Finland’s Prime Minister Sanna Marin apologised on Tuesday for a photo of two topless women, taken after the Ruisrock music festival, inside her residence in July.
While Marin conceded that the photo was "not appropriate" after it had been leaked on social media, it caused a storm in Finnish media because it follows widespread criticism after leaked footage of the Finnish PM emerged on social media, which showed her dancing at a party with friends.
The Finnish opposition had lashed out at Marin, saying the behaviour was not fitting for a Prime Minister, which a lot of the Finnish media appeared to support.
"There is an exaggerated media panic about this," Tuija Saresma, Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland), told The Brussels Times. "There are things we should worry about, like who leaked the photo, how it leaked, and why. But to blame Sanne Marin shows a real moral panic."
Unfounded claims
Much of the backlash against Marin has centred around drugs, although there is no evidence for these claims.
"A known neo-nazi and the Finnish equivalent of 4chan anonymous message board began to speculate that the participants in the video were on drugs," said Janne M. Korhonen, researcher at the Finnish Aalto University, in a Twitter thread.
"Their evidence: they thought someone on the video talked about 'flour gang,' which these trolls interpreted to mean drugs," he said. "The trolls from the anonymous message board – a hotbed of misogynism and far-right trolling – began to drum up the 'controversy'. A known pro-Putin conspiracy theorist picked up the neo-nazi tweets and amplified them."
Once amplified, Korhonen explained that the Finnish press "jumped on the bandwagon," despite the fact that their only evidence was a "journalist insinuating that the lack of bottles in the short video means that the participants must be on drugs" and "an anonymous acoustics expert."
However, Korhonen does not believe it, pointing out that "this conveniently anonymous expert says that someone in the audio is talking about 'flour,' which the police, crime journalists and actual researchers say isn ot used to refer to drugs in Finnish drug culture."
Further to this, Korhonen stresses the irony in the Conservatives' positioning against Marin.
Conservative backlash
Finland ranks fifth in the EU's gender equality index, but much of the criticism against Marin appears to centre around different expectations of men and women in power.
Saresma of the University of Jyväskylä explained that people like to think there are no differences between men and women in power, "but for women to be accepted like men they have to be twice as good."
This means that when a young woman and mother is in a powerful position, "we expect her to be superhuman. Except politicians (and women) are human too, so they also have flaws," she added.
Asked if Marin would have been criticised in the same way if she were a man, Saresma stressed that the criticism was amplified because the Finnish PM "has a young child and is a mother" and that those issues would not have been so central if she had been a man.
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Saresma believes there is a "double standard" in Finland, pointing out how many male politicians have either had drinking problems or have been seen drinking in public.
Although women in Finland won the right to vote in 1906, seeing women, especially young ones, in positions of power is still something to get used to, Saresma said. Marin, too, surrounds herself with young people, who are celebrities and influencers and do not look like the people society is used to seeing politicians surrounded by, she explained.
At the heart of the moral panic is the issue of the role of women in society. Although the word 'sin' is not used because Finland is a secular society, Saresma stressed that a moralistic tone is used against Marin, which suggests married women and mothers should stay at home, especially if their husbands are not out with them.
"We like to think of ourselves as modern and gender equal," she said. "But when progressive values are brought to the fore and we start approaching gender equality, there is a backlash. Even in Finland."
