Women Are Sexually Harassing Men Simply by Existing

Recent scandals in the Finnish Parliament show feminism still has plenty of work to do.

Iiris Suomela. Image credit: FinnishGovernment, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. Source.

Finland is a pioneer in women’s rights. Finnish women got full political rights, both the right to vote and the right to stand for election, in 1906. Well, as much as anyone had political rights in Russia back then.

But anyway, Finland got some of the world’s first female MPs in the 1907 election. We’ve had a female president, and we currently have a female Prime Minister, the Social Democratic Party’s Sanna Marin, and a female governing coalition.

But there’s still a lot of work to do. Marin gets dragged into scandal after scandal for the dumbest things. Women still struggle to be taken seriously in politics in Finland, like we do in the rest of the world and in all professional fields.

And in Finland, too, young women and teenage girls often find ourselves are at the mercy of men with power.

The Serial Harasser

The major, well-respected Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat (HS) published a big story a couple of weeks ago about the alleged harassment of several young women and teen girls by Wille Rydman, an MP of the conservative, pro-business Kokoomus party.