Dave,

I was introduced to Cerebus as a result of "Tangent" -- I'm probably the only case where you actually gained a reader, instead of a losing a reader, because of it. After reading "Tangent," I was told to take a look at "Reads." And wow! What a difference. I actually liked "Reads." Your metaphor seemed a bit too earnest, but it was also really damned funny, so it balanced out. Your observations were, if a little naïve, correct at their core.

Since "Reads," you've gone loopy. When I read "Tangent" I'd really have liked to see some rational arguments backing up ideas you'd obviously been mulling over since "Reads". Instead, it was clear that you were just full of shit. And while you made some good points, you didn't seem to know what made them good points. Correct observations in 1995 were just being rationalized by the beliefs of the Dave Sim of today.

"I was hoping for twenty pages of uninterrupted profanity -- either that or just endless passages juxtaposing the names of women and gay men with careful descriptions of syphilitic eruptions, weeping sores and intestinal polyps." [Steve Lieber, Comicon.com panels. Topic: Dave Sim Tangents]

Despite the fact that you champion reason, your writing lacks the factual and intellectual rigor required by even an undergrad English essay, and your arguments aren't all that logical. I like it when good arguments are taken seriously, and I doubt many people will take yours seriously, which is a shame. If you really want "Tangent" to be taken seriously by anybody with more than two brain cells to rub together, you first have to form a rational argument for your premises, rather than string together a bunch of ad-hoc ranting and religious hokum.

So I decided to go through Tangent #1 to demonstrate how it should have been written, and show you how a reasoned argument about the inferiority of women should actually have been made.

"Foremost, [my ideas about women] originate from the research that I did for Mothers & Daughters. Not the voluminous reading of everything from nurse novels to voodoo pop... to Women's Studies. [1] No, the research which most contributed to my 'ideas about women' was the series of informal interviews I conducted with mothers and daughters..."

I don't think very much of your "informal interviews" with women. Your sample, your methods, your prejudices going into the research, and the interpretation of your results are all highly suspect. Any error in your admittedly informal research would give you vastly different data.

"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..."

My applause for your efforts is unnecessary. You've given us no clue as to your survey methods. Your statement shows a certain bias in favor of your conclusions; it also makes me wonder from where you got these women. Speaking of anecdotal evidence, as favored by feminists? You're guilty of it in spades.

There's lots of literature on how (and why) to conduct unbiased studies. And you know what? It's damned hard. If I put ads in the paper, canvass a retirement home, accost people on street corners, or solicit university students starving at the end of semester ("Come here, little boy, and I'll give you $20"), the kind of people who would answer questions in each location would vary. The answers I'd get with different kinds of questions would vary as well.

"Scientific methods used to justify classifying behaviours into such dichotomies as normal and abnormal, moral and immoral, legal and illegal often reflect the evaluators' norms, values and beliefs at a particular time and place. The ethnographic record shows that across cultures and historical eras the variation in norms, values, practices, and beliefs is dynamic, and extreme." [Robert Bartholomew]

As for your research -- which you pass off quickly in your urge to get to the descriptions of your horrifying experiences with the Creatures From Emoticon -- I wonder about your bias there, too. You read a whole bunch of trash fiction, pop psychology, and hokus feminism -- the kind of things not taken seriously by the majority of women, scholars, or men. [2] A parallel would be me finding out about guys by reading spy novels and Spider-Man comics, buying some Seven Habits of Highly Effective People managerial pap, and then looking at some Islamic fundamentalist literature.

From your research, you draw the conclusion that women are emotion-based beings. This would be all right -- unpopular, but alright -- if you'd actually done anything to seriously, rationally prove your point. You're proud that you don't wank, yet you've been doing an awful lot of the intellectual variety.

You go on to discuss these emotion-based beings. A valid topic for discussion, but instead of your columns of anecdotal whining, I would have actually developed the case logically, by first determining whether or not emotion-based minds actually exist. If they do exist, how would they behave? Then, test that hypothesis against real-world data. Does it stick? Just knowing you're right isn't enough; lots of feminists know they're right, too.

There is indeed a school of thought (Stephen Pinker, Antonio Damasio, Edmund Rolls) that has researched the mind and concluded that human beings are, yes, emotion-based. That doesn't mean what you described; what you described was a product of it. What it means is that all people's thoughts are based on, and triggered by, emotion. [3]

A fine point that you miss in your headlong rush to your conclusions: There is a big difference between instinct and emotion. All people can (and do) react to basic stimulus -- that's instinct. But there needs to be a reason to filter any particular stimuli through the higher brain after that point. If things fulfill an instinct (warm, salty, safe, arousing, "Ooo - puppies!") there's no need for the mind to consider that stimulus further. I think this is the reason many of the things in our society are shit: they cater to instinct only.

