Well, I finished rereading Sinfest, right up to this day. What do I have to say? Well, I don't necessarily take back the concept that the comic is valuable public record. I would still rather read the archive than look at a comparable amount of NYT, but that's just me. The worst comics are better than any news.
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Sure, Sinfest has always had problems, famously so. For a while it seemed the author, Tatsuya Ishida, was trying to fix them. In fact, something else was happening, something I will see if I can explain and address in this post, endeavoring to be exhaustive; hence this post will be triggering if you've been here before. Also long.
Today we cover a lot of ground. I shall endeavor to marry as much precision to as much economy as I am able, but we will be here awhile, and I will be forced to ask every reader to meet me halfway as I race by massive points, each of which can and have generated enough debate to fill libraries.
Hopefully I shall break no glass I have used to build my own house, and hopefully I can admit it when I have.
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Tatsuya Ishida, author of Sinfest, has clearly and in no uncertain terms embraced a system of thought which, at best, takes the position that trans people are victims of a post-modern deception. This is not to say that I think this is possible. According to this system, which brands itself as Radical Feminism, trans people do not exist, for to claim transness is to claim a relativistic position in a purely literal, organic context which is not reinterpretable. I don't think such contexts are legitimate.
According to the "radical" feminism promoted in Sinfest, the trans position is untenable no matter the form: transness as a corrosive meme implanted by bad actors, transness as pathology (interrelated with the memetic argument: the virality of it), transness as a political tool (admittedly, transness is as problematized, reduced, distorted, and manipulated as anything else which enters the political sphere and the news cycle; it is yet another way in which it proves it is as natural a human phenomenon as any other), and in total the possibility of any authentic experience of gender apart from sex, apart from or in contest with essential masculinity and maleness and essential femininity and femaleness. In order to be a feminist, in this school of thinking, one must destroy the roles of gender while enforcing sex as cause and gender as effect. The reproductive genital becomes the lone determinant, the fulcrum of sex and gender. One can do and be what one wishes, may fill any role, as long as one is a woman or a man.
It is, indeed, fully opposed to itself.
At worst, and as the logical consequence of the train of thought I have outlined above, radfems consider trans people a subhuman criminal class of only rapists who groom children through propaganda both to swell their ranks and satisfy their appetites, and seek political power for the same reasons, based on a selective sample of anecdotes involving a tiny minority of a tiny minority, exactly as a white man might make the error of considering every black man in America an uncivilizable ape that wants to rape his wife and help Jews take over the country. Of course, people are perfectly capable of occupying both these stances at once, or one and not the other, and/or a whole array of equally unhealthy and always contradictory impossibilities, and not think themselves violently deluded.
I take exception to these stances, personally. All these sick, bloody-minded stances, indeed delusions, which are all one delusion, really--exchange the value of any number of variables, put the figures in any number of contexts, but the simple mathematics of this fundamental equation stays the same:
"X equals I decide the truth and what is fair, and if you, Y, disagree with me, I can say and do whatever it takes to dominate your thinking, control your behavior, fuck your life up, even kill you if I can; socially through ostracizing or by taking your actual life myself, or through an empowered proxy. If you would kill and bury yourself after admitting I'm right, and living a profitable amount of time under what I have decided is fair, that would be best."
Exception taken also to all imaginable sophistry generated in the support and defense of this position, including any that overlap with my own ideas. Unequivocally. With some heat. Heat tripled when X is already incorporated into the safe end of dominant social paradigms and Y isn't, and is outnumbered by X one hundred to one.
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Therefore I must take exception to Sinfest, a comic not even brave enough to come out and say "I hate trans people, fuckem, that's just me. That's what being a radical feminist means. Lesbians are great (for me), and gays are fine (I am told). Men are men, women are women, only men have penises and only women have vaginas, and every other expression of gender is some fake psyop shit made up by pedophiles to fuck with children. Amirite ladies? Am I a good guy or what? Please don't yell at me, please tell each other in your secret woman councils that I am good and not evil, despite my blatantly misogynistic past. I like white people, I am not a screaming monkey, I am a good and fully westernized Jesus boy who hates the devil. Will a WASP woman finally fuck me or what?"
Well, it is exactly what Tatsuya Ishida has ultimately ended up saying, but it's not what he's been pretending to say.
