Marian and Sam have reached an agreement: Sam has left work to focus on the children and support Marian in launching her Moroccan rug import business.
The couple understands it as a fair turn, since Marian previously raised her first-born daughter and he was able to fully dedicate himself to her robotics company.
Now Sam takes selfies with the baby in his backpack, shows off as a model father and gets hearts in nets and pats on the back from the other mothers at school.
This is the initial premise of
This is not Sweden
, a fiction series premiered last December on RTVE.
Marian (played by Aina Clotet, who also co-directs and co-writes) and Sam (Marcel Borràs, Clotet's partner in real life) seem convinced of their decision.
But as the series progresses, he falters: he intensely longs for public and work spaces;
He spies on his former colleagues on social media and, secretly from Marian, tries to develop new projects.
Sam begins a stressful double life in which he goes to the playground, gives snacks and changes diapers, but also works at dawn or tries to
zoom
with an investor at the risk of his daughter, dressed as Elsa from
Frozen,
bursting in for a corner of your screen.
When things start to go well for Marian in the business, he becomes sad.
Marian replies: “I remember when you got promoted.
That emotion you felt.
I was very happy for you.”
This scene of unequal reactions to an achievement connects with an archetype being developed in the 21st century: the heterosexual man who wants to support his partner but resents her prominence.
In the cinema of the first decade of the 2000s, this new type of character emerged, through scripts signed by women.
In films like
Erin Brockovich
(2000),
The Devil Wears Prada
(2004) or
Julie & Julia
(2009), an empathetic, affectionate boyfriend skilled in domestic tasks accepted her project with initial enthusiasm, whether it involved suing to an electrical company, work for a demanding manager or take on a culinary challenge and write a blog.
But halfway through the plot the boyfriend got fed up and abandoned the relationship, functioning as a moral warning for the protagonist.
She apologized for having exceeded her dedication to her own passion, he accepted the apology and the outcome was a happier ending thanks to this reconciliation.
Years later, however, the internet felt the need to review some of these cases.
Nate, the boyfriend of
The Devil Wears Prada
played by Adrian Grenier, gave rise to a viral debate in 2017 when he was revisited in different articles as the true villain of the film - and not the diabolical boss of the title - due to his pressure and his constant annoyance towards her intense transformation.
The leading actress, Anne Hathaway, wanted to come out to defend him in an interview, declaring that it was above all about immaturity and not fierce machismo, as if they were incompatible concepts.
But let's go back to the first decade of the two thousand.
This cinematographic mirror reflected a collective awareness.
After the eighties and nineties, which had urged women to combine career, care and affection, the myth of the
isolated
superwoman was necessarily questioned.
What was happening with the figure of her partner?
In 2008 the Ministry of Equality published a report in Spain,
Men with egalitarian values.
Life stories, achievements achieved and pending challenges
.
It analyzed interviews with anonymous men who considered themselves feminists, and who recognized the difficulty of putting the theory into practice after a lifetime in a sexist education: “They continue to naturalize as men their own dominant and self-referential existential place, from which Privileges are exercised, among which the main one is feeling that women are available, in the style of 'existential butlers'.
[...] It would be striking that men who opt for egalitarian couple bonds have never asked themselves what they offer in exchange, as if they did not realize that the equality to which they aspire requires reciprocity in any area. existential.
Reciprocity that in this profile of men should already be oriented towards the legitimation of an existential place that validates women, not only as nutrients and enablers of their lives with the possibility of having the rights to develop their own activities.
In 2010, Sheryl Sandberg, then CEO of Facebook, gave an influential TED talk:
Why do we have so few female leaders?
Among the three basic requirements that she proposed to persevere in a career was
Make your partner a real partner
.
Sandberg's speech has inevitably been often challenged - for example, in the book
Bad Feminist
, by Roxane Gay - for its fervently meritocratic basis, with its American millionaire motivational jargon, and for simplifying the scheme by ignoring many factors.
