Female thinking systems.

Females Thinking Systems.

http://www.theabsolute.net/misogyny/tangents.html

Part # 1

TANGENT

BY DAVE SIM

if the ensuing seems unduly harsh to male and female feminists (which it will since
everything besides complete and abject surrender to feminism strikes male and
female feminists as unduly harsh) there is, perhaps, some small feminist consolation to
be had from the fact that, with the completion of “Tangent,” I intend to “have done” with
the subject of gender and gender “issues” entirely: in much the same way that The
Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing constituted my “hail and farewell” to the subject of
self-publishing. As with the Guide, “Tangent” represents a summing up of my
conclusions about a subject which has occupied my attentions for a period of time and
which I have resolved for myself in my own way and to my own satisfaction (and which I
am now pleased to put behind me so that I can pursue other areas of interest to me).

PRE-TANGENT

Carol West resigned her position as Aardvark-Vanaheim's Administrative Assistant (a
very fancy feminist name for a very plain secretarial position: mea culpa, mea maxima
culpa, and I don't intend that ironically) after “inputting” a first draught of “Tangent” parts
one and two. Her resignation, far from being either a surprise or a disheartening event,
to me, seemed just the latest example of feminism undermining its own 30-year long
campaign to be taken seriously as a societal movement by (literally) getting offended
and leaving in a huff whenever it encounters any viewpoint which does not represent
absolute capitulation to its own. At some point – whether the intervening period is
measured in days, weeks, months, years, decades or centuries – At Some Point,
feminism will, I am sure, at long last be forced to face a number of hard questions
about its total lack of intellectual foundation. Carol West can get offended and leave,
but the hard questions remain. My feminist readers can roll their eyes theatrically, but
the hard questions remain. They can exhale noisily, but the hard questions remain.
They can snort derisively, but the hard questions remain. They can, collectively, turn
their backs, but the hard questions remain.

In the arena of intellectual opinion, when it comes to these hard questions, asking Dave
Sim, “Why do you hate women so much?” is irrelevant when my subject is feminism's
lack of sound intellectual footing. It is irrelevant whether I hate women. It is irrelevant
whether I love women. It is irrelevant whether I consider women in any emotional
context whatsoever, just as – when my question is directed toward feminism's lack of
sound intellectual footing – it is irrelevant whether I hate ice cream, whether I love ice
cream or whether I consider ice cream in any emotional context whatsoever. All That Is
Relevant, when the issue at hand is my contention that feminism lacks a sound
intellectual foundation, All That Is Relevant, Germane and/or Pertinent is the intellectual
foundation – or lack of same – upon which feminism rests.

Walking away is not relevant. Rolling one's eyes theatrically is not relevant. Snorting
derisively is not relevant.

It seems to me that after thirty years, all thinking people must be coming to realize that
these reactions – far from constituting a defence of feminism – lead, inescapably, in
the contrary direction: lead, inescapably, to the fact that feminism has no sound
intellectual foundation: that, in fact, feminism has only its own rapidly dwindling
momentum and the sheer gall, chutzpah, nerve and inherent unreasoning contrariness
of its perpetrators as its foundation, as its sole line of defence, as its single raison
d'etre and as its solitary rationale.

Anyway, this is how I began:

TANGENT I

Having dispensed with the Hemingways (how many of you still think that Mary
Hemingway – despite having murdered her husband – is a “strong, independent
woman and a good role model for wives everywhere”? Show of hands. Almost all of
you. Big surprise.) I now prepare for the next complete waste of my own time and
energy: my promised “last word on gender” entitled “Tangent”.

* * * * * * *

All males (as opposed to men) sound like social workers and/or voodoo profession
wannabe's, so it came as no surprise – when the fellow turned to me and asked
“Where do you think your ideas about women come from?” – and the saccharine
undertone was there (“When we share our experiences with others, it helps us to get in
touch with our innermost feelings and emotions”).

“Where do you think your ideas about women come from?”

