Where have all the Vikings Gone?

This morning, I read the magazine What Is Enlightenment that Glenn picked up for me from a local health food store because the cover had a number of articles about men including "Constructing the New Man," "19 Powerful Women Tell the Truth about Men," and "A Scandalous Look at Scandinavia: Where women are women and men are too."

Uh, okay, I thought, this can't be good, it's a magazine from a crunchy organic healthfood store with what I assumed would be a somewhat biased picture of the male gender complete with articles describing how men should be more like women. I was mildly surprised to find out that the articles were actually somewhat enlightened themselves. While I didn't exactly love them, I didn't hate them either. The articles were not too bad.

Due to time constraints, I will tell you about the main article that caught my eye--the one on men acting like women in Scandinavia. The author, Elizabeth Debold, sets out to Scandinavia to find out how "gender equality" is playing itself out in that culture. She starts out the article describing how in Sweden, for a man to pee standing up is increasingly considered to be "the height of vulgarity and possibly suggestive of violence." Debold seems surprised to find out that gender equality is not all it's cracked up to be, especially when she discovers that the new equality is nothing more than "patriarchy in drag." Despite progressive sources that suggest that Scandinavians, particularly Danes, are the happiest people in the world, possibly because they are so egalitarian, Debold finds out that men there are not doing so well.

Apparently, relationships and having a good sex life is of the highest value in places like Denmark. Yet, Denmark has one of the world's highest divorce rates. In eight out of ten cases, the woman ends the marriage. Debold attends a men's group in Copenhagen and notes that "the men speak about a vague, almost inchoate experience of victimization."

One man responds to the sense of victimization, "There's a kind of victimization with not knowing which way to go, how you are supposed to be, what to do in a relationship. We're in a double bind." Another man states, "I have tried to give women what they say they want, but they always want something else. Women think that what they want is for the man to really talk and to be at home with the kids. But she doesn't want that for long. She wants a strong man."

A guy named Bo states, "We end up relating to women in a way that is more like woman to woman, not man to woman. We are feminized in our relationships, and they don't last."

There is constant fear in the men there that they are always doing something wrong, and who can blame them? They are told that they are somehow guilty of oppressing women from a young age. In Sweden, little boys are given dolls to play with and girls are given tractors. Pupils in Demark are sent to do traditional women's jobs because of an "equality" project. All of this indoctrination and brainwashing is, in my opinion, sick and abusive.

Let's hope the US never goes the way of Scandinavia--for all the talk about equality, it sounds like the men there are nothing but second class citizens who are lost, lonely and victimized. We must all keep up the fight for men's rights and fight male bashing and misandry whenever we see it in order to keep this from happening in our country.