The Importance of a Woman’s No
At the beginning of the 1970s, the number of female members of parliament in Finland had barely risen to more than twenty per cent, women were not allowed to keep their surnames when they got married, and the Equality Act did not yet exist. Rape within marriage was not to be criminalized until twenty years later, in 1994. A female no weighed much less than a male one.
The author Märta Tikkanen was a mother of four, the principal of Arbis and in four years she had published the books Nu imorron, Ingenmansland and Vem kerr sig om Doris Mihailov. When her fourth novel, Men Can’t Be Raped, was published in 1975, she had no idea how strong the reactions would be.
“I wanted to write specifically about women’s sexuality, about gender roles and, above all, about rape, because it wasn’t something that was talked about loudly in Finland at the time. I was naïve and just wanted to do everything I could to make society more open and equal. I didn’t realize that you couldn’t criticize men as a group.
Tikkanen was used to criticism. She had received bitter comments for wearing long trousers in her position as principal and had been accused of “letting Finns and communists in” at Arbis. Yet she had never been able to prepare for the storm of hatred she would be subjected to when the novel about a woman’s revenge was published. Tikkanen was called a perverted sex maniac, Hufvudstadsbladet’s reviewer Erik Wahlström described the book as “a sleazy shock novel” and friends would rather go over to the other side of the street than meet the author. A student at Arbis even came up and said that the principal could easily drown himself in the sea outside Barösund. Tikkanen replied coldly that she is unfortunately able to swim.
“Then I got a good answer, but mostly I was completely unprepared for the disgust I was met with. It was a difficult and unpleasant time for me.
Tikkanen describes Finland in the seventies as “enormously male chauvinistic”, where women and children always had to give way to men. Helsingin Sanomat’s reviewers were able to bundle seven books by female authors into a single review. Tikkanen herself worked full-time, took care of four children and wrote books at night. Her husband and great love Henrik Tikkanen boasted that he had never even bathed a child.
“But on the way home from his workplace at Helsingin Sanomat , he sometimes bought ready-made food to take away, and at least that freed me from cooking.
Fortunately, she had the support of her sister Gunnel and later of her friend Åsa Moberg , who in 1976 predicted in Aftonbladet that Men Cannot Be Raped would become a classic. It was in Sweden that Tikkanen received redress.
“I remember exactly when it happened, I was invited by SVT to give an interview about the novel and on my way to the studio, in a long sloping corridor, I met a man who turned to me in passing and said, ‘What a fantastic book you’ve written’.
However, it is the support of other women that Tikkanen wants to highlight. The feminist movement exists precisely because women have supported and listened to each other. She takes #metoo as an example. Highlighting common experiences, in books and later on social media, has meant that women together have dared to speak up.
“Metoo is absolutely fantastic, but imagine that it’s still going so slowly. Even in today’s Finland, it is men who take up the most space. Women are allowed to come here, but not anymore. People always point out that Finland was one of the first countries in the world where women were given the right to vote, but you can’t base an entire gender equality movement on the right to vote from 1906 alone. In Finland, for example, men’s violence against women is still a major problem.
When the MeToo movement reached Finland in the autumn of 2017, a quarter of men felt that the movement had had a negative impact on their interaction with women. One reason for the men’s sceptical attitude towards metoo was probably due to the unpleasant realisation of being part of a problem. A similar reaction as Men Can’t Be Raped provoked in 1975.
More than forty years before MeToo, Tikkanen highlighted a woman’s right to say no to sex and that the victim of a rape never has herself to blame. In the seventies, it was an extremely infected subject that aroused both disgust and fear. A lot has happened since then, but forty-five years later, Finland still does not have a consent law.
Text: Peppe Öhman