full screen Malin Wollin has written columns in Aftonbladet since 2006. This is her last. Photo: Suvad Mrkonjic
Under a lamppost in front of a game shop, I had arranged to meet a man in a newspaper. I wanted to sell him a fixed column in his publication.
I promised I would be very cheap. If I told you the fee, you wouldn’t believe me, and by the way, I’ve forgotten. But it doesn’t matter, the publicist under the lamppost had agreed to an outdoor meeting quite unnecessarily, he didn’t want a columnist. He heard my pitch and then he said no. He probably just wanted to look at a girl who was with a Kalmar FF player. For some it is
it something.
Six months later, I became a columnist at Aftonbladet.
Assuming the man was still standing under the lamppost, he might have thought Oh damn!
There he got, I thought and wrote, driven by nay-saying men under lampposts.
On one of the last days of the year I drive to the city to write my last Aftonbladet column.
In front of the city’s central station, I turn in to drop off my daughter and suddenly we hear the sound of stone rubbing against metal. The plate is mine, the stone belongs to the city. A woman with a child slaps her hand to her mouth in shock. Why does she do that? Can’t she just shrug her shoulders and give me a thumbs up? I want her to smile at me that it could have been worse.
Tormented by the woman’s expression, we remain in the car, my child and I, we breathe, she pats my thigh.
It could always be worse, we tell each other.
I call home and say that I drove myself half to death in a mountain.
But damn Malin, he says. Like it was my fault.
How happy he will be when he finds just a few white claw marks in the black. Female cunning is the finest thing I know.
full screen Aftonbladet’s running sheet on December 15, 2006.
“I write about my ass”it was on the slip when I wrote my first column in Aftonbladet in December 2006.
There was quite a bit about my ass, but all the more about other things.
Like that text about children having the right to search for their origins. Since I’m going anyway, I can tell you that a private Facebook group of single moms with IVF children banded together and did everything they could to destroy my professional life.
Spreading hate is easy, put on some mascara and go out and get a man: absolutely impossible.
Then came the bikes. It’s the same with cycling shorts on men as it is with nude beaches: it’s never the ones you want to see who get there.
Dear cyclists who emailed clients everywhere: You will never finish, you will not be happier, you will not even live anymore.
And then there was the petrol riot. It was a blow in the air to protest and it was a blow in the air to argue with you, but it was fun while it lasted.
I haven’t loved getting hate but I haven’t hated it either. It has been an obvious and natural part of my everyday life to be called a whore and pussy, but when they call me Bang, I float on the feeling proudly. I have received so many beautiful emails, and not a single one can be taken away from me.
“You didn’t think you’d stay at Aftonbladet forever, did you?” my sister wondered.
But I thought so.
It started in 2006.
It ends in 2023.
See you under a lamp post.
2023-12-31 02:18:15
#lamppost
