I’ve never wanted to be a man. Despite the obvious inequality between men and women when I was growing up, it never seemed to me that men’s roles were that much of a bargain. My dad and the other men I knew as a child didn’t seem happier than my mom or the other women in my neighborhood. Sure, they earned real money, and often controlled it, but it was in return for doing a lot of things that were dull, dirty, and sometimes downright dangerous—not in the sense of being exciting but rather flat-out life-threatening. Yet there is one thing I have always envied about men: they can pee standing up. It may seem silly, or even trivial, but I can’t count how many times in how many places it would have been such a relief to stand and deliver.

So when I read recently that in Sweden for a man to point his plumbing at the pissoir is increasingly considered, as one writer explained, “the height of vulgarity and possibly suggestive of violence,” I couldn’t believe it. These guys once were Vikings. How did they become persuaded to take a seat? Sleuthing a bit, I discovered that in 2000, a feminist group at Stockholm University demanded that all urinals be removed because they were discriminatory to women. Talk about penis envy! I had no idea that this was how culture was evolving in Sweden, Holland, and all the Scandinavian countries that are leading the gender-equality revolution. In 2005, the World Economic Forum deemed Sweden as the “most advanced country” for women in regard to economic and political empowerment, educational attainment, and health and well-being. Sweden and the other small homogeneous nations of Northern Europe have generous maternal and paternal leave policies, free access to higher education, affordable child care, and more. They have legislated a smorgasbord of policies designed to level the playing field between women and men that make my feminist heart beat faster. But it never occurred to me that as women took to their feet, men would sit down—on the john, no less!

Thinking about this dislodged an odd tidbit of information from my memory. Ten years or so ago, I read a news story about how the Swedes were bored in the bedroom—their interest in sex had actually declined since the late sixties. The article suggested that women were finding it difficult to maintain sexual interest in their partners. In the effort to create a truly gender-equal society, Swedish men had become so, shall we say, similar in temperament to women that the spark that keeps an intimate relationship alive was getting snuffed out. Could it be that in Sweden, to put it a bit crudely, women were women, and the men were too?

Now, to be fair, and not just blinkered by my own biases, our sense of what is appropriately male or female is profoundly influenced by cultural norms. For example, women in the United States began shaving their body hair in the early twentieth century in order to look more “feminine.” While this custom has morphed and spread, some other cultures do still see it as bizarre. But I had never thought much about how men would change if cultural values shifted to support the traditionally female domestic sphere. My assumption has always been that doing so would be positive for all of us—allowing women and men to express the full range of human qualities that historically had been divided by gender. And that it would free us to be more committed and creative in our relationships. But what if it wasn’t so simple? I became very curious about men in progressive Scandinavia—Sweden, Denmark, and Norway—the land where Vikings once plotted their fearless and fearsome raids. Popular progressive and spiritual thought tells us that making a shift in Western culture toward the feminine is the path to peace and a positive future. Many would say that we need to look no further than to Northern Europe to see a preview of our own future. What, I wanted to know, was happening to men in those most egalitarian countries? Researching this, however, proved to be quite difficult. Progressive sources describe this terrain just south of the Arctic Circle as nothing short of paradise—Scandinavians, particularly the Danes, get high marks for being among the happiest people in the world. Conservatives insist that something is rotten in the State of Denmark (and Sweden and Norway), but their responses are laced with antifeminist misogyny, gender fundamentalism, and xenophobia. I needed to find out for myself. So, at the first hint of spring earlier this year, I set out for Denmark, the oldest ongoing kingdom in the world, on a quest to discover what’s happened to the Vikings …

