Know how to please me
I
remember when I was in high school and we had to choose the class
president in a meeting in which the whole cohort was present. Now, I
have learned by watching movies that in America the high school teens
often actively compete for this job as a popularity contest, leading to
all kinds of hilarious mayhem. So there might be something in it, I
don't know. Anyway, what I remember most vividly was when one of the
girls stood up and nominated the visiting male exchange student from
America. After she had said his name, smiling as enthusiastically as if
he had already won the nomination, her face looked like she had just
had an orgasm. As the said exchange student didn't speak a word of
Finnish and thus had no idea what the heck was going on, he just looked
at everybody with this puzzled and curious look, having heard his name
but not understanding anything else. I remember wondering back then how
very silly this nomination was, since even though I had no idea what
the job of the class president actually entailed, I reasoned that being
able to read, write and speak Finnish would certainly be necessary in
it. I thought for a moment of pointing out this fact, but somehow
sensed that it would have been a stupid question.
Of course, these days I can understand that day's events a lot better. The same way that I understand why in the gym class girls carried their gym clothes inside the plastic shopping bags of more high-end clothing stores, but never in an ordinary supermarket plastic bag. But that's a whole another story perhaps for a later post, since there is one more interesting cultural difference between Finland and pretty much the rest of the whole world that I haven't written anything about so far. So I guess I could rather do this now.
You see, us Finns, as a nation, have a very low self esteem in aggregate. We are always concerned of what other nations think of us or if anybody remembers Paavo Nurmi or the Helsinki Summer Olympics in 1952, with this constantly nagging suspicion of inferiority which is in some cases appropriate and in some other cases totally needless. But this general attitude has a few important practical consequences. One of them concerns the way that the Finnish women tend to behave. Now, I know that the following lament sounds like a total cliche and something that men in all nations would say, but when it comes to foreigners, Finnish women really are easy. And not just easy, but so unimaginably and indescribably easy for foreign men to bed that Panu once put it aptly by saying that Finland has two totally separate sexual marketplaces just like Soviet Russia had two totally separate economic markets: one for those who held foreign currency and one for those who didn't.
In the 70's or 80's, any foreigner could come to Finland and enjoy a sexual buffet of willing women unseen anywhere else until the Eastern Block after its collapse started to offer similar opportunities to Western men. The Finnish women were and still are so easy that if you are any kind of foreigner, you can reliably count on the Finnish women sticking to you like flies to honey. It used to be so ridiculous that you could even be a short, fat, hairy and sweaty little pig, but as long as you were clearly a foreigner, that fact alone was enough: you could be sure that you would always find a date and hump, as the Finnish women got all dizzy from your whole exciting foreignerness. And how would it be if the Finnish women treated these foreign guest the same way that they would treat Finnish men? That would be like inviting guests to your home and when they arrive, being the way that you are when you are home alone, not expecting any company. Wouldn't that be wrong? (Of course, a few Finnish men who had spent several years working abroad and could thus pass as a German or a Pole if needed also learned to use this to their advantage.)
About ten years ago, this farce reached its absolute climax when a black American man named Steven Thomas, or as he was more affectionately known, "Doggy Steve", had sex with a couple of hundred Finnish women over a time span of a few years, without bothering to tell any of these women that he was HIV-positive. In the nightlife of Helsinki, Steven got away with a "rapper" and a "playa" act that in retrospect must have been so utterly pathetic that I don't even want to imagine what would have happened if he had tried it in America, especially within the black community there. But as they say, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is the king, so I guess that we can't really fault Steven for his finding this opportunity for successful acts of arbitrage. I kind of have to wonder, if Steven had followed the same act in America by just walking to some middle-class white woman and telling her that he thinks that she is very beautiful and he wants to have sex with her, would the typical reaction to this have been very different than it usually was in Finland? I tend to think so. For example, "mace" might probably become applied.