No. He has to make a coward's comic about how a only a pomo* zombie would believe that a hot dog is a taco, but too gutless to come out and say that trans people don't exist. It's a whole archive of shit like that. Brave enough to put a sign reading "TRANSPHOBE" in the hand of someone in a crowd of woke zombies (and like, I'm with you! go to hell, woke zombies) trashing and threatening a lone girl, but too gutless to come out and say shit like "cisgender" and "transphobe" is a slur on the level of the n-word. Brave enough to play with and appropriate drag culture, but too cowardly to give a single, barely-utilized gay character a single trait to distinguish him from a laundry list of stereotypes. Brave enough to express regret over drawing a joke like the Blaxploitation Funk Bible, but too much of a wuss to have a black character generate an original line of dialogue or a recurring role beyond bolstering the author's progressive credentials--four strips about police killing unarmed black men, token black man storyline, infantilized black girl moral compass, Barack Obama caricatures--I swear, the comic was less racist when it was racist. Brave enough to say that you should quit using porn and paying for sex--to harp on it for years--but too cowardly to say even once that you shouldn't rape, to even use the phrase rape culture--in a comic where there is ALWAYS a pimp around, ALWAYS a bunch of prostitutes around. A couple of #MeToo strips, literally just two, for all the measurable worth such an artifact could vouch for. I guess he thought it would have looked weird if he just completely ignored it.
All this time, about ten years out of the twenty of the comic's run, screaming about respecting women, liberating women, and the man still draws ten sluts a week in his comic. Every devil girl that was ever a devil girl is still a devil girl. The women of the resistance are primarily infantilized caricatures whose antics never change a thing. Witch culture played with like a toy, played with to be seen playing with it. Frankly, all expressions of femininity, and all the feminine values discussed in the comic, do nothing except serve the creator's interests in one form or another, existing in whatever limbos they are doomed to at his pleasure and at his service--he pimps them out, you might say--and this applies to the comic's entire run, from Monique's first appearance to the whole female cast today.
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My computer troubles and many other considerations upon my time meant I hadn't caught up with Sinfest since about 2016, so that's a whole presidency I got to read brand-new for the first time. I didn't expect things to look the way they did to me once I got to 2016, and I didn't have any expectations for what I would find as I moved forwards, but indeed, from 2016 onwards, it just gets ridiculous. I've read Sinfest from scratch plenty of times before, but once you see it, the full scope of the run with the benefit of the full two decades, it is fucking transparent. You know what else is transparent? None of the dudes ever change. The asshole dudes are the same asshole dudes.
Hey. Pay close fucking attention. In the webcomic Sinfest, by Tatsuya Ishida, none of the dudes ever change.
The main male protagonist has not been written out, doesn't know how to behave like a human being and can't seem to grasp why anyone really would behave like a human being, and still exploits women. In his work, and in secret behavior, Slick continues to degrade and hate women. Like, hate them.
Slick.
Do you get it? It's not a complicated work of art. The red herrings, like the author's actual self-insertion, lose their power over a long enough time period. His presence in his own comic is false; Slick's is real. Slick's public face is canonically inauthentic; his shadow self is authentic, and stronger than him. You don't need a big deconstructive analysis.
These fucking dudes can't even quit jacking it to porn, which like, I don't give too much of a fuck. I used porn like crazy the whole time I was a teenager, and sparingly for old time's sake into my early twenties. Porn is, in my opinion, mostly sad and criminal shit, and no one really needs it, but some people draw porn that isn't like that, and there is porn by women for women (which remains problematic in my opinion, but at least no one is getting a cumshot washed off them in a used toilet), and frankly we have worse problems in this life. But Tatsuya pretends to give a fuck. And yet! The man is at least twelve years older than me, and still this rigmarole with the porn.
How bout a tip? Why don't you just watch some like, extremely hardcore gay porn, like an Irish bodybuilder and an Ethiopian bodybuilder taking turns pounding each other's tight muscular asses as hard as they can with their thick nine-inchers until what you're looking at is nothing but boring flesh and you start thinking about chores you could be doing. Why don't you look at some penile mutilation porn compilations until you throw up. Oh, are these not your thing? Did you forget that not only women exist in porn? Or are you fully aware and that's not really the point?
Why don't you do literally anything other than think about, look at, or make comics about porn. You massive dork-wad.
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It's a massive disappointment. Sad shit, man. Having read this comic since I was a twelve-year old kid, as a grown man I'm here to tell you that I held out hope and held my judgment back for years and years, but at the end of the day Sinfest has been self-serving, false-ass bullshit.
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So the point, the reason I am even bothering to say anything instead of rolling my eyes and getting right along with my life, is that it's not just that Sinfest sucks. If it was just that, who would give a fuck? Not me. It used to suck honestly, and I could laugh at how bad and ridiculous those pr0n-loving, unlaid morons could be, un-self-aware and hopeless. Later I could hope that the feminism could grow into something truly revolutionary and the characters would enter stages of growth that would change their world. It never did, but that's no sin. Comics don't have to deliver correct discourse or be cancelled for their failure to do so, don't have to be morally correct on all points. Art doesn't have to be those things, can't be those things really.
