🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin has apologized for a topless photo of guests at her official residence. The development comes just days after she voluntarily took—and passed—a drug test after accusations of having an excessive party lifestyle. Marin acknowledged partying "in a boisterous way" but said she was angry that the footage was leaked to the media. She said alcohol was consumed but that she was not aware of any drug use at the party.
The 36-year-old, who until recently was the world's youngest PM, has made no secret of enjoying going to clubs and music festivals, admitted the picture is "not appropriate."
"I'm a person, a real person also, even though I'm a prime minister," she said. "So, I won't change the way I behave. Of course, I have to be careful...because it can be represented as the whole government. But I'm still a person."
While women in politics dealing with misogyny is nothing new, I found the vitriol hurled at Marin shocking not only because Finland is considered one of the top industrialized countries for gender equality, but because of the blatant display of our seriously outdated double-standards when it comes to men versus women in power.
The fact that an adult woman—and leader of a country—is being this loudly chided for what she does in her personal time demonstrates that our own view of how politicians should behave in 2022 needs a serious upgrade. If we can allow male politicians to get away with sexual relations in the oval office or lying about parties during COVID lockdowns, why do we still come down so hard on women for doing so much less?
"It seems like certain people still today have a hard time comprehending the fact that you can be both a young woman...and a competent politician at the same time," Rikke Dal Stottrup of Danish women's magazine, Alt for Damerne, said in an interview. "We wanted to emphasize the fact that you can be a great prime minister, CEO, editor, nurse—insert job title—and hit the dance floor on weekends, too. If we want to have more diversity...we have to expand our view on what a politician can look like. We have to accept the whole package and not just what we historically have been used to."
The good news is that the uproar over Marin is giving us an opportunity to do just that, and finally shift our ancient attitude infantilizing women in positions of power. Finnish women are also calling out the unacceptable hypocrisy and misogyny hurled at their PM by posting their own photos partying with their girlfriends tagged with #SolidarityWithSanna to call out what they see as unfair, sexist treatment of Marin.
"Why can't she party after work? Do we expect our leaders not to be human beings?" tweeted Ashok Swain, a professor of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University in Sweden.
The current over-emphasis on Marin's private life is especially infuriating since Finland is navigating its bid to join the NATO military alliance while dealing with its neighbor, Russia's, invasion of Ukraine.
The PM clearly has much more important issues to address than dancing with her girlfriends in her own time. So why don't we let her do her job?
Anushay Hossain is a writer and a feminist policy analyst focusing on women's health legislation. She is a regular on-air guest at CNN, MSNBC, and PBS, and her writing on politics, gender, and race has been published in Forbes, CNN, USA TODAY, The Daily Beast, and more. Hossain is also the host of the Spilling Chai podcast and author of "The Pain Gap: How Sexism and Racism in Healthcare Kill Women."
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
