This post is full of random stuff, like a coleslaw. Enjoy.
1. The new Finnish cabinet has more women than men.
It does not mean that now patriarchy will be tipped on its head, even in Finland, and nobody will come around with gelding shears. Honest.
Rather, one day future governments, all over the world, will have women and men in percentages which over the long-run end up matching the percentages of women and men in the relevant populations. Some years there will be more men, some years there will be more women, and some years the numbers are roughly equal.
A goddess can dream, in any case.
(Now I suddenly imagine a cabinet created by all those people with Trump masks on. That's the kind of dream Trump dreams: Himself, eternally, in power. And fuck the rest of the humankind.)
2. The story about "the night witches," Russian women who flew bombers in WWII is fascinating.
3. Marin Alsop, the first woman to lead a major US orchestra, describes conducting-while-female as follows:
Despite the progress made in recent years, she said, female conductors were still judged differently from their male counterparts while on the podium. “The thing about conducting is it’s all body language,” she said, and “our society interprets gesture very differently from men or from women.”
A delicate touch from a woman, for example, is often seen as weakness, when the same gesture from a man is seen as sensitive, she said. Unlike men, women conductors are “required to think twice about gesture because it’s not just the gesture, it’s how the musicians interpret the gesture.”
I found that fascinating, because it's a concrete example of the frequent pattern many of us have observed: Women are held to different standards in, say, politics and business, because their behavior and statements are interpreted with added expectations about how women behave or should behave.
This phenomenon may well have to do with fields where women are a minority, and might fade away when women stop being minorities. On the other hand, I may be wrong about that.
4. The first rose opened in my garden. It's a David Austin one, with a difficult metallic tone of soft orange (if that makes sense), and tends to clash with the purple-pale-yellow-white-and-pink colors of the June garden here. So I isolate it with lots of lady's mantles (visible in the picture as the small yellow flowers).
