Many women feel that the woman's lot in contemporary society requires criticism — but all they manage to say is 'I'm not a feminist, but...'. Kaarina Hazard is, and speaks her mind

Haven't I heard yet that it's time to give it up already? Haven't I heard that single-minded, humourless feminism won't get you an inch closer to where you want to be? That your credibility suffers, the cause suffers, and women suffer so just be quiet for one goddamn second already! So why is this peach-pit-sized pea, this woman thingy, still chafing my cute little nose? Simply because I'm a woman. And what if you weren't, the enquiry comes every now and then, meaning to be sly — apparently intending to get the feminist to swear that, yes, of course she would be interested in it regardless of what equipment she had down south. The unspoken assertion of this sly enquiry is that the authenticity of feminism should be demonstrated by its non-alignment with gender, as if feminism were some sort of religious-like conviction rather than a tool.


Photo: Adam Korpak

     
     So what if I were a man? Oh, I would shoot and ride horses! I would belch and fart with the boys every night on a ten-thousand-euro monthly salary, and occupy myself solely with secret stallion trades. I would only want to see women as they bend down lithely to retrieve the bottle opener when it slips from my own hand under the table. The problem is that I'm not a man; that is precisely the problem. I've bought the argument about gender equality, equal freedom of speech and action, and my whole adult life I've been left pissed off that there is the gap between the declaration and the reality, the existence of which is too often disputed. If the world were what was shown to me during social studies class, I would keep my mouth shut. It just isn't.
     Without fail, every weekend supplement has that perky beauty queen who says with a smile that she can hold her own and take care of herself, but she is not any kind of feminist — certainly not, not that. And the young lady doesn't bat an eyelid; her gaze does not waver nor her brow wrinkle at the thought that by being there in that magazine expressing herself so beautifully, she is enjoying all the privileges of citizenship that countless unnamed fellow sisters have earned just for her over the course of decades and centuries. This girl chirping in her underwear in the magazine is the flower and crowning jewel of the women's movement up to this point! Why on earth is she so determined to distance herself from her heritage?
     Dear young women, I know that feminism is a tiresome, old-fashioned and trifling subject. I know that on sweet summer nights the 1323 Treaty of Pähkinäsaari [Schlüsselburg] is more interesting to you than gender quotas or the problems of equal pay — and may that be granted to you. But before you sigh that you've already heard all about the equality of the sexes and snap that the life you're living as a free, adult woman is much more full than that of your mothers, I would like to briefly remind you of two things. Work for money. And remember that gender is not a private matter.
     Your part is not easy in any sense of the word. As healthy, clever beings you have long since realised what a woman has to be able to do if she wants to be taken seriously: a trinity of A Babe, A Mother and A Professional. Perhaps you've already noticed the instability of this triangle: when you try at one, you fail at the other.
     Our shared public discourse thrives on differences, including differences between the sexes. The greater the differences, distances and opposites appear, the more arousing accounts of the world you get. This is why the papers are full of discord and extremes, which serve to arouse our interest. The tabloids don't do stories about how peacefully families do the dishes, clean the house and wash laundry in comparative harmony; instead they say that a man who does housework gets sex. They don't get a headline from an engaged couple going to a holiday cottage, but rather from the young woman whacking her rich older man over the head out on an island. A peaceful married couple sailing in unisex shell suits doesn't interest us, but the quarrels of a drug addict and an actress certainly do.
     The draw of stark situations comes from the fact that we don't focus. Opposites can be understood at a single, lazy glance. In order to keep the goldmine of lazy intellect from ever running out, we hold on tooth and nail to gender-related habits in our public discourse. At irregular intervals we read tales in the main dailies in which our bad behaviour is explained by biological differences — sometimes women's brains have a plumper prattle lobe and men's a more robust hunting callosum, while at other times women are from Venus and men from Mars. These sorts of cursory explanations dig an unnecessary, despicable chasm between beings attempting to work together and achieve a common understanding.
     This hysterical underlining of differences would hardly be worth bothering about if it did not lead to behaviour time and time again. When a -woman is described as a noodle-brained mysterious continent who doesn't even know herself what she wants, it's easier to pay her eighty cents instead of a euro. When a woman is thought of as wanting fulfilment from her work more than money, it is easier just to see her work as chores. If we were brazen enough to say that a woman is a compliant being who is driven from day to day by the same things that a man is, many of our everyday practices would lose their foundation. After a radical declaration like this, operating a paper mill would not necessarily be more obviously valuable than caring for premature babies.
     A woman's work is only recognised as work when she stops doing it unnoticed. So the next time a man in your company looks around for somewhere to set his empty coffee cup on, don't lift a finger.
     Dear young women: the next time you irritably declare that you can't stand people harping about equality since it already obviously exists, remember that this world wants to keep women poor. The presence of money always makes a woman into a bit of a whore.
     At the end of 2001 a big study about the gap in pay between the sexes was published. According to the study commissioned by the Finnish Ombudsman for Equality, women continue to receive approximately 20 per cent less pay than men. According to this study, one half of this difference in salaries is 'explained' by the fact that men and women gravitate towards different professions, different areas of education and different industries. What this means to say is that women go for lower-paying jobs; lower-paying jobs belong to women. We pay more for taking care of a paper machine than for taking care of premature babies because a paper machine pumps out paper to sell, while on the other hand a premature baby, at most, pumps out shit. No matter how thoroughly you accept these economic explanations, ten per cent of the difference in salary still remains 'unexplained'. This means that women who are the same age, have the same training and job titles and work in the same fields as men, despite all their similarities, still receive 90 cents when men are given a full euro.
     Gaps in pay may be unexplained in studies, but they are not inexplicable. Women are paid less for the same work done in the same time to the same quality because — as has been said — money is fundamentally unbecoming of a lady. According to our entrenched attitudes, a woman does not need earthly goods to practise her virtues. If anything, she needs inner beauty: selfless love, long-suffering and profound grace, which are expressed both as volunteer service and the bearing of total responsibility in homes where there is no husband. Although logic says differently, in the end we always think of a woman's primary work being self-expression and as such something that is just done to pass the time, whereas men get down to business, doing work that must be done and must be paid. Because in the end woman and money together always bring to mind whores, women — especially young and pretty ones — are not willingly given too much money, so that their reputations will not be unnecessarily sullied by wealth. In some strange way it is still natural for us to think that a man pays for his life, but a woman is fulfilled by her life.

