emancipazione femminile e Finlandia

I was reading this silly book, The secret dreamworld of a shopaholic, by Sophie Kinsella. It clearly belongs to what in literary criticism is called trivialliteratur: unoriginal, low-quality books that follow a quite stereotypical and rigid scheme, previously proven to be successful.

Still it made me think something about women emancipation, a topic that's very dear to me.
Somehow I can now grasp better how I feel about the women situation in Finland.
There are a whole lot of women - even here, but it's more common in Finland - who feel they have to be just brainiac all the time. They feel obliged to always take themselves so seriously, and this is why they seemed so stiff to me. This is also why they can never let on that they care about the physical appareance: they feel they wouldn't be taken seriously if they did.

Men are allowed to go crazy and be silly sometimes (an example of mass-silliness is the football, but they can be silly in many other ways) and nobody would stop to take them seriously because of that. Instead women have to be either one or the other: clever and all brainiac OR pretty and fashion-conscious (=frivolous =not emancipated). Men can go silly and still be clever; women can't, so it's all "let's be deep about life and all philosofical" and shame on you if you spend 500€ on clothes, you must be of the dumb kind.

It's a bit the same attitude I had as a teen-ager. What a relief it was to find that I could also be light at times, and just "not have an opinion" about a lot of things.

So in Finland girls feel that emancipation passes only from the take-yourself-too-seriously path; here the situation is split: if I want to speak about the last Gucci bag I have to find the party girls, if i want to go and see my favourite Greek tragedy, I have to find the intellectual types.

Emancipation is the freedom to express yourself at the maximum of your potential, and I guess not many women can do that at present, not even in Finland (of course, I'm not saying I can)