No revolution has ever delivered the revolution it promised at the outset. The wheel mostly just turns, and that's fine or not fine, but there can't really be any justified blame for it. The wheel turns, the river flows, the world spins.
However, Sinfest is used as a tool and a vehicle, and because of what that tool can be used for and what it is visibly being used for, because of what is being delivered in that vehicle, an interpretation does have to be laid out in order to bring that payload to light.
Problem is, Tatsuya Ishida is not a feminist and has never been a feminist, didn't perform a heel turn from being a misogynist to a being a feminist and then turn again into radical feminism--or there is the possibility that he did exactly that but is in fact nothing, and all of Sinfest is exactly as is professional wrestling: a trick by an actor.
Either way, to endorse or champion his art as feminist is to be duped. What is actually happening here is that a dude who hates women has spent half his career trying his damnedest to get away with seeming like he's one of the good guys, safe and trying and different than he was, different than the bad men. He made his comic unpalatable to the idiots who actually loved the misogyny taken literally, which seemed great, but he turned them into a strawman to beat and be beaten by, as the occasion best served, for a decade-plus, all while championing a "resistance" that neither resisted nor revolutionized--because it is not equipped to do so, by the author's own design--and maintaining the essentials of his comic completely unchanged, undisturbed--examined, tweaked, repainted, rebranded, but in their fundamentals, just the same.
You can bullshit a lot in front of me and not hear me comment, but that crap is really too far.
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At one point in Tatsuya Ishida's such feminism comic, a male character asks a female character how he can be fight misogyny and be an ally. She tells him that in order to fight the patriarchy, he must support women, read radical feminism, and destroy the porn and prostitution industries. And that really is it! Hilarious.
Last Sunday strip, critical race theory was likened to coca-cola. Coca-cola is beneath trash, the worst thing that has ever happened to America and maybe to the world, as anyone with any presence of mind knows and understands. But wait, what, you're not into that shit, Tat? But all you have to do in order to not be racist and be a good ally is support people of color, read critical race theory, and destroy white supremacy! Double hilarious?
Ah, but you're into white supremacists these days, I guess. I guess, indeed, rustbelt and flyover whites are the true and only victims of our unjust society. 2021 revealed to you, somehow, that they're the actual authentic Christians around here, the maligned and the misunderstood, the demonized and brutalized, the beaten down and bloodied hope of the West. Which you're suddenly all about! That's kinda new and weird.
One feels all in all that in the end this is because there's cultural credit to be gained with the subset of that demographic, and others, which agree with you that we should beat the gay right out of our kids before they turn into filthy trannies or lunatic queers, and that if we fail in this, those children should be disowned, banished, relegated to the lowest possible positions in society, even murdered. So they're the new heroes of Sinfest. We threw our socialism (lmao) hat in the trash. The true revolution (lmao) is in embracing tradition.
And I really am laughing, motherfucker! Who the fuck are you? Are you even, were you ever, real?
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I am not trying to say that poor white people are evil, and automatically white supremacists. I am not trying to defend rhetoric that dehumanizes poor white people even when they are white supremacists. It's all the same trick, and I'm not against people who are tricked, do not advocate for punishing tricked people. I'm against the trick. This may sound a lot like a different formula, regarding sin. Well, the big thing with sin is that it is propagated by a great Deceiver, no?
Look man. If it's all the same bullshit, don't pick sides. I thought you understood that. Soon as you pick a side, you're on the wrong fucking side. Hate gay people, hate trans people, hate blacks all you want. You don't have to get on a team about it; nor do you don't have to pretend that you love everybody. I'm not asking you to cut a long deep line down the length of your face and bleed and scar for the Rape of Nanking just because you're Japanese. You don't have to suck black dick beneath a pink skirt to prove you have an open mind--it's ok to be straight, it's ok to be racist, you can stay being straight and racist, hate gays and blacks as much as you feel. Maybe you spend too much time on internet if you've been convinced otherwise.
Literally all you have to do is not fuck with people. Literally! You can choke on a big white salty hot load of your own hate, knock yourself the fuck out with the hard throbbing mallet of your own hate, marry a hateful bitch and sit down every evening for the rest of your lives just to get a good strong hate going, just don't fuck with people.
Hate me all day. It will not affect how many baskets I make when I shoot hoops, the thoughts I have when I look at the sky, how my food tastes, anything. But if you fuck with me, I feel it. That shit interferes with me. That makes it so it's harder for me to think straight, get a job, be perceived as human, etc.