Many authors take a scientific bent on this subject -- sociobiology, it's called -- by dissecting society compared to other social species. Their version of the argument goes like this: We have behavior in common with other animals - sleeping, hunting, fighting, fucking. Since animals are not conscious, they react to everything instinctually. The degree to which our behavior parallels our cousins' is the degree to which we're acting from instinct ourselves; Cynthia Heimel, the "Women" columnist in Playboy, says all she needed to know about people she learned from watching dogs.

Anyway, the evidence shows that those who are inclined to think in more than two grunts and an "Ugg!" -- to move above their instinctive minds -- actually fall onto a very broad scale between analytic and emotional, but they are, sadly, rare.

So, having mounted an argument, using some real sources, that instinct plays a preeminent role in human behavior, you've built a floor for your arguments. Now, you can discuss why minds are emotion-based, and why women, in particular, will opt for the "feel good" solution over a thinking-intensive one.

Whatever you think of Kohlberg's theory of moral development, he found that there is a discrepancy between how women scored in ethical responses to situations and how men responded: women scored lower. Ethics are a product of analytical thinking. Are women less likely to think analytically about ethical questions? Why would they opt for an "everybody feels good" approach rather than a "because it's right" approach, more so than men?

Well, look at it evolutionarily: when has a woman, in nature, needed analytical skills? Chances are she's a mother. Raising kids isn't rocket science, but it requires patience and attention to detail. It follows that, since childbirth is women's most important function in nature, our brains might be geared towards this activity.

Childbearing is necessarily more important to women. A mother has invested more in the process of reproduction at the outset than a father. Even physically, an egg is 1000 times bigger than sperm. [4] While it's in a man's best interest to drop as many easily-made sperm into as many mates as possible, it's in a woman's interest to be choosy. To mate, women require that a man care both for her and for her demanding offspring. Only the best, most able men actually get to have sex. In many species, weak males never mate.

So, men have to actively compete for women if they want to reproduce. This role as prized possession must encourage passive and social behaviors in women. Conversely, men have to be tactical and aggressive, competing for resources and mates both.

Recent studies have also shown that our hormones, as well as our social functions, determine how our brains are structured, even in the womb. Higher levels of testosterone in girls produce better analytical skills while estrogen reduces them -- but increases feelings of nurturing.

Be it structural or functional, there are numerous books on the differences between the brains of women and men. Lots of non-scientific literature, which amounts to guessing through people-watching, has posited the existence of "emotional intelligence" -- mostly to make women feel better about not scoring high in tests of "intelligent intelligence" - but those books have been pretty much disproved. The mind seems to work in the same way for both men and women, with the only differences being the degrees of talent exhibited by each sex.

Anne Moir and David Jessel, the authors of Brain Sex, found that, cultural factors aside, men score higher in mathematics and analysis, while girls have superior memories and spatial abilities. Intriguingly, men's brains are more specifically developed in both visuo-spatial and emotional areas. This is because the brain is built from the limbic system, which is buried deep in the brain around sex and food, then upwards towards the forebrain, the intelligence center. All stimuli must pass through the first to get to the second.

It makes sense that how our brains are shaped will depend upon how powerful or muted the messages are when they make it through. Indeed, our instincts determine where messages are first directed when we start to think about them. Finding the connection between emotion and reason would suggest that men are better equipped to reason from the bottom up, for this reason.

"Normally, [women's] weakness makes masculine protection necessary to their existence and to the exercise of their overpowering maternal instinct, and so their whole effort is to obtain this protection in the easiest way possible. The net result is that feminine morality is a morality of opportunism and imminent expediency, and that the normal woman has no respect for, and scarcely a conception of abstract truth. Thus is proved a fact noted by Schopenhauer and many other observers: that a woman seldom manifests any true sense of justice or of honor." [H.L. Menken]

Women, it turns out, have more diffusely organized brains. Stimulus arrives filtered through a vastly different array of synapses, although it arrives in exactly the same way. While women can multitask better than men, and can bring more experiences to bear at once, they have to contend with higher levels of "background noise." This suggests that women have a harder time separating emotion and reason because emotional capacities are developed across a greater area of the brain, and hence are integrated into the areas used for analytic thinking. Men's minds are more compartmentalized and this keeps emotion more separate from analytics.