At this point, as astonishing and unbelievable as this might sound to my American readers, know that many swarthy foreigners habitually do exactly this to the Finnish women they meet on the street. They know that the probability of success is high enough so that it doesn't really matter what the targets of your unsuccessful attempts end up thinking about you. It's not like you are ever going to see these women anywhere else, and there is plenty of fish left in the sea. Hah, now that I wrote that sentence, I remember years ago listening to a young leftist woman who was telling me about this time that some Middle-Eastern man, at least ten years older than her, who she had met on the street had basically started the conversation by telling her that he wants to be her boyfriend and have lots of sex with her. After the rough start he had stuck around like a horsefly, attacking from every angle totally oblivious to her polite refusals and requests to be left alone as she is not interested right now. Oh, I was younger then and much more naive about the ways of the world, but even then, I found her frustrated explanation of her futile attempts to explain to this man that he is validating negative stereotypes and this way harming his fellow immigrants and giving ammunition to racists which he just didn't seem to understand at all to be breathtakingly stupid. Fortunately, I knew better than to state that opinion out loud.
Right now, I assume that Steven is still sitting in jail, with only his fond memories to keep him company. (His death would certainly have been news, so since I haven't heard anything about it, I assume that it didn't happen.) But I'd say that the funniest part of this whole comedy of errors was when some of these women later tried to sheepishly claim that Steven had "raped" them. Or how they now knew that they really didn't want to engage in casual sex and casual sex is just wrong, the whole thing being about men using women as mindless receptacles to empty their balls. Sure thing, toots. Sure thing.
Now that foreigners have become much more common in Finland (so that in a small rural town, the daily newspaper doesn't have to put out a big headline "A Negro Seen Walking in the Main Street"), and Finns have lost their romantic and exotic view of foreigners and now have a clearer idea of what many subgroups of these "top experts" and "future assets for the nation" tend to be like in practice. During the past decade or two Finland has grown up a bit culturally and mentally, to emerge as an actual full-fledged nation. So the net result is that the Finnish women are no longer as easy just for any foreigner to hump and dump as they used to be.
Of course, there are still exceptions such as that one subculture of middle-aged women who import black studs from Africa, the more violent the better, to marry and later burden the Finnish social services sector with. (For some mysterious reason, these women are not a target of a media condemnation similar to those men who import wives from East Europe and East Asia, even though their numbers are roughly similar. The only time these women are seen in media is when they complain that other Finnish women are constantly trying to hit on their men, even when they stand next to him.) Similarly, almost as a rule every male Mediterranean or Middle Eastern immigrant in Finland has a blonde wife at home (and the Britons might describe this woman with the handy adjective "chav"), taking care of their three or more kids while her husband is out with his buddies.
Now, why did I think of Steven Thomas in the first place, leading me to write this whole post? Because of the recent news article from Britain, "Woman is jailed for infecting lover with HIV". As I read about this woman, Sarah Jane Porter, who collected and infected her boyfriends on purpose and still refuses to help the authorities to find them by naming them, I immediately had this mental image of feminists instinctively defending this poor woman who had probably been raped and is the real victim here. However, I then came upon an important paragraph that instantly revealed that this woman is only going to get total radio silence from her leftist sisters:
Of course, these days I can understand that day's events a lot better. The same way that I understand why in the gym class girls carried their gym clothes inside the plastic shopping bags of more high-end clothing stores, but never in an ordinary supermarket plastic bag. But that's a whole another story perhaps for a later post, since there is one more interesting cultural difference between Finland and pretty much the rest of the whole world that I haven't written anything about so far. So I guess I could rather do this now.
You see, us Finns, as a nation, have a very low self esteem in aggregate. We are always concerned of what other nations think of us or if anybody remembers Paavo Nurmi or the Helsinki Summer Olympics in 1952, with this constantly nagging suspicion of inferiority which is in some cases appropriate and in some other cases totally needless. But this general attitude has a few important practical consequences. One of them concerns the way that the Finnish women tend to behave. Now, I know that the following lament sounds like a total cliche and something that men in all nations would say, but when it comes to foreigners, Finnish women really are easy. And not just easy, but so unimaginably and indescribably easy for foreign men to bed that Panu once put it aptly by saying that Finland has two totally separate sexual marketplaces just like Soviet Russia had two totally separate economic markets: one for those who held foreign currency and one for those who didn't.