There's making fun, there's making a statement, and there's fucking with people. And sometimes you gotta fuck with people--I am fucking with you, or at least trying--but then there's being cruel, and also, not knowing what the fuck you're saying.
You are increasingly cruel, you don't seem to know what you're saying, and believe it or not, you do possess certain powers in your fuckery which, consciously or not, give your fuckery the ability to affect people's lives.
I bet women have said something like this to you before.
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It is not feminism to maintain a population of victims for you to save or dispose of. That's not progress. That's farming. You know what farming is, in the context of human bodies, when the valuation of the bodies in centered on sex? I know I promised not to waste a lot of words, which is why when I repeat stuff, three times, I am saying, pay attention. So pay attention: that's not progress, or feminism, or learning, or virtue. That's pimping. To be clear, pimping is not feminist, or brave, or anything other than fucking disgusting.
Almost every pimp I've ever known of, heard of, seen directly, or seen portrayed, has always pretended to love women. They kill, violate, brutalize, enslave them, and sell their parts and time and health away, but they love women. Love bitches. Love 'em. Why is it so important for such a creature to pretend he loves what he so clearly hates?
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Nor is it feminism to repeat what what women tell you like a parrot in order to seem safe to women. That's being a dog, and a dog will sic what it's told to sic and love what it's told to love; tolerate what it is forced to tolerate. But such a creature, no longer strictly a dog but rather an organic tool, can also turn on its owner, and the world. Such a creature needs a leash; without one, it's nothing but a beast.
Men don't need to be on leashes. A man ought to be capable of being his own master. You shouldn't need to chain a man to a post. A dog may be another matter.
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The role of feminism in your life cannot be to make you palatable to women. There is nothing any woman in the world owes you in exchange for the decency you treat them with, and treating women with decency is the only thinkable course of action.
You understand? There's no extenuating circumstance that ever liberates you from that truth.
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It is not feminism to game your decency in order to reap any kind of reward.
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Feminism, like virtue, is a thing that if done in exchange, ceases to be. And like virtue, if used as a weapon, becomes something else entirely.
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It is not feminism to tell women what their bodies mean, are, signify, whatever. Worry about the male body, if you're going to try to control someone's agency; at least you have a leg to stand on, since you call yourself a man.
However, you're gonna run into me, and I don't, won't and can't give a fuck what you say I should be or say or do because I'm my own man, and I decide what that means and how to express it. Try to stop me, and I won't let you. Try to do it around me, and I'll stop you like I would any other bully doing any other bully shit, with reason so far as possible, and forcibly if necessary. Dig it? No?
Too bad. Get on your knees and suck my dick about it, if you're angry. Beyond that, I have nothing for you. You know the rules: you wanna stop me, you better be smart enough to get at me and strong enough to kill me. Delicious, delicious male privilege. Savor the flavor.
No one decides for me what a man is. No one decides for you what a man is. If you want to be told, that's your affair. But you can't tell me. I decide for myself what it means to be a man.
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Feminism consists of two things and two things only, if you're a man: do your own work, and let women be themselves as complete agents wholly independent of you. All women! I don't give a fuck whether you agree with their lifestyles, ideas, or choices. That's none of your fucking business actually!
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A man's work lies within himself, and right in front of him. His work compasses the world, as he is an intrinsic part of the song of life, the life of the world. And if there is something eternal in him, what we could call a soul, that too is his work.
So there's a lot of work for every man, each man to his own work. I think mostly we all agree on some form of this. How we hold each other to that as men, in cooperation and in conflict, and what world we build out of that dialogue, is essentially the main part of all our lives and the substrate of all the institutions and agreements we live by as men, as well as all the ways we cheat and change that in our vain efforts to control the consequences of our actions and the causes and effects of this world. In this, each man has a certain degree of freedom, and a certain degree of power, and a certain degree of responsibility.
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So, bearing that in mind, back to being in relation to women:
Indeed, respect women as you respect all life.
Keep women safe as you safeguard all life.
Use whatever powers and privileges you are blessed with in such ways as to give women space for themselves and opportunity to manage their affairs with autonomy.
Don't decide for women what their work is. Don't decide for a woman what is appropriate for a woman, or to a woman, or what if anything makes her less than other women (nothing does). Don't decide for women what a woman is. Leave that shit up to women. I understand: women may tell you contradictory things, one woman one thing, another woman another thing. God forbid women disagree; God forbid women not present a totally homogenous population of ideas and standards and boundaries for your ease of consumption!
