Women

***Women*** is a "phonebook" collection of the *Cerebus* comic book which covers the second section of the "Mothers & Daughters" storyline (*Cerebus No. 163* through *Cerebus No. 174*). It was first published in April, 1994 by Aardvark-Vanaheim in an edition of 3,500 copies.

## Dave Sim on *Women*

* 03/05: Q1a: Cerebus dreams and speaks with the Regency Elf who states that the "real" Regency elf has dark hair, pointy ears, and can't leave the Regency Hotel. Is it safe to assume, therefore, that our Elf is a "fake" Elf, and the duplicate Elf of Flight was a fake "fake" Elf?

DAVE: It would depend, I guess on what you think of elves in general. My own supposition, to quote Neil Gaiman, is "there's something there." Just as the Church in the upper city is ancient, so is the Regency Hotel at the upper city's opposite end. What was there before and to what extent does whatever-is still inhabit the grounds and the building? At the same time it is interesting that, while elves-little people-are a universal construct, I can't remember hearing of elves haunting a building in the way that ghosts are said to do. The omission seems significant to me-a universal construct and no record of any of them ever appearing indoors. If they really are just quirks in people's minds, presumably they would be seen everywhere that people and their minds are found. Not only are they never seen indoors, but when was the last time you heard of an "elf sighting"? I tried to convey the impression that the Regency Elf was more on the order of something like the Loch Ness Monster-a specific beastie in a specific locale that is, if not widely accepted, at least more widely accepted than generally mythologized creatures. I would suspect that more people believe in the Loch Ness Monster than believe in the existence-generally-of mythological creatures.
Of course it also needs to be born in mind that this was a dream and that dreams in a conventional sense usually don't mean much of anything. They're just sensible enough to be interesting but not sensible enough to be the basis of decision-making.

* Q1b: Additionally, the Elf says that she was created as a result of Cerebus and Po's FIRST Mind Game, even though it was Cerebus' second - can this contradiction be reconciled by seeing it as the first, from the Elf's own perspective?

DAVE: Well, this becomes a core problem when you move into the realm of fantastic constructs. You're trying to apply conventional forms of reason to what an elf is telling you. But, what the heck, I'm game. Who is to say that the fake elf wasn't created as a result of the first Mind Game which took place a period of time before Cerebus arrived at the Regency? Either she was extruded from Cerebus and inhabited him and only needed a context in which to manifest-which she found in the Ambassador Suite-or she manifested up ahead in Cerebus' life and was basically just waiting for him to "catch up" to the point in his life where-and when-she has incarnated/will incarnate.
* Q1c: Was the real Regency Elf somehow involved in this procreation?