Two things:

Foremost, they originate from the research that I did for Mothers & Daughters. Not the
voluminous reading of everything from nurse novels to voodoo pop (My Mother, My
Self; Our Bodies, Our Selves; Our House-pets, Our, Selves, et al) to Women's Studies
[“ . . . and after all correlatives of the societal norm have been maximized through the
intuitive, the nurturing and spiritually nutritive, through the hard-won maturation of our
collective emotive a priori dispensation-construct: regarded (herein) not as the mere
imitative imposition of the aforementioned “will to power” (the now universally
discredited patriarchal model) but a new model founded upon, to reiterate, the intuitive,
the nurturing and spiritually nutritive, pursuant to, but not inextricably bound within the ad
hoc antecedent culture and/or cultural imperative blah blah blah”]. All I got out of that
research, I already knew: a) women want to be raped by rich, muscular, handsome
doctors b) women are completely self-absorbed and, thus, see themselves in
everything around them and c) feminism is no different from communism in that all of its
literature is founded upon convoluted syntax, bafflegab and academic jargon which
paints a false (albeit attractive) picture of an unattainable utopia which can be achieved
– easily! – by everyone in the world simply and simultaneously (in both feminist and
communist literature the “crux point” is invariable) changing their basic nature
overnight. Acknowledging – (grudgingly) the small likelihood of so sweeping a societal
change coming about on its own, “a rigorous and thorough program of (communist and
feminist literature share an admiration for the euphemism) re-education may be called
for.” That is, all “non-comrades, non-fellow travellers” must be subjected to unrelenting
political indoctrination, sloganeering and brainwashing (“A woman's right to choose! A
woman's right to choose!”).

(I sense that my situation with feminism is comparable to that of pre-1989 writers faced
with the task of “debunking” communism: how extensive, lengthy and intricate an
explanation can one pursue in explaining that two-plus-two do not equal five, but in fact,
equal four without – even in one's own view – treading well within the lunatic borders of
the excruciatingly self-evident? I suspect that feminism, like communism, must be
allowed to “strut and fret its hour upon the stage,” “playing out” its manifold absurdities
until even the most ardent and most willfully ignorant “true believer” comes to realize –
as has happened with communism – that “there is no there, there.”)

No. The research which most contributed to my “ideas about women” was the series of
informal interviews I conducted with mothers and daughters – with mothers about their
daughters, with daughters about their mothers, with daughters about their daughters,
with mothers about their mothers. It was really the first time in my adult life that I spoke
to women who I found physically unattractive and the first time I spoke to women with
any motive besides getting them into bed. In the case of the attractive women that I
interviewed, it was a guarantee that I was not going to get them into bed – “mothers
and daughters,” as subject, existing at the opposite end of the conversational spectrum
from those topics which lead to sex – and (knowing that) for the first time in my adult life
the intellectual, reasoning, “writerly” part of my mind was engaged when talking to
women.

For the first while, I couldn't figure out what was wrong.

I'm usually a “quick study” when it comes to a given subject – the “high altitude
mapping” as Alan Moore called it in our “Dialogue: From Hell” a few years back. It's
really what writing is made up of. Ask the hard questions, narrow the list of possibilities
and work with the resulting template. As it turns out, nothing in the feminist psyche
conforms to this model. All women are feminists and all feminist evidence is anecdotal.
Ask them a question and they will tell you a little story. Ask them a question to clarify
what you infer is the point of the story and they will tell you another story. When they do
attempt to draw a conclusion or a larger inference from an anecdote they will often ask,
“Does that make any sense?” And the answer, of course is (almost invariably) no, it
doesn't make any sense. And since I wasn't trying to get any of them into bed, I would
say so (if you're trying to get them into bed, you always say “yes, that makes perfect
sense” or manufacture some sensible interpretation that has nothing to do with what
they said). Telling them that they don't make sense, I found, is like telling them that not
only do they not win the trip to Hawaii, they don't even get the Samsonite luggage. They
become forlorn and uncommunicative. That was when I realized that it was impossible
to engage them on an intellectual, reasoning, “writerly” level – that is, in a purely matter-
of-fact fashion. I had to act, had to portray myself as being happy, sympathetic,
interested and cheerful in order to maintain a level of . . .