Conclusion? Women, in responding to basic instinctual situations, have become biologically hardwired to use emotion above all else to solve problems, because of the needs of biology to make women care first and foremost for offspring, both having them and providing for them. From the ground up, men are built for responding quite differently than women, and this is reflected in all higher reasoning.

I must qualify this: as Edward O. Wilson says, "A discovery of this nature does not vitiate the ideals of Western civilization. We are not compelled to believe in biological uniformity in order to affirm human freedom and dignity."

Human genetics does not specifically determine an array of individual traits, it just sets our capacity to develop an array of traits. Some can be changed with very little effort, others with much rigor, and some not at all. The variation between individuals is greater than the variation between sexes: We are all one species, and our differences are a starting point, not an ending point, for our continually evolving society.

This is by no means an exhaustive study. Take from the above what you will, but I think I've demonstrated that relying on a pop culture and radical feminist literature, along with some conversations you've had, is not reasonable.

You then claim that our world is becoming "feminized," and you attribute it to the evils of sex. Others have asked the same question, but come to a different conclusion: In his 1994 book In Defense of Elitism, William A. Henry discusses why the world has turned into a "feel good" place where ideas aren't as important as gratification: the "why ask why?" society. He posits that "the missing element in every phase of [...] life, from education to culture to the thicket of identity politics, is what used to be called rugged individualism." Basically, we're all a bunch of spoiled brats. That's why reason can't win an argument with emotion: Thinking is hard.

We're seeing the results of this in the sense of entitlement all citizens have: They feel they are owed a good future by having suffered through the adversity of everyday life. And Henry's not the only one -- there are many other writers who are also asking why each generation is more pleasure-based than the last. Some examples are Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, Michael Shermer's How We Believe, Gross and Leavitt's Higher Superstition, Carl Sagan's Demon-Haunted World, and Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.

After demonstrating the above, you can now go on to discuss its consequences: believing all those impossible things before breakfast. About dealing with women sexually, you say:

"Celibate Dave Sim sees reality more clearly than sexually-active Dave Sim... Surrendering an accurate perception of reality for a world of fairytale falsehoods was part of the high price of sex, a price I was no longer prepared to pay."

Okay, let me get this straight: You found that when you're schtupping women you're a hypnotized zombie, but without sex you're strong-minded? Um, Dave, come on. Avoiding situations that call for an ethical backbone isn't an answer, it's a cop-out.

Of course you don't have to have sex. It's been shown to be quite good for the brain, but since you don't think you can do the deed without turning into Zombie Boy your decision is reasonable on its face.

But I wonder why sex has that effect on you? Is sex so good that you lose the ability to stand up for your values? Does it turn a switch in your brain that demands obedience? That's like saying you'll never drink wine because you have to get into a car and drive. I just want to be sure you're not just weaseling your way out of growing a spine and facing the ramifications of what you believe. To quote Homer Simpson, "Weaseling out of things is what separates us from the animals, boy... except the weasel."

You go on to discuss feminist myths accepted in society. This part could be really good if you analyzed your data before you drew your conclusions, instead of after.

Your point about government-funded daycare is great. Why should I pay for somebody else's choices? If I drink, the public doesn't buy my aspirin the next morning. If I want to fuck, the public doesn't pay for my hooker. Whatever happened to personal responsibility?

"[...] some astronomical percentage of parents thought it was the responsibility of public schools to teach sexual morality."

Actually, the parents wanted the school to teach that sex was wrong. In any case, it doesn't matter why homosexuals are homosexual. It's a free country, and nobody should be telling anyone else whom to sodomize. It's not polite.

"[...] inexplicable as it is that some acts of coitus produce offspring while others do not (despite the best efforts of medical science to establish irrefutable "laws" of cause-and-effect) [...]"

You're dead wrong here. Medical science has done a pretty good job of establishing laws of cause and effect. Pregnancy isn't inexplicable at all. Women are only fertile three to five days a month, and sperm are only motile for a few hours; they hang around for at most three days. Sometimes the sperms are duds; sometimes the egg is a dud. Sometimes fertilization happens but not implantation in the uterine wall, because it may not be fully developed or may be busily breaking down. Other times, pregnancy happens but spontaneously aborts (there's a one-in-four chance of this).

