The women’s group Ottar wanted only female appellants during the demonstration for free abortion. One of these women got ill and Jan Erik Søndeland was to take the place of his fellow party member. The aim of the women’s group Ottar is to split the team; they refuse to let Søndeland speak just because he is a man.
Personally, I think that we ought to be uncompromising regarding the fact that a woman’s body is the sole, inviolable choice of the woman herself. The law on abortion must remain untouched; it is that simple. I support Ottar’s struggle for keeping this law unchanged a hundred per cent. Still, Ottar exposes a complete lack of insight in equality when they refuse someone to speak based solely on their gender.
All women have a father, maybe a brother, husband, or grandfather. To refuse men’s support through pleas is to stagnate equality. It should, by the way, be to the advantage of woman and man, but if you ask a radical feminist, women have monopoly of equality. Then it is no longer equality; it is a struggle for women’s’ liberation, and the man is the enemy. We, the women, are reduced to some miserable beings, and I will have none of it!
What it really implies, is that according to radical feminists, women are the weak gender that must always be taken care of. Why else would they feel threatened by the presence of a man? Do they not understand that we need men to reproduce?
If we had tried to view the issue from another angle, and refused a woman just because she is female, we had gotten enormous newspaper headlines for several days! We would all have agreed that equality was threatened and massive demonstrations would have been mobilised.
The women’s group Ottar makes itself irrelevant through its hatred against men. That is really quite fine. The radical feminism exposes a constant cowardness regarding the real struggle for women’s liberation.
They are not totally unused to being criticised by me regarding their unsubtle focus on the struggle for women’s liberation.
One thing is, however, crystal clear; the women’s group Ottar does not represent us women. Most women do not resent co-operating with men. The presence of men does not threaten our existence. And as we often ask for the support of men in the struggle for women’s’ liberation, we should not close off men from struggles to be fought as a team and not as a split group where the gender defines who is entitled to provide support or not.
Translated to English by Lars Hoem