Don't decide what makes a woman valid. Can a woman make you valid? No. That is asinine. The validity of a man and the validity of a woman are inherent and equal traits. A woman can no more decide what you are for you than you can decide for her.
The relationship is only a relationship if there is balance. Friendship, love, work, art--balance. No balanced relationship is wholly unhealthy, and no imbalanced relationship can be very healthy.
A man ought properly seek to have a balanced relationship with as much of the universe as he can reasonably grow into and maintain.
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The great misconception, the great driving lie, is that men control.
Slaves control.
Men, free men, accept.
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Check the latin on the word "accept". Check the etymology. Then remember that man is not needfully a gendered term; to be a man has meant in many senses to be a member of the human race, and women are decidedly human. The division between man and woman, man of paler skin and man of darker skin, man from the east and man from the west--these are distinctions that block man's ability to accept himself, distinctions made by the elite--men who through the blessings of good fortune and inheritance, and under the warping weight of responsibility over organization and debt (society), mistakenly believe that they are as gods--in order to make their organizations more profitable for themselves, in order to control. The elite are slaves, and it is their slavishness that creates so many of the problems in this world. Like a man who takes good care of his head and lets his feet go to hell. Well, eventually, that dude's back is gonna hurt him badly, and his feet will be as attached as they ever were.
Do you understand what I am saying. Slaves dominate, own, exert control. A free man accepts. Read some Tolstoy. Look at Jesus and the Buddha--you may remember them--they have benevolently appeared in your comic to some extent.
Man accepts.
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What "radical" feminists are really talking about when they talk about trans people, trans women specifically, is rape. They are by definition adherents of the second wave of feminism (a regressive position, which I will detail), which in its modern form is defined by aversion/dominance responses to historical and persistent trauma.
First-wave feminism reestablished basic humanity for women in political modernity (for certain women in certain countries). Once this was in place, it is natural that the most acute trauma and worst pressure over and on women be the crux, focus, and goad when it comes to the direction feminism ought to take, its position in society, and the position, definition, and role of woman in society. The movement, second-wave feminism, accomplished much for women and society in its time in terms of securing safety and opportunity for women as the century went on--indeed, to protect women from men that rape, dehumanize, and oppress women.
Now that generation of feminism has been left behind by the discourse it elevated, through the freedoms it helped generate. Yet it has found consistent life in its historical continuity as the "original" feminist movement and its central precept: the memory and threat of penetrative rape, the segregation of the penetrative from the penetrable. The rhetoric amounts to this: men are defined as penetrators, defined again by their penetrating equipment, and women, defined as only-penetrable and womb-possessing. Patriarchal modes of social organization throughout history have demonstrated that the patriarchal experiment has run its course and failed, and a return to matriarchal modes of social organization is called for and politically desirable. This train of thought it culminates in a female elite, and cultural modes dominated by matriarchal organization.
We switch places, problems solved. Naturally.
Second-wave feminism, calling itself--still--radical, past, say, arbitrarily, 1990 or so, is the most slavish, confused, and concussed extant wave of feminism. Like dudes passionately desiring the return of monarchical rule in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty one. Though there is literally no radicality left in the position, every other stripe of feminist is afraid to call themselves radical, because they do not wish to be associated with these old gender-essentialist retrogrades. The truly radical elements of feminism had to be picked up and carried into the third wave, and there have been many since, as is the nature of progressing schools of psychosocial thought--once established, radicality is impossible, and the cutting edge moves on. Second wave feminism attempted to be more inclusive of all women (wonderful irony talking about it now) yet they failed by their own metrics for over twenty years.
Indeed, working under this formula, women never rape women. This formula asserts that women cannot ever rape men. I suppose in a way that is something of a radical concept.
Can a father not rape his daughter? Some men believe that, believe that a daughter is property, and as property with sexual characteristics, it is his to sexualize as he sees fit. Do some mothers believe the same of their daughters?
I assert that it is so. I assert that fathers rape sons and daughters, sons rape fellow sons and daughters, mothers rape daughters and sons, and daughters rape fellow daughters and sons. These are things that happen, and it is all rape, and it is independent of patriarchy or matriarchy. Further, and logically, raped sons rape other men and other women. Further, and logically, raped women rape other women and other men. Many other kinds of traumas find their outlets libidinally, and it follows once more that traumatized people rape innocent people, that traumatized people rape traumatized people. There is no point looking for an initial trauma vis a vis gender; we were African macaques when we thought nothing of murdering for thrill and gain and raping for the sake of rape, and we still do these things, whatever we call ourselves now.