Gender Equality, Then and Now

Of course, I’m being more than a little facetious about the Viking question. To ask what happened to the Vikings is like asking where all of the knights from the Crusades have gone. Nonetheless, a thousand years ago, the Scandinavians had a death-defying, off-the-edge-of-the-world boldness. They sailed to four continents in wooden boats—“discovering” North America more than seven hundred years before the other Europeans. Norse mythology always seemed to me to be more fierce than that of the Greeks and Romans. Jove just wanted to get it on with every woman he saw; Thor literally hammered his numerous enemies—giants, dwarves, and Old Age itself. The Vikings as a people had a reputation for being as ferocious as their gods. The “Viking Age” started around 793 CE when they came calling at a famous early Christian religious site, the church of Lindisfarne, in England. As Alcuin, an English monk, described it at the time, “The heathens poured out the blood of saints around the altar, and trampled on the bodies of saints in the temple of God, like dung in the streets.” While our perception may be distorted by the Christian view of Norse paganism, their indomitable spirit and appetite for pillage led them all the way in one direction to Russia and in the other to what is now New York City. Pillaging was an equal opportunity affair—Leif the Lucky’s sister Freydis led her own expedition down the coast of North America, and Broka Aubur wore pants and attacked her unfaithful husband with a sword, to name two legendary female Vikings. While we associate dominance with masculinity and therefore with men, they are not the same thing. In warrior cultures like the Vikings, dominance matters more than gender. If you can decimate your enemies, it doesn’t matter who you are.

The goal in contemporary Scandinavia is also to make gender not matter—but in a completely different way. “Gender is losing meaning,” explains Jørgen Lorentzen, postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at the University of Oslo. Jørgen studies men’s changing roles and is a member of the prestigious Norwegian Men’s Commission. The Commission was established to advise the government on how men can make the transition into a gender-neutral society. “In some very recent studies that we have conducted, we see that gender means less and less. Gender doesn’t mean anything for employment, politics, or sharing work and family. Gender has nothing to do with who cooks or takes care of children. Men and women are equally able to do these things.”

Throughout our conversation, Jørgen makes it clear that Norway, and by extension the other countries in Northern Europe, is still in a transition. “What is your vision of a fully gender-neutral society? What will it look like?” I ask him.

“I hope that gender will lose its meaning even more,” he replies. “A gender-free society will have less sexual harassment, less rape, less violence, and more sex. And sex will not be a taboo.”  

Not a taboo? The Northern European countries, especially Scandinavia, have had an international reputation for being leaders in the sexual revolution since the 1950s. Sex isn’t kept in the closet or even the bedroom—it’s all right out there on display. Believe it or not, in 2006 the Danish Road Safety Council created a television ad filled with women jiggling their bare breasts and holding speed limit signs. (The idea was to catch the attention of Danish men who are inveterate speeders.) But that’s not the half of it. Hard-core pornography is available on television. Women sunbathe wearing only G-strings in city parks. There is great tolerance for same-sex unions and for liberating any sexual preference from the shadows of shame. It’s gone so far that, at the extreme end, in Holland, a group tried to create a political party to support pedophilia. (Fortunately, it caused an uproar.) Sex—in any and all forms—is far from being taboo in these countries. In fact, it seems to be one of the main priorities. This prompts me to ask Jørgen: “Would you say that having a good sex life is one of the deepest values in Norwegian society?”

“Having a good sex life is an important part of being a human being,” he replies. “There is a lot of focus on it, especially on women having sexual pleasure. Gender equality gives women a much higher degree of pleasure.”

Perhaps the information I had on relationships fizzling out was wrong. These countries may be the closest thing to a feminist paradise that we have ever had.

Boys Will Be Girls

Twelve hundred years after the Vikings tromped on English soil, the Scandinavians now like to emphasize that most Vikings were farmers. While it’s probably statistically true that more people were tilling than pillaging, I wonder if this reframing of the past may be related to the revolution in values that’s happening there. Being a Viking, or a warrior of any kind, is not in vogue—particularly not for boys. In early childhood education in Sweden, little boys are given dolls to play with and girls are given toy tractors. It’s all part of the Anti-Sexism Awareness Training that begins in kindergarten, through which the schools, supported by the government, are deliberately trying to switch the accepted gender roles. While programs of this kind were tried in many U.S. schools in the seventies, they were a dismal failure. Perhaps the United States is too diverse a culture to experiment in this way without raising the ire of parents who want their children to assume traditional roles. But as far as I am aware of in the United States, nine times out of ten, and much to our dismay as egalitarian idealists, girls would cradle the toy tractors in a blanket and boys would use the baby doll as a machine gun. The kids resisted taking up what they perceived as the wrong toys for their gender. Shifting this kind of preference is not easy, because boys and girls start with certain predispositions that are usually related to their role in reproduction; they also mimic what they see the men and women doing around them.