Do you remember everything that the Internet and electronic data processing were supposed to bring — connecting people in different parts of the world and making offices paperless? According to the wildest visions, advertising was also supposed to change completely. Through online purchasing, consumers were supposed to receive commercial communication tailored to just their specific needs with 100% accuracy, saving sellers money and buyers bother. But what did we get? The Top 3 from my own email: Enlarge your penis up to 3+ inches! Get cheap Viagra NOW! Invest your money: 700% interest! Email may be effective and cheap from the advertiser's perspective, but it takes a good-sized bite out of advertising's credibility. Or what is a 40-year-old woman supposed to think when she is addressed over and over as being rich, dickless and impotent?
     Next to the gale of persistently misdirected electronic mass mailings the old stand-by personal offers brought by the post start to look appealing. Though they don't really hit the mark either: in their colourful letters the big magazine companies address me year after year by my other first name that I've never used. But I can still give them credit for getting the gender right: at least they offer me women's magazines instead of men's to read. On the other hand, in guessing my age they go badly awry. As the carrot to entice me to subscribe they offer me makeup bags lined in pink or key chains trimmed with gold-coloured plastic with glittering glass crystals. How on earth have they got in their heads that I'm a twelve-year old, smitten with glitz and glitter?


Photo: Adam Korpak
     

      It may be that the young lady of the 21st century is a new, post-modern woman, whose daily work at self-definition in the consumer world passes like a game, and whose choices are not guided by anything more than her own imagination. Perhaps the new generation really has achieved an entirely new kind of freedom which is not bound by ancient roles. But then why do the ads still have the same mother crouching down to clean the oven, who still smiles, teeth glittering, as happily as half a century ago when the spray bottle that will remove the burnt-on deposits appears in her hand as if by magic? Why do we still encounter the same white-coated laboratory man who can promise us up to 72% thicker hair? How is it that new chemical formulae are always being found for creams that exfoliate years off our faces? And how is it possible that with all the options of powders, crystals, capsules and balls we still haven't found the final clothes-washing solution? And how many wing, flap and fold variations do we still need to get acquainted with before the development of the panty liner reaches its final zenith? And the question that has become eternal by now: when are we going to get to see blood in an advertisement for a sanitary pad?
     The woman of the 21st century is still addressed as a biblical character, whose duties and interests have not fundamentally changed at all since Adam's rib. Few of us are madonnas or whores — so why is the woman of the advertisements always just a household appliance attempting to maximise her efficiency or a fleshy object with a thick head of hair?
     Instead of focusing on individual advertisements in the frequently flaring discussion in which we criticise advertising, the focus should be on the whole appalling mess of the commercial image of women. Let us take, for example, the ads displayed over the course of an hour during the breaks in a certain Finnish drama series a few years ago. A woman happy in the forest with a man and a small boy, a woman happy in the toilet with a small boy, a woman chasing a man with a rolling pin, a woman rocking a tired baby; a woman buttering bread, a woman pregnant. A woman swinging her hair; a woman, failed as an artist and wanting to sell her palette; a woman begging her husband to take her on holiday; a woman making love in the sea on vacation; a woman sitting contentedly as a man steers a yacht.
