A revolution smeared with porridge
Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, Katrin Jakobsdóttir in Iceland, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the US. How do women in power affect the quality of life of citizens?
It depends on the woman. I remember both Queen Elizabeth and Margaret Thatcher, and women who are leaders of right-wing parties, like Marine Le Pen in France or Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and the same is true of right-wing parties in Denmark and Norway. I don’t think gender alone matters the most here. It is not always the case that women leaders prioritise perceived feminine values such as care and social solidarity, i.e. that they have a progressive, left-wing agenda and can put it into practice. But when that happens, then there is indeed a new quality in politics, as in the case of Jacinda Ardern – her heart is on the left, in the public sphere she doesn’t pretend to be an honourable man to gain credibility, and on top of that she has been able to build a strong political base so as to play the game on her own terms.
Just to remind you: after coming to power, she almost immediately raised the minimum wage, began lowering college fees, introduced paid leave for victims of domestic violence, and extended parental leave for women. But isn’t it generally the case that for a woman to reach for power, she has to have a supportive, egalitarian context?
Not necessarily. There are the so-called token women, female symbols, that is, placed in a high position by more important men. In Poland, we have the example of Prime Minister Beata Szydło – she reached for power because someone let her, because it suited the political need to show a more caring gentle face of Law and Justice party. So it’s also not always the case that women have power because they are treated with equality.
So let’s look at countries where that power is realistically in the hands of women. Erna Solberg, then prime minister of Norway, held a press conference for children at the beginning of the pandemic. Do women see minority issues more clearly?
I have to disappoint you. Viewed from the perspective of political sociology, the political agenda and attitude is much more important than gender. I think this behaviour of the Norwegian prime minister is less due to her gender, a maternal desire to take care of children, and more due to the fact that in Scandinavia they recognise that children should have some knowledge of how politics work, and that their mental stability is important and they need to be helped to understand reality.
So can we even say that the presence of women in politics improves it?
There are no clear answers. In the Western European context, there are studies which say that if there are at least 35% women in parliament or in some other institution, it really translates into greater importance of issues related to the sphere of care, social assistance, education, in other words, all those areas which, firstly, are feminised, and secondly, it is women who do unpaid work in them, at home and outside it. But if one looks at it in contexts other than the Western European one, this relation is not quite as obvious.
Look at the current Polish parliament, we have 24% women in it. The party that proportionally introduced the most of them is Law and Justice (PiS). We already know that women don’t always have a progressive agenda, and sometimes women’s entry into politics is due to very specific factors. In Rwanda, for example, after the genocide and the nightmare of trauma, women account for 65% of the population, so they took power because it simply had to happen – there were no political leaders or a stable power structure. No one else would do it for them.
Ultimately, the answer to your question is simple: women are capable of changing politics for the better if they have that political goal and are part of a broader group that is trying to do it with them.
Christine Lagarde, long-time director of the International Monetary Fund, said that if Lehman Brothers were Lehman Sisters, the world would look different. As I understand it, that’s a bit of wishful thinking, isn’t it?
I don’t think this fundamentally changed the situation at Lehman Brothers, because the logic of ‘casino capitalism’ was and still remains very strong in financial institutions. But I understand Legarde is referring to studies showing that in today’s society, women are less likely to be involved in extremist movements, and less likely to take the risks in their political choices as heads of large corporations that have been the cause of all this trouble. So in that sense, yes – there are certain characteristics of women as a group that could positively impact our society.
But would those top positions really be reached by women who represent these qualities? Sheryl Sandberg, author of ‘Lean In’, formulates a vision of feminism as a process of women’s ascent to the top of the corporate ladder, she says: we all deserve the best. The question is: what about those women who don’t have the slightest chance of at least stepping up to that ladder, because they don’t have a chance of getting an education or a good job? Is the corporate world ready to not only hire women and increase diversity among leaders, but also, for example, give up a portion of their earnings to be a better employer for women?
You partially live in Sweden, so you have a unique comparative scale. It is an unusual country when it comes to the position of women in Europe, e.g. it has the highest percentage of female company board members (21%, the European average is 8%). How does this change the everyday lives of Swedish men and women?
A far more revolutionary process than the entry of women into the highest areas of government is the entry of men into domestic work and childcare. This changes the gender relationship fundamentally and society as a whole. During their first visits to Sweden, many people notice a huge number of fathers with young children. In Poland, on playgrounds you see mainly mums, nannies or grandmas.
Well, unless it’s Saturday – then it’s daddies’ day.
Sometimes they show up there then. Parenting is taken very seriously in Sweden. At university and in a lot of companies, you leave at around 3-4 pm, and it’s obvious that men do too, because they really look after their children. Or if we are in kindergartens, it’s not that strange that the caregiver will be a man, whereas in our country it is an entirely feminised profession. Men in general often play the role of carers, they can cook and do the laundry, which affects what Poland has a problem with, namely fertility. Because when men don’t get involved in childcare, usually there’s no second child, women say: sorry, but I can’t handle it myself. In Sweden it is very common for people who decide to have children at all to have several. Women have real support and even something which is very rare in Poland, that is co-responsibility.
