Sexual Misconduct Looks Different When a Woman is the Perpetrator
And like many such cases, the real story behind Iceland’s former Minister for Children is probably complicated.
Janice Fiamengo, Mar 31, 2025
Last week, Ásthildur Lóa Thórsdóttir [above], Iceland’s Minister for Education and Children’s Affairs, was revealed to have had a sexual relationship with a teen boy decades ago, when she was 23 years old. The case vividly highlights the west’s double standards about sex between adults and minors, and it exposes grey areas in victim-centered sanctimony.
That the case occurred in Iceland, a feminist stronghold with a female president, a female prime minister, and a claimed “zero-tolerance policy for sexual abuse and exploitation of children,” is not at all surprising. No one seriously expects feminists to apply their touted compassion to male teenagers; and no one believes that their championing of gender equality includes sexual probity for women.
Iceland is so thoroughly feminist that in 2023, the prime minister herself joined other women on a one-day strike to demand, amongst other utopian objectives, “an end to unequal pay,” neatly sidestepping (while illustrating) that the so-called pay gap is caused primarily by women’s tendency to work fewer hours than men do. Female moral innocence is such a cherished belief of the Nordic island nation that it has designated 2025 as Women’s Year, with “12 months of events dedicated to progressing gender equality.” (Interested readers should consult a gushing Guardian article, “Women are the best to women,” which depicts Iceland as a near-idyllic women-led community in which men hardly figure.)
Clearly, when the most powerful woman in the country can take a day off to showcase women’s alleged lack of power, few women are prepared to consider their own potential abuse of it.
That brings us to the Minister for Children’s Affairs, who appeared flabbergasted last week to find that her long-ago sexual past has become fodder for unsympathetic public discussion and suggestions of serious impropriety. “I understand … what it looks like,” she is quoted as saying to reporters, seemingly exasperated at how difficult it is “to get the right story in the news today.” At 58 years of age, Thórsdóttir is being given a tiny glimpse into what thousands of men have experienced since feminism entered its Jacobin phase.
Over three decades ago, Thórsdóttir began a relationship with a 15-year-old boy who was attending her church group. He has been identified as Eirik Asmundsson. He was a troubled boy with a chaotic home life, and she was an adult member in the group; newspaper articles have said that she was a group counselor, which she denies. She claims that the relationship did not become sexual until the boy was 16, and that he pursued her.