Ever see Desmond Morris's The Human Animal? Morris talks about "sperm wars," and shows under a microscope how sperms form little latticework fortresses out of their tails, and send assassin sperm out to attack foreign sperm Tora Tora Tora-style. Stealth sperm sneak through and hunt out the egg. It's really very cool.

This stuff is basic first-year biology. Just because things aren't apparent without a microscope doesn't mean they're not happening.

"If abortion is, as the feminists insist, a matter of a woman having control over her own body, then I think a public demonstration of a woman willing herself to become un-pregnant [...]"

Don't be silly. Feminists don't mean "control over" in the sense that we move our arms and legs, they mean in terms of self-determination. In her wonderful article on abortion, author Wendy McElroy discusses the right to self-determination, and how it's a basic right in society: If I want to do things to my body I can, and nobody should be able to stop me. She argues that a fetus is part of its mother's tissues and so it is pretty much like any other body part -- a kidney, for instance, or a limb. Sure, it's silly to cut out a lung or two, but you can do it if you want.

The argument falls short if a point can be found where the foetus becomes another person who has their own right to self-determination. As a British judge once said: your right to swing your fist ends a half an inch before the other man's nose. A good way to counter the self-determination argument is the example of smoking or drinking during pregnancy. Most people agree a woman has a right to do those things, but what about the rights of the person whose development she's affecting? We take away kids that are being smacked around, but we can't yank out a fetus and give it to Child Services. Whether or not you agree, that's what feminists actually mean, a much more involved argument than you give them credit for.

"[...] it seems to me that here, God's hand is very much in evidence and 'what God hath joined together let not man put asunder' [...]"

For one thing, abortion is not what the Bible was referring to. The Bible was referring to marriage, specifically in reference to Moses haphazardly divorcing people.

"I'm reasonably certain that marriage is a completely pagan, completely female invention no more sacred as an institution than are feminism or communism."

Actually, the Bible itself mentions marriage often. I don't think the ceremony need quote all of the references to make it clear to the parties that they're not just being given legal permission to shack up and breed. But yes, that people are choosing to get married "Christian" with no intention of living as Christian man and wife is, indeed, ridiculous.

Marriages weren't catch-as-catch-can in the old days only because divorce was a grievous sin -- if you didn't like it, you were stuck with it, thanks to Moses. The Bible is quite clear about God's stance on the whole thing.

And I don't care what you think about him, don't bring God into it. It's not in good taste, and it's the ultimate example of an appeal to authority -- a very, very, very bad logical fallacy. It's using an unprovable belief to back up an argument. There's nothing worse than someone claiming to think rationally and then saying "Well, yeah, I believe in... therefore..." You may as well say "Well, yeah, I feel... therefore..." You can use a belief in an argument as long as you're discussing beliefs, or attempting to prove them. But you're discussing actual physical realities here.

Anything God says is hearsay, anyway; we have absolutely no way of verifying it with the man himself. The potential for misattribution is huge, given the time span and the lack of divine intervention (or at least some divine rephrasing) since the Bible was written.

"It is, after all, called Matrimony and not Patrimony, right? I mean, duh."

It's called Matrimony because women are the child-bearers. Mater means, obviously, mother, and -mony means pertaining to an abstract state: pertaining to the state of motherhood. That was what you got when you married a woman: a mother for your children. In the old days we had no way of knowing who was daddy, but we could always tell who was mommy (note the heroic restraint stopping me from saying, "Duh.")

Marriage arose when society arose. When you're wandering about in the desert it doesn't help to have your population warring amongst themselves for sex. Marriage reduced sexual competition by marking certain people "out of bounds." (This from Desmond Morris again.) In agricultural times, marriage was also a good way to cement trade relations with your neighbors. You were assured your family line would continue, and the girl's Pater familias gained control over how the new husband went about his business. Most agricultural societies were geritocracies, so the husband had to respect the older father-in-law. In exchange for the loss of power he got a wife, kids, baby-sitter, cook, seamstress (Proverbs 31 outlines the things you got from a good wife)... oh, and did I mention her often sizable dowry, usually land and livestock?

Marriage was just another contract, but this one involved transferring the ownership of a daughter, instead of sheep. I'm sure the arrangement was entirely a women's idea -- a woman on crack, maybe. Look:

"[I]n the world's earliest civilizations, those of the Near East, women became a chattel first of her father, then of her husband, then of her son ... In general, whether she was Egyptian, Babylonian, or Jewish, the "free" woman - as distinct from the slave, whose lot appears to have been very little worse - was the property of her father during childhood and her husband from adolescence on. Unless by some fortunate chance love intervened, she was to her husband essentially a mother for his children and a housekeeper, a kind of upper servant to be treated well unless she failed in her duties, in which case she could be dismissed or pensioned off according to inclination." [Reay Tannahill]

So much for the golden age of the Goddess. And on that note: Paganism wasn't completely female. The Masons are older and more pagan than anything "goddess-based;" Wicca arose in 1956. Despite what feminists might posit, there is no proof whatsoever that pagan societies were ever matriarchies -- quite the contrary.