DAVE: Well, that's kind of funny in retrospect in a YHWHist context. As it says in the Koran about joining gods with God-"those who do not create but were themselves created"-it's a characteristic vice of such beings to see themselves as both pre-existent and procreative and, of course, like YHWH the Regency Elf is a BRGWST (as long as we're trafficking in imaginary constructs, let's pretend that outsiders are actually taking an interest here and explain that that stands for "Big Round Glowing White Strange Thing"). I would say there are characteristics inherent in the condition, one of which is to have pre-existence as a core belief (YHWH creating the plants before they were in the ground is a good example) and the other is to have an obsessive interest in procreation. I think it was Lawrence Summers, the President of Harvard who pointed out that when -in good politically correct interchangeably gendered fashion- he gave his infant daughter trucks to play with, she instantly christened them "daddy truck" and "baby truck", it's a good example of that. Everything is procreative on the female side of the ledger. God has a Mother God and a Father God, that kind of thing.
It seems to me to be a core self-preservation evasiveness that becomes genetic nature. The only alternative being to see yourself as just so much vibrating pixy dust, no sooner manifested than, poof, you're gone-which science would seem to indicate is far closer to the truth.
(having invoked the name of the redoubtable Mr. Summers, I thought that I would mention that his vilification and ostracism seemed to bring about a strange "Dave Sim Reconsidered" thread popping up in the comic-book field which vanished as quickly as it arrived-I suspect because of the cautionary note implied: if you dare to even raise the possibility that the two genders are not interchangeable, there is no "going back" no matter how many times you apologize or how abjectly you grovel before the feminists or how many millions of dollars you promise in funding for feminist hallucinations which I begin to suspect was the whole point of the extremist feminist reaction-feminist terrorism, to call a spade a spade , a kind of intellectual Kristalnacht by which totalitarian feminists ensured that the subject could no more be discussed than a Zionist newspaper could be successfully launched in Berlin in 1937. It's a calculated totalitarian risk, of course, which presumes that the implicit consequences of running afoul of the Marxist-feminist party line supersedes the urge towards free and open discussion, intellectual curiosity and academic honesty. If you don't want to spend the rest of your life as an outcast-or worse-you WILL believe that the sun goes around the earth, Mr. Galileo)
"Our Elf" (as you so charmingly and possessively express it) I would assume was a creation of that over-arching nature which inhabited and possessed Cerebus all of his life, an extrusion prompted by the Mind Game as, it seems to me, YHWH and all YHWHs in general can be said to be the products of Mind Games. They don't exist but paradoxically they do, however temporarily.
* Q1d: Also, was your choice to reveal all this information in a dream purposeful ambiguity with respect to a definitive statement of the Elf's true origins? (i167)

DAVE: I wouldn't describe it so much as purposeful ambiguity as an expression of something I was experiencing in my life for only the second or third time at the time which was an over-arching reality that would not acknowledge my existence because I didn't have a "core woman" in my life. Once you have turned over the determination of the nature of reality to the BRGWST's as everyone besides me has chosen to do, this becomes a brick wall, a deal breaker. If you won't get married again, if you won't have a daughter either by birth or adoption, if you won't have a female confidant to whom you pour out your heart and soul, if you won't subjugate your life to your mother's whims, then you are considered "outside the camp"-unclean. At its most histrionic extremes, the assumption is that Dave Sim will have to kill himself because he doesn't have a woman in his life. It's what happens when reality dislocates so completely that the idea of a man living- happily-without a woman dominating his life is viewed as inconceivable and tragic.
In the context of the story, the Ascension was imminent and Cerebus was going to participate unless he could be deflected and he was, therefore, living in just such a context as the one described above. Essentially that "other half of reality" kept trying to hook him up with someone, anyone, as long as they were female. The Regency Elf was manufacturing a context in which Cerebus was her daddy. It's a level of encroachment I have certainly experienced in my own life and which I have come to see as that opposing force recognizing that unless EVERY man in the world is under the domination of a woman or the domination of a consortium of women, one of those men is apt to see through the illusory construct and persist in identifying it as such. Which, of course, I'm doing. No wife to be suddenly and dramatically taken ill or daughter to suddenly find herself at death's door because I won't give up on identifying what I see as reality. No female leverage whatsoever. In the staccato fashion of the storyline at that point, I was trying to illustrate how desperate that opposing force was becoming, something I have again experienced in my life (Well, okay, who did he USE to go out with? Have her contact him and see if she can't get under his skin and deflect him. It's a long shot, but it's all we've got. There has to be some woman somewhere that we can find and use to beat him over the head with. There HAS to be.) It was really one of the defining characteristics of Suenteus Po and Cerebus and one of the few traits they had in common: no dominating female presence in either of their lives. Jaka was just too far away and Jaka was the only one who would "work" on Cerebus to the extent that that opposing force required. Had there been a means of getting Jaka to the scene of the crime, Cerebus would never have participated in the Ascension. He'd be off somewhere happily sipping herbal tea and munching on cucumber finger sandwiches.
* Q2a: We read a letter written by an elderly woman who laments the good old days when men ran the world and women tended the home and raised the children. Their job was to provide comfort for the man so he could go back out into the world to work and rule it. This was life in balance, a hard life, but The Way Things Should Be. It's a much better life than the one where women join men outside the home, strangers raise children, and magic is gone (and elderly women who lament the passing of such days are put to death). These sentiments seem to echo thoughts you have expressed several times over the subsequent ten years (and as recently as your detailed response in a late Latter Days letter column to a colleague's wife are The 10 Impossible Things). Does it sum up what you truly believe about how society should be constructed and what is wrong with it today?