In our first conversation, my two Danish hosts, Peter Bastian and Jon Bertelsen, tell me that Denmark has similarly enforced this shift in gender roles through the schools. Peter, a well-known Danish musician and bestselling author, was part of what they call the ’68 generation—the rebellious crew that has steered the country on the path toward gender equality. Jon is cofounding director of a small infotech business, and grew up in the brave new world that Peter’s generation was trying to create. I know both of them through the organization EnlightenNext, the publisher of What Is Enlightenment?

“When everything opened up in 1968 with the women’s movement,” Peter says eagerly, brushing his blond hair out of his eyes, “we men just felt so guilty. To see how women had been so oppressed—it was like, oh, this is all our fault.”

“I was born in 1970,” says Jon. Tall and lanky, wearing the jeans-and-sweater uniform of the urban Danish man, he speaks quietly but with an urgency. “At the time when I grew up, the social structures to bring about equality were pretty much in place—put there by Peter’s generation. By the 1980s, gender equality was being implemented in the school system. When I was around twelve years old, my class was part of a two-year ‘equality project’ headed by a gender-equality consultant employed by the municipality. The consultant was a woman, and our main teacher was a woman as well.

“At one point, we were sent out to get a week of work experience. All pupils do that in Denmark. Because of this equality project, all the boys were sent to traditional women’s jobs and all the girls to traditional men’s jobs. I spent a whole week in an old-age home surrounded by middle-aged female nurses—and hated it.”

“Did you say anything about it?” I ask.

“No,” he says with a slight shrug. “But I do remember that there was a really weird vibe around the whole thing. Once our teacher asked the class for volunteers to pick up a crate of soft drinks at the supermarket. Some of us guys responded—and then she said very shrilly, ‘Well, I think we should have some strong girls do that!’” Jon looks a bit astonished as he says this. “Another example was when some guys from my class became national champs in track and field. We were very proud of it, but our teacher wouldn’t let us cheer and celebrate. It was as if it wasn’t cool that we had won.”

“What did you get from all this?”

He thinks for a few seconds. “The main message was: Being a boy, you are guilty because you are oppressing the girls by default. Most of us guys resisted in different ways—but what can you do as twelve-year-olds when all the grownups, including your male teachers, think that they are doing a great and right thing?”

Vikings in Glass Slippers

Jon’s statement that he and his friends resisted having their positive pride and self-assertion squashed echoes in my mind as he, Peter, and I head out to dinner later that evening. How ironic that he should have chosen that particular word—it was so important in the work that Carol Gilligan, my other colleagues at Harvard, and I did on girls’ psychological development in the 1990s. We discovered that just at the point when girls realized that to be popular and attractive young women they would have to shoehorn themselves into the narrow glass slipper of feminine ideals—being sexy or skinny or ditzy or whatever—they would resist. Resistance came in different forms: questioning, acting out, getting angry, complaining, trying to fight back. For the most part, they eventually gave in, yet this often led to an inner resistance and conflict—depression or self-mutilation or eating disorders or simply a persistent sense of victimization. As Carol said, girls learn that in order to have relationships as young women in patriarchy, they have to give up authentic relationship with themselves and with others. It seems to be a fundamental response: When one’s spirit, integrity, wholehearted love of life, or connection with others is threatened or squashed, we human beings resist however we can with whatever we’ve got. Could it be that in Denmark, and Northern Europe in general, the shoe (or glass slipper) was now on the other foot—that boys even more than girls were having to squeeze themselves into narrowly prescribed norms?

Later, in a whitewashed room at the EnlightenNext center in Copenhagen, I have a chance to explore this question further with a group of about ten men who range in age from their early twenties to their forties, with Peter as the elder in his early sixties. For the past few months, Peter and Jon have been hosting a group of men who are grappling with their role in their rapidly changing culture. Sitting in a circle with them I’m struck by how extraordinarily tall some of them are—the Danes are the second tallest people in the world—and wonder if height was a survival value for Vikings. I open the conversation by explaining what I am researching and ask: “What do you think has changed in gender expectations? What are you expected to do now that is different from what your fathers had to do?”

