of her personality. 25% for her marriage, 25% for her family, 25% for her job, 25% for her kids. To me – and I am, so far as I know, the only individual who has actually moved his thinking far enough outside of the delusional Marxist-feminist construct to see the obvious truth – giving a fraction of your time and attention to that wide a variety of lifestyle choices looks like an across-the-board recipe for intentional mediocrity. Mediocre marriage, mediocre family life, mediocre job performance, mediocre parenting. It seems obvious to me that if the lawyer is giving 100% at his job and what time he can to his marriage and his family and his parenting and his wife and the mother of his children is giving 100% devotion to their marriage, their family and their kids, and what she can to whatever outside job she might hold on a piece-work or freelance basis then everyone is getting much closer to 100% performance. Even if he capitulates to Marxist-feminism and cuts back his time and attention to his profession to 25% and 25% for the kids and his wife ignores the kids and their home 75% of the time by going out and getting a full-time job, you're still getting literally – 50% -- half-assed child rearing.


Back when the father working and mother rearing the children and making the home was the universal norm (or very close to it), children's literacy levels were much higher, there was virtually no child therapy or child psychology to speak of, psychoactive prescription medicines for children were unheard of, marriages didn't usually end in divorce, we didn't even have a term for "child poverty".


I agree with you Asa insofar as I don't think daycare is the issue.


I think the issue is one of where we need, as men and women, to devote the vast majority of their time and energy in order to produce the most smoothly functioning society that provides the greatest good for the greatest number. I don't think where we are or where we've been going since Marxist-feminism hit in 1970 provides that. In fact, I think the evidence points in an entirely different direction, which if we are just courageous enough to face it head-on and choose wisely will make all of the needless complications of daycare and all the other peculiar ramifications of the Marxist-feminist delusion a bad thirty-seven year long dream.


Okay, that's two Impossible Things down, Twelve to go.





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