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Those left behind by the third wave persist, as rape persists. Its main deal lies in the fight to ensure that trans people not exist, since the entire "trans meme" is a conspiracy designed by rapists. For weak people, the stated direction of the punch is at the strongest enemy--in this case, the patriarchy, which is the devil and his hell. This leaves them with absolutely no hope of victory and frankly no reason for anyone to expect anything material of them, but they sound like heroes. The place the punch actually goes--because there is a punch, a reason all these people get together in the end--is always down. There is nowhere else for weak people to punch. It takes strength to punch up, and not to punch.
Punching down is particularly easy when the target is trans people, because so many people will punch with you even if they are perfectly ready to punch you next. Once those pesky trannies are out of the way, of course. Shit.
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Communities that ostensibly fight rape culture have these things in common:
They fight against each other endlessly.
So desperate are they for allies--a limited resource which is one of the things they fight each other for--and for people to understand and see them, that they make rules and use propaganda.
Finally, they often endorse and support rapists who come into their circles. Thanks to their rules and propaganda, the rapists know to be dressed to the nines in the party uniform, and to holler the party line louder and more militantly than anyone else, so that they might rape (also steal, or in other ways parasitize) with ease and at some length, discretion permitting (it often does, in many cases for years). Then they are forced to either protect these rapists or "weaken the movement".
Rapists understand this intimately, and bank on the protection of the latter clause. And it's not just feminist communities or leftist enclaves. Look at the fucking Vatican, just look at all the priests around here that rape kids and stay priests. Look at every level of government and big business in the United States.
Listen. The trauma of rape hangs over every community that has ever tried to be a community.
Rapists farm these tides intelligently; they drink and eat and grow trauma. How successful they are as individuals is dependent on their charisma, cunning, and manipulative abilities, and even more so, how far they are willing to go, how hard they are willing to work. Many rapists are exceptionally gifted and highly motivated in these areas. These are the exact traits it takes to make effective politicians, executive officers, war generals, presidents and kings. This is why the most raped thing in history is the environment itself, our own planet. Because all flesh, all flesh is ass, and every man's entitled to a piece of ass. Amirite, boys?
So who profits from radical feminist rhetoric? Rapists. Primarily rapists. This I assure you three times over. Are you maybe reading this, J.K. Rowling? I've read your shit since I was small too, and I want you to hear this from someone: that shit only helps rapists. It helps rapists rape children. They tell you that trans people rape children, scream about it constantly, in order to make it seem like they are not the ones raping children. But they are.
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That's just life, I guess. I haven't been able to figure out a way to stop them. Rapists work in our schools, banks, police departments, congresses and parliaments and courts, major businesses local, national, and international, everywhere. Rapists write our great literature and music, our just and unjust laws, and they tell us the news. Some get locked up. Some never do. Some get outed, known about, have to change their lives. Some never do. Some change their ways of their own volition; reform, recant, redeem. Some never do. Some are hung out to dry, publicly and gruesomely, so that the vast majority can keep raping, and we can all feel like we do justice. Yes, we all still practice human sacrifice; didn't you know?
Everywhere one turns, rapists hold sway. And yet! We know it is a crime, we do get some of them some ways, and we know, collectively--for not every human being is a rapist, not every victim of rape perpetuates the trauma, not everyone stays silent, complicit, unknowing--we know, collectively, that it need not be this way. Our efforts are necessary, and are not for nothing--same as against any other terrible hallmark of the worst devils of our human nature.
However, if your efforts consists of stressing that one group of people is more likely to rape than another group? I'm gonna conclude you're a rapist, fighting for rapists. That's what rapists do: shift blame. I said that already, and it's the thing most worth repeating. Rapists shift the blame.
People rape. Every race, color, creed, culture, and gender rapes. All of them. Rapists exist in every category. Get fucking used to it. Humans do what? Eat, shit, breathe, die, and fuck. What else, deriving from that? We steal, lie, make mistakes, kill, and rape. Humans being human, all humans.
You either fight that or ignore it. If you fight it, you have to have good reconnaissance. So this is your intel, for bitterer and worse: rapists are everywhere, absolutely everywhere. If you try to do something with people, some of those people will probably be rapists right from the outset. They may not have raped yet, but it is in them, as it is in you and in me, and the trajectory of the work and the opportunities that it affords for rape will be taken advantage of. The more people the thing involves, and the longer it goes on--I don't know where the points are, but at some point, rapists will absolutely become involved, and will gain the power and position they need in order to rape. That is literally math. That is literally lines intersecting on a graph.
