AlicetheKurious wrote:Tangentially:
[list]Iceland: the world's most feminist country
Iceland has just banned all strip clubs. Perhaps it's down to the lesbian prime minister, but this may just be the most female-friendly country on the planet
o Julie Bindel
o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 25 March 2010 22.00 GMT
Iceland's Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Saturday 27 March 2010
Iceland's prime minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir, was wrongly credited with being the country's first female head of state. That honour goes to Vigdis Finnbogadottir, who served as president from 1980 to 1996
Iceland is fast becoming a world-leader in feminism. A country with a tiny population of 320,000, it is on the brink of achieving what many considered to be impossible: closing down its sex industry.
While activists in Britain battle on in an attempt to regulate lapdance clubs – the number of which has been growing at an alarming rate during the last decade – Iceland has passed a law that will result in every strip club in the country being shut down. And forget hiring a topless waitress in an attempt to get around the bar: the law, which was passed with no votes against and only two abstentions, will make it illegal for any business to profit from the nudity of its employees.
Even more impressive: the Nordic state is the first country in the world to ban stripping and lapdancing for feminist, rather than religious, reasons. Kolbrún Halldórsdóttir, the politician who first proposed the ban, firmly told the national press on Wednesday: "It is not acceptable that women or people in general are a product to be sold." When I asked her if she thinks Iceland has become the greatest feminist country in the world, she replied: "It is certainly up there. Mainly as a result of the feminist groups putting pressure on parliamentarians. These women work 24 hours a day, seven days a week with their campaigns and it eventually filters down to all of society."
The news is a real boost to feminists around the world, showing us that when an entire country unites behind an idea anything can happen. And it is bound to give a shot in the arm to the feminist campaign in the UK against an industry that is both a cause and a consequence of gaping inequality between men and women.
According to Icelandic police, 100 foreign women travel to the country annually to work in strip clubs. It is unclear whether the women are trafficked, but feminists say it is telling that as the stripping industry has grown, the number of Icelandic women wishing to work in it has not. Supporters of the bill say that some of the clubs are a front for prostitution – and that many of the women work there because of drug abuse and poverty rather than free choice. I have visited a strip club in Reykjavik and observed the women. None of them looked happy in their work.
So how has Iceland managed it? To start with, it has a strong women's movement and a high number of female politicans. Almost half the parliamentarians are female and it was ranked fourth out of 130 countries on the international gender gap index (behind Norway, Finland and Sweden). All four of these Scandinavian countries have, to some degree, criminalised the purchase of sex (legislation that the UK will adopt on 1 April). "Once you break past the glass ceiling and have more than one third of female politicians," says Halldórsdóttir, "something changes. Feminist energy seems to permeate everything."
Thank you, Alice, for this information. For years I have been trying to explain the oppression of females on planet Earth to men (and women) who can't (or refuse to) see the forest for the trees. I have always been against censorship and outright banning of prostitution and "sex work" because I hoped the world would simply evolve where things like the commodification of women's bodies simply disappeared (at least in so-called first world countries, educated countries) just as outright ownership of people has gone by the wayside.
Everyone seems to ignore the stats about why women do this work and the stats about how many women are raped, including a huge number of female soldiers raped by their "brothers in arms." And of course the answer is that WOMEN should take more courses on self-defense and WOMEN should NOT do certain things or dress certain ways.
How about we call on Men to stop raping. Why are there classes in schools for females to protect themselves yet there are no classes in schools for boys and men to uh, stop raping us?
I love new experiments and I hope Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir's goes well!
