As a group, we have to start deconstructing gender norms.
Last century at the beginning, many imagined that women's issues could be promoted without promoting the rights of maids. Bourgeois women's organizations certainly did not demand the right to vote for all women. It would no longer be a stretch to propose limiting the right to vote based on income level. Culture changes when it is changed.
Equality has advanced in a revolutionary way. In the 19th century, the husband lost the right to discipline or beat his wife before the law. Then the father's power over unmarried women was broken. In my senior year in 1994, the husband lost the right to rape his wife. I had time to have numerous conversations in bars, in which men emphatically argued that they promised to give when they got married.
I grew up as a girl in a time when Finland debated about female priesthood and watched on television The Benny Hill Show, where sexual harassment is the central driving force of humor. I also think it was a really fun program. My mind is saturated with vocabulary and imagery that is hard to get rid of.
We we're all still on the road when it comes to untangling our own prejudices. Some are further along than others, but there is enough work for everyone for a lifetime. I don't see a better way to do that than through meetings and conversations with all kinds of people.
The biggest equality challenge in modern Finland is related to racism. As long as we discuss equality only among like-minded or similar people, we are doomed to lose. All the challenges of equality are part of the same problematic thinking, according to which women and men are inevitably different as citizens, people can be divided into us and others.
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Culture changes when it is changed.
We live in a country where some girls and women are forced, under the threat of violence, to live in a parallel reality without the freedom to go, come and love. They can't dress however they want. For Somali girls who have shown academic ability, a secondary degree is recommended for the traditional occupation of an immigrant girl. Our girls are taken abroad to be mutilated. If Miina Sillanpää lived, he would surely intervene in this. Freedom belongs to everyone. Also for brown girls.
In legislation there is still much to be done for equality. For example, when it comes to conscription, the law is still not the same for everyone. However, the biggest change is needed at the level of civil society.
If we want girls and women from families who have arrived here from all different backgrounds to be part of common Finnish equality, we have to start meeting everyone, hearing everyone's stories, putting all kinds of performers on stage.
If we want people to be free to choose their own life path according to their own inclinations and not according to narrow gender roles, we have to start working on dismantling gender norms as a whole. We must be ready to critically examine our own life story and choices as well.
in Finland the occupation and the division of family leave between the child's parents are still chosen in accordance with stereotypes. White men beat white women. It's nice to imagine that you chose your lifestyle yourself, but that's not true. We are all puppies who, in order to please others, have ended up like our environment or resigned to our fate.
We can all grow ourselves by developing towards greater freedom and promote equality in society as citizens of a free country. Then we can't pick raisins from the bun and speak only for the perspective of equality that is easiest for us to understand or even in our own interest.
A writer is a writer.
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