the finnish prime minister is cooler than you and that's okay

go watch legally blonde and drink a shirley temple, you’ll be fine

sanna marin is the 36 year old finnish prime minister who has faced controversy for having a social life. marin was photographed dancing and drinking at various concerts, music festivals, and nightclubs. as a result 42% of finns say these photos have hurt their view of her. if that's the case i can kiss any chance of a potential political career goodbye. sorry i know how to have fun.  most of the backlash has already received backlash (what’s the bo burnham lyric?) for being misogynistic, and rightfully so. marin was not breaking any covid regulations and did not break any laws, so what is the issue? lack of professionalism to be exact. i could go whole philosophy student on you and ask what is professionalism and does it really matter how professional you are if you’re good at your job? but i’ll spare you. while i think those are very valid questions, i also think that we expect different levels of ‘professionalism’ from politicians. i’ll get into that later. i have yet to see a male politician face this amount of backlash for having fun. the idea that we hold women to much higher standards than men of the same stature is not a new one. since the #girlboss era much more attention has been put on the fact that women in positions of power have to check a lot more boxes than their male counterparts. none of what i’m saying is new, to quote pete davidson in bodies bodies bodies “she doesn’t have thoughts she has a twitter account”. that being said, the double standard conversation is very much valid.

another piece that belongs in the dissection of the backlash is age. marin is 36, in politics you might as well be a teenager and we know how much society vilifies teenage girls. i could fill a whole essay on that topic alone (i did for one of my classes last year, let me know if you want to read it). either way, marin is a young woman in politics. if woman put an asterisk next to her name, young underlined it. i mean how can she prove she’s responsible, she’s so young. she can’t possibly be that experienced and qualified that young. the idea of even having a prime minister that young is shocking to a large percentage of the voting population and i can pretty confidently say that her age would be less of a factor if she was a man. however, i do want to talk about why it is so shocking to have a 36 year old prime minister. as we know society does not handle change well. in 2012 the united states congress had a 15% approval rating (they sucked) yet 90% of house members who sought reelection were successful. when these same people keep getting reelected over and over again we end up with politicians who at their prehistoric age are very out of touch with the current reigning culture and specifically young people. we also become so used to seeing corpses as our representatives that when someone younger comes along it’s strange and out of the ordinary. this is not to say that our elders are not sentient humans who are fully capable of being their own person and don’t deserve respect. but it is to say that it is very difficult for them to keep up with, to speak like said old person, “how times are changing”. the idea that a politician uses social media like a normal everyday person is a weird concept to grasp onto because most of the politicians we see sound like they’re going to lecture me on what a VHS is. so when people see politicians like marin posting on social media, wearing cute trendy outfits, and acting like a normal person it’s off putting. seeing a young person acting like a young person seems unprofessional to them because the only examples of professionalism is older people acting like older people.  when you only have one example of right to go off of everything else seems wrong. 

i made a joke earlier about how my political career could never happen if video and photographic proof of me having fun and acting young means i lack professionalism. and i think the concept of a digital footprint and politics is a very complex thing. you used to be able to limit being a messy teenager to just real life but now you’re one online too. i am no exception to this, in fact i think i am the perfect example; i post too much about taylor swift, my concert posts containy videos of me screaming the lyrics very off key, and i might play into the ‘crazy, feminist, hysterical, unhinged woman’ a little too much and a little too well. that might also explain why i am single.  moving on, the point is, does me being a regular teenager on the internet mean i shouldn’t be able to pursue politics in the future. in the age of digging up tweets from 10 years ago voters need to get used to the idea that politicians and elected officials will have had some kind of internet presence at a young age and have, a lot of the time, discovered themselves and their thoughts and opinions in a sometimes public manner.  by scrolling through someone’s twitter likes you can see them go from centrists, to overly online, to radical leftist, to radical rightist, to back to centrist. people change their minds and grow and right now that growth is often public. now what on earth does this have to do with sanna marin? i see that the critiques of her professionalism only come when she is not actively on the job. no one has any problems with how she interacts with other world leaders and her policies are generally well liked. the issues come with how she lives outside of work, maybe not even how just the fact that she does live outside of work. isn’t she supposed to be a prime minister and not a person?

why are politicians not people? and i don’t mean that in an anti-semetic  lizard people way, i mean it an a why do we as the voting population delegate our elected officials as nothing more than their job title. i find it funny seeing as politicians spend so much of their time trying to be seen as human and ‘in the community’ yet they’re still seen as the other. by becoming a politician it almost seems like you are surrendering your ability to be a person. you don’t get to have a life outside your job and if you do then you are automatically not good at your job. it almost feels backwards from what we say we want in elected officials: we want them to be human and we want them to be like us but not too like us, then they’re bad at their job. i feel like that mindset has to do with the fact that, surprise surprise, being a politician isn’t an easy job. if the politician is too much like the regulars then that means we have to accept that a regular person is making these decisions that affect regular people. no shot that’s allowed. they have to be different from us so when i don’t like what they do i can separate them from being like me in order to attack them. when you objectify someone and treat them like a novelty, all those things you say and think about them don’t count because you’re not saying it about a real person, you’re saying it about a politician. objectification when talking about a person is often used to describe how women are treat like sex objects by men. their humanity is stripped away (think megan fox in transformers) in order for men to not feel guilty about the way they’re degrading women. however, the philosophical origin of objectification simply means treating a subject like an object. if we link this back to marin, people see a pretty, young woman, who does something they don’t like (act like a young woman) and uses everything in their arsenal to dehumanize her so they don’t feel bad about attacking her. In their mind there is no way a pretty young woman can be successful in her career and still have fun. not on their watch. because they are miserable in their job and are probably insecure so they take it out on their antithesis. 

overall this whole thing gives off madonna-whore complex vibes. if marin dancing with her friends angers you then i’m just going to assume you are miserable, and do not appreciate the masterpiece that is 2001’s legally blonde starring THE reese witherspoon. that and femininity probably scares you. did you know you can order drinks that don’t taste bad? you’re allowed to do that fyi. leaving off with a reminder that politicians are people and even if you don’t like their policies they still have a very hard job. in some situations i almost pity them. unless we’re talking about ted cruise, he can rot.