Building up our houses

I've often thought that one thing missing in modern life is older women passing down healthy social mores to younger women (what can you pass down when the social creed is "do whatever you will"?).

So I was pleased to see an example (via Dalrock) of a woman trying to pass on some good advice about marriage to other women. Her name is Heidi Stone, and I know little about her except that she appears to be an American Protestant Christian.

She begins by noting how many marriages are failing in her social circle. She then points out to her female readers that divorce often does not lead to a happy future relationship:

Remarriage for women, as we age, becomes less and less likely. Should we get started talking about the cost of child support? On both sides? What about how alimony can financially cripple either party’s ability to provide for a second family. It doesn’t happen or it takes too much of the paycheck.

Simply? It makes sense to just stay married. Especially for us, ladies. Especially for us.

That’s you and me, darlin’. You and me. We’ve already invested our perky selves, baby-making hips, and the “looks cute in a two-piece” years. We’ve given them to the man we wake up to and the children we make dinner for and unless we are careful, that investment might not pay off.

I know I want to reap the rewards of that investment.

I’ve earned those rewards. There is no way I want to jeopardize where I end up and how I live because I didn’t have the courage or willingness to pursue my marriage and family with integrity now. Before the hurricanes and menopausal tornadoes.

See, to be blunt, we don’t fare well in the re-marriage market as only 25% of women who are divorced in their 30’s-40’s actually remarry. Men will generally marry at a rate closer to 50% but, even then, they aren’t looking at our Match.Com profiles. They tend to marry women far younger than themselves the second time and, well, that rather gives a raspberry to both our aging marketability and our chances at second time marital bliss.

So only 25% of women who divorce in their 30s and 40s will remarry, and only 7% of single women aged over 50 will ever even cohabit again with a man:

The people most unlikely to find a partner and settle into a new long-term relationship are women aged over 50, with only 7 per cent moving in with a partner.

If a woman "invests" her youthful beauty and fertility in marriage, then she maximises her chances of being in a loving relationship with a man in her later decades (in the second half of her life). If this is ignored, then many people will live alone from middle-age. In trailblazing feminist Sweden 52% of households now consist of only one person:

Why, then, does Sweden stand out when it comes to the high number of single households? Trägårdh says that Sweden is a "radically individualistic" country with a social structure that enables people to live independently - that is, to avoid having to rely on one another.

"It has something to do both with values and with the types of institutions we have created in Sweden in more recent decades," explains Trägårdh.

"Individual autonomy has been important for a long time here, as well as the idea that relationships - even in family and love - should be voluntary. And our institutions guarantee the possibility for relationships to be voluntary, for individuals to make the decision to leave a relationship if they so wish."

The emphasis in Sweden is on the liberal aim of maximising individual autonomy by making it easy to dissolve marriages and to live independently of anyone else - but they have succeeded so well in this aim that a majority of households now have just one person (in comparison the percentage of single person households in nearby Poland is 24%, in Singapore it is 11% and in India 3.7%.)

The next part of Heidi Stone's advice is equally good. She asks women to think about the mistakes that wives sometimes make that bring down their own houses:

This is to the sisters who bulldoze their own security and future. Shingle by shingle. Tear by manipulating tear. Guilt trips by angry blaming.

Every day, systematically destroying their homes, one snark, one bitterness, one resentment at a time the foundation crumbles until there is nothing left to preserve. Nothing left to fight for or hold on to.

I don’t have to make a list, we are familiar with the usual suspects. Anger, resentment, bitterness, defensiveness, and arrogance. No one needs to be convinced those elements are at the heart of poor choices. Toxic to our warmth and hospitality.

But we justify. We excuse our failures. When we are at church thinly masking our dishonor of our spouse with a carefully worded prayer request or trying to explain our behavior to our friends… Maybe we spend too much time searching for a friendly ear when we believe we’ve been horribly “wronged”.

But there really is no limit to the depths of ugliness in the human heart. Have you thought about how disrespect and comparison, victimhood, and slander can pull down your house?

Men are brought up to think that failure or success depends on their own efforts, their character, their strength. But the fate of some marriages is decided not by the actions of the husband, but within the mind and soul of the wife. The marriage rests on her ability to manage her thoughts and emotions, so that she does not dwell on the negatives, or hold on to grievances, or seek to belittle, or slide between a sensitivity to being patronised and a feeling of superiority.

Is it not one task of a human culture to help women to inhabit the better part of themselves ("our warmth and hospitality") rather than the more destructive parts? Is it not important for men to take an interest in this, given that men seek emotional and physical intimacy with their wives but are unlikely to genuinely achieve this if women cannot overcome the kind of failures that Heidi Stone describes?

Just two of Sweden's problems

Sweden's government has operated something like an open borders policy for refugees. I noticed a couple of statistics in the news that highlight how short-sighted this policy is. The first statistic is that it takes a very long time for refugees to find employment. After 15 years in Sweden only a third have found work, which means that they have to be carried by the Swedish taxpayer:

The second statistic is that for the first time since records began in the 1700s there are more men than women in Sweden, due in part to the fact that many of the refugees/economic migrants are young men from the Muslim world.

So a young Swedish male will find himself having to pay extra taxes to support the immigrants and at the same time deal with the distortions in the sex ratio caused by immigration. He will then be told to celebrate diversity.

