Herr(ing) Song

I am luxuriating in bed listening to the amazing Eliza Carthy album 'Rice', which in addition to a song about herring also has a tune called "Swedish". If you look, you find Sweden everywhere... especially when you live there.

We have furniture - about half of which comes from IKEA, and the rest comes from the recycling room in our apartment building. IKEA, for the uninitiated, is a global furniture empire originating in Sweden that aims to sell cheap furniture while adhering to basic standards of taste and quality. It certainly is amazingly cheap, but because of this everyone in Sweden has it, and it all has the conspicuous IKEA look because everything in the store is designed to match everything else. So it is a little bit disturbing to have IKEA in your home with its conspicuousness and clean-line faux-yuppie pretensions of style. The chipped ugly furniture from the recycling room is much more to our taste, but we were very lucky to get all the IKEA furniture from Axel's mum, so we're not looking a gift horse in the mouth. The red courdoroy fold-out-bed sofa is really cool too. We had a flat-warming to celebrate the arrival of the furniture, which was a really nice time. Our friends here make up in quality for what they lack in quantity.

Axel has been beavering away at his music, and has just bought a fancy acoustic guitar off a local pop-musician. Right now he's practising on his fancy New Orleans electric guitar, learning blues finger picking from a DVD. I love the library here! They have an excellent selection of DVDs, CDs, English language books and more, all for free. We've been watching a couple of films every week, and taking out stacks of CDs at a time. So for all that we're short of money, we're never bored.

Yesterday was the International Women's Day, a fact that often goes unremarked in New Zealand (last year the Dom Post ran an article on 'blokettes' - women who "drink like men", with no mention of the date's significance, or the irony of running such an anti-feminist article). Here there is much more awareness, including a short film festival about women's issues and women's rights. I am told that in Sweden it would be very un-PC to not describe oneself as a feminist, and that even arch-patriarchs embrace the term. Of course, patriarchy isn't defeated here, but the gender relations certainly feel different. You wouldn't get felt up in a bar here, or be whistled at on the street. The notion of equality is very dear to the hearts of Swedes, and thus far I have found it to be firmly drilled into the Swedish mentality. It is amazing to me to see men so confident with feminist discourse and struggles. It is different from male feminists at home, who still often seem to see feminism as a women's issue. I'm not suggesting that NZ male feminists (or at least the ones I've met) are any less concerned or passionate, but it seems that they still view the struggle as on behalf of the category 'women'. Swedes seem to see feminism as a struggle for the benefit of society, they protest unequal treatment of people, not unequal treatment of 'women', and therefore men can own and claim feminism too. Of course, I'm speaking only from my own feeling of general sentiments, so nobody quote me on this! I just think it is interesting that the word "feminist" is so political and dangerous in NZ (and the US and many other places), and yet here it is as ubiquitous an ideal as democracy, which are in fact part of the same ideal for Swedes.