Swedish feminist party burn $13,000 of donations to make a point

First of all, a little cultural explanation. In Sweden, the government is made up of a coalition of several smaller parties banding together under a common flag. The two biggest parties are the Moderate one (current government) and the Social Democrats (who ruled for several years up until the last election four years ago), who are on opposing sides. Like the article says, a party needs at least 4% of the votes to get seats in the government.

There are a lot of tiny parties that can't really hope to get in, and some that are balancing on the edge, like the Christian Democrats and the Sweden Democrats (read: the racist party. So far they haven't gotten into the government, knock on wood). Like the article says, the Feminist Party only got 1% of the votes last election and I'm not quite sure how they expect to gain sympathizers with this stunt.

Also, let me preface this to say that I think it's great that we have a feminist party over here.

Unfortunately it's run by a bunch of morons who scare potential symphatizers away by doing stuff like this, or declaring that they intend to impose a tax on all men, to be used in a fund for women who have been beaten by their husbands. While a nice idea to start a fund for such a thing, it's, well, a weee bit unfair to all those men who wouldn't think about harming their wives. The party is simply falling over on the wrong side of the fence, where they seem to rather want to express their hatred for men than actually do constructive things to work towards equality.

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Sweden's Feminist party roasted a pile of bank notes worth 100,000 Swedish crowns ($13,010) on Tuesday in a stunt designed to highlight wage disparities between men and women ahead of a national election.

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The stunt, using money donated by an advertising agency, was designed to illustrate how women in Sweden "lose" 100,000 crowns every minute because their wages are lower than men's

Hey Mrs. Schyman, did you inform the people supporting your cause that you would use their donations like this instead of... I dunno... start that fund you wanted to create by taxing men?

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"This is a lot of money for a lot of people and it is a lot of money for me but in a political campaign it is a drop in the ocean," [party leader] Schyman added.

Oh, alright then. Guess that makes it a-okay.

Oi.

A guy from a local PR-firm analyzed this and commented that it's sure to bring them attention, but there's both good and bad attention.

I'm all for making a point, but that's a whole lot of money that could have been better used for much more useful things! Why not burn Monopoly money or something instead?

While I can agree that this was a dumb thing to do, I can't really say that I agree it was wrong or bad. Granted, it may scare off future campaign contributors, but that was money that was donated to their party for use in political campaigning. And that is how the party used it, even if they were unorthodox in their methods. And since it was their money to start off with, they have every right to use it however they wish, provided they're not doing anything illegal.

Dumb, certainly. But hardly awful, I think.

Hmmm. I seem to recall it being illegal to destroy currency in the US. Does Sweden have a similar rule?

Oh boy!

Nevvy wrote:

declaring that they intend to impose a tax on all men, to be used in a fund for women who have been beaten by their husbands. While a nice idea to start a fund for such a thing, it's, well, a weee bit unfair to all those men who wouldn't think about harming their wives.

Also,

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I wish there were more up-to-date statistics.

KelinciHutan: I understand your point. Still, wastefulness like this makes my blood pressure rise.

gaijinguy wrote:

Hmmm. I seem to recall it being illegal to destroy currency in the US. Does Sweden have a similar rule?

Not that I know of. I haven't seen it in the news in connection with this, so I assume there isn't one. Would be a funny twist though.

What a waste of good money. I'm sure they could have found something worthwhile to spend it on, rather than scaring off potential donors by literally burning through the money.

Psy-4 wrote:

Oh boy!
[Stuff]
I wish there were more up-to-date statistics.

For the record: "Nonreciprocal" is "person A hits person B and person B doesn't hit back," correct?

Nevvy wrote:

KelinciHutan: I understand your point. Still, wastefulness like this makes my blood pressure rise.

gaijinguy wrote:

Hmmm. I seem to recall it being illegal to destroy currency in the US. Does Sweden have a similar rule?

Not that I know of. I haven't seen it in the news in connection with this, so I assume there isn't one. Would be a funny twist though.

OK, I did a little poking around and from what I've been able to find (nothing really authoritative, unfortunately) it apparently isn't illegal to destroy currency in Sweden.