In Sweden boys play with fluffy go walkies

Sweden has bought into autonomy theory in a big way. According to this theory, the aim of life is to maximise individual autonomy, i.e. the ability to self-determine who we are. Therefore whatever is predetermined rather than self-determined is a prison or straitjacket that impedes our freedom to be whoever we want to be. Our sex is something that is predetermined. Therefore, think the liberal autonomists, it must be made not to matter.

And so in Sweden it is now thought wrong to show boys playing with traditionally boy toys and girls with girl toys. Which means you get advertising catalogues like the one below, showing a boy playing with a toy called "Fluffy go walkies".

A Swedish toy catalogue

Does it matter if Sweden tries to abolish sex distinctions? Yes and no. Sex distinctions are so deeply embedded into us, that they will continue in some form regardless of the policy of the Swedish authorities. They can never be made not to matter.

It is odd, though, for Sweden to journey down this road. In a heterosexual culture, there ought to be a celebration of sex distinctions rather than a statist effort to suppress these differences. It can also be disappointing (and disorienting) to young men and women in their late teens and twenties to find the opposite sex not fully embracing their masculinity or femininity. It takes away some of the context in which young people orient themselves to committed relationships. And, finally, we tend to be most settled in ourselves when we have a deeper sense of our own masculinity and femininity. So it makes little sense to blur gender lines when we consider what is important to individual identity.

A Swedish patriot on love of country

Stefan Torssell is a Swede who has written a defence of patriotic love. I'm a little reliant on Google translate in what follows (and it's an abridged version of his column), but the gist of his argument is clear enough.

It is he who loves who is happy...

And then comes the question: can someone love their country? I believe they can and actually remember the moment when my love grew...I went on the folk high school excursion. We lay in the grass and talked.

All around me were red cottages along a country road. Large arable fields spread out. Sweden was a beautiful country with good values...The language, culture and traditions created a national community that made us develop into a good society.

Just as insights about oneself are a prerequisite for being able to love another human being, a love of country presupposes that you know your country's places, fauna, traditions and culture. I grew up in my language, in my country, in my nature and our traditions.

It is essential for me to be able to love my country. But it is not enough. Love of Sweden contains love in two ways: it is a feeling, and it is an active choice.

It may seem pathetic to write about the love of a country. Some may perceive it as pompous in our time when the denial of their own national culture has become a competition. My experience of Sweden recalls the love of a person. They want to stay in that person's proximity, giving up a part of himself and is sympathetically tuned to that person.

There are those who do not love Sweden. One member of the cultural Left who often persecutes the Sweden Democrats (the patriotic party) is Martin Aagard. I heard him on the radio a while ago. He explained that he did not feel anything for his native Sweden.

I think the idea is not foreign to the cultural left that one can hate their own nation, or at least feel indifference. From that state can be born a destructiveness. It is not just the Left that can have this negativity to their own country. Even right circles I believe can make such choices.

Increasingly now I hear people express themselves negatively about Sweden, not only Mona Sahlin and Reinfeldt. Sweden has no culture. Swedish culture is borrowing from other more developed cultures. Swedish culture is barbarism.

The Swedish Democrats expressing kindness to Sweden is described as xenophobic. Many are forced to be cautious. They try to adapt to the zeitgeist to malign everything that is Swedish. They are to be regretted.

I've written about this before in terms of love, but it bears repeating. Faithfulness and truth are necessary in a relationship. The worst thing we can do to ourselves is to lie to someone we care about. Anyone who wants to lose a friend or a loved one should lie immediately to the man. The lie starts a mental process of decomposition and soon the friendship or love lost.

The powerful want EU countries to grow together into a federation with a single currency and a uniform law of free movement of capital. Multiculturalism has a purpose. It breaks down a country's uniqueness and national institutions.

That the Sweden Democrats are disliked by people with power and influence, I interpret as a sign that they are lying to us and about us. 

But there is another question. Can even the love of a country end? I think so.

The Sweden I discovered long ago is no more. Fragmentation in the nation is extensive. Much happens that is detestable. I have a strong feeling that many want to destroy Sweden in order to get something else.

My country feels strange when terrorists with Swedish citizenship are captured in an Arab country or when Swedes who committed a gang rape are reported to have spoken an incomprehensible language. I do not regard them as Swedes and I doubt very strongly that they do themselves.

Obviously, it is not the negative consequences of multiculturalism the establishment want. They want Sweden to become something else. What is happening now they consider a passing phase. Because they just want to discuss what is good with multiculturalism and only with those who think alike. I and the majority of the population have never been asked.

They are ruining Sweden. The whole project seems to now move toward a tragedy. We'll see which side wins. We who are sympathetic to Sweden or those who want to impose multiculturalism?

The good news from Sweden is that the Sweden Democrats are strong enough to have won 20 seats in the parliament. Below is a photo of the leader of the Sweden Democrats, Jimmie Åkesson, at a community event in his hometown.

I particularly liked Torssell's analogy between the love of a person and the love of a country:

My experience of Sweden recalls the love of a person. They want to stay in that person's proximity, giving up a part of himself and is sympathetically tuned to that person.

Does Evin Cetin really love all Swedes?

The Swedish Social Democrats are the left-liberal party in that country. One of their members is a young woman of Kurdish descent by the name of Evin Cetin.

Evin Cetin does not like the rival Sweden Democrats, the party of Swedish nationalists. So she dressed up in Swedish national costume and claimed that she was "more Swedish" than the Sweden Democrats because she "loved all Swedes":

"For me, Swedishness is about tolerance, about openness, about helping people and giving people the chance to build a good life," she tells The Local, adding that it's a political ideology she hopes to take with her to Brussels if elected.