     Of the 22 ads shown during that prime-time hour, only one presented us with a woman who might perhaps stand up to closer inspection. Hiking in the wilderness, this woman climbed onto a rock, sat down and wrote in her journal the phrase 'First time as a retiree.' Suomi Mutual may have said more than they intended: a woman isn't free until she is old.
     Advertisements are nevertheless tolerated because testing the tenability of their claims is not the purpose of the exercise. And this because we live in a world of feelings, in a society of motley choices made by moody people on the basis of how they feel at the moment, in which the measure of a person is not the agility of her wit, the consistency of her actions or her tenacity or her integrity, but rather the depth of her feelings. We judge the competence of our fellow beings on the basis of how they feel to us at any given moment; the mercurial criteria of our approval again and again become our own feelings about other people's feelings.
     In advertising the most important thing is not the individual products being advertised nor the methods employed in individual ads, but rather that it always presents choices based on feelings as the only way to choose. In declaring freedom of choice, advertisements must pay close attention that the idea of freedom is not to be understood too literally. Ads always have to create the feeling that the only possible choice is a reactive choice; that there are no choices outside of those being presented.
     Feelings fit especially well in this market economy environment in which citizenship is being replaced by customership. Isn't the idea of all kinds of competition that in the end we will be able to choose the option that pleases us the most based on our feelings? A couple of decades ago, choosing a jalopy, a mouldy house or a bad job was shameful and a sign of a failure in judgment, but now such incidents can be listed with a wide grin as the fruit of emotion gone awry — still pure in its absoluteness — and thus right. Wrong choices are certainly unfortunate, but the flame of feeling behind them is something genuine, true and right, and so no one will blame you for your actions. The greatest sin a modern person can commit would certainly be a choice made contrary to his or her own feelings.
     Just as surely as the personal once was recognised as political, both the personal and the communal are now commercial.
     In our commercially correct world, passers-by arouse only either envy or contempt. A lady strolling down the street in an expensive neighbourhood in her immaculate boutique designer dress can be judged on these facts alone: both contempt (look at what a wasteful life she lives) and envy (she doesn't have to worry about the mortgage) flare immediately. It follows from this advertisement mentality that we are constantly obsessed with mean-spirited trivialities.
     An advertisement is a command, which can be reacted to only with ones and zeros. The restlessness of our nights is caused by this: when you've just been screaming yes and no all day — akin to the kinds of choices a two-year-old has — the same mood carries over into our dreams as well. It's impossible for us to get away from advertising; there is hardly anything else.
     It is the rare advertisement that comes up with anything new. The rhythms and dramaturgy, characters, plot twists and surprises of these stories are familiar to us from our fairy tales. It is pointless to think that fantasy would be a narrative mode that only defines advertising. Even in our true stories we exchange true, yet tediously ambiguous and complicated situations, characters and twists of fate for elegant narrative and orthodox effects. We don't care for truths, preferring good stories instead. When it is claimed that daily news reporting has become trivial and brutally graphic, it means that the papers want to tell better stories than our plotless and cursory world offers. And the tabloids don't want the aura of a serious newspaper anyway. They want to be a novel, even if only a bad one.

Translated by Owen Witesman

These extracts are from a collection of articles, Kontallaan. Muistiinpanoja mediasta ('On all fours. Notes on the media', Teos, 2006)