But the criticisms and replies also pointed out the need to attend to the responsibility of supporting a colleague.
A Harvard Business School study of interviews with 25,000 graduates in 2014 still insisted that more than half of men expected their careers to come before those of their wives, while the majority of women expected egalitarian marriages (almost no women He aspired to make his own career a priority).
In the second decade of the century, statistics continue to be stubborn in this regard.
UNED professors, within the framework of the European project
Men in care,
led by Teresa Jurado, published a study in 2022,
Caregiving parents in Europe: towards a universal caregiving family?
The conclusion showed that 95.5% of working men in Spain did not take advantage of conciliation measures that implied a decrease in income for them.
“Expecting a large number of men to work with reduced hours and their corresponding salary reduction is not realistic due to the expectations of hegemonic masculinity,” the study noted among its conclusions.
Sam from
This Isn't Sweden
takes the step, but encounters his own frustration, and social penalization from his former colleagues.
The series delves into the aforementioned “archetype under construction” of the 21st century: Sam is silent about his resentment, he has no references or friends with whom he can vent the boredom of parenting, and he is not able to applaud the success of his partner.
Some men who share with the character in the series the egalitarian conscience, the heterosexual condition and the extensive time dedicated to parenting have answered questions about the conflict that arises between Sam and Marian: Álvaro (journalist, 47 years old) says: “It's in the cultural DNA of guys: it's difficult to accept the prominence of the woman you're with;
For those of us who are aware, there is something that escapes us.
Often when she tells me good news that she has been given at work, before being happy for her I tend to take a panoramic look at the matter, I do
mansplaining
, I give my opinion as if it were general news.”
Miguel (economist, 40 years old): “When she goes on a trip and I stay with the children, everyone empathizes with me as if I were a victim and a hero at the same time, and no one reacts like that if I am the one who is He goes and she stays.”
Mariano (firefighter, 48 years old): “Firefighters, because of the shifts in our profession, tend to dedicate themselves more to domestic tasks during their free time, so with my colleagues I share a lot of vent about how heavy household chores are.
What I have noticed is that since we moved to a town on the outskirts of Madrid I only interact with mothers when we are with the children, they are not with the fathers as much.”
They all agree on the difficulty of establishing more emotionally honest friendships between men: “Now there is a tide of vindication of female friendship;
I only manage to have a real complicity with women or with gay friends, with straight people my age it is very difficult for me” (Álvaro).
“It still happens, with the group I go running with, that I tell them that I can't go with them because I have to stay with the children and they tell me: 'Oh, your wife doesn't give you permission' (Miguel).
This was one of the conclusions of the Women's Institute study back in 2008: the internalized assumption that the domestic space continues to belong to her, where she controls and manages the tasks, and the public space to him, who is the one who authorizes or he tolerates her career with his support.
But despite the evidence reflected in studies and statistics, they also reflect contradictory subjective perceptions.
This is what happened in the first and very popular CIS survey on the perception of equality, published in January 2024: 44.1% of men believe that so much progress has been made that now the truly discriminated against are them - what is relevant about this data is the breakdown of voting intention: of the men who voted for Vox, 88.1% reported feeling that discrimination;
66.1% of the PP;
22.4% of the PSOE, and 9.5% of Sumar.
In the same survey, paradoxically, the usual data on inequality in terms of time dedicated to the home or children are reflected.
As
This Is Not Sweden progresses,
Marian's desire to resign appears, exhausted by wanting to achieve everything.
Meanwhile, Sam will have a hard time admitting how far his initial expectation was from the everyday labyrinth he has found himself in.
The prerogatives of a self-help manual, the satisfied self-portrait with a child on top or the ability to dream of one's own project take time, sometimes more than two decades of the 21st century, to be sustained.
And, as the recent CIS survey shows, for some it is even possible to affirm that a structural and ancient discrimination has been resolved and has even victimized the famous
royal partner
that Sheryl Sandberg claimed.
While the data insists, perhaps fiction illuminates us with its mirror.
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