Stieg Larsson's best-selling crime novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008), was originally published three years earlier under the much more provocative title Män som hatar kvinnor - Men Who Hate Women; one that indicates the misogyny and violence at the heart of the book and, it seems, Swedish society (despite its reputation for social and sexual equality).
As critics have noted, the work brutally examines this disjunction between image and reality. Where many imagine Sweden to be a kind of achieved utopia, Larsson finds political, financial, and moral corruption - not to mention a form of fascism that is both historically present and rooted in the everyday behaviour (the speech acts, the pleasures, the dreams and fantasies) of those who would like to see an Ikea world triumphant.
I have to admit, Swedish neo-Nazism and corporate greed doesn't really surprise me. But I was shocked to learn from an EU report last year on sexual violence against women, that, whilst there is an extensive problem across the Continent, it's the Scandinavian countries, where the problem is at its most acute: 46% of Swedish women interviewed, for example, report being the victim of some form of physical or sexual abuse at the hands of men.
Without wanting to sound flippant, it's perhaps no wonder that so many Swedish women have chosen to make their home in Chako Paul City, a female-only town established in 1820 on the edge of the forests to the north. Better to be in a healthy, happy lesbian world than an unhealthy, unhappy heterosexual one where misogyny and rape are common and normalized.
Better even just to keep to yourself and make your own fun; which, apparently, a lot of Swedish women do with great enthusiasm. In fact, they even have a new word for it, thanks to the Swedish Association for Sexual Education (RFSU): klittra - a portmanteau of clitoris and glitter. This neologism might not be ideal, but it's better I suppose than other options that included pulla and runka.
However, whilst I have no objections to Amazonian lesbians living in their own communities, or masturbating women who like to grind their own coffee, as Oliver Mellors would describe it, one can't help but hope for the establishment of better - non-violent, non-sexist - male/female relationships in the future. For I suspect that separatism and sexual solipsism are only partial and short-term solutions (though this suspicion itself might be one full of heteronormative prejudice).
Afterthought: perhaps it will be a young Swedish woman - with or without a dragoon tattoo - who will show us a way forward. And who knows, she might already be living in Malmö; obedient of heart and golden of skin ...
Afterthought: perhaps it will be a young Swedish woman - with or without a dragoon tattoo - who will show us a way forward. And who knows, she might already be living in Malmö; obedient of heart and golden of skin ...
