Stefan Holm's attack on the comedian Emil Persson has sparked debate and divided the country into two camps: Those who applaud the measure and those who are shocked by the previous reaction.
Voices from the so-called manosphere express both open and defiant support for Holm after the attack. The SD's group leader in Gothenburg, Jörgen Fogelklou, believes that it is impractical to report the slightest attack. The right-wing debater and author Jens Ganman posts a picture on social media with the exclamation "Je suis Stefan Holm".
What happens when a violent attack, prompted by an eight-year-old offensive joke, wins explicit sympathy in the right wing?
I have to confess that I, too, was filled with weariness at the news of Holm's attack and the police report it led to
I rarely sympathize with it. I have to confess that I, too, was filled with weariness at the news of Holm's attack and the police report it caused. Then the matter certainly appeared as a rapid course without duration, as a sentence could read.
As a researcher of violence, I should know better than to minimize "small violence", as it leads us to be surprised time and time again by completed serious crimes. But perhaps my initial reaction says something that is worth knowing about the Swedish conversation and the Swedish policy on violence.
Governments regardless of color have in recent decades pursued a policy where violence is made gender-neutral. Women's vulnerability to violence in relationships is given special attention because they happen to be the most violent group. Men's exposure to violence is also noticed in the name of individualism, namely that no individual should be subjected to violence or abusive treatment.
Men are associated with violence and are considered to need to be able to vent this predisposition
Strange as it may seem, it is instead the voices from the right that pick up the gender perspective. It is unmanly not to tolerate a little violence, is heard, for example, in the support for Stefan Holm. Men are associated with violence and are considered to need to be able to vent this predisposition.
I do not share the position, but unlike a long-standing gender-neutral policy of violence, I see, like the men of the extreme right, that violence and gender have strong connections and that the perpetrator is a man.
While the policy of violence turns a deaf ear to men's use of violence, it undermines the basis for effective policies against violence.
Instead of problematizing the violent masculinity that is reproduced in increasingly fixed forms in our contemporary culture, and the violence that women are subjected to by men, contemporary politics frames men's practice of violence in gender-neutral and individual-centered terms.
The men of the manosphere are thus given free leeway to identify themselves with violence without it being met with an analysis of politics and society
The dangerousness of violence, its gendered nature, its appeal to an emerging increasingly gender-conservative men's movement and its impact on women's increasingly controlled life space are not acknowledged. The men of the manosphere are thus given free rein to identify themselves with violence without it being met with an analysis of politics and society.
The demand on the rest of us to nevertheless react and distance ourselves when a guy, ex-Olympian and now romance writer, jumps on another guy outside an elevator, therefore rings hollow. That was also my first reaction: Do we have to care about this, too?
But yes! Of course, the dissociation from Stefan Holm's actions must be sharp and clear. However, a gendered analysis of violence, of his actions and of the support he has received, is required for the distancing to be effective. Not a society that rants about violence but fails to grasp its place and dynamic role in our culture – now also practiced at one of its main parnassus, the Book Fair.
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