. . . I don't know what you would call it. It wasn't communication in any meaningful sense
of the term as I understand it. It was a kind of “emotional badminton.” I acted happy,
sympathetic, interested and cheerful and then it was her turn to act happy, sympathetic,
interested and cheerful and then it was my turn, etc. She might accidentally say
something interesting where I could, with sincerity, say that I found what she had just
said interesting. This temporarily escalated the level of her cheerfulness but, alas, that
is all that it did: whatever was being said ranking a very distant second to maintaining
and escalating the level of cheerfulness. A very, very distant second. I realized that this
is where the “henhouse cacophony” originates. If “communication” within a group of
women is working properly (as women see “working properly”) everyone should be
talking faster and faster and faster and in a higher and higher musical range – either
portraying themselves or being (the two states being deemed interchangeable in the
female world) cheerful, more cheerful, “cheerfulest” – until, maximum cheerfulness
having been achieved, a glass breaks or something.

That was when I realized that women are emotion-based beings. “Once a thing is seen,
it can't be unseen.” I gave a couple of more tries at relationships after that (a year-and-
a-half and three-and-a-half years respectively) but it was really like solving a “brain
teaser” after someone has given you the answer. You know – one of those puzzles
where you are supposed to “make three triangles by connecting the dots using only
seven lines” (or whatever). It can drive you insane for a month, but if you look in the
back of the book, or if someone shows you how it's solved or you figure it out on your
own, there is little entertainment value to be had in endlessly drawing those same
seven lines to make those same three triangles. Likewise, there is little in the way of
intellectual value to be derived from revisiting – either mentally or “in person” the simple
fact (once discovered), that women are emotion-based beings and that (consequently)
any female-centred or female-originated political movement – more precisely,
“political” “movement” – will lack sound intellectual footing. Hence, my billing of
“Tangent” as “my last word on gender.”

Women are emotion-based beings.

One of the spillovers from Mothers & Daughters into Rick's Story was Viktor Davis
telling Rick, “Just be happy every waking minute of your life and you've got her for as
long as you want her.” Which was really a perverse way for Viktor Davis to put it. It's
valid advice, but the “every minute of your life” was unnecessarily arduous (which Viktor
knew but, in his willfully cruel way, thought he would add as a little “going away” present
for Rick). It could be more appropriately phrased as: “If things aren't going right, just act
cheerful and say things in a musical tone of voice and everything will be fine.” Which
they will, but, in my own experience, I found that that was no way to live. But even as I
found that that was no way to live, I recognized there was no other way to live in the
context. With an emotion-based being, your only choices are to narcotize her with a
steady stream of cheerful, musical expression or manufacture a chaotic mixture of
emotional portrayals to “wake her up” (“awake” being a purely relative term, of course,
in referring to emotion-based beings). You can try being sensible and reasonable but
all you're going to get back is an emotion-based portrayal of sense and reason having
nothing to do with sense and reason. An emotion-based being just attempts to reflect
and/or portray what little emotion she can discern in sense and reason (“sombre,”
“serious,” “earnest,” “non-musical”) and attaches the portrayal to an arbitrary stream of
musical vocalizations having nothing to do with the subject at hand. This invariably
provokes extreme impatience in the non-emotion-based being, to whose impatient
expressions the emotion-based being will invariably respond: “Why are you getting so
angry?” Impatience is not a happy emotion, but an identifiable one for an emotion-
based being: “I was singing your sombre, serious, earnest, non-musical song with you
and now you're angry. Why don't you just sing a cheerful song instead so we can both
be happy?” To the emotion-based being, this makes perfect sense.

(All lengthy and thorough explanations being digressional, at this point the fellow
asked, “Is this like that book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus?” To his
credit, he hadn't actually read the book. Neither have I. “There's always a danger with
those things,” I said. “I was in a bookstore and I saw the cover of the sequel, Men Are
From Mars, Women Are From Venus, Children Are From Heaven.” The fellow nodded
readily. However, as there were a number of women eavesdropping in the vicinity, I
thought it worth adding for their benefit, “If a man lowers himself to a woman's level of
fairy-tale metaphor – I mean, self-evidently men are not from Mars and women are not
from Venus – women will invariably drag the discussion over into something
comparable to Children are From Heaven smiling and chuckling and feeling really
good about themselves.” “Children are From Heaven. Now we're really getting
somewhere.” The fellow nodded impatiently.)

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