Will Sinfest Play in Peoria?

"Sometimes you wanna go

Where everybody knows your name

And they're always glad you came"

 

Cheers intro

 

 

Earlier this year when I joked about certain webcartoonists flipping their political switch from Tatsuya Ishida to Jack Chick (thereby confirming my prediction about the snowflake generation) I was ironically unaware that Ishida himself had taken a steep plunge in that direction in recent months, having not checked up on his magnum opus Sinfest for several years.

Sinfest, for anyone who's managed to avoid it, was in the early 2000s a quite funny mish-mash of jokes at the expense of everything from cheap genre movies to religions to poetry slams to recreational drugs to both genders to cats and dogs, to really anything the author could punch a line at. Though not exceptionally original, its trenchant, unapologetic vivacity earned it a place in the limelight. After 2008, the author switched gears abruptly to feminism, more feminism and pretty much nothing but feminism all day every day, increasingly foregoing humor altogether in favor of simply bemoaning his masculinity, bashing men as guilty of all the world's ills and upholding women as immaculate victims of male evil. Apparently sometime last year he switched tracks yet again to right-wing conspiracy theory, now attacking "wokeness" which by his definition includes vaccination and holding up traditionalism, including religiosity, as inherent goodness.

 

First, let's address the author's motivation. For a long time, whenever his name was mentioned, everyone seemed desperate to pin down Ishida's exact position on the political spectrum (most commonly as "trans-exclusionary radical feminist") but I was never clear on what viewpoint exactly Sinfest promoted aside from the general hatred of men (and sex as a representation of male desire) connecting all feminism. However, the more recent swerve into anti-government, anti-medicine, anti-globalist conspiracism, by its very magnitude, throws light on his previous devotion to left-wing extremism as well.

He's weak.

That's it. There's the big mystery solved by the very eagerness, the fanaticism with which the author yet again dives into a new subculture. For all his considerable talent as a cartoonist and satirist and the punch thus imparted to his causes, Tatsuya Ishida is probably a very weak-willed individual hiding behind extremist viewpoints as self-justification. I'm reminded of a page from another webcomic, Questionable Content, where a gynoid with a very large, military-grade chassis storms away from a party in indignation at everyone commenting on her height. The page was titled "othering" in an attempt to equate simply noticing any difference watsoever between individuals as an act of imperialist oppression as per contemporary social constructionist mass insanity.

As an aside, having lived my entire life as a freak for various reasons, it's not that hard to distinguish genuine ill-will from people casually asking where your accent's from simply because it's literally all they know about you at that point in the conversation. More generally, it is natural for strangers to begin their observations of each other by the observable, by their very strangeness and "other"-ness, before learning details. You are not being oppressed simply because the world has not been pruned of everyone unlike yourself. Recent decades though have seen a vast proliferation of those who crib their lack of personality off internet quizzes and would rather lop off their own shins than find themselves of a different height than everyone else at the party.

 

With its second big shift in tone, Sinfest becomes an interesting case study in the mentality of natural followers, born-again minions. The particular cult he's promoting at any given moment might be anything, so long as it provides belonging among the saved in defense against an overwhelming wider world (be it presented as "the patriarchy" or vaccines) and forty or fifty years ago he might've joined the Manson Family or Jonestown; I'm downright surprised he's not a Scientologist. Subsuming the self in such a manner makes for some jarring lack of self-awareness... like, say, portraying anyone who accepts vaccination as a self-debasing masochist... while just a month prior applauding one of the heroes in a sexless relationship with a literal succubus... whom he addresses as "miss"(tress) in case the hypocrisy was too subtle for you.

Which brings us to a second point: has this past year's Sinfest really changed that much from its rabid feminist days? From what I've seen, femininity is still portrayed as the definition of goodness. Sex is still evil and harmful to women. Men are still evil unless explicitly subservient to female interests (see the father/husband in prison, the heroes going to save the world by saving a female personification of the year 2021) and no woman can ever do wrong except by masculine influence. That female characters are now wearing overalls instead of Matrix shades makes little difference once you scratch the surface. The idolatry at the center of Ishida's worship is still that of Venus figurines.

The shallowness of Sinfest's transition supports not only my point that snowflakes' desperation to atone for their original sin in being born the wrong sex/race/etc. will translate to traditional religion in the 2020s but, more important, that Ishida's minion mentality manifests most consistently as self-flagellation over his insufficiency as a servant of females. By genuflecting before women, he will never risk having his height noticed at the party. He's still as feminist as he ever was, and as one whose cartoons one might find taped to social "science" professors' doors in universities all through last decade, his non-conversion reflects upon the movement in return.

 

Feminism, for all it masquerades as left-wing politics, is an overwhelmingly reactionary viewpoint struggling to maintain the traditional precept of male debt toward females. Its popularity, its political convenience as justification for attacking men, spiked most noticeably as the sexual revolution threatened to demystify women's most entrenched means of control over men and incidentally the wealthy's ability to control the entire populace by appealing to half of it. Let's not act surprised that beneath all the fabricated accusations of wage gaps and rape cultures we find the same old Mrs. Grundy preaching animal husbandry.