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 teem, 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-evidendy 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.)

Anyway, I just found that I couldn't live that way. A woman is going to do whatever makes her cheerful at the moment and that, in my experience, is the extent of her perception of ethics. In order to maintain a relationship with an emotion-based being it is necessary to be cheerful about anything that makes her cheerful. Coupled with a "woman's right to choose" as central ethic - or, rather, "ethic" - this involves a wide and variegated spectrum of feminist actions and behaviours and opinions. At one time, I rated sex as being very, very, very high on my list of life's pleasures. Ultimately, for myself, the spiritual toll which was exacted by maintaining a rictus grin in the face of all feminist actions, behaviours and opinions across the full range of that spectrum made the price of sex too high - which, considering how highly I once rated sex as a pleasure is really saying something, I think.

[I discovered, through celibacy and the avoidance of masturbation that sexual desire is a lot like a rash. If you keep "scratching it" you make it worse and, thus, "scratching it" comes to seem like an urgent, toppermost of the poppermost, central necessity in your life. If you learn to leave your penis alone, I discovered, your penis will learn to leave you alone.]

This dovetailed with the "second source" in answering "Where do you think your ideas about women come from?": my own decision to alternate periods of intentional celibacy (as opposed to "not getting laid") with periods of monogamous sexual activity and semi-monogamous sexual activity. Having gone back and forth between the two states over the course of a decade, I can state unequivocally that celibate Dave Sim sees reality more clearly than sexually-active Dave Sim (who wilfully hypnotized himself into seeing the world in a manifestly untrue way and persuaded himself that feminist lies were true, that many feminist lies contained elements of truth, that feminist lies were not wholly untruthful). Surrendering an accurate perception of reality for a world of fairy-tale falsehoods was part of the high price of sex, a price I was no longer prepared to pay.