Mirna Funk: “Who Cares!” – Culture

Feminism is once again in bad shape in this country, at least if you believe Mirna Funk. Two types of women are to blame. Some call themselves feminists, but do everything wrong. They constantly complain about injustices, are “woke warriors” or “social justice fighters” and have not understood that if you want to change the world, you have to start with yourself. The other type of woman are the desperate, sitting around with “crossed arms and scowling,” a heap of misery full of ostentatious disadvantage. Mirna Funk naturally does not consider the second type to be feminists, because “every woman who sits lethargically at home and screams ‘I’m not participating as long as we earn 18 percent less than men!’ instead of catapulting yourself to the C-level to introduce fair pay is not progressive, it’s anti-feminist”.

Mirna Funk is different, she’s one of the doers, the sexually liberated, the climbers, one of those “who don’t tweet, but make appearances.” She drives a pink Porsche, which she calls “Porschi” and in which she dashes “wildly from A to B”. Mirna Funk was once offered a managerial job and then explained to her future boss that she could only work until 4:30 p.m. because that was when she picked up her daughter, who she is raising alone, from the day care center. In addition, her daughter would later pay the pension of this same boss, she added, which made the boss’ eyes light up. Mirna Funk also had bad school qualifications, evaded taxes for years, only understood the difference between gross and net when she was middle-aged, and today invests in ETFs and art.

Mirna Funk is the woman made alone

In general, one learns from “Who Cares!”, Mirna Funk’s recently published instructions for a self-determined female life, above all something about how improbable and yet possible the rise of its author was. From weed truant to popular novelist, from the very bottom to pretty high up, with no help or inherited privileges. Mirna Funk is the woman made alone. And because, contrary to expectations, it worked so well, something must be derived from it for the lives of the other 42 million women in this country. For example, according to Mirna Funk: “What I can say today about professional advancement is that it is linked to nothing more than the unconditional will to want to create something.” In addition to the obligatory cash flow, Mirna Funk has packed other tips and tricks into the book for optimizing everyday life for modern women: love (“No man in this world can bring you satisfaction”), sex (“There is no need for safe spaces or speaking rooms furnished with plush. It takes courage”) and children (“There is no care work, no relationship work, no friendship work. It is nothing more than the human condition”).

This rather down-to-earth diagnosis of the always possible liberation from all sorts of binding and small-minded contexts is surprising. Precisely because there are currently approaches in German-language feminist scholarship that tie criticism of unfair structures, from spouse splitting to salary gender gaps, back to active emancipation. From the philosopher Eva von Redecker, for example, who in “Revolution for Life” describes the well-known fact that certain types of work, such as caring for the sick, children and the elderly, are not seen as full work at the social and state level. Or the sociologist Sarah Speck, who recently wrote that making the world of work more flexible during the corona pandemic did not necessarily mean equal distribution of household chores among male and female family members, but rather the new social figure of the “home all-round mum” who worked to the point of exhaustion ” created.

It would be a little cheap, though, to say “Who Cares!” to accuse a lack of interest in the scientific debate, because that is a direction that the book does not want to take at all. Nevertheless, it has a clear address. Without May 2021, she writes in the foreword, her book would not have existed. At that time, on the online portal Pinkstinks, she had called on women to “leave their lazy husbands on Mother’s Day”, whereupon a “few left-over row house feminists” and a “part of the literature business” started a shitstorm. Unfortunately, thoughts that develop out of the ugly Twitter situation are rarely finely knitted.

The style of Mirna Funk’s reckoning with her critics is reminiscent of a – very long – thread in a social medium: personal, in the spotlight, in love with contrasts. As they in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Informing the audience a few months ago that author Max Czollek lied to them during a break years ago that his parents were both Jewish, it had a similar twist. Some things just fit better at a party, others on Twitter or on a blog, not everything necessarily on printed pages.

“There’s nothing here, there’s nothing here, I can’t. It’s passive and not sovereign.”

In any case, groundbreaking conclusions can be drawn from “Who Cares!” accordingly hardly pick out. But there are many nuances of an amusingly short-lived actionism. For example, when Mirna Funk calls out to parents who haven’t gotten any daycare places for their children: Just do it yourself. Or in the original: “This culture that denies responsibility and is subservient to the state is simply foreign to me. If there is no daycare center near you, the children up to 6 p.m., then simply open it up and help other mothers to pursue their dreams and concepts of life, but stop saying: There’s nothing here, there’s nothing here, I can’t. That’s passive and not sovereign. This you-can-do attitude may be entertaining and lively, but Mirna Funk also leaves open what the manager, who became a kindergarten teacher out of a predicament, should do with her own career dreams. The main thing is that this is the mantra of her book, there is no whining.

Larger contexts of political economy or so-called intersectionality, i.e. the combination of several forms of social disadvantage, play no role here. The fact that some immigrants, male or female, can play poker less casually on the job market and therefore do not have the same opportunities for advancement is not worth a line to Mirna Funk.

The American Dream, which has long been pushed into the drawer of myths, that anyone can become anything if they just make a real effort, becomes the German Dream for her, and above all it is one thing, honest workmanship by individuals: women should “with sweat and strength create a world for their children and grandchildren that is more beautiful than the current one”. The fact that everything will be better if only everyone works harder sounds like a fairy tale written by Mirna Funk.