Blog
28.February 2009 - 00:00
Still making mistakes?(The Parliament Magazine)
Parliament Magazine Editorial Board Member, Eija-Riitta Korhola, looks back over 2 Parliament Mandates of influencing Environmental Law.
Finland is a land of control freaks and disapproving people. It is particularly hard for a woman to do anything other than make mistakes. A serious woman will be accused of having had a charisma bypass operation, while one more easy-going and humorous will be labelled as hare-brained. Worse still, if a woman pays attention to her looks, it causes serious doubts about her political weight as if powder on the nose dims the political shine too. Not that shabby people are let off the hook any easier, the damage they do to the image of Finland is a source of collective shame in this country.
There is only one lesson to be learned from all this: Be mediocre. Don’t draw attention to yourself – for Finland is like Hotel California: You can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave!
Another serious crime for a female politician is to make fun of herself. At this point I cannot help but bring up a legendary key ring that still haunts me after 15 years.
In America in the 1990’s, a Professor of Philosophy took me to a store that sold frivolous things. American humour often sinks to my own level, so I was drawn like a moth to a flame, to a T-shirt that announced: My next husband will be normal. “Avert your eyes” I inwardly shouted, “….you can’t make fun of family values”. I then noticed a key ring with the message: I may not be brilliant but I have great breasts.
Now that key ring tickled my sense of humour for I was a tired mum with an unfinished doctoral thesis and three young kids whom I had breast-fed seemingly without a break over many years. “Let’s be merry and grateful for what is left and take all the support we can get,” I thought….. and bought the key ring.
My only excuse was that at the time I wasn’t yet a politician.
I got used to my key holder, it rattled in my pocket for years, and when I became a politician I still carried it with me. The safest thing would have been to bury it in my garden the night after my first election. Yet I never showed it in public.
Some years later I was reading a women’s magazine editorial advising that: “Very often one has to protect politicians from themselves. Luckily, our female solidarity prevents me from revealing who walks around with a key ring that says more or less ‘Maybe I’m a bimbo but I have good breasts, too’ ” wrote the editor and continued on the subject of how politicians are the first to destroy their own credibility.
Life in the limelight is never easy, but this kind of ‘female solidarity’ would very soon make it unbearable. Losing the copyright to my own motives would increase that feeling of unpleasantness.
“Once elected the one and only thing in a politician’s mind is to be re-elected”, say the armchair experts.
Wouldn’t it be amusing to apply the same kind of judgement to other professions, from midwives to undertakers? A doctor saves a patient’s life out of vanity; a brilliant war-zone reporter only does it to impress his publisher; a professor’s motive to give a brilliant lecture is merely to flirt with his students – not to mention the gynaecologist giving yeast infection medication just to advance his career.
I accept that politicians need to safeguard their credibility. Almost 10 years of influencing EU environmental legislation has taught me that frivolous key rings come in many forms. Take, for example, the EU’s flagship law to slow down the man-made causes of global warming: the revised Emission Trading Directive. I have worked tirelessly in favour of such a directive BUT in a form that is sensitive to the needs and concerns of our energy intensive industries who are exposed to global markets – and I have been vilified for that. In recent years, I have been an outspoken supporter of nuclear energy within our energy mix because all other non-emitting technologies are more expensive – and I have been criticised for that too. But these pragmatic “key rings” will not be buried in my garden either – because we cannot influence the much needed world approach to climate change if we cripple our economy and put our citizens out of work in the process!
So my key ring remains in my handbag and my industrial pragmatism remains in my political portfolio.
Parliament Magazine Editorial Board Member, Eija-Riitta Korhola, looks back over 2 Parliament Mandates of influencing Environmental Law.
Finland is a land of control freaks and disapproving people. It is particularly hard for a woman to do anything other than make mistakes. A serious woman will be accused of having had a charisma bypass operation, while one more easy-going and humorous will be labelled as hare-brained. Worse still, if a woman pays attention to her looks, it causes serious doubts about her political weight as if powder on the nose dims the political shine too. Not that shabby people are let off the hook any easier, the damage they do to the image of Finland is a source of collective shame in this country.
There is only one lesson to be learned from all this: Be mediocre. Don’t draw attention to yourself – for Finland is like Hotel California: You can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave!
Another serious crime for a female politician is to make fun of herself. At this point I cannot help but bring up a legendary key ring that still haunts me after 15 years.
In America in the 1990’s, a Professor of Philosophy took me to a store that sold frivolous things. American humour often sinks to my own level, so I was drawn like a moth to a flame, to a T-shirt that announced: My next husband will be normal. “Avert your eyes” I inwardly shouted, “….you can’t make fun of family values”. I then noticed a key ring with the message: I may not be brilliant but I have great breasts.
Now that key ring tickled my sense of humour for I was a tired mum with an unfinished doctoral thesis and three young kids whom I had breast-fed seemingly without a break over many years. “Let’s be merry and grateful for what is left and take all the support we can get,” I thought….. and bought the key ring.
My only excuse was that at the time I wasn’t yet a politician.
I got used to my key holder, it rattled in my pocket for years, and when I became a politician I still carried it with me. The safest thing would have been to bury it in my garden the night after my first election. Yet I never showed it in public.
Some years later I was reading a women’s magazine editorial advising that: “Very often one has to protect politicians from themselves. Luckily, our female solidarity prevents me from revealing who walks around with a key ring that says more or less ‘Maybe I’m a bimbo but I have good breasts, too’ ” wrote the editor and continued on the subject of how politicians are the first to destroy their own credibility.
Life in the limelight is never easy, but this kind of ‘female solidarity’ would very soon make it unbearable. Losing the copyright to my own motives would increase that feeling of unpleasantness.
“Once elected the one and only thing in a politician’s mind is to be re-elected”, say the armchair experts.
Wouldn’t it be amusing to apply the same kind of judgement to other professions, from midwives to undertakers? A doctor saves a patient’s life out of vanity; a brilliant war-zone reporter only does it to impress his publisher; a professor’s motive to give a brilliant lecture is merely to flirt with his students – not to mention the gynaecologist giving yeast infection medication just to advance his career.
I accept that politicians need to safeguard their credibility. Almost 10 years of influencing EU environmental legislation has taught me that frivolous key rings come in many forms. Take, for example, the EU’s flagship law to slow down the man-made causes of global warming: the revised Emission Trading Directive. I have worked tirelessly in favour of such a directive BUT in a form that is sensitive to the needs and concerns of our energy intensive industries who are exposed to global markets – and I have been vilified for that. In recent years, I have been an outspoken supporter of nuclear energy within our energy mix because all other non-emitting technologies are more expensive – and I have been criticised for that too. But these pragmatic “key rings” will not be buried in my garden either – because we cannot influence the much needed world approach to climate change if we cripple our economy and put our citizens out of work in the process!
So my key ring remains in my handbag and my industrial pragmatism remains in my political portfolio.