Monday 10 June 2013

Post-Agrarian Matriarchal Society


Cerebus #194 (May 1995)
Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard
DAVE SIM:
(from an interview with Charles Brownstein, Feature #4, 1997)
The structure of Estarcion didn't so much collapse as mutate. I mean, I was really stretching a point and you have to bear that in mind. It was taking a series of hypotheticals with definitive answers and pretending the answers weren't definitive. How could you have a post-agrarian matriarchal society? Actually, it started with a feminist society - women on top. The tripartite "she dresses better than me and she's prettier than me so she thinks she's better than me," "She's not as nicely dressed as I am and she's not as pretty as I am so she's jealous of me," and "How you are dressed and how you look are not important" are simply unresolvable and the first two will always overwhelm the third. Which is why I had Cirin make shapeless ugly dresses with hoods a core element of her revolution. In real life, she'd only be able to get a small percentage of women to go along with it. Even if she could it would still bog down over whose eyes were prettier, a nicer shape, a better colour.

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