In Scandinavia's equality central, an antifeminist backlash?

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In Scandinavia's equality central, an antifeminist backlash?

 

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For the VAD conference but take my name off of it please.

 

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For the source google "By Louise S. Nissen"

 

 

 

In Scandinavia's equality central, an antifeminist backlash?

By Louise S. Nissen

International Herald Tribune

 

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2005

COPENHAGEN On the surface, women have never been stronger and more powerful.

In the United States, the idea of a female commander in chief no longer

seems so far-fetched. In some Nordic countries, almost half the members of

Parliament are female. And shows like "Sex and the City" have conquered

viewers worldwide with their take on equality and sex. And yet the legacy of

the feminist revolution, which enabled the rise of strong women and

sensitive men, is under scrutiny these days.

 

Studies from the United States and Scandinavia, where gender equality has

progressed the furthest, show that many women find it hard to fuse their

high-flying careers with raising a family, and, consequently, they back down

from having a professional life - some even before they've started one. In

Sweden, for years the poster country for equality between the sexes, a new

feminist party gained enormous momentum last year by objecting to the

increase in violence against women and the gap between women's and men's

salaries. This autumn, however, the feminist initiative fell into disarray

after the movement embarked on a radical direction, rendering negative

feelings that some have dubbed an antifeminist backlash.

 

A similar backlash has now hit neighboring Denmark, too. Denmark is one of

the most gender-equal countries in the world, where paternal leave is

becoming increasingly popular and 75 percent of women have jobs. Yet in a

new book, 12 prominent and influential women - artists, intellectuals and

politicians - from the golden age of feminism in the '60s and '70s wonder

whether gender-equality has gone too far. The women interviewed in "What

Life Has Taught Me," by Ninka-Bernadette Mauritson warn against

"totalitarian feminism," which they think might wreck harmony between the

sexes: Men need to be men and women, women, they now say. Some of the women

regret their earlier militant insistence that men should be soft and

sensitive and want back the prefeminist "real man."

 

A good life is a life with a man who is unabashedly a man, according to this

group of feminists born around 1945.

 

Their generation spent their 20s burning bras, dumping high heels and

crashing buses while paying only 80 percent of the fare - since women were

paid less then. Now they say they want men with broad-shouldered attitudes,

men who can admire them and whom they can look up to - even from the high

heels that are back in vogue. Take the singer Trille Nielsen, for example.

She achieved superstar status in the '70s by singing "Hey Sister" with a

hoarse voice. Today she says: "I've reached the point where I'm no longer

afraid of or irritated with men who are proud of their masculinity."

 

A Danish former first lady and member of Parliament, Lone Dybkjaer,

dispatches her husband, the former socialist Prime Minister Poul Nyrup

Rasmussen, to their empty, chilly summer cottage with a toolbox. There he

can be a handy he-man with only birds and rustic floors to distract him. "He

has a whole world of construction projects and tools," the former first lady

says with an amused smile. Earlier feminists defined freedom as dividing up

all housework, which served to engage men in child care and housework and

pushed women toward becoming tough professionals. But Dybkjaer concludes

that "there is a freedom in having these spaces on our own. I have read men

saying that they feel driven into a corner; they feel they don't have any

room at home. It's not like that at our house. Poul takes up quite some

space." She thinks the wise woman lets her man play macho - and that only

then can she be a real woman.

 

Anne Braad, a well-known cleric in Copenhagen, thinks that she feminized her

husband into obscurity and may have made him a caricature of himself. "He

was womanly, approaching the motherly. There he was, shaking up the pillows

in the living room, looking after the children and calling me when he wasn't

at home to make sure I had put Band-Aids on the kids." Roles were completely

switched in Braad's marriage. "And that was a huge mistake," she says today.

 

Braad blames her divorce on this exchange of roles. She now suspects that

she threw her husband right into the arms of a much younger woman, where his

battered manhood could be restored.

 

Other earlier feminists interviewed in the book also assert that gender

equality can be stifling. "It is good to have a man you can look up too,"

the actress and writer Anne Marie Helger says. And Etta Cameron, a singer,

claims: "All men that we meet teach us something. If you're wise, you accept

that knowledge."

 

A famous feminist slogan from the '70s said, "The private is political." It

still is, some of the feminists declare. Braad sees the equality debate

today as about women wanting even more power: "Men are hardly allowed to

present their points of view or raise their voices without feminists crying

out."

 

Having listened to one woman after the other deplore differences lost in the

name of freedom - it's freeing to reach Lillian Knudsen, former head of the

women's union in Denmark. She has herself greatly improved women's working

conditions and pays more attention to what is gained than what is lost.

Equal pay and equal power in public and private spheres are still distant

dreams, even up here in the north. Yet in the World Economic Forum's new

gender gap index launched in May, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark and

Finland ranked one through five among several nations in female economic

participation and opportunity, political empowerment, educational attainment

and access to health care. Knudsen says she adopted "manly behavior" to

reach the top and suspects that she had no choice.

 

Her generation of women had to establish networks from those old schools,

like men - to lobby, push and conduct cloakroom politics over drinks late at

night - like the opposite sex, Knudsen says.

 

And Maria Marcus, a writer and television-journalist notorious in the '70s

for a tell-all book about her masochism, says that the not-yet-subtle

notions of the equality movement ravaged old ways while it infused women

with new life chances: "We started raising question marks because the

starting point was discontent with the roles and structure."

 

Another strong voice that epitomizes the feminist movement here is the

writer Suzanne Brogger. In 1974 the feminist madonna, famous for her huge

hats, untamability and candid statements, published the book "Free Us from

Love," which bulldozed the notions of marriage and family and was translated

into 20 languages. And then she ended up in - marriage. Does Brogger want to

declare the death of the soft man these days?

 

Nope.

 

"The thrill is gone when it comes to mating, that's true; the electricity

level is on low. But the dream of the 'strong man's' comeback is mere

fantasy," she asserts.

 

Feminists knew from the start that the women's revolt would threaten male

supremacy and upset the erotic scene, even ruin it, Brogger says. "That was

the price. You don't change 2,500 years of female oppression in a summer

holiday or a generation or two. We are still longing for the fully developed

human potential in both men and women in all spheres of life, private and

public." And in the meantime? "Women might want - not a sentimental macho,"

Brogger says, "but a bright man with a sense of humor who can make us

laugh."

 

 

 

Louise S. Nissen is a Danish journalist and former U.S. correspondent.

 

 

 

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