DAVE: It's really not in my nature to consider how society should be constructed. That would be conferring on myself an overview that I don't think anyone holds sufficiently to warrant listening to them in the absolutist sense. Society will be as society will be based on the cumulative decision-making of its participants and (more universally) its abstainers. Everyone has free will. Everyone gets to decide for themselves. I think if you look at the way that society was prior to 1970, it worked a lot better. For one thing, more women got married and stayed married which I think is important to women and important in ways which I think women underrate at their own peril. But, it is their peril. My own view is that the vast majority of women want to be wives and mothers and a minority of women want to be frontier neurosurgeons and are willing to trade marital happiness for career success. I think the evidence supports that view. But women are also intrinsically dissatisfied, in my experience. Becoming Stepford Wives was a conscious decision and "living the female dream". Each princess has her own castle and her own little plot of grass where she rules all that she surveys. That wears thin because it there's no social aspect to it. So the dissatisfied princess who badgered her poor husband to buy an overpriced gargantuan house in the suburbs decides, with Betty Friedan's help, that it was a massive patriarchal conspiracy to oppress her natural blah blah blah. Personally what I think worked best for years is proximity and reliability. If, from the time you're married, you can walk home and have lunch everyday with your wife and kids and have dinner everyday with your wife and kids, that marriage is going to "take". If you see your wife every third day and the rest of the time you order pizza, I don't think that marriage is going to "take". It is the fact of the princess being alone in the castle for fifteen hours while waiting for the prince to come home-forty-five minutes both ways because the bigger the castle the further it is from any viable workplace-and the gnawing belief that the prince is having a lot more fun having lunch with five other people and talking to people all day: that's what I think undermined marriage. Men are creatures of habit. Marriage is a habit they can get used to either happily or resignedly. But I think the core thought has to be "This is my family, these are the people I am responsible for," and a reciprocal response on the other half of the deal. "This is what I'm working for" to have breakfast, lunch and dinner every day with these people-to make sure I'm here and to make sure they're here and to make sure that they're cared for. In today's "gay roommate" construct, women are insulted by the idea of being cared for. Which, as far as I'm concerned, eliminates 90% of the masculine motive in participating in marriage. If you don't need to be cared for, what am I doing here? If none of you need to be cared for, why would any of us care? You're all big, strong, independent women-let's just do the horizontal mamba a bunch of times and then move on. When Family Law has been structured the way it has, I think it becomes ridiculous. What you are saying to men is: "You have to please ME or I'm walking away with half of your stuff. With you or without you, it's your call. Decide I'm right about everything or I'll see you in court." I couldn't picture being that desperate for female companionship and I think it's really unfortunate that so many men seem to be that desperate. No one should have that level of control over another person and their worldly goods and their future.
* Q2b: And how, if at all, did your religious awakening affect this view? (i169)

