Dave Sim's Feminine Mystique

I walked alongside Matt as we went back to the apartments one night, after we'd climbed out of the big van we rode to and from the home of the family who hosted our church group. We didn't say much -- there wasn't much left to say -- but when we got to the stairs of my section, Matt spoke.

"Alicia," he said, almost shouting (he did this with secrets, as though able to say them only if they seemed casual and public), "you scare me."

I blinked, waiting.

"I don't know how you know what I'm thinking or what I'm going to do," he continued.

"Well," I said, and explained how I had known we would "break up" the first week of the new school year. It seemed obvious to me, I said.

He shook his head slightly and went up to his apartment. I went to mine.

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Last week, I read Dave Sim's Reads, which is the ninth or tenth book in his Cerebus comic book anthology series. It was less comic book than the others -- partly because it contained a fair amount of text, probably making up half or more of the volume.

Sim starts with a thinly veiled avatar of himself in the "reads" author, Victor Reid. The style of the account of Reid's life and times as a suddenly famous "reads" author is pseudo-Victorian, probably meant to be styled after Oscar Wilde (who Sim includes as a main character of a previous book, Melmoth).

I had no problem with Victor Reid.

About a third of the book is comic -- a depiction of an epic battle between the title character, Cerebus, and the head of the matriarchal society in which he lives.

(By "comic," I mean "illustrated," not "funny.")

The last portion of the book is another section of text -- interspersed with battle -- written about and from the perspective of, alternatingly, Viktor Davis.

Viktor Davis is so much Dave Sim that the use of a pseudonym seems like an artistic statement on the nature of identity.

Sim draws "the reader" in by referring to "the reader" in the text. He neutralizes the fact of his diagnosis as a borderline schizophrenic by admitting to it; he tells the reader that stopping the reading here is the only way for the reader to retain control -- otherwise, Viktor Davis has all the control.

And then he goes to work.

He manipulates "the reader" physically, imposing images and uncomfortable lack of distance as directly as he can in a text -- "the reader can feel Viktor Davis's breath in the reader's ear"-style.

He tells the reader how the reader feels: The reader is captivated, for instance, by a glowing orb in space, more beautiful than anything the reader has ever seen. The fact that you may not care even a little about the glowing orb is never acknowledged; you are forced to share the reader's subjective position, or else skim or skip the text. (Skipping is cheating.)

All of this is designed to paralyze. Your honor is at stake if you leave (crybaby, couldn't handle it), and your identity is at stake if you stay. You're not allowed the distance of judgment (he knows he's schizophrenic) or of looking away (the cigarette smoke, his breath in the reader's ear, the reader stares at the orb).

Your only permitted movement is three-dimensional -- out of the book.

I stayed (wanting to test my identity).

Then he started in against women.

Women read minds, he had said in his previous (comic) books. Reading minds and changing minds is the equivalent of rape, he said. Men rape women physically; women rape men mentally.
I stayed and did not flinch; this was a test.

I felt like I'd been left in a room with a raving lunatic who had a knife. I felt like I'd been jailed for a year without a trial. I felt like I'd been tortured.

(Feelings are all women talk about, he said. [And they're rubbish.])

Viktor Davis droned on -- Viktor Davis, self-involved -- Viktor Davis, over us all -- the victor, Viktor Davis.

Viktor Davis's cadence reminded me of nothing so much as Silence of the Lambs: "It puts the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again."

(The irony of "Buffalo Bill's" wanting to become a woman by stealing their skin is not lost, here.)

I stayed; this was an unpassable test.

As a woman, nothing I could respond with would have been adequate defense, and you don't try to reason with a knife-wielding lunatic, anyway. You stay calm. You make no sudden moves. You endure it.

He kept circling but never lunged -- for whatever reason, incapable of carrying out his threat. (Distance and time, perhaps.)

I finished the book despite knowing that in part I was finishing to prove myself better than Dave Sim -- to prove him wrong -- and that I could never receive acknowledgement for this. I was invisible to him, not even eyes peering out from behind "the reader" mask.

Dave Sim argues, two books later in Guys, that men want only to "get er innabed" while women want to "get to know him better." Men are forced to pretend to be what they're not -- someone who doesn't only want to "get her into bed" -- and then need to decide, once they've gotten what they wanted, whether to continue pretending to be that other, fake person in order to get what they want again, or to move on -- to wear the mask or to cast it off.

I only wanted to read my Cerebus comic book, and I only needed to read it once. At the end of Reads, I cast off the mask.

By my figuring, if he exists in some parallel universe as a separate entity, every moment Viktor Davis becomes more and more of what he hates -- a haughty, manipulative, mind-reading "woman."

(Though as Buffalo Bill learns, putting a woman's skin on it doesn't make it woman.)

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He may have a point about the telepathy, though.