2014 was the year when we publicly executed the man of culture. Five years later, Daniel Sjölin and Åsa Beckman met in Expressen, the topic of the debate was the “feminization” of literature in particular and fine culture in general.
So we were here again.
The kick-off was carried out by the football journalist Johanna Frändén in Aftonbladet (20/5). She stated that although there are men on the cultural pages and that although they write about divorces and toddler suffering, they seem to shy away from talking about this among themselves.
Expressens newly appointed cultural director Victor Malm gave her the right with the addition that even the male regrowth on the cultural sides is lousy. “Among the younger generation’s new cultural voices, it is difficult to find one who has an odd number second to last in the social security number,” says Malm and outlines a disturbing picture of society where young boys to a lesser extent than girls of the same age grow up to think people. Instead, their brains fade with the number of hours played in Fortnite. According to statistics, young women identify themselves primarily as feminists, an identity with an “intellectual core” – boys, on the other hand, as gamers.
Just like in 2019 years of debate where Åsa Beckman pointed out that the flight of men can sadly be due to the reduced status of the cultural world, meant Kristofer Andersson in the radio program P3 Klubben this week that a cultural journalist met the same fate as the teaching profession, where the women’s entry eroded the union’s reputation. “Reduced status” is often another way of saying: wage dumping and deteriorating working conditions. Instead, men see their future where cash and jobs are. Type as a coder, engineers or in the financial industry.
But in that case, what does the causal link look like: did the status of the cultural world fall in connection with the women starting to take over, or were they given the opportunity to break new ground because a status dive had already begun? Or is the explanation completely different?
Casper Törnblom argued, for example in SvD because a trend-sensitive cultural guy who has spent his upbringing in groups of friends where everyone nods in agreement about how quirky guys are, can find it difficult to be proactive in conversations and debates. Man (men) are passivated. The author Anna Axfors wrote in the same newspaper that as usual it is just that men do not want to talk emotions, because they are emotionally underdeveloped.
Now: another unannounced try to explain the gender exchange of the cultural pages!
Old-fashioned media seem to have met their pioneer in their digital equivalent (hence the status dive), and in order to keep pace, self-presentation, the main currency of digitalisation, has taken an increasingly central place in the cultural pages as well. There is gossip about inflated bylines and the importance of “profiling” yourself as a writer.
During the 2000s, a theory has flourished in feminist academia about women, especially young middle-class women, as the “ideal neoliberal subject”. In an article from 2018, the American psychology professor Alexandra Rutherford summarizes the theory that women are obliged to incorporate neoliberal virtues to a greater extent than men. Such as “working with and reshaping one’s self, regulating every aspect of one’s manner, and presenting all one’s actions as the result of free choice.”
In the last section of the podcast Forum (in which I also participate), Myrna Lorentzson reasoned about the fact that being a young woman has always been synonymous with holding a doctorate in the noble art of self-presentation – now more than ever before. If one orients oneself without difficulty in the narrow jungle of neoliberal ideals of independence, post-feminist jargon and the logic of the popularity of the new media, the career opportunities in the exposure market are endless.
The fact that young women to a large extent identify themselves as feminists is emblematic and smart. It is a dressy, and often profitable, pose.
Read more chronicles and other texts by Saga Cavallin