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+--- Thread: In the 'Nordic paradox', high rates of gender equality does not equal safety for women (/showthread.php?tid=1409)
In the 'Nordic paradox', high rates of gender equality does not equal safety for women - Magpie - Jul 24 2025
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-19/why-nordic-paradox-means-womens-equality-doesnt-equal-safety/103842754
Quote:For 14 years, the small Nordic nation of Iceland has topped the World Economic Forum gender-gap rankings, considered to have closed 91.2 per cent of the male-female divide.
The survey considers the gender gap on four metrics: health, education and political empowerment and economic participation.
But statistics on violence in the country, paint a vastly different portrait of the nation's treatment of women.
About 40 per cent of Icelandic women experience gender-based and sexual violence in their lifetime, according to a landmark 2018 study by the University of Iceland.
Further in the article:
Quote:Many in the field accept there are challenges with comparing and collecting data, but repeated studies have shown rates of violence are higher than other European countries.
RE: In the 'Nordic paradox', high rates of gender equality does not equal safety for w... - Impress Polly - Jul 24 2025
Still think equality with moids is possible? When greater educational attainment, more economic equality, and higher levels of political representation all translate into higher rates of rape and battery of women and girls, it's called male resentment. Resentment that you demanded equality.
The only possible way women can escape this paradox is by physically separating themselves from men.
RE: In the 'Nordic paradox', high rates of gender equality does not equal safety for w... - Magpie - Jul 25 2025
(Jul 24 2025, 6:47 PM)Impress Polly Still think equality with moids is possible? When greater educational attainment, more economic equality, and higher levels of political representation all translate into higher rates of rape and battery of women and girls, it's called male resentment. Resentment that you demanded equality.
The only possible way women can escape this paradox is by physically separating themselves from men.
If you're asking me, then no, I don't. I think that defining feminism as being about equality of the sexes rather than female liberation was a mistake. You can't have equality with a class of people that are actively oppressing and exploiting you.
Even if I didn't already think so beforehand, it's pretty hard to come to any other conclusion after reading that article. The most powerful people in Iceland are all female, yet it clearly doesn't translate into the same amount of power for women overall as all the powerful positions being filled by men does for men overall.
RE: In the 'Nordic paradox', high rates of gender equality does not equal safety for w... - moondark - Jul 27 2025
Privilege doesn't die easily. Since it is based on the assumption that it is deserved, backlash is to be expected. We are certainly seeing that now in the U.S. IMO, a whole lot of what's going on with Trump is a major maculinist backlash movement in the wake of #MeToo and other acts of female self-empowerment, along with racism, the other ugliest face of hierarchism. Both have been triggered to their fullest extent by pandemic-induced uncertainty and loss of control on a global scale.
Fear of death is more about loss of identity than loss of physicality, and when in fear, the already fear-ruled (which is all hierarchists) double-down on their attempts to control externals in order to bring about identity security. But no matter how much wealth or influence they accumulate (or how many classes they "other" and abuse), they never feel safer, because identity security doesn't reside externally. Which just triggers them all the more, because they don't know how else to respond to their fears.
And yet, I am old enough to have witnessed considerable progress in equality, despite all of this. It's easy to miss, as it has been SO slow and incremental, and there is SO much farther to go. However, comparing it with other countries that are similar to the U.S. 50 years ago, changes do become apparent.
I spent much of my twenties (early to mid-80s) asking myself whether it was worth interacting with men or trying to change them at all. I was a separatist and mostly avoided men as much as I could. My fundamental question was, CAN men change, or is their behavior inherent?
Ultimately, I decided that they did have the capacity to change, and even that they would... eventually. And it is happening - I now see men taking stands and educating each other on a public and global scale that I would never have thought possible 40 years ago. This is the very core of change. The burden can't ultimately be on subordinated classes in a hierarchy to change the ruling class. Challenge it for our own well-being, yes. But to erase that whole overlord/underling dynamic, the privilege group has to recognize the superiority of self-empowerment based on authenticity and cooperation, and quit privilege.
Before that happens, there is and will be ferocious pushback. It's going to take generations. It already has. I believe what the U.S. is going through with Trump has to happen, to resolve issues about privilege and hierarchy in our country left over from the Civil War and earlier. These issues weren't resolved by the Union victory, just repressed. Changing behavior is progress for victims, but if minds aren't also changed, it won't stick. What we're seeing now is what happens when change of behavior is enacted under external pressures without the changing of minds.
Bernie and AOC have been criticized for using big words people don't know in their "fighting oligarchy" tour. But people DO know what oligarchy is, they just didn't have the word for it (and now they do), which is what has made those tours so successful, clarifying who the enemy (politically speaking) really is.
Now let's do "toxic masculinity." That needs to be recognizable to and rejected by a sizable percentage of those who have embraced it. Some of them have embraced it intentionally, conscious of its relation to sex and race-based hierarchy. Those will be the hardest to change, but it does happen - we have seen white supremacists recant, for example.
But I think (hope) a lot of Trump supporters didn't really understand what they were embracing. And now they are finally starting to perceive it. I'm trying not to get my hopes up that this will be the straw that breaks the illusion's back.
Male "progressives" are jumping a too gleefully and triumphantly on the potential political implications of the conservative shift in perception, demoting the suffering of women and girls to a secondary (if that) issue. That's a huge mistake that could push questioning conservatives back into their denial. Not to mention pissing me off a lot. A WHOLE lot!
The suffering of women and girls is at the core of this shift, and of the long absent and so important unity of Republicans and Democrats. The announcement that the Epstein files wouldn't be released because there was no there there came on July 7th. That the sorrow and horror of the Epstein sex trafficking finally became visceral instead of abstract as dozens of girl children's bodies were still being retrieved from the July 4th Texas floods is no coincidence. The connection between the sorrow and horror over irreparable harm to vulnerable young females in both situations was natural, and I suspect largely unconscious, but as we've seen, hugely powerful.
Recognizing and abhorring this pain, bringing women to the forefront, and re-peopling us (as in "feminism is the radical notion that women are people") is exactly the emotional shift that needs to happen to divorce those who have embraced toxic masculinity without understanding what it is from MAGA. And women with followings and profeminist men need to step up and keep the focus on the victims, where it belongs.