"Furthermore, scholars generally agree that there is no indication, either archaeological or in the written record, that any ancient people ever worshipped a single, archetypal goddess." [Charlotte Allen]

"'Deadbeat Dads,' to me, is a skewed feminist perception. It is not that men are deserting their families in many cases, so much as it is that they are being driven from their families by the pressure to Believe Five Impossible Things Before Breakfast, to capitulate, that is, to Feminist Ideology, to admit to the Orwellian imperative to believe that Feminist Lies are the Truth and that Masculine Truths are Lies. Reason can't win in an argument with Emotion."

This is just showing off, Dave, and is also a cheap way knock women -- which you should already have succeeded in doing, pages ago. Anyway, you're missing another point: The only time the "Deadbeat Dad" should be used, I think, is when a fellow and his wife specifically get pregnant with the intention of producing some child'uns. Chances are good that Mr. Deadbeat leaves because his life isn't turning out well, not because she's forced him to believe something; that they're married and have produced future generations of Deadbeats is proof that he believes. Heck, he might have asked her for children! And just as being drunk doesn't excuse you from rape, being in love shouldn't excuse you from blindness. If Mr. Deadbeat changes his mind, tough: He made a decision that he knew at the time had serious ramifications -- kids.

The best advice for Mr. Deadbeat is this: Don't get married! Feed her that birth control pill every single day. If you come to your senses and it's too late, you're screwed.

Marriage is a specific institution made in law to provide for offspring. Married men are partially responsible for those sprogs because they promised to be, and whether or not they like it isn't anyone else's problem, nor should it be. Personal responsibility, right?

Now this is a purely ethical consideration: I do agree that the law is unfairly biased in favor of mothers. William Henry discusses this in Elitism, where he says that women can't expect both to work and raise children at the same time and expect to do a good job at either. I think it's obvious that alimony is an admission of this, and it refutes feminism's claims that "self-sufficient women" can have it all without the help of men. It's one or the other, not both.

"By this point, any woman still reading is probably wishing she could puncture my bombastic carcass with whatever is the contemporary equivalent of a hatpin." [William Henry]

Accidental pregnancy outside wedlock is everyone's fault, but ultimately the woman's -- if she doesn't make him wear a condom, if she isn't on the pill, if she doesn't give up the kid for adoption, it's her responsibility. Whether or not she can afford to keep herself and her kid is another question, which is easy to answer: Don't have or keep a kid unless you, and only you, can afford to have a kid. It's irresponsible. Yes, I realize that this is fantasy, but in an ideal world everybody would listen to me.

So, Dave, that's how you do it.

To be arguing your case effectively you need to stick to the subject. First, you need to discuss the traits of emotion-based beings, why they're emotion-based, how you came to that conclusion. Saying that all women are feminists is a waste of time; you can't prove it. For instance, there is a branch feminism that exists to discredit feminism! They're called Individualist Feminists, and have many female members (myself included).

Instead, prove that our cultural ideology is flawed. Prove, using examples like I did, that women are emotion-based and susceptible to society's prevalent myths and ideas. Discuss why personal responsibility no longer exists, and why creatures of reason and light have been overwhelmed by those clearly destructive forces of darkness into letting this happen. (This is what William Henry and his ilk try to do).

Then discuss the ramifications of your conclusion -- but only after you've given your audience enough facts to follow you there. You should have addressed each point from your "sixteen impossible things" and discussed why each one was flawed, and why it agreed with your hypothesis -- like you did with the government-funded daycare and the alimony thing.

Also, in many places you simply failed to define your terms. He who controls the words controls the debate -- you can up and change your definitions whenever you like, which makes it very difficult to pin you down when your logic is faulty.

As much as I admire the fact that you're completely self-taught, it would behoove you to formally develop your writing and thinking, and perhaps have someone outside your circle of acquaintances critique your work.