"Wearing national dress on the Sweden Democrats' day was sending a very clear message that we should not hand over the concept of Swedishness to forces that are against Sweden," she said.

"The Sweden Democrats are Sweden-hostile."

Cetin said she considers herself more Swedish than the Sweden Democrats because she loves nine million Swedes, whereas the party only loves about five million.

"They only love some Swedes, I love all of them."

But here's the kick to this story. Evin Cetin caused some controversy last year when she made a trip to the Middle-East and was photographed dancing with the guerrilla fighters of Kurdistan’s Free Life Party (PJAK).

Evin Cetin dancing with Kurdish guerrilla fighters

So on the one hand Evin Cetin wants to define the Swedish people out of existence by claiming that Swedish identity is based on nothing more than tolerance and helping people. But on the other hand she supports an armed struggle for a homeland for her own Kurdish ethnic group.

Evin Cetin doesn't love all Swedes. If she did she would want the same goods for them that she claims for herself, including the good of being able to live within an ethnic homeland. Her willingness to define the Swedes out of existence as one of the distinct peoples of the world is an act of aggression not of love.

A tax on men

There is a university town in the north of Sweden called Umeå. The town council of Umeå has an equality committee and this committee has raised for debate the idea of introducting gender taxes, specifically a tax on men. What's interesting is the justification given for placing special taxes on men:

Umeå will be the municipality in Sweden working most to be equal. A municipality in which women and men have the power to shape their own lives and society on equal terms, with as much influence, with an equal opportunity to live a financially independent life.

If you're wondering why I write so often on Sweden, it's because they express liberal principles so clearly and openly.

A general aim of liberalism is individual autonomy. By autonomy is meant being able to self-determine one's own life and being independent. Equality means that individuals have the same level of autonomy: the same "power to shape their own lives" and "an equal opportunity to live a financially independent life".

The Swedes are convinced that you get autonomy and independence via careers and money. Therefore, equality for women means that women should be equally committed to careers as men and should receive at least as much money as men do.

And so the Umeå equality committee is absolutely convinced that it is a gross injustice if women spend any more time with their babies than men do. Men must take an equal share of parental leave if equality is to exist.

Similarly the Umeå equality committee believes that justice requires that women be made perfectly financially independent of men through a guarantee of equal earnings, even if this means taxing men extra to reduce male take home pay.

And so you get ideas like this:

Umeå municipality's overall gender equality objectives are: To create opportunities for women and men have the power to shape society and their own lives.

An important factor is economic equality and economic independence. Therefore, we might begin to investigate the introduction of a gender tax?

Would a gender tax designed so it would be about men paying higher taxes because there is still an unexplained pay gap of around seven per cent in favor of men.

But there are more reasons that makes an average of 4,500 kronor per month, the difference in income between men and women. It's about the choices we have to do and how these choices are valued. Women still take the majority of parental leave and work part-time to a greater extent and more unpaid work at home. Women lost in their wallets for life.

The injustice of it is necessary to talk about and take responsibility for.

Should we be economically equal and financially independent? How will we get there? Is an equality tax the only option? Or are there other ways?

Closing the pay gap, to challenge the structures and actively work for an equal distribution of unpaid housework, breaking the gender segregated labor market, to ensure that fathers are taking a larger share of parental leave, to challenge our own beliefs and dare to see things for how they actually looks and not how we think it looks.

...A municipality in which all women and men have the power to shape their own lives and society on equal terms, with as much power and with equally loud voice so that both women and men are able to live a financially independent life, whole life.

Most Western countries are following the same ideas, even if they are less upfront in spelling them out.

I find it a particularly sterile vision of society, one in which it is assumed that women lose out when men commit themselves to a provider role and in which the aim is not a closer, complementary union between men and women but maximum independence.

It is a vision, too, which assumes that motherhood is a negative factor in a woman's life, a potential impediment to acquiring money and independence, that must therefore be delegated equally to men.

This kind of liberalism, when boiled down to its essential aims, is really about career and money. It doesn't rise to anything more than this. It is a low and dispirited expression of Western culture.

Swedish Centre Party supports polygamy

The Swedish Centre Party is one of the parties forming the current Swedish Government. It has taken a turn toward a classical (i.e. right) liberal position in recent years which has helped it increase its support in urban areas like Stockholm. It is also reportedly the richest political party in the world, having sold its interest in a newspaper group for $265,000,000.

The Centre Party recently came up with a new platform after consultation with 10,000 party members. It's a platform which combines both the "small state/free market" aspect of right liberalism, with a liberal emphasis on individual autonomy.

And so the new platform includes a flat tax and the abolition of inheritance tax, combined with a proposal for free immigration and the legalisation of polygamy.

By free immigration is meant something very close to open borders. Prospective immigrants would not need to satisfy any criteria relating to education or employment:

In late 2012, the party began opposing all limits on immigration, such as the requirement for some degree of job skills and a clean criminal record. It supports a plan that would see Sweden's population quadrupled to 40 million inhabitants.

The party justified this policy as part of a commitment to freedom and equal rights:

The Centre Party seeks open borders, free movement and a generous refugee policy. For a party that protects freedom and builds its values ​​on the equal rights there is no other logical position than that one is for a free immigration.
 

But they also want cheap labour:

He stresses that the new, generous immigration policies must be combined with a new labor policy.

Crucial elements are C-proposals on flexible priority rules and lower wages for those who are new to the labor market.