Which is odd, and. . . what's that other word. . . oh yeah: "Stupid."

Gai: It's also not illegal to have sex with animals here, technically. The law prohibiting that was repelled in 1944, because it was grouped with the law against homosexuality - which was what was ACTUALLY legalised.

Zoophilia instead falls under animal abuse. Still, there's no law explicitly saying that you can't rape your dog.

Nevvy wrote:

Gai: It's also not illegal to have sex with animals here, technically. The law prohibiting that was repelled in 1944, because it was grouped with the law against homosexuality - which was what was ACTUALLY legalised.

Zoophilia instead falls under animal abuse. Still, there's no law explicitly saying that you can't rape your dog.

Sorry, I'm sort of dense. What does this have to do with burning money?

I can see where they were coming from, it reminds me of this viral campaign.

Still, way to give feminism a bad name, Swedish feminist party.

gaijinguy wrote:

Nevvy wrote:

Gai: It's also not illegal to have sex with animals here, technically. The law prohibiting that was repelled in 1944, because it was grouped with the law against homosexuality - which was what was ACTUALLY legalised.

Zoophilia instead falls under animal abuse. Still, there's no law explicitly saying that you can't rape your dog.

Sorry, I'm sort of dense. What does this have to do with burning money?

Ah, I was referring to the stupidity of us not having a law against destroying money, with another stupid lack-of-law.

ZoZo wrote:

Still, way to give feminism a bad name, Swedish feminist party.

BURNT ALL THE CASH AND YOU'RE TO BLAME
YOU GIVE FEMINISM A BAD NAME (BAD NAME)

Nevvy wrote:

declaring that they intend to impose a tax on all men, to be used in a fund for women who have been beaten by their husbands. While a nice idea to start a fund for such a thing, it's, well, a weee bit unfair to all those men who wouldn't think about harming their wives.

You mean all those men who currently don't do a fucking thing to stop domestic violence?

Quote :

they seem to rather want to express their hatred for men than actually do constructive things to work towards equality.

A tax to fund anti-domestic violence programmes = hatred of men.

Psy-4 wrote:

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I wish there were more up-to-date statistics.

Oh, this is the study you referred to in the other thread, correct? Is it one that equates a woman slapping her boyfriend's face with a man throwing his partner down a flight of stairs by categorising them both as "violence", and then goes SEE SEE WOMEN ARE CRAZY EVIL BITCHES BATTERING POOR MEN

ZoZo wrote:

Still, way to give feminism a bad name, Swedish feminist party.

Don't do that, ZoZo. It doesn't suit you.

Cyberwulf wrote:

Nevvy wrote:

declaring that they intend to impose a tax on all men, to be used in a fund for women who have been beaten by their husbands. While a nice idea to start a fund for such a thing, it's, well, a weee bit unfair to all those men who wouldn't think about harming their wives.

You mean all those men who currently don't do a fucking thing to stop domestic violence?

I would think that not being violent towards one's partner and teaching one's kids not to be violent by setting a good example is doing a fucking thing about domestic violence, at least on a small scale.

I would wonder how they would approach this tax. Would FtMs be taxed on the basis of who they are now, or on their biological sex? Same with MtFs. Although quite a few rad-fems absolutely hate and are prejudiced against transsexual people, so there's another can of worms right there.

It's kinda like a cut price KLF

Cy, I'm sure this is bound to dissolve into another one of those arguments as it's pretty much set up for it, so I'm just going to say:

About the "hatred of men". What I mean is that the tax thing is just one thing the party has declared. They're simply too radical, wanting to punish ALL men for everything, and coming off as desiring a world where men are treated worse than women have ever been instead of working towards equality for men and women.

Nevvy wrote:

gaijinguy wrote:

Sorry, I'm sort of dense. What does this have to do with burning money?

Ah, I was referring to the stupidity of us not having a law against destroying money, with another stupid lack-of-law.

OK, that makes sense.

Good to know that we've got some consensus on the "burning a big pile of money is bloody stupid" thing, if nothing else.

gaijinguy wrote:

For the record: "Nonreciprocal" is "person A hits person B and person B doesn't hit back," correct?