What’s the difference?
These Polish women, who otherwise have quite nice partners, often say: Okay, he helps me, but I’m the nasty overseer who has to tell someone what to do – go and get vaccinated, buy toilet paper etc. This makes women feel they are not their husbands’ partners, but managers of home life. In Sweden, it often looks different. The easiest way to grasp this is by looking at dads who spend time with their kids in groups.
As in Johan Bävman’s photo essay ‘Swedish Dads’, which shows fathers on parental leave: one, wrapped in a scarf, running around with a vacuum cleaner, another painting his child’s nails and swinging another child on his knee at the same time, a third washing his little girls in the sink, and a fourth dealing with a runny nose. In Sweden, parents get 480 days of parental leave, which they can use until the child is eight years old. They can split it 50/50, plus each parent has two months reserved just for them.
This changes the expectations towards masculinity in general – we stop treating it as something that is supposed to be associated with strength, domination and we start thinking about masculinity in terms of care, emotional contact and readiness to help. Women who gain access to the highest levels of government are usually a small percentage of those women who are privileged for various reasons. What we really need to do in order to make a global revolution is to involve men in all those areas that until now have mainly involved women.
Ada Colau, the mayor of Barcelona, recently created the Centre for New Masculinities. In the Polish media mainly right-wing portals wrote about it in this spirit: ‘Barcelona mayor declares war on men’. It’s interesting that even in progressive Barcelona, space is needed to build a new imaginarium.
It’s needed everywhere! The trouble is that usually when men get down to it, they do it in the context of threatened masculinity, which needs to be defended like independence, and usually it is a militaristic masculinity, tough, emotionless, aiming at a position of strength. These are, for example, paternal masculine movements in the traditional dimension. Few grassroots mobilisations are progressive. Recently the Jagiellonian Club, a fairly conservative institution, issued a report on discrimination against men. I talked to its author. Our perspectives on the sources of men’s problems differed: I believe that patriarchy also has negative effects on many men, because it stigmatises showing affection and seeking help, the author pointed out, for example, the feminisation of education. However, we agreed that women cannot do everything for men, and even when they try, like the mayor, it is immediately seen as an attack on the essence of masculinity. Men themselves have to work out a new model of masculinity and mobilise around it in order to reject what is harmful in the current models. They need to start asking about the space of their individual choice and how much we are determined by culture, economics. Women have been working it out for over 100 years, men should too, en masse.
Why?
Because they’re in a tough spot, a cultural shift is underway, and they don’t quite know what to do about it. Some feel threatened and react with aggression or anti-female attitudes, some achieve fulfilment in good relationships and family relations but rarely mobilise in groups, their redefined masculinity has no public dimension. And some of them are just somewhere in the middle. Look at traditional relationships, in my family, for instance. I came from a working class background, my mum worked shifts in a shop and my dad worked at a transport depot, he was often the one to come home early as mum worked in the evenings and it was his job to take care of us and feed us. He was the one who cooked a big pot of hunter’s stew on Saturday, so there would be enough for the whole week. Often in traditional family arrangements there are times when men take over various spheres not because it is due to their ideological beliefs, but because it is a necessity. And that’s the potential you can draw on.
Margaret Mead, studying the peoples of Oceania for over 70 years, showed, for example, that there are communities in which fishing is considered to be an exclusively female activity, in which women shave their heads and men do their hair. That among Filipinos it is believed that no man can keep a secret, and that the people of Manus Island are convinced that only men can play with children. In the indigenous community in the Kuna Yala islands of Panama that I met, it is women who inherit land, it is their husbands who move into their homes after marriage. Western scholars want to call it matriarchy, but that term doesn’t fit there at all – women don’t feel power over men, and vice versa. Everyone has their own zones, a woman’s role and a man’s role is not worse or better.
Many analyses show that the process of industrialisation, or even earlier what we today call the Enlightenment, that is, the separation of the public sphere as a political sphere and the consequent division between the public and the domestic spheres, largely sent women home. Before, private with public, home work with paid work were mixed together, everyone participated in them. This does not mean, of course, that there was no hierarchy of power, but there was not such a strong gender ideology, we might even jokingly say, which has made us imagine masculinity and femininity as two distinct subsets today.
Yes, there are some differences between genders when we look at whole groups, but the variation between these groups is less than the variation between individuals in the male group or in the female group.
Meaning?
Meaning that I am more different from a woman who has a completely different lifestyle, education, and age than I am from a man with whom I share class or education-related characteristics.
