Why Am I Not Danish?

It’s not that I long to talk about TV shows, but this one has been so interesting that I can’t resist. I’m

Maybe on a good day.....

speaking of a Danish drama called “Borgen,” which is about the Prime Minister (PM) of Denmark, who happens to be a woman. We watched the last episode of the second season of Borgen yesterday and I dreamed about the PM, Birgitte Nyborg, off and on all night.

Spoiler alert! But, as my Shakespeare professor once said, if you’re upset to discover that Romeo and Juliet die at the end of the play, you’ve lost the point of literature. Okay, maybe I’ve lost the point of it, by now, eons later, Professor Finkelpearl long retired; but his message was that knowing the ending of the story doesn’t lessen its impact, it makes the story richer. So, I am performing due diligence in warning you of spoilers; but I’m telling you, Readers, a spoiler doesn’t matter in this case.

This season found Birgitte pinioned by the demands of her job and her desire to be available to her children. One of her children had an acute mental health crisis, and following the shrink’s injunction that her recovery would require big changes in the family, the PM decided she had to take a leave from work. Naturally, this made big news. Other (male) politicians, of course, took advantage of her absence to build themselves up while running her down. Predictably, they turned her gender into an issue. Questions about her mothering, and whether a mother could handle the job of PM dominated the press. She was a bad mother, because her daughter was struggling; and she was a bad politician, because she was distracted by her child. Eventually, even though she wasn’t quite ready to return to work, she did return, because her advisors suggested the situation was getting out of hand, and policy implementation was foundering in a perceived power vacuum.

The PM’s instinct was to ignore the press. She refused to respond to the insinuations that her gender affected her ability to lead. She told her aides that responding was beneath her. She was happy to talk politics, she said, not gender. It would have been easy to get on the TV and angrily ask if journalists would be asking these questions of a man. And of course it would have been easy to say that a man would probably not take a leave to be there for a child - because men assume the women will do it. Women have to shoulder more roles. That doesn’t mean they do inferior work, by any means. But Birgitte didn’t go that route.

The PM had been struggling all season as a single mom, by the way. After her first year in office, her husband Philip left, feeling frustrated, neglected, and probably emasculated when she took on the demanding job of PM.

Jerk.

Finally, in the last episode, she told him off – thank goodness – and said he’d given up too fast and hadn’t been understanding enough of the demands of her new job and how long it would take to adjust to them. When a former male PM got on the news and talked about how hard it had been on his wife, how neglected she had felt, and how inevitable that neglect had been when he was PM, it seemed to strike a new chord with Philip. While he didn’t say so, one can hope the realization had begun to penetrate that he’d been an ass. I believe that’s the technical term. He’d applied a double standard to Birgitte. I thought it was a nice touch to show Philip getting driven around by his new girlfriend, a busy pediatrician, another strong woman; the suggestion being that he was entirely too passive about his life choices and didn’t know how to fight. Also, that he both enjoyed and was immobilized by the powerful women in his life.

When the PM returned, she gave a short speech to the legislature. It was marvelous. She pointed out that the first four women in Danish politics were elected in 1918, therefore, the debate about gender was about a hundred years too late. That ship has sailed, she said, in different words. Danish words. Her point was, here I am, I am PM, and I am doing what I have to do, so shut up about my gender and get back to work. It was great.

This was all entirely diverting and engrossing, and there was added pleasure, too, that the husband said the actress who plays the PM looks like me. But it was an uncomfortable feeling, too, when I consider how mired and stuck I sometimes feel in my own life, and how unfledged I am professionally, and when I see how much she does in her life. In fact all the women in the show are professionals, and it makes me feel like I haven’t done enough.

There’s been a whispered, provocative question circulating among feminists and sociologists that it’s awfully interesting that our society discovered, just at the time when women were getting into the professions seriously and moving out of the home, that mothering is a fulltime job requiring 100% attendance at home to provide a solid base for the children. Mom can go back to work, the suggestion is, but her kids may turn out sociopaths. So go ahead and take away some deserving man’s job, but watch what you reap.

The implication, I suppose, is that my generation grew up to be a bunch of miserable degenerates (slackers, anyone?), because a lot of us had parents who worked - and who, by the way, practiced a more hands-off style of parenting. Therefore, we try to give our children what we think we missed.

Yet now there’s a move away from “helicopter parenting” and a yearning for the freedom kids experienced in the latchkey kid days. Or was it the fifties and sixties when kids were outside all day long, roaming freely, while their moms were home suffering from the problem with no name? It’s all so confusing. What’s a feminist mother to do?