"I think most people would choose to get a job that paid less than going into isolation for ten years.

...It is many times better quality of life to have a job in Sweden compared with living in poverty or on the run somewhere else. That's how you should think."
 

The new part platform also includes the legalising of polygamy. The current leader of the Centre Party, Annie Lööf, came out in support of polygamy in 2006 when she was vice chair of the party's youth wing. The reason she gave for supporting polygamy is the standard liberal one:

"I don't think the state and laws should determine who and with whom my neighbours or I want to live," she wrote in a blog post at the time, according to SR.

"If my neighbour wants to marry two men, I wouldn't move or care. That's his or her choice."

All that matters to a liberal like Annie Lööf is that we maximise our autonomy, understood to mean our power to be self-determining individuals. What's missing is a concern for the nature of marriage itself and the longer-term effects on both the individual and society of changing from monogamous marriage to polygamy.

What's missing too is a sense that when it comes to relationships, we aren't free to choose in any direction. We can only choose within the culture of relationships that exists in society. If, for instance, a culture of polygamy is established, then inevitably there are going to be some men who will miss out on marriage whether they have chosen this or not, and some women who will find themselves with a choice of either having to share a husband or else leave a marriage. Polygamous culture, too, often involves older men with resources marrying much younger women, and women being cordoned off from the relatively large group of unmarried younger men.

If you want to marry well you have to be protective of the culture of relationships in society rather than focusing on autonomy alone.

The proposal to legalise polygamy is being resisted by sections of the Centre Party. It might not get through, but the proposal itself shows the direction that liberal principles are taking the party. If you sincerely believe that people should be free to marry whoever they choose, because individual autonomy trumps everything and because it would violate "equal rights" to deny this choice, then it's difficult to see on what principled basis polygamy will continue to be rejected.

Photoshopped for Sweden

A toy catalogue distributed in Denmark had to be photoshopped for Sweden:

A comparison between this year's Toys R Us catalogues in Sweden and Denmark, where Top Toy is also the franchisee, showed that a boy wielding a toy machine gun in the Danish edition had been replaced by a girl in Sweden.

Elsewhere, a girl was Photoshopped out of the "Hello Kitty" page, a girl holding a baby doll was replaced by a boy, and, in sister chain BR's catalogue, a young girl's pink T-shirt was turned light blue.

In Sweden you aren't supposed to make distinctions between what boys and girls might choose for toys. Equality there means boys playing with dolls as much as girls.

Why? As I've pointed out many times, under the principles of liberalism predetermined qualities like our sex aren't supposed to matter. Therefore it is thought progressive if sex distinctions are erased. So the Swedes are being good liberals in wanting the toy catalogues photoshopped.



Swedish Nerf girl

And we could add on something else by way of explanation. Left liberals often argue that sex distinctions exist because the dominant group (men) created them as a means of establishing a privilege over an oppressed group (women). Therefore, the masculine way is the privileged one that women should try to get a piece of. Equality, in other words, means getting women to have more of the good stuff (the masculine way), whilst getting men to share some of the bad stuff (the feminine things).

If that's what you believe, then you'll like the idea of young boys being encouraged to play with dolls, whilst young girls fire Nerf guns. It will seem like a levelling out, in which the masculine good stuff is shared out more equally between men and women.

The traditionalist response? I don't think we're going to panic if a girl has a go playing with a Nerf gun. But in general we would see it as a positive thing for a boy to develop along masculine lines and a girl along feminine lines. If a boy adopts a masculine identity he will want to embody the masculine to the fullest and best degree - that will be his path of self-development. And this will help him to bear the burdens of a masculine role in his adult life, to win the respect of his male peer group and to attract the interest of a future wife. Hopefully, too, it will help to connect the identity of a man to a larger, meaningful good that is found within the masculine virtues.

And the same goes for a girl who adopts a feminine identity.

A lot of men and women do still follow a traditionalist path, although discussion of it is more muted than it once was. That has been a loss to Western culture.

What is the Swedish family being replaced by?

If you want to be a self-defining, autonomous individual then you won't like the set character of the traditional family. It will be thought of as restrictive, as not offering enough choice. So the trend in liberal societies is to leave the family undefined.

It's the same old story - whatever is predetermined is thought to be oppressive and in need of deconstructing.

I was reminded of this by an article in the Herald Sun on the way family has been taught here in Victoria. As long ago as the 1980s it was decided that it was better to leave the family only vaguely defined:

"What I've found is that in the 1970s and early-'80s, the curriculum authors tried to hang on to that very traditional notion of the nuclear family," Ms Farrelly said.

"By the time they got to the '80s, they conceded this wasn't going to wash, and they got quite anxious."

Instead of then exploring different types of family units, Ms Farrelly said the educators came up with really quite weird definitions such as "groups of people who share things".

"Then family just disappeared. The course (now) focuses very much on the individual," she said.

So there's another liberal definition of the family to add to the list: "groups of people who share things".

That's a bit like a recent definition of the family by the director of Family Relationship Services Australia who said,

The definition I like now is whoever you share your toothpaste with, that’s your family.

So is this vaguely defined family really going to catch on? Are we going to see all sorts of permutations and combinations of people choosing to share things together?

The indications right now are that that's not what's happening. If we take a look at Sweden, which has pioneered the changes to family life, something else is emerging:

What you can see is that 47% of Swedish households are comprised of only one person. That's such a striking statistic. Next highest is Norway on 40% and then Germany on 39%. The UK is 34% and the US is 27% (low compared to the Europeans, but in 1950 the figure for America was only 9%).

