Danish women, gender division and sexual identity

This is something that I've been wondering about since I came here ; sadly, I don't know any Danish women well enough to raise this thorny issue with, but maybe some of you have some insight into it.

Danish society is known to have attained a large amount of gender equality - I'm not going go into this because I think it's a topic all on its own. But socially, I get the impression that men and women, outside of procreation, don't really seem to have that much to do with each other. For example, Danes love their "boys/girls night out" as they call it. So much so that you start wondering if they ever do anything else. Is this a consequence of Denmark's strong alcohol culture, where men + women + booze = oops?

Furthermore, I'm also a bit surprised at how important sex seems to be to Danish women's self-image. You see it a lot in women like Joan Ørting, the woman who runs the (*shudder*) sexology column at Ekstabladet. She seems to have reduced women to the worst male stereotypes imaginable, yet as far as I know she's quite popular and well-regarded amongst Danish women, and she certainly doesn't seem alone in her views.

It's  almost as if Danish women are accustomed to their men wanting them largely for sex. Danish women tolerate "porn" in public far more than women in Sweden do, if my wife is anything go by. Neither of us are particularly prudish, but there's sex, and then there's sexism, and it's unhealthy if you can't tell them apart. It's like, women here know they can't beat men, so they've joined them in some kind of superficial boy's paradise. You notice that outside of sex, Danish women don't really seem that interested in men. They seem to socialize mostly with other women, or within their families. I've always had a lot of platonic female friends, yet after almost ten years here, I can't figure the women out.

And then there was that "Karen" video on youtube a few weeks back, of the Danish woman who supposedly got pregnant from a one-night stand with a foreign man. Danes were outraged, but if you read the comments in the press, the anger was largely over how people outside of Denmark would see the women here. As in, sure, Danish women do that sort of thing all the time, they don't really like it, but there's a social pact in which men and women agree not to look down on each other for doing it. The moment the rest of the world gets in on it, you can call it something altogether less polite.

Your thoughts?

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I don’t think that is a fair assessment. What Joan Ørting is trying to do is point out the fact that women can and do enjoy sex as much as men, and by being more vocal and dominant they can get more pleasure from it. Versus, just being there when the man is ready and laying down. I don’t believe Denmark is different than any other western culture, but since the population is so small, things like this stick out more than in a country as the UK or US.

I believe that Denmark is more sexually tolerant then most countries but that is a good thing, why should we be ashamed of something so natural, as many cultures would have us be, that said, I am against sex in marketing that is just wrong.

BR /Dave

davecos, I really don't mind Ørting's sex advice - some of it is actually pretty good :) It's her attitude towards relationships I find odd. And I'm asking, is she simply reflecting the attitudes of women here in general? She seems to promote the idea that the main thing women need from men is sex, and that "traditional" values such as intimacy are outdated. Once upon a time I read her column regularly on eb.dk, and I was surprised how, for example, she suggested that communication and friendship were unnecessary complications for a relationship, and that women were better off using physical attraction as a way to land a suitable mate. Similarly, she often implies that once the sex in a relationship goes cold, the relationship is invariably over. These are hardly new ideas, but I was surprised to see them coming from a woman : that's the sort of advice you're more likely to get in a men's magazine.

I don't think Denmark is a lot like other European societies in this sense. The problem is definitely not sex or openness about sex - the problem is a lack of everything else. Where did things like _communication_ go? From what I hear/see/read about many other countries, and certainly my own experience with Sweden, Germany, Holland other northern European countries, is that the trend is towards "feminising" men, as in making men more emotionally open and getting them to relate to women in ways other than sex. But Denmark, to me anyway, seems to have done the opposite - women here behave like men, and men tend to be a bit ... macho.

I'm not trying to make a value judgment per se - equality is equality, which ever way you achieve it. I'm just trying to understand what I see.