*
Anyway. All this is to say that red flags and trying to be honest are the only tools we have. All we can do is take the best care of and protect ourselves, and the people we can protect and take care of to the best of our ability for as long as we can. Communicating honestly about it all is step one, and there are more, one imagines, but as it stands, there is no perfect defense against rape. If a rape-free culture giving rise to a rape-free society is to be, it is to be in a future no one living is likely to see. We have barely begun that work, and can hardly begun to imagine how to begin healing.
So. Sinfest is a red flag. Sinfest has always been and has largely stayed either promoting or dependent on rape culture, even though it has pretended otherwise. Currently it is more and more heavy-handedly concentrating on how people who disagree with the author are mind-controlled by demons. That's the conclusion, for what it is worth.
*
Do I say this to cancel Tatsuya Ishida and bring Sinfest down? No. I never heard of a solution to anything that involved silence and erasure and censorship. I mean, I did, but my interpretation of "solution" was in conflict with what I was hearing.
I say all this because I have to, in my bones I have to. Started typing almost as soon as I caught up with the comic. I say all this also because I believe many people need to read it as I've written it, starting with Tatsuya Ishida.
Finally I say all this because I believe there is no point at which a human being cannot change their minds, transform their thinking, and choose a new way. As an example in defiance of Godwin, I am of the opinion that it would have been better if Hitler and Goebbels, for all of us as well as for them, if they had found the courage to face justice, and the task of life after their crimes. Not to be executed, but to face a form of justice that was redemptive. There is absolutely nothing Christlike in killing someone to punish them (this would seem obvious, but I guess there's a fight about it), and nothing either in imprisonment, though I grudgingly admit that here we are closer to the mark--where there is life, there is hope, though the life we generally allow the average prisoner is testing the limits of the proverb, and in most cases it is merely a slower and crueler execution.
Crazy as it sounds, the best thing is to try and forgive. Here is my radical assertion: it is only through forgiveness that healing can begin. And if we determine to do better, but do not forgive ourselves, we are more likely to do worse.
In life, in art, in work, in interrelation, I believe that while human beings always retain something essential to their individuality in all these categories their whole lives long that is immutable and never changes, human beings always change, and in surprising ways. Some change is superficial and some sinks deep, as deep as the immutable. The immutable, in the end, is framed by the changeable element, and so contextualized within it. And the changeable element cannot exist without its roots in the immutable, cannot be taken as the entire whole just because it is what is dominantly perceived. Words like "immutable" lose meaning when you try to use them literally, and perception is terribly limited. Everything I've ever said could be totally wrong! I don't think so, but I allow that it is possible. Certainly I will assert that everything that everyone has ever said could have at the very least been said more precisely--but ours is limited consciousness, applying microscopic, inefficient tools to measure and describe an infinite universe we can only see a fraction of a percent of.
We are different people and the same people in every moment of existence. Like the world and everything else in it, we human beings ride the edge of total chaos and perfect order and are the edge of total chaos and perfect order. We are all uniquely the same, and there is no point in judgment, or blame, that does not offer forgiveness and absolution.
So I don't want Tatuya Ishida to shut up. I want him to keep doing whatever he feels like doing and make whatever he wants to make. I want him to give me occasion to see that he has transformed himself into a stronger person, a better artist, a human being whose worldview is capable of transformation. I don't need him to tell me that I'm right, or for Sinfest to start embracing my views and exhorting my values instead of someone else's. And I want him to do this of his own volition, approaching the process with honesty, because I'm not into coercion, or going through the motions.
What I want is kind of beside the point, to tell the truth; I merely hold on to certain hopes.
I think it's excellent that Sinfest has never stopped updating, and I hope it continues. I hope that it changes, going forward, changes radically. I have no control over that, but this would be a good outcome.
Right now, I look at the newest update of Sinfest, and I see a form of extra-stupid, cartwheel-turning hate speech, which is just so crazy and sad. That wasn't true back when the comic was "unacceptable". Back then, it made racist and misogynist jokes, but it wasn't hateful. This movement away from that form of toxicity, which was childish and shitty, into its modern form, which is the author's profound hatred of himself holding a twisted mirror up to the world, was slow and gradual and not without its sense; the initial movement was, if honest, exciting.
Because indeed, patriarchy must be dismantled if we are to have justice; indeed, there is a story trying to come out of Sinfest and transform its characters that the social commentary only blocks and poisons. Indeed, the Church of Wokeness is some bullshit, and the way the discourse has been queered is not the way I would have queered it. I have made it clear that I don't like bullies, yes? Not trying to blame people for their trauma, but I have been in enough queer spaces to say with confidence that queers rape and bully in a social caste system just like straights do.
