All great female writers have asked it, the question of how it is possible that a hundred years of women's movement still has not yielded greater results.

How can one be a free woman, when there are no free men?

Irena Požar puts it indirectly in her study "The Backlash: Metoo and the Revolution That Stopped", which is published almost five years after women all over the world told about sexual violence from known and unknown men, in all classes, in all professions. 

The autumn of 2017 was a revolution

, writes Požar.

But then it quickly became quiet, before the backlash came.

The "revenge the patriarchy would take".

It is a thin book;

thin because few women now dare to testify, thin because the depictions of men's abuse must be censored in order not to risk lawsuits.

Požar describes how in the autumn of 2017 she experienced the media as "allies", that they finally covered violence against women as it should always have been covered.

One could have guessed that it would go badly

: especially with Aftonbladet and Expressen, who quickly put in the classic competition gear where it was both a matter of being first and yummy in their news, but also keeping their own workplace problems out of the spotlight.

In 2018 and 2019, several Swedish newspapers were also sentenced by the Press' opinion committee for ill-founded name publications.

A dozen women have also been convicted of libel.

Quite quickly afterwards, designated men were allowed to speak out, quite quickly metoo was considered by several well-known journalists and lawyers to have "gone too far".

The word witch hunt appeared.

Instead of being more careful

in his journalistic work, the media turned their backs on the wind, says Požar, a revolutionary craze turned into suspicion - against women.

And it spread in public.

Old prejudices about men and women came back, about how female victims behave, about men's uncontrollable sexuality as women's responsibility to parry.

As if nothing had happened since Maria-Pia Boethiü's groundbreaking report on rape in Expressen in 1976 (which later became the book "Blame yourself") or Susan Faludi's "Backlash - the war against women" from 1991.

The media became afraid

of making mistakes - and rather did nothing.

It is in the great silence we find ourselves now, says Požar, who makes concise references to other authors and previous research to show that this is an ancient pattern.

She herself belongs to the fourth wave of feminism, she is well aware of the value of historizing - especially since feminism has often had to reinvent the wheel, and each generation has been equally intoxicated by the realization that now, now it is changing.

One of her most important theses

is that the silence of the media has affected all low-wage working women who have written appeals for the construction industry, healthcare, schools, the cleaning industry.

It was an irresistible media narrative when successful women accused supported men - an individual celebrity story that, when the defamation came, instead dismissed metoo as an "elite project".

So these "ordinary women" were silenced once more.

Politics then?

Požar says with a sad grimace that Åsa Regnér, the then Minister for Gender Equality, resigned for a top job at the UN the day after she received signatures and proposals from "the largest gender equality policy movement since the 1970s".

And in the last election campaign, Metoo was next forgotten.

Irena Požar's pamphlet may have been written in melancholy, but it glows tightly beneath the surface.