DAVE: Mm, no, not really. I mean, in the sense that I was observing a Sabbath and reading Scripture and fasting and then going down to visit Susan and spending Sunday lying around drinking white wine and reading the Sunday Boston Globe and the New York Times. The contrast was pretty self-evident and in a long-distance relationship it really comes down to "God or the girlfriend." As it does to this day. I certainly don't know any women or know OF any women who would be remotely tolerant of someone making five specific daily prayer times THE priority in his life. I think in our dislocated society, it's a given that the girlfriend comes first and God will just have to find a spot wherever He can, which is, of course, repellent to me. I try to keep the occasions when I miss a prayer or I'm more than forty minutes late for a prayer to an absolute minimum. I miss prayer times when I go to visit Chet in Toronto, so I tend to keep the visits to one a month or one every three weeks. But, I can't say that the encroachment from the other side was something that I associated with my faith in God. I think it was a calculated risk that women took, knowing that they were making marriage repellent to men so they've expanded all of the definitions of marriage. You live with someone for a year, you're married. You live with someone for a year and they have a kid, even if the kid isn't yours, you're responsible for him or her. You make more money after a break-up, you owe her on the basis of your improved financial status not on the basis of how you were doing when you were with her. The more repellent they make marriage, the more they have to encroach to keep the revenues flowing to women who are only equipped to be wives and mothers and haven't the aptitude to provide for themselves. The more they encroach, the more repellent they make marriage, so the more they have to encroach and so on. It's getting really severe and we're just getting started down that garden path.
* Q3a: The Judge, still resembling Swoon, points out that he was wrong and he's sorry. Wrong about what? About Cerebus' fate perhaps?

DAVE: No, he was right about that. Cerebus died alone, unmourned and unloved.
* Q3b: Or about his creation tale in which the male void destroys the innocent female light? (i171)

DAVE: Well, obviously that would be my view. Reality is not especially happy but it has to be dealt with on its own terms and seeing femaleness as inherently consisting of the suffering of innocent victims-totalitarian feminism is founded upon the, to me, spurious idea that women are owed all of the monetary war reparations in the battle of the sexes-I think is fatuous and unsupported by the facts and all it does is to generate greater and greater levels of ludicrous misapprehension. i.e. how are you going to portray women as victims in academe when the classes are all 75% women and 25% men? I know a lot more guys who are comfortable in their own skins than I know women who are comfortable in theirs and I think being comfortable in your own skin is a hallmark of being on the right track. It seems to me that women have made their choices and pushed the boundaries where they wanted them pushed and encroached where they thought it was advantageous to them to encroach and I still see mostly guys who are comfortable in their own skins and women who are spending a lot of time freaking out more than they ever have before.
* Q5: When Po appears in public, he is immediately recognized by the Iestans. Why? Does he look like he did in earlier incarnations (the only previous hint to his presence was someone saying they saw the pope in town, but he was now over 6 feet tall)? What do we really know about the lifetime deeds of THIS Po (other than his ability to play chess, and traverse the spheres)? How long had he been living in obscurity? (i174)

DAVE: That was something that I couldn't establish in the context of the story because it was something universally accepted by everyone in the context. Picture if you saw Santa Claus outside the Vatican. "It's Santa Claus". Now how did you know that? Uh, he was a big fat guy with a red suit with white trim and a white beard and mustache. Does Santa Claus always look like that? This guy is wearing a red suit and has all those other qualities but you wouldn't describe him as Santa Claus. The question would just be irritating. Everyone knows what Santa Claus looks like. Don't talk stupid. He was even more archetypal than that. "Look It's Jesus."
Well, no one has ever seen Jesus and even the Shroud of Turin would match a lot of folks from Charles Manson to John Lennon and back again. How do you know that that's Jesus? A lot of it would be context. That's Cerebus, that's Astoria, that's Cirin-you'd be watching for another archetypal figure. The tallness? The white hair flopped over? The gray fur? It gets into interesting areas in the same way that the accepted visualization of Jesus gets into interesting areas. They're all different but they're all the same. It's very rare to see a clean-shaven Jesus or a short-haired Jesus. The Shroud of Turin aside, why is that? Occasionally one of the secular magazines will run a feature on all of the depictions of Jesus. Yep, that's Jesus. It's kind of crazy if you think about it. Here's a guy no one has ever seen and all of the depictions of him differ and yet everyone knows exactly what he looks like and everyone just takes that reality very much for granted.