I can’t help wondering if I’ve been hooked by some line cast by the feminist backlash. Because I surely felt my attendance at home was preferred. I felt that my kids needed me home, at least when they were little. However, now that they are older, and feminism has moved back into the mainstream, I want to earn money and show them a “productive” role model. Unfortunately, now it’s much harder to build a meaningful career because I’m, well, older. So I flop around on the deck, regretting my choice.

After all, I am not a degenerate, even though my parents worked. My stepmother stayed home with my sister for a while, but the honest truth is that I was happier when she wasn’t there. We had a housekeeper, so I was not a latchkey kid, though several of my friends were – and it was fun to go to their houses after school. But I did manage to grow up and attend college and graduate school and get married, have children, and become the neurotic, anxiety-riven overthinker that I am today, without winning a lot of ribbons for participation in soccer, without Mom being There for me. On the other hand, the minute my first child was born, I was all in. I wanted to be there for all of it. I don’t regret that.

Ah, the pendulum. Back and forth, back and forth. We are all getting sleepy. I relate to Birgitte Nyborg in this: the push-pull conflict over women’s roles needs to end. Cease the discussion about qualifications. We need to move to a new understanding of women’s needs, of children’s needs, and of men’s needs, too. The line between working at paid work and caring for family needs porosity. It’s still too rigid. A mom who needs or wants paying work, needs places to go. Let’s talk about that.

Borgen and Me: The Political Gets Personal

Do you know what Borgen is? Until a few weeks ago, neither did I. Among the husband’s side of the family we’ve become obsessed with Scandinavian television and literature. Well, "literature" may be overstating the quality of the reading material. I'm talking about the genre known as Nordic Noir*, specializing in barely functioning yet mesmerizing detectives trying to solve grisly murders without themselves becoming victims of either their own weaknesses (how Shakespearean) or of the killers they’re trailing. Some of these novels have been adapted for TV, but now we’ve discovered – and by "we" I mean my mother-in-law (MIL) – original television series on DVD. The latest one she passed along to us is a Danish show called “Borgen.” She passed it along to us, and with it, she passed along a request that I blog about it.

Borgen, for those who, like me, know zero about Denmark besides that it was the land of Hans Christian Anderson, is the locus of Denmark’s parliament. “Borgen” the TV series is about its fictional first female Prime Minister, Birgitte Nyborg, a forty-something brunette with a husband and two children. Turns out that the real Denmark also has its first female Prime Minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a forty-something blonde. There, now you know as much as I do about actual Danish politics. 

So let’s begin with this: what I think I know about Denmark. What I think I know about Denmark is  it’s one of those Scandinavian countries with a strong socialist system that fosters equality between the sexes and classes and where everyone is attractive, white, and wears burly sweaters. This is also what I think of when I think of Sweden, Finland, and Norway, but to prove that the MIL is right to expect something intelligent from me, let me also say that I do differentiate among those Northern European countries. For example, while my idea of Denmark is that it’s one of those socialist countries that fosters equality between the sexes and where everyone is attractive, white, and wears burly sweaters, I don’t stereotype everyone there as tall and blonde. That’s Sweden. Denmark has brunettes, and possibly redheads. Norway has brunettes, too. This I learned on my junior year at Oxford. And Finland? Cell phones and excellent schools.

This is the sum total of my knowledge of these countries. Wait, no, that’s incomplete. I know from Nordic Noir that there is a fine heroin trade with Asia, a sex slave situation from Eastern Europe, and racial tension with the few immigrants there. Despite the existence of poverty and junkies there, Denmark has come a long way since the Little Match Girl died of cold and starvation back in H. C. Anderson’s day.

Why am I writing about “Borgen”? Because the MIL was right. There is a lot to say about it. I’ll admit I’m feeling a smidge pressured, though. She expects I will have something interesting to say. And for the MIL, interesting is more than witty. There has to be pith there, too. Evidence of intellect. That kind of thing. This is a problem, because most of what I think about when I think about “Borgen” is that Birgitte Nyborg, the Prime Minister in the series, is not a super-skinny woman, but has some curves, and even half-heartedly despairs of them. So I think about how fat or not she thinks she is, and how fat or not I am in comparison to her – TV adds fifteen pounds, so really she is not at all fat, the actress, I mean, and how I’m not on TV so does the mirror add fifteen pounds or is that just life? - and what percent of her life she spends thinking about it – the fictional character, I mean - considering that she is the Prime Minister.