So liberalism is moving us not so much toward the new undefined family as toward solo living.

Sweden: the nation as a multicultural workplace

Here's some synchronicity for you. Yesterday I wrote a post in which I criticised Australian writer David Penberthy for viewing the nation as a multicultural workplace.

Today I looked at the Swedish news and a Swedish minister was setting forth his own view of the nation as a multicultural workplace.

Tobias Billström is quoted as saying that 'Every global citizen should work in Sweden'. The Local website then gives his speech as follows:

Sweden's efforts to liberalize rules governing labour migration are meant to ensure that working in Sweden becomes an obvious choice for every global citizen, argues migration minister Tobias Billström.

Continued openness to the outside world is critical to our future development. Mobility, both migration and international trade, promotes our economic growth.

It must also be noted that Sweden is a small country on the edge of Europe with a climate that isn't altogether welcoming for part of the year. Sweden has therefore taken a leading role in international migration. When others lower the barriers, we open more roads. In the global competition for labor, Sweden should be able to attract the people who move across borders.

Sweden didn't seem to do too badly economically when the Swedes took responsibility for their own development rather than outsourcing it to others. But that traditional way of doing things doesn't fit the liberal concept of what a nation is - that it's a kind of multicultural workplace.

And so the Swedes have gone to an extreme of open borders - they are allowing employers to set their immigration policy. Here is Billström again:

Following reforms enacted in 2008, the prerequisites are in place for meeting the needs of the Swedish labour market by now allowing employers to decide what skills are needed at the company.

There's no public authority as well suited as the employers themselves for assessing those needs and therefore there are no restrictive quotas or no requirements for a specific skill or education level.

No quotas. No requirements for skills or education. What Sweden looks like in the future will be decided by employers, not by the Swedish parliament.

Liberals are making life a very small thing. What is thought to matter is labour force participation - above and beyond that doesn't seem to register much in the minds of liberal technocrats. And the only community we are thought to belong to is a global one of wandering labour resources.

Can this really last? Are people really going to be satisfied with such a trivialised material view of what life is about? And can a society really hold together when there is no sense of a loyalty to nation that transcends economics?

There are some Swedes who don't accept Billström's trivialising, dissolving concept of nation. I don't know much about the Sweden Democrats, so I can't endorse everything about them, but they have a more traditional concept of the nation and their support is growing: recent opinion polls put them as the third most popular party in Sweden.

A picture of the leader of the Sweden Democrats, Jimmie Åkesson:

Dr Jordan Peterson - asking the right questions

Here's a good find. There's a Canadian professor called Dr Jordan Peterson who appears on a Toronto TV station. Dr Peterson has worked as a Harvard professor and now teaches at the University of Toronto.

What I like about his videos is that he asks the right questions, which is something rare now amongst Western intellectuals. I'll post a few of his videos in coming weeks, but the first one is about the gender neutralisers in Sweden:



After summarising the efforts by Swedish liberals to abolish gender distinctions he responds by asking questions like:

• What if gender roles...represent ideals to aspire to?
• What if it's too much to ask each child to be a good girl and a good boy at the same time?
• What if such virtues cannot initially be developed without specialisation?

They're the kind of questions that deserve to be raised but are not often heard.

A country tries to banish gender

I'm seeing more things I've written about at this site hit the mainstream media. For example, at the quite lefty American website Slate there is an article on Sweden's efforts to make gender not matter (the subheading of the article is "A country tries to banish gender").

The Swedish project is an earnest attempt to fulfil the logic of liberal politics. If you believe that autonomy is the highest good, then you will believe that individuals should be self-determining, which then leads to the belief that predetermined qualities should be made not to matter. And our sex is a predetermined quality.

So the Swedes are implementing the same philosophy as other Western countries, only more radically. The starting point of making gender not matter was the idea of equal opportunity. But in a society with equal opportunity men and women will still choose different roles and commitments. Our sex will still matter. So the logic of the liberal principle is to push beyond equal opportunity.

And so the author of the Slate article observes:

for many Swedes, gender equality is not enough. Many are pushing for the Nordic nation to be not simply gender-equal but gender-neutral. The idea is that the government and society should tolerate no distinctions at all between the sexes. This means on the narrow level that society should show sensitivity to people who don't identify themselves as either male or female, including allowing any type of couple to marry. But that’s the least radical part of the project. What many gender-neutral activists are after is a society that entirely erases traditional gender roles and stereotypes at even the most mundane levels.

What follows is a list of examples of the Swedes showing intolerance toward sex distinctions. I've catalogued many of them myself, but here are some of the ones I missed:

• A Swedish children's clothes company has removed the boys and girls sections in its stores
• One Swedish preschool abolished free play because of concerns that when children play freely "stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented."
• The Swedish Green Party wants to place "gender pedagogues" in every preschool to act as watchdogs on gender
•  In some Swedish preschools it is forbidden to use the terms boys and girls.
• In one Swedish children's book the words for mum and dad were replaced as being too gendered

There are many more examples given in the Slate article. What's interesting is that the article takes the attitude that the Swedes are being intolerant and intrusive in pushing their gender policy so far - that they have ended up micromanaging people's lives. That's a good observation, but it doesn't go far enough as a criticism. The liberal Swedes no doubt believe that they are acting justly for a good cause in doing so - and if you accept the underlying liberal premises then they would be right.