And twitter...**
*
No, don't be canceled. That changes nothing, fixes nothing. Shit isn't over till it's over. I believe in every single human being on this earth, rapists included, and I believe tomorrow is another day for them, as it is for me. The truth is always there, and its power to liberate is well-documented. I forgive Tatsuya Ishida all his bullshit, the bullshit fifteen years ago and the bullshit now. It's shit, a wide variety, but it's never all and only shit. More art is always the answer, never less.
So I hope for change, and truth, and freedom. I hope to see that forgiveness is worth it, and keep forgiving even if it's not, because whether it's worth it or not is actually impossible for me to know; we have to take these things on faith.
Corny, pointless, probably for nothing. It's all I got. We can only attempt to be the change we wish for in this world, as authentically and continuously as we can, and never expect to see it.
*
To put a pin in this massive dirigible, Sinfest cannot be political and good at the same time because in the end, the author could do a sociopolitical cartoon or he could tell a story, but doing both seems to be too much for him and we've ended up with a work where the political commentary is reactionary and crushed into metaphorical structures that are unsuitable. The story is lost, wandering in a wilderness, and compromised by the political necessities of the commentary. The characters cannot be authentic individuals and mouthpieces and metaphors at the same time. Finally, are you making art or yelling on twitter? Creating meaningfully or drawing and then jacking off to the same porn? Telling the truth or trying to be right (wrong), and "good"?
Decide. Up to you. You are a grown-ass man. Think about that, would you?
My advice? Such as it is: take a retreat from life, reevaluate the world and its occupants as you have understood them, revalue all values, reread your whole archive, think again, and come back as who you really are to make the comic you really wanna make. And seriously, remember that you are a grown-ass man. You don't need to be afraid of or pissed off by a bunch of confused and tricked children/robots on twitter or get on your knees in front of any living thing or concept.
Stand the fuck up and open your eyes.
*
I'm tired. This is too long to read. What can I say. What more, I mean. Infinitely more!
I dunno. Hope it's something to think about.
--JL
*That's postmodernism. Supposedly. Calling something something else and believing it. This is of course an absurd reduction.
Postmodernist thought is nothing more than the case for becoming able read a whole text, the obvious and the hidden, text and subtext and metatext, and to perform textual analysis in areas not traditionally thought of as textual. It leaves you little excuse for just ripping out the parts of a text that you like or hate and calling it the whole, or for believing only what the author wants you to believe, or for believing only what society wants you to believe about the author or the subject or itself. Any statements made about text by postmodernists necessarily represent only the text that particular interpreter generated about said prior text, and is not, by definition, "postmodernism", but either a new or regressive interpretation derived through deconstruction and subjective analysis. There is indeed no guarantee that these conclusions will not be drawn based on the agenda of the interpreter, nor that their interpretation will be free of their prejudices. However, this does not mean that the analytic toolkit of postmodernist thought is without honest application--very much the opposite.
The thing is, anyone can use good ideas to say stuff you hate.
Same basic game it ever was.
Anyway if you want to talk about gender as a deconstructible and reconstructible text, we definitely can and should, but that is another longest post ever, probably.
Just by the way, it's the worst when people don't know what the fuck they're talking about and talk shit anyway. Seriously that "'postmodern' taco stand" is the worst comic strip in Sinfest and probably deserves a spot in the top twenty worst four-panel sequences of all time.
**Look, though. If you don't get that Twitter is a psyop designed to divide each from the other by promoting the worst of us all, you are fucked. Imagine a bunch of cows standing in a field. They look like cows. They are cows. Suddenly a bunch of dudes show up and set up like a thousand chutes going in all directions. The chutes look the same to us, and we know they all go to the exact same slaughterhouse. But the cows can appreciate differences in the chutes, aesthetic differences perhaps, differences in workmanship, in direction and grade of descent or ascent. In addition, to each other they are not a bunch of cows; some cows hate bulls, some bulls hate cows, some cows like to huddle close together when they feed, some stand apart, some cows are all descended from a certain pair, some cows are particolored and some are solid, and based on these metrics, none of which change the fact that they are cows going down a slaughterhouse chute, they fight and scream and push each other down, sometimes kill each other. The grass of the field is churned into mud. The noise is absolutely incredible. The cows, who are all the same damn cow in the end, fucking hate each other and stand as far away from each other as possible, and climb into their chosen slaughterhouse chutes like emperors processing on purple velvet to be murdered, racked, flayed, dismembered, packaged, purchased, and consumed. THEY FEEL LIKE HEROES THE WHOLE TIME, HERO GENIUSES WHO ARE WINNING WAY MORE THAN THE OTHER, STUPID COWS.
That's Twitter, but it's also how it's always been in society, and that is what it does to everybody. Get the fuck out of that shit.