But despair not, MIL, because my point – and Readers, you know I have one - is that this show has a realistic, complex view of its characters. Furthermore, the main character and one of the key supporting characters are women, and the show explores the many roles they fulfill as educated career women with considerable nuance and realism that you don’t see on American television.

For example, in the third episode, a character has an abortion. Can you imagine that happening on American TV? Not only does she have an abortion, but her decision is dramatized. The viewer watches her learn she’s pregnant, get an ultrasound to confirm it, and hide it from her employer - because she's conflicted about being pregnant, not because she's worried she will be fired. Katrine is twenty-eight, and a rising TV political analyst with a public profile and obvious ambition. She had been having an affair with a married man, who died suddenly, after which she discovered she was pregnant. Both people she tells about the pregnancy expect she will terminate it. One is her ex-boyfriend, who assumes she will terminate. The second is her mother, who tells her to. Can you imagine that? And not only that, but also, her mother tells her to have an abortion despite being a practicing Christian. She tells Katrine she is hanging onto this pregnancy for the wrong reason – grief that the father of the baby has just died, and she wants to have some part of him. “You’re the one who believes in God,” says Katrine, who expected a different response from her mother. Her mother says, “God has nothing to do with this. You must look out for yourself.” 

God has nothing to do with this. From a Christian woman.

Not only that, but Katrine has this abortion (which is presumably covered by her health insurance, which is presumably covered by the taxes she pays to her government who then invest that money into a social safety net) without incident – though not without a few tears – and returns to work immediately. She is not maimed by the experience physically nor psychologically, and apparently her religious mother isn’t worried for her soul, either.

Can you imagine any of this on American TV? Or in American discourse in any way?

That Katrine Fønsmark in Denmark can get an abortion safely, legally, and with excellent anesthesia, apparently, in a clean and well-run health facility, on national television, shows that Denmark is way ahead of us. This very common plot point in the average professional woman’s actual life in America is kept hidden from view on US TV and in the movies. For wouldn’t I have done the same as Katrine if I were a young, single, rising professional who got knocked up by a married man? Yes, I would have, and most of the women I know would have – or did – too. The majority of abortions performed in the US are on women in their twenties. Over 90% of the abortions are performed at thirteen weeks’ gestation or less, and about 70% at under eight weeks’. There are about a million abortions performed a year. (http://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/data_stats/) Only we aren’t allowed to talk about it. And while we are busy not talking about this very common solution to a very common problem, unwanted pregnancy, we are forgetting to fight for our right to it, and we are in danger of losing it.

There has been much talk lately about the dearth of female leaders in corporate and political affairs, and a renewed look at feminism and work-life balance, and at the challenges women face maintaining careers and families and returning to careers after focusing on raising children, and this is terrific. I am all for this kind of talk. But, as Deborah Spar, President of Barnard, said recently on NPR (she has a new book about feminism), the feminist agenda needs to focus on a few other things as well. It needs to return to the activist, civil-rights bent it had back before my generation thought we’d reaped the benefits of the women’s movement and were all set. Deborah Spar, like Madeleine Kunin, says we need to focus on equal pay; paid family leave; and quality childcare.

However, this agenda presupposes that women have control over their reproductive systems. This agenda steps around the edges of this right, because there is still that infuriating minority of legislators and deluded constituents who are working as hard as they possibly can to undermine it. If women can’t control their reproductive systems, then they can’t really control anything in their lives. Which is exactly how a few wildly flapping fundamentalist sexists want it, but is not how most people want it to be.

But also – and here’s where I start sounding like one of those liberal conspiracy theorists – while we are fighting to retain the right to abortion and birth control – yes, even to birth control - we are not advocating for those other three agenda items: paid family leave, equal pay, and quality childcare. These agenda items might cost a lot more government dollars overall than legal abortion. Perhaps it suits certain powerful minority voices to keep us plugging the reproductive rights dyke, because while we have our fingers over there, we aren’t lobbying over here for these other measures that would potentially fundamentally change the structure of our working lives and therefore of our society.

So I have to ask myself, who benefits from the way things are now? Who benefits if things don’t change? And what might things look like if this so-called feminist – but really just humanist – agenda came into being? Furthermore, if we don’t let ourselves get distracted by the assault on abortion, at least not entirely, and if we do return to the more civil-rights focused aspects of the women’s movement and get these family-friendly policies installed, then I imagine reproductive rights will be strengthened along with them.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. As Walt Whitman said, “I contain multitudes.” We all do.

* For a great overview of Nordic Noir, try this.