So what's needed is a better concept of the ultimate goods that a society aims for. Autonomy cannot be the sole, overriding good - if it is thought to be so, then the end point will be the kind of micromanaging of preschoolers - of play, of language, of thought - that the Swedes are pushing toward (with countries like Australia not far behind).

In Sweden Spiderman pushes a pram

The Swedes take liberalism so seriously, that toy catalogues there now show a boy Spiderman pushing a pram.

Swedish Spiderman happily carries a pink purse whilst pushing a pink pram

The justification? It's exactly what you would expect from those following liberal ideas:

Kaj Wiberg is the CEO of the company behind the catalogue, "Leklust", and claims that it is time to move forward from old-fashioned gender restrictions.

"Gender roles are an outdated thing," he told Metro newspaper.

Carl Emanuelsson, spokesman for Sweden's Feminist Initiative, welcomes the concept.

"It's great that this company has tried to show that people don't need to be stuck in gender roles," he told The Local.

"Examples such as these show other ways that we can break free from the roles that are forced on us, the roles that we are limited by."

In the catalogue, on a predominantly pink page full of dolls and prams, a child dressed as spiderman can be seen pushing a pink pram.

On another page, a blonde-haired girl with rolled up sleeves is pedalling what appears to be a racing vehicle.

Elsewhere, the catalogue features another boy standing in front of a toy stove, apparently cooking a make-believe meal.

"The problem with toy stores and their catalogues is that they're selling a concept; an idea about boys and girls and what kind of qualities and interests they should have," Lady Dahmer told The Local.

"It's about money because as long as they can fool us into believing boys and girls are fundamentally different, they can keep selling us twice as much."

That is the kind of thing you'd say if you were indoctrinated in a liberal ideology. Liberals believe that the overriding good is individual autonomy, a personal freedom to be a self-determining individual.

But our sex is not something that we get to self-determine, it is predetermined. Therefore, it is held to be a negative limitation on the individual, one from which the individual must be liberated. And so liberals talk about masculinity and femininity in negative, limiting terms as a fetter, or a prison, or a straitjacket.

And look at how Kaj Windberg justifies his pram-pushing Spiderman. He talks about gender being a "restriction" that people are "stuck in" and "limited by" and that they need to "break free" from. He treats sex distinctions as a negative restriction on the individual.

If you didn't start out from liberal first principles, you wouldn't think this way. You would recognise the importance of your sex to your self-identity and you would look on the fulfilment of your masculinity or femininity as something meaningful - as an expression of being that connects you as an individual to something larger than yourself.

But let's say you do accept the liberal first principles and you reject your own sex as something that is predetermined. In order to believe that you can be "liberated" from a predetermined masculinity or femininity, you will have to think of sex distinctions as being entirely socially constructed - as having no basis in nature.

That's why Lady Dahmer believes that it is the toy catalogues which are creating the sex distinctions; they are creating a "concept" in order to make money and "fooling" people into believing that boys and girls are different.

She believes that boys and girls are fundamentally the same and that capitalism is creating the concept of sex distinctions in order to be able to sell twice as much stuff.

That might not sound credible to those who understand the biological basis for sex distinctions, nor to those who understand the existence of sex distinctions across place and time, but it fits within a liberal ideology and so is accepted by those who support that ideology.

And one positive benefit of having Spiderman carry pink handbags and push prams? It might help cheer up Alex the Swede.

The limits of the welfare state

The Swedish Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, has raised the possibility that Swedes might need to work until the age of 75 before they get the pension.

It seems that the limits of the welfare state have finally been reached. The choice for Swedes is either to cut back state social engineering programmes or to work an additional ten years to pay for them.

The Swedish PM favours working until the age of 75. I can't see that happening on a large scale. Most people are not as robust in their 70s; perhaps they could work part-time at a relatively low stress job, but for many people more than that is not realistic.

It's another example of the West going backwards. For a long time the retirement age edged downward. In Australia there are some who were even able to retire at 55. But the trend is now changing. The UK recently began a process of pushing the retirement age upward and now the Swedish PM is suggesting 75 as a retirement age.

Swedish feminists: men must sit with their legs crossed

I wish I could state confidently that this is some sort of a prank. But it seems to be serious. A Swedish feminist group has set up a website in which they post photos of men sitting with legs apart on public transport. This they consider to be an act of masculinist power over women. From their manifesto:

Macho in the public transport system is a standard critical action group. We were created to draw attention to a normalized and often invisible and unconscious power of expression in a casual and communal area. The trains, buses, commuter trains and subways take more space than you physically have, by example, by spreading your legs or falling down on the seat is a concrete example of how power and masculinity co-create. Taking over someone else's site is a symbolic and active recreation, not only of power but also of a stereotypical masculinity.

We believe in a world where gender does not play a part in the opportunities, rights and responsibilities we have. Male, female, power and non power is created by social structures. Who can and will power is not a biological fact but a natural occurrence and re-created all of us.

It may not sound like a much problem when there is rape, starvation, beatings, sexual harassment and unequal pay for equal work. That's not true. In a world that is so clearly marked by a gender power structure all the little details are important.

Guys are taking more space in many situations, particularly in public transport. We want to highlight and problematize why girls and boys are different.  Why does the stereotypical macho man sit more widely?  How does the way one sits in public areas recreate a structural advantage for men?

The google translation may not be perfect, but it gives you an idea of what the group is about.  They believe in the standard left-liberal idea that society has been constructed to enact male power over women and that therefore both masculinity and sex distinctions ought to be deconstructed in order to bring about equal rights.