I'm only going to do your first "Tangent;" I think I've made my point... Okay, okay, I can't resist:

"In the night there shall be two men in one bed: the one shall be taken and the other shall be left ..." ([Luke] 17:34) "Two women shall be grinding together: the one shall be taken and the other left." (17:35)

"Grinding" is the actual word in the original text used elsewhere to describe the first step in making bread: grinding wheat. Besides, it actually states in other places in the Bible that yes, homosexuality is a sin: two men lying together is an abomination (Leviticus 18:22, if I'm not mistaken). However, men often slept -- just slept -- in the same bed, because they were brothers or related. That, and three-bedroom mud huts with two-car garages weren't in style back then. Space was limited.

Luckily for intelligent people, books written by crazy cultists about a fairytale "Creator" because they didn't understand why the sun rose in the morning do not have to be an authoritative ethical source. Indeed, if you're using the Bible as an ethical authority you're just as weak-minded as the unreasonable people you're condemning. Besides which, you later say that homosexuality is wrong because it makes you physically ill -- that's basing an argument on how you feel. Zap! That's no argument at all.

Ethics aren't determined by someone else saying, "This is right" and, "That is wrong." Ethics are developed through observation, contemplation, and the application of reason to each situation in a self-aware (instead of self-obsessed) manner -- filling your space in the world and exercising the rights you have, without slopping over into someone else's space or violating their rights.

In closing, there are lots of things in the world that are contrary to reason, intellect and common sense, and the only thing a person can do is to make others aware of this. I believe that is the biggest responsibility people have. The only thing one can do to fight ignorance is by countering it with information. As Edmund Burke said, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil to is for good men to do nothing." Or for good women to do nothing.

Bibliography

• Charlotte Allen, "The Scholars and the Goddess." The Atlantic, January 2001
• Robert Bartholomew, "Borderlands: Deviance, Psychiatry and Cultral Relativism". Skeptic, Vol. 8 No. 3 2000
• William A. Henry III, In Defense of Elitism. Doubleday, 1994.
• Richard Michod, Eros and Evolution. Perseus Books, 1994.
• Anne Moir and David Jessel, Brain Sex. Delta Reissue Edition, 1992.
• Desmond Morris, The Human Animal. BBC Productions, 1994
• Reay Tannahill, Sex in History. Scarborough House Publishers, Revised & Updated Edition, 1982.
• Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature. Harvard University Press, 1988.

Endnotes

1. [A]s a general rule, political monocultures encourage intellectual insularity, tendentious standards, superficial scholarship, special pleading, and savage enforcement of doctrinal conformity. Most of my academic colleagues will concur that this pretty well describes Women's Studies as long as they don't have to say so in public. It is now beyond challenge that a "discipline" may be little more than a propaganda operation for a fervent political movement, yet still be accorded the trappings of a genuine scholarly enterprise... A maverick professor in the Midwest was rudely reminded of this recently when he attempted to organize a formal course on "political correctness." His nervous colleagues quickly shot down the idea, having been notified by a representative of the feminist scholarly community that "We forbid any course that says we restrict free speech." [Norman Levitt]

2. This kind of feminism, if I'm not mistaken from your quote, is Gender Feminism. It's mostly written in a postmodernist style (see Lacan, Baudrillard, Latour) to lend itself academic weight. Postmodern literature as a whole doesn't make sense, and the Sokal Hoax did a wonderful job of making everyone in social science professions look like idiots: Sokal and Brickmont discredit some fairly major postmodernists in their book Fashionable Nonsense; John Ralston Saul has much to say about it in Voltaire's Bastards and The Doubter's Companion; also see Paul Gross and Norman Levitt's Higher Superstition, as well as several different publications including a few articles in Skeptic. Levitt is a wonderfully nasty man who openly admits that making fools of people fills him with glee.

3. The oft-quoted case of Phineas Gage, who had a rod blown through the front of his brain, is a good example of this: he could neither feel, display, nor recognize emotions. He was incapable of learning or extrapolating to future events. He had memory, and he could think about what he knew, but he couldn't plan (or indeed live a normal life). One case isn't proof of a trend, but Iowa University's Head of Neurology Antonio Damasio in his book Descartes' Error discusses his studies of other brain-damaged patients and concludes that emotion is a necessary component of rationality. Scientific American has also run six or seven articles about the development of emotion, intelligence and mind.

4. Richard Michod, Eros and Evolution.

R.S. Stephen works as an electro-mechanical systems technologist to pay for her expensive writing habit. She lives in Kingston, Ontario. This essay is a revised version of one published in her eponymous 'zine Sarcastic Girl in 2001.

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