In the 70's or 80's, any foreigner could come to Finland and enjoy a sexual buffet of willing women unseen anywhere else until the Eastern Block after its collapse started to offer similar opportunities to Western men. The Finnish women were and still are so easy that if you are any kind of foreigner, you can reliably count on the Finnish women sticking to you like flies to honey. It used to be so ridiculous that you could even be a short, fat, hairy and sweaty little pig, but as long as you were clearly a foreigner, that fact alone was enough: you could be sure that you would always find a date and hump, as the Finnish women got all dizzy from your whole exciting foreignerness. And how would it be if the Finnish women treated these foreign guest the same way that they would treat Finnish men? That would be like inviting guests to your home and when they arrive, being the way that you are when you are home alone, not expecting any company. Wouldn't that be wrong? (Of course, a few Finnish men who had spent several years working abroad and could thus pass as a German or a Pole if needed also learned to use this to their advantage.)
About ten years ago, this farce reached its absolute climax when a black American man named Steven Thomas, or as he was more affectionately known, "Doggy Steve", had sex with a couple of hundred Finnish women over a time span of a few years, without bothering to tell any of these women that he was HIV-positive. In the nightlife of Helsinki, Steven got away with a "rapper" and a "playa" act that in retrospect must have been so utterly pathetic that I don't even want to imagine what would have happened if he had tried it in America, especially within the black community there. But as they say, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is the king, so I guess that we can't really fault Steven for his finding this opportunity for successful acts of arbitrage. I kind of have to wonder, if Steven had followed the same act in America by just walking to some middle-class white woman and telling her that he thinks that she is very beautiful and he wants to have sex with her, would the typical reaction to this have been very different than it usually was in Finland? I tend to think so. For example, "mace" might probably become applied.
At this point, as astonishing and unbelievable as this might sound to my American readers, know that many swarthy foreigners habitually do exactly this to the Finnish women they meet on the street. They know that the probability of success is high enough so that it doesn't really matter what the targets of your unsuccessful attempts end up thinking about you. It's not like you are ever going to see these women anywhere else, and there is plenty of fish left in the sea. Hah, now that I wrote that sentence, I remember years ago listening to a young leftist woman who was telling me about this time that some Middle-Eastern man, at least ten years older than her, who she had met on the street had basically started the conversation by telling her that he wants to be her boyfriend and have lots of sex with her. After the rough start he had stuck around like a horsefly, attacking from every angle totally oblivious to her polite refusals and requests to be left alone as she is not interested right now. Oh, I was younger then and much more naive about the ways of the world, but even then, I found her frustrated explanation of her futile attempts to explain to this man that he is validating negative stereotypes and this way harming his fellow immigrants and giving ammunition to racists which he just didn't seem to understand at all to be breathtakingly stupid. Fortunately, I knew better than to state that opinion out loud.
Right now, I assume that Steven is still sitting in jail, with only his fond memories to keep him company. (His death would certainly have been news, so since I haven't heard anything about it, I assume that it didn't happen.) But I'd say that the funniest part of this whole comedy of errors was when some of these women later tried to sheepishly claim that Steven had "raped" them. Or how they now knew that they really didn't want to engage in casual sex and casual sex is just wrong, the whole thing being about men using women as mindless receptacles to empty their balls. Sure thing, toots. Sure thing.
Now that foreigners have become much more common in Finland (so that in a small rural town, the daily newspaper doesn't have to put out a big headline "A Negro Seen Walking in the Main Street"), and Finns have lost their romantic and exotic view of foreigners and now have a clearer idea of what many subgroups of these "top experts" and "future assets for the nation" tend to be like in practice. During the past decade or two Finland has grown up a bit culturally and mentally, to emerge as an actual full-fledged nation. So the net result is that the Finnish women are no longer as easy just for any foreigner to hump and dump as they used to be.
Of course, there are still exceptions such as that one subculture of middle-aged women who import black studs from Africa, the more violent the better, to marry and later burden the Finnish social services sector with. (For some mysterious reason, these women are not a target of a media condemnation similar to those men who import wives from East Europe and East Asia, even though their numbers are roughly similar. The only time these women are seen in media is when they complain that other Finnish women are constantly trying to hit on their men, even when they stand next to him.) Similarly, almost as a rule every male Mediterranean or Middle Eastern immigrant in Finland has a blonde wife at home (and the Britons might describe this woman with the handy adjective "chav"), taking care of their three or more kids while her husband is out with his buddies.