They seem to take this left-liberal idea so earnestly that they believe that a man sitting on a train with his legs a little apart is an expression of male power over women. Here's the kind of photo they take to demonstrate their cause:

Naughty Swedish male

The first comment placed by a Swedish woman, Jenny, under the photo above reads:

My guy usually sits cross-legged because it is so easy! Just like me...and he is super manly! Cheer him!

Unless I've missed some irony in this comment, Jenny seems to think we should applaud her boyfriend for sitting with his legs crossed just like she does.

The reaction from Swedish men? Some seem to have reacted too defensively, arguing they have to sit with their legs apart for the sake of comfort or health. That's giving these feminists way too much ground.

But to give Swedish men some credit, someone went to the trouble of setting up a spoof site - see here.

Radical quotas

How's this for an affirmative action proposal. Tanja Bergqvist at her Swedish site has linked to a newspaper story from 2007 in which Zoran Alagic and Kurdo Baksi put forward a radical new "equality" proposal.

Who are these two men? I don't know much about Baksi except that he has been involved in a Swedish multicultural magazine called Black-White. But Alagic is well and truly a member of the political class in Sweden. He was a member of the Swedish PM's press staff and then became the press officer for the Swedish Teachers' Association.

These two men made this proposal:

We need to bring about a change in economic structures of power and break the male monopoly. A quota may be the solution. It is possibly not enough of a law on quotas by gender - we should also see action to really broaden recruitment to the business community on a broad front. We therefore propose a moratorium in Swedish industry:

The next five years, all white, tall, heterosexual, blond and blue-eyed men between 40 and 50 years be set at the bottom of the employment hierarchy, in the university corridors, the newspaper editors and the Boards of Directors.

The rest - women, homosexuals, disabled, immigrants, and 55 or older - a priority for at least five years.

So they not only want gender quotas, they also want a quota based on race, height, sexuality, hair colour, eye colour and age.

It seems that "equality" knows no limits.

How do Swedish courts treat the family?

OK, so maybe it is Swedish month at Oz Conservative. The stories from that country keep piling in. The latest one concerns a father and mother who decided to punish their children by placing tabasco hot sauce on their tongues when they were caught out lying.

The parents were brought before a court, found guilty of assault and each fined the equivalent of 60 days wages. But that's not what really struck me about the story. It's the following bit. As well as the fine and a suspended jail sentence the parents were ordered to pay $2,222 to the children.

Now, even if you are fiercely opposed to these kinds of punishments for children, what the Swedish court has done goes way beyond setting limits to how parents can discipline their children. The parents were not only ordered to pay fines to the state, but to their own children. And that, to me, means that the Swedish courts no longer recognise the distinct relationship between parent and child nor what you might call the "internal unity" of the family.

The Swedish court is treating the parents and the children as if they are unrelated citizens. The court is, in other words, pretending to be blind to the real relationship parents and children have with each other as part of a family.

If the court were aware of the culture of family life, then it would never order adult parents to pay a "fine" to their own young children. That not only ruptures the sense of parental authority within the family, but it also breaks apart the sense of the family as a cohesive unit, rather than just a collection of individuals sharing a roof together.

A Swedish school wants to make conception gender neutral

Sweden has embarked on an effort to abolish sex distinctions. I reported this week on preschools in Sweden which proudly offer princess costumes for the boys to wear. And now comes the news that there are youngsters in Sweden who are getting "gender neutral" sex ed lessons:

"The teaching of sex and relationships has fallen behind. This fall a new curriculum was introduced requiring the topic be included in more subject areas. But Freya School in Gnesta is one step ahead. "Activities in this school are likely to constitute a model for other schools in the country that must operate in accordance with the curriculum that takes effect in autumn 2011 and that "includes clearer descriptions of how sex education should be integrated in the different subjects in school." Both municipal strategists and math and science teachers are engaged in the work:

"The important thing is that students can see how it all fits together, says Maja (math and science teacher) and Karina (Municipal equality strategist). How sexuality is often influenced by others' standards and values. Therefore, teaching is also done in a neutral manner. In the anatomical teaching, they try to be as clear as possible.

"We want to get away from metaphors that sperm are active and eggs passive in the fertilization process, or that men's and women's genitalia are described as complementary. Such descriptions serve only to reinforce traditional gender norms and heteronormativity", they say.

Several things spring to mind. First, at the same time that they are ramming a political ideology down the throats of youngsters, they are telling themselves that they are teaching "in a neutral manner". Swedes have to start calling them out on this. It has to be openly recognised that Sweden has a state ideology into which students are being involuntarily indoctrinated.

Second, regardless of how active the sperm and the egg are in the fertilisation process, it shows how far things have gone in Sweden that this is all a politically sensitive subject. In other words, it shows how radical and far reaching the Swedish authorities intend to be in carrying out their programme of abolishing traditional sex distinctions.

Third, how would you like to live in a place which has a "municipal equality strategist" wanting to mainstream such ideas not just in sex ed classes but throughout the curriculum, even in maths classes? It would be like living in the Soviet Union and having every subject area taught within a Marxist-Leninist perspective.

Anyway, this is how one Swede suggests that the gender equality people would prefer to imagine the process of fertilisation:

The idea that sperm actually swim to the egg is a social construction produced in the mind of the patriarchy. The egg is not only there, but it actually swim into the penis, where it immediately "takes its share" of life by grabbing the nearest confused sperm, abducts it, runs over everything in its path and then returns with the passive sperm to the womb where it locks into it, and then drills into it, causing a fusion, if the sperm does not die during the egg's wild rampage. If so the egg goes back into the penis and takes a more capable passive sperm that can withstand some beating - it's so evolution favored the swift eggs and rugged sperm that do not dare move a muscle.  