Nonreciprocal means 'not returned in kind', so... yes.

Cyberwulf wrote:

A tax to fund anti-domestic violence programmes = hatred of men.

Nevvy, can you confirm that they explicitly stated that the money would go to women victims and only women victims? Because overlooking men as victims of domestic violence is kind of... misandrist?

Cyberwulf wrote:

Oh, this is the study you referred to in the other thread, correct? Is it one that equates a woman slapping her boyfriend's face with a man throwing his partner down a flight of stairs by categorising them both as "violence", and then goes SEE SEE WOMEN ARE CRAZY EVIL BITCHES BATTERING POOR MEN

Aww, here you go again, downplaying it. Because when women do it, it's always so light and insignificant(and therefore okay?), and men are just brutes. But let's see more from that article.

Quote :

Furthermore, Whitaker discovered, of the 24 percent of relationships that had been violent, half had been reciprocal and half had not. Although more men than women (53 percent versus 49 percent) had experienced nonreciprocal violent relationships, more women than men (52 percent versus 47 percent) had taken part in ones involving reciprocal violence.

Regarding perpetration of violence, more women than men (25 percent versus 11 percent) were responsible. In fact, 71 percent of the instigators in nonreciprocal partner violence were women. This finding surprised Whitaker and his colleagues, they admitted in their study report.

As for physical injury due to intimate partner violence, it was more likely to occur when the violence was reciprocal than nonreciprocal. And while injury was more likely when violence was perpetrated by men, in relationships with reciprocal violence it was the men who were injured more often (25 percent of the time) than were women (20 percent of the time). “This is important as violence perpetrated by women is often seen as not serious,” Whitaker and his group stressed.

Welp.

Psy-4 wrote:

Nevvy, can you confirm that they explicitly stated that the money would go to women victims and only women victims? Because overlooking men as victims of domestic violence is kind of... misandrist?

I've only managed to find some Swedish sources for the newsbits and I'm too tired to play translator right now, but at the gist of it they're saying that men are evil, evil, evil and deserve nothing. To be fair, in the second link they also present their intention to even out the right to taking paid leaves from work (480 paid days in total) in order to care for your child, which traditionally favors women.

And on the other hand, here's some English stuff from their page on Wikipedia:

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On 13 September 2005 another of the 15 founding members of the Executive Committee, Susanne Linde, resigned from the party. Linde was the only member of the founding group who had previously been active in a centre-right political party, the Liberal People's Party. She gave as her principal reason the treatment she had received from another committee member Tiina Rosenberg, who, among other claims, had criticised her for being a heterosexual, and calling her a "middle class hag". Linde was unhappy with Rosenberg's "reverse homophobia". Witt-Brattström claimed Rosenberg had called her a "gender traitor" for having sex with men.

... yeah.

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Nevvy wrote:

gaijinguy wrote:

Nevvy wrote:

Gai: It's also not illegal to have sex with animals here, technically. The law prohibiting that was repelled in 1944, because it was grouped with the law against homosexuality - which was what was ACTUALLY legalised.

Zoophilia instead falls under animal abuse. Still, there's no law explicitly saying that you can't rape your dog.

Sorry, I'm sort of dense. What does this have to do with burning money?

Ah, I was referring to the stupidity of us not having a law against destroying money, with another stupid lack-of-law.

Well, to be fair, it's not like lawmakers can predict every situation.

I mean, it's money. Who the fuck destroys money?

All fiat currency is distributed by the government and is legal tender, and if there is a law against destroying legal tenders, woops.

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“This is important as violence perpetrated by women is often seen as not serious,” Whitaker and his group stressed.

Could that be because women are looked down on as dainty little things that big strong men couldn't possibly be harmed by, and if a man complains about it, he's just a big sissy?

What an excellent example of how patriarchy hurts everybody.

myeerah wrote:

Quote :

“This is important as violence perpetrated by women is often seen as not serious,” Whitaker and his group stressed.

Could that be because women are looked down on as dainty little things that big strong men couldn't possibly be harmed by, and if a man complains about it, he's just a big sissy?

What does that have to do with the 'patriarchy' which supposedly only harms women?