Now, why did I think of Steven Thomas in the first place, leading me to write this whole post? Because of the recent news article from Britain, "Woman is jailed for infecting lover with HIV". As I read about this woman, Sarah Jane Porter, who collected and infected her boyfriends on purpose and still refuses to help the authorities to find them by naming them, I immediately had this mental image of feminists instinctively defending this poor woman who had probably been raped and is the real victim here. However, I then came upon an important paragraph that instantly revealed that this woman is only going to get total radio silence from her leftist sisters:
Police found a total of four of Porters' former lovers, all of whom were Afro-Caribbean and linked to the dance music industry.
And of course, this story cannot be complete without the expression of concern that reminds us about the really important priorities of this case:
Campaigners said they were concerned that the way the case was investigated appeared to criminalise anyone with HIV.
Deborah Jack, chief executive of the National Aids Trust, said: "The prospect of the police investigating the sexual history of people living with HIV in this speculative way is profoundly stigmatising, and appears to treat everyone with HIV as a potential criminal.
Suddenly, that sounds oddly familiar. I wonder if I have read something similar somewhere recently... hmmm... it doesn't seem to ring a bell right now, even though it somehow just feels like it is in the tip of my tongue... maybe it had something to do with "profiling"... oh, dunno. Perhaps I will remember it later.
Finnish **men** really are easy? What about you and your lovely wife?
Who was easy? You. A Finnish man.
Posted by Anonymous | 1:00 PM
I recall somewhat similar phenomena from my last year in high school at the dawn of the century. For some reason, an exchange student, who couldn't speak finnish at all, attended our high school. She was, of course, friends with the more popular activist students, and for some (idiotic, I imagine) reason they had her make a speech in front of an audience on St. Lucia day. I still remember listening to her in the dimmed gym hall and not understanding a word she said. I remember feeling sorry for her, and I was disgusted at the student activists who deliberately embarassed her, although I'm sure the activists were only ecstatic about the whole affair.
Oddly enough, the exchange student did not seem to have any romantic affairs during her stay. I guess finnish men are not that easy :-)
Posted by Lord Boredom | 1:31 PM
Wonderful. I've always had a fantasy of moving to Finland someday ... and that was before I heard this about the women.
Posted by Otto Kerner | 3:02 PM
I think that Finns having low self esteem is 15 years old BS that does not apply anymore. Bloody hell, we live in a rich technologically advanced society, have the most educated population in the EU, have the great outdoors with lots of space for everyone, an interestingly weird language that sounds like gibberish to outsiders (a great advantage in many situations), an egalitarian society with great-looking strong promiscuous women, and many cultural aspects we can be proud of.
Posted by Anonymous | 3:12 PM
You mean that like the Japanese, Finns have small confidence?
Posted by Loki on the run | 7:05 PM
"Suddenly, that sounds oddly familiar"
Actually, Iltasanomat or Iltalehti had a small recap and picture of Steven Thomas accompanying this story about Sarah Jane Porter. By the way, here's a different angle to the Porter story:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1802230,00.html
"Porter's real crime: she slept with black men" by Hannah Pool
Herja
Posted by Anonymous | 7:31 AM
I wrote about this topic years ago in Soneraplaza's discussion group, but it seems that it's impossible to find that old the message..
I'll try to repeat some of the main points..
There are several reasons why picking up finnish women is easier to foreign men than finnish men.
a) Foreign men have higher status. Imagine a woman telling her friends that she has italian or french lover!! OMG, they must be great in bed etc..
b) If man speaks English as a mother language, he has unbelievable advantage. All finns know that finnish men are said to be quiet and not too polished in verbal skills. However, if finnish woman has to use English (typically BAD English) in conversation, she faces an unseen situation, a man whose verbal skills are far superior to her's.
c) Foreign man can use more brutal techniques. He doesn't have to be worried about "loosing his face", since like Ilkka said, his not going to see them ever again.
And trust me, I've seen the edge foreign men have in Finland. I lived several years in student apartment and during that time I had 3 neighbors who were foreign. And those were also only men who had regular sexlife (each of them also had many women during their stay, not just one).
My american neighbor once had two women at once at the apartment. Neither of the women talked English, not ONE WORD :) Language of love is sometimes enough..
Kari Katyyri
Posted by Anonymous | 7:36 AM
I forgot something earlier..
d) Foreign men know that they can always have an interesting discussion with finnish women about cultural differences between Finland and their home country. Finnish men don't have such an obvious route to success. Remember that foreign men are experts in this topic, since they have polished their act with countless finnish women.
Kari Katyyri
Posted by Anonymous | 12:33 AM