Mayholes and Swedish boy princesses

I don't know how seriously we're meant to take this story. But even if it is meant humorously, it says something about the modern world.

Swedes have traditionally danced around a maypole during midsummer festivals. But now a feminist group wants them to dance around a "mayhole" instead. Why? Because they regard the maypole as a phallic symbol, and because other aspects of the festival are too heteronormative and patriarchal:

Chamberland ... who launched the group on Facebook in 2008, believes the traditional Midsummer maypole is a sexist phallic symbol that should be replaced by something of a more feminine flavour.

Rather than erecting a maypole, he and other members in the group want Swedes to spend time fashioning 'mayholes' by digging a hole in the ground or arranging tree branches in the shape of a vagina.

“It could be all different sizes, laid on the ground, or erected into the sky. It could be built from flowers, fabric, leafs, stones or glass," says Chamberland, who believes Sweden's current Midsummer tradition is too "heteronormative".

“It’s not just the pole," he explains.

"The tradition of girls picking seven different flowers to put under their pillow to dream about their future man is also very heteronormative and patriarchal."

Some Swedes have responded that men and women are represented equally in the maypole tradition because the earth represents the woman, but:

such explanations fail to convince Chamberland, who has just finished his master degree in gender studies, that Midsummer celebrations don’t need changing.

“That still reflects the different gender roles and the view that there are only two genders and that sex should only be vaginal and between a man and a woman when in fact there are lots of different ways to have sex,” he argues.

Stina Svensson, a spokesperson for the feminist political party Feminist Initiative welcomes Chamberland's efforts.

“I think it seems like a creative new way to celebrate Midsummer and I think it’s good when people celebrate the way they want to instead of how they should,” she says.

Another story from Sweden concerns the efforts to deconstruct gender roles in Swedish preschools. A reporter from the Dagens Nyheter went to a preschool and spoke to the boys about wearing princess costumes. The reporter then interviewed the staff about their efforts to break down the sex distinctions between the children:

Sanna Karlsson and Mia Smith's preschool teacher at Årstaberg. Mia is in charge of operations and works in a young group, True is working with slightly older children.

In the pre-school curriculum, it is clear such that we will offer boys and girls the same opportunities and that we should discourage children from being confined by gender stereotypes. An awareness of gender is part of the pedagogue mission, says Sanna Karlsson.

The assumption is that all children should have access to the same material regardless of sex, says Mia Svensson.

Often, it is about offering princess costumes to the boys and building materials to the girls. Although the response of individual children is something you think about.

How do the staff work?

We are in constant discussion, says Mia.

The boys in young departments will be happy about being in a skirt, coming to preschool in nail polish and want to make themselves beautiful. But somewhere along the way something happens.

The older the children begin to comment on each other, become more aware of what they and others are wearing. Just the clothes are clear markers of status as they get older.

Yet there is a lot of experimentation with different roles among the boys.

A good example is that when they dress up as Batman or in very masculine attributes, but it does not seem to control the game. Maybe they stand there in the Spiderman costume and prepare food or walk around with dolls, says Mia Svensson.

The staff works consciously so that the boys should dare to speak freely outside of gender conventions. But much is also about the attitudes they encounter at home. Both she and Sanna Karlsson face sometimes bad parents.

Even if they think it's OK that the boys dress as a princess, they are worried that they will be teased or about the negative response of other adults and children.

Awareness of gender is a fair question, and gives tremendous gains in the environment among children, says Sanna. We notice it becomes a more tolerant atmosphere in which children signal to each other that you can be who you are.

For the staff at Årstaberg it's not about trying to get kids to do something they do not want, but about individual freedom.

This is liberal autonomy theory in action (Dagens Nyheter describes its editorial stance as "independently liberal"). If the highest good is autonomy - a freedom to self-determine - and our sex is something we don't get to self-determine, then sex roles will be thought of negatively as something that limit us. That's why the article talks about children being "confined by gender stereotypes", whereas boys dressing as princesses is held to signal an "individual freedom" to "be who you are".

Swedish preschool teachers are bound to follow this view of the world:

Preschool curriculum developed in 1998 is a guiding document with legal bearing capacity as all the staff at the country's pre-schools must consider.

It says: "The pre-school is to counteract traditional gender patterns and gender roles.

As I've noted before, the Swedish state is not neutral. Liberalism is the state ideology.

Oslo police reveal rape statistics

The following video from Norwegian TV doesn't fit into the standard liberal narrative and so will probably receive no publicity here in Australia. The video shows a policewoman revealing the rape statistics for the city of Oslo from 2006 to 2010. 86 women reported being raped; of the 83 attackers who could be identified all were of non-Western appearance.

This means that there is no rape epidemic amongst the Norwegian population, as feminists would claim. In five years, not a single Norwegian or even Western man was reported by a woman as having committed a rape - in a city of 1,500,000. All the talk about having to change men and mainstream masculinity to stop rape is misdirected.

It means too that the standard liberal assumption that it is white Christian men who are violent oppressors of other people does not fit what is happening here. What we have here are non-Western Muslim men who are committing acts of violence against mostly white Norwegian women. Not surprisingly, the wikipedia article on Oslo has a section talking about white flight from Oslo (see 'demographics').