And how do our ideas about masculinity and femininity affect domestic violence, that is, against women and children?
Very simply: if we treat someone as a subject, a person, rather than an object, violence is much less likely to occur. An important moment in the process that leads to violence – because it is a process, not one sudden outburst – is the tendency not to see a person of value in the other person, someone worthy of respect. We see this now with refugees: first they must be dehumanised, and then they can be killed. The mechanism is no different in the case of domestic violence – here it is based on the belief that men have the right to influence women’s well-being or have control of their bodies because they are better. It’s not much different from racism either – if you think someone is inferior, you don’t consider their suffering important or that they deserve protection and respect.
Moving on to the international context, we encounter trouble again: what came first? When we look, for example, at femicides in Latin America, where women mobilised en masse against this issue, or at India, we see postcolonial contexts, that is, contexts marked by systemic violence. When we look at Western Europe, especially Scandinavia, violence is taboo today. Also towards children. Because children are human, and hitting them is senseless infliction of suffering. Violence happens there too, of course, but never on a massive scale, because it’s socially unacceptable and the state basically serves to protect people from violence. There is a very important connection between domestic violence and the bloody colonial history of each country and the process of independence or, as in the case of Argentina, political violence lasting for decades. Such historical experiences reinforce a model of militarised macho masculinity and give greater permission for violence against the weak.
I can’t stand the view of Latinos as ‘exotic barbarians’. That women are killed there because men are machos and it’s a matter of their flawed culture. My experience is that in many indigenous communities women are strong and treated with respect, I found it hard to believe that this is where it started. Now I see that we have systemically scolded them with violence.
I would also add that we often fail to realise that the existence of macho masculinity does not at all mean that women are weak and downtrodden. There are extremely strong models of politically engaged femininity in Mexico and Argentina, such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. These are not models like from the image of the ever-suffering Polish Mother.
The figure of the mother in general is held in a reverence close to sainthood in many Latino countries, even in contexts as violent as drug cartels.
The problem with this macho masculinity is that if guys don’t take responsibility for their children and the state doesn’t support women, then they have to be strong, they have no choice, they have to build strong multi-generational ties among women and organise politically, even if it’s very difficult for them to influence power. What we can emulate is the solidarity of Latino women and strong women’s movements with inter-class dimensions.
When my son was little, we lived in Spain for a few months. One night when he was sick, exhausted from sleepless nights, my husband and I argued terribly. The following day, an elderly neighbour knocks on the door asking if I’m okay because she heard screaming during the night. I think: how wonderful that she reacted! I explained to her what happened and that it was okay. But she didn’t believe me! And that was great too. She called the beat cop. Two police officers came and made sure to ask me – without the participation of my partner – with genuine concern if I was okay because my neighbour was worried. I felt that if I had something embarrassing to confess to them, I would not hesitate to do so. I tell this story because Spain is a country where domestic violence is still a hot topic, but there has also been a drastic change in society there.
The state is invaluable here! This connection between the standards that make us respond and the institutions that support and act is necessary and brings good results in dealing with violence.
And how do accepted models of masculinity and femininity affect education?
This is an extremely broad subject. It has long been said, for example, that there should be more male kindergarten teachers, because we need men to take charge, and children would benefit from the experience of different role models. Not to mention the content of textbooks and educational programmes, because in Poland it’s a disaster in this regard. Under the slogan that we are defending children from sexualisation, we are actually exposing them to sexual exploitation because they will have no knowledge of their bodies, boundaries, and how they should react when threatened. This is a nightmare. LGBTIQ young people feel terrible because this group is being hounded, but it’s bad for everyone: if we narrow our field of vision to stereotypical visions of femininity and masculinity, we force children into boxes that they often don’t fit into – after all, each of us has some traits that don’t fit into gender ideals. Why are these kids being constrained like this? This problem will haunt us for decades.
I once had a conversation with philosopher Jess Prinz about how moral relativism is the only way to build societies where we can live in peace. If we learn to live with respect for a variety of morals, we are capable of not killing each other in the name of having the one and only truth. I guess those gender patterns work the same way – only if we loosen up will we create a safe world for all of us.
This is the question of what the purpose of politics is – whether it’s meant to shape human beings like dough and bake the same human beings in moulds, or to let that dough naturally grow in different directions and have us differ in a meaningful and peaceful way. I think such projects of die-cutting people are doomed to failure in the long run, as history shows us, but it is difficult for us to even assess at this point how much suffering this will bring along the way.
How does treating gender in a dominance-subordination pattern affect our health?
A culture of strong gender divisions is bad for everyone’s health. Men are more likely to get various serious illnesses and die earlier because they are culturally persuaded not to take care of their health – there is a much higher tolerance among them for health risk behaviours, plus there is an assumption that if they start getting tested, it means they are wimps.
The second aspect is the lack of treatment of men and women as groups in which a disease may have a different course. I feel this involves an even broader problem – inhumane attitudes towards patients. In part, of course, this is due to structural issues – there is a terrible shortage of nurses in Poland, and there are not enough doctors, so they have too little time for patients. But lack of time does not explain the widespread lack of respect for the subjectivity of patients, especially female patients. The stories patients tell about gynaecologists – in private health care, where there is both more time and theoretically the client is our master – are hair-raising. Reading the reports of the Rodzić Po Ludzku (Childbirth with Dignity) Foundation gives a similar effect: half of the women who give birth in Poland have experienced some kind of mistreatment or discomfort.
Take, for example, the issue of caesarean section. Statistics show that Polish women have a caesarean section three times more often than the statistical European woman. The idea arises: let’s ban it! That will solve the problem. Instead of reflection! Because many women prefer to ask for a caesarean section and to pay for it, because they are afraid of the effects of hypoxia on the baby, that they will be treated badly, that it will be a nightmare, that they will howl in pain, and that no one will even give them anaesthetic, and so on. These particular behaviours of medical personnel are due to the fact that women in labour are treated like meat, not like human beings. And now let’s compare that to Sweden. My friend was very afraid of giving birth. She was referred to a psychologist who, after several sessions, came to the conclusion that in her case the fear associated with natural childbirth was so great that a caesarean section would be better for her and her baby. It was possible to do the surgery under partial anaesthesia so that she was conscious, her husband was with her. It turns out that you can have a companion in the operating room. He is dressed, washed, like everyone else. The friend was able to experience her birth in a way that was free of fear and full of respect for her dignity. Women in Poland can only dream about that.
Medics and nurses don’t take women’s pain seriously.
I ended up with a dermatologist who started removing my moles without anaesthesia. ‘What are you doing!’, I screamed. And he said, ‘Women don’t feel pain here’. ‘Are you crazy?!’, I replied. ‘Please give me the anaesthetic this instant’. And this was in a private clinic in Warsaw – all that marble, and yet there’s a guy attacking me with a scalpel without anaesthesia because he read ‘Brain Sex’ in college.
Let’s end with love, then. How does all this stuff we talk about affect how we love each other?
Except for parental love, which inherently begins with a great inequality of power, because it is the parent who has the ability – indeed it is an obligation – to make many decisions for the child, I do not believe in love in a situation of inequality. I find that deep attachment, passion, friendship, which for me are the ingredients of love, thrive best in the warm light and light rain of a partner relationship.
Of course there are cases of various addictions and emotional involvement with people who hurt us, but these are still cases when it is worth going to therapy and working through things from the past, because usually there we can find the reasons that made us consider suffering as a necessary part of being with another person. While passion and commitment can be experienced in an unequal situation, in my opinion, it is impossible to build a truly lasting relationship that produces happiness. Yes, there are often lasting marriages based on inequality, especially in countries with deprivation, which is because people, usually women, have nowhere else to go. These are scary stories about people living in a house where someone locks the fridge shut. These are cases of people who live on two floors of a house and hate each other. I’m so glad there is such a thing as divorce – for many women it’s the only escape from various forms of violence and domination.
An image from El Salvador immediately comes to mind where abortion has been completely illegal for years. There, young women who are rape victims and get pregnant are often forced into marriage with the rapist out of fear of being judged and out of poverty probably too.
I have no doubt that the only way out of this trap of loneliness and alienation is to understand that there is a human being on the other side. Unfortunately, the pornographic culture that surrounds us is not conducive to this. Yesterday my husband and I watched a video about orgasms that is available on HER docs – ‘The Little Death’. In it, women say that they often faked a big orgasm at the beginning of their sexual relationships because they were afraid they would disappoint someone or that something was wrong with them if they didn’t feel what they saw in films. How terrible it is that people, instead of exploring themselves and figuring out what makes them happy and what will make the other person happy, what will be cool, fun for both of them, have to wonder: do I have the right to feel what I feel? Am I normal? This space of sexual freedom combined with equality has a truly wonderful effect, such that at last we can all be fully human – men don’t have to be sex machines with big penises always erect and driving expensive cars, and women don’t have to be plastic Barbie dolls who pretend that they have nothing to offer except their bodies. Equality is the way to a better world, simply put.
Dr hab. Elżbieta Korolczuk - sociologist, works at Södertörn University in Stockholm and teaches at the Centre for American Studies at the University of Warsaw. She examines social movements (including anti-gender and populist movements), civil society, gender category, and parenting. Together with Agnieszka Graff, she has published the book ‘Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment’ (2021, Routledge), the Polish translation of which will be published by Krytyka Polityczna in early 2022
Author: Maria Hawranek
Photo: pexels.com
The text was published in „Wolna Sobota” a magazine of „Gazeta Wyborcza” on 20 November 2021