“The expectation has a lot to do with being able to carry out tasks that normally are women’s tasks—like taking care of the kids. Men have to become fathers,” says Christian, a compact man with wavy blond hair and clear blue eyes. “Not to become like women—not feminized—but we have to develop the qualities that women have already developed, such as nurturing and caretaking.”

Jon adds, “The highest value, the most important thing in Denmark, is to get a partner and have a relationship and then a family. The relationship is the highest thing that we have.”

“And if it doesn’t work, you get a new partner,” interjects another with an ironic shrug.

Denmark has one of the world’s highest divorce rates. In eight out of ten cases, the woman ends the marriage.

As the conversation continues, I notice that the men speak about a vague, almost inchoate experience of victimization. “Where did this sense of victimization come from?”

Christian responds, “There’s a kind of victimization with not knowing which way to go, how you are supposed to be, what to do in your relationship. We’re in a double bind.”

“What is the double bind?” I ask.

Martin jumps in, speaking rapidly but softly. “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.”

“We end up relating to women in a way that is more like woman to woman, not man to woman,” says Bo. “We are feminized in our relationships, and they don’t last.”

Jon explains that their relationships end up revolving around what the woman wants. “There’s a constant fear that I feel—like I’m doing it wrong somehow. That I should feel like this or like that, and you just don’t know what you are supposed to do. Very few men stop and think, ‘So what do I want? What makes sense here?’ And it’s true not just in our relationships with women, but everywhere. That’s why we come here, men talking with men—we’re not talking about women really.”

Martin nods in agreement: “I think that the big problem with the new man is that we have forgotten to take responsibility. We let women make all of the decisions. And now we have no direction.”

“There’s something inside yourself that gets messed up as a man when you have no internal compass, no higher value, and then you do whatever you have to do to keep your sexual relationship,” says Jon. “You are lost.”

Another young man in his twenties, tall with shaggy dark hair, leans forward. “I have a friend studying philosophy here in Copenhagen. He told me that he wants to learn how to be authentic so that he can get the women he wants. I tried to explain to him why he should give that up, because doing anything to be with a woman makes you weak, completely uncertain about yourself.”

Christian comments, “Many people would say it’s crazy to give that up, because a sexual relationship is the most important thing in their inner life. But being willing to do anything for it has an effect.”

“Men get depressed,” Jon notes. “I know guys who are not functioning at all. Some get aggressive. It’s really bad. But there is so little motivation to do anything.”

The Masculine Mystique

Why would there be much motivation to do anything different? Denmark, according to recent surveys, is supposed to be the country where people are happiest. In a recent 60 Minutes episode, correspondent Morley Safer went to Denmark to find out why, and he noted the ample social welfare system that pays for education, parental leave, and health care, to name a few key benefits. In this segment, an earnest young Danish man says he would consider himself a success in life if he were happy and could spend a lot of time with his children. He said he didn’t care about making money and cautioned the audience not to believe in the American Dream because it could lead to disappointment.

Later, Peter, Jon, and I go for a drink at a crowded local bar. Sitting at a table near the entrance, I look around and see only a few couples and only one mixed group of men and women. They are strikingly handsome and healthy, but the mood is almost subdued—a few smiles, little laughter. Even in groups, the Danes seem solitary. A blast of cool air announces new arrivals. I look up to see five women standing in the entrance. One woman flicks her hair like a racehorse tossing its mane. I’m struck by how beautiful these women are—and how confident they seem. Steadily, they survey the scene, conferring with each other briefly before they approach the bar. I could see these women staring into the distant horizon at the prow of a Viking longship.

But I find myself distracted. I can’t get out of my head an encounter I had with one of the men after our meeting. We didn’t say much, but as we stood face to face, I was drawn to his eyes, which conveyed a kind of yearning that I found almost irresistible. I’d never seen a man with eyes like that. And meeting the gaze of another man, I saw the same soft, beseeching quality in his eyes too. There was something so familiar about that look. As I turned away to join Peter and Jon, it hit me: I know where I’d seen that look before. The night before we three had been talking about classic masculine ideals and watched YouTube clips of Humphrey Bogart in the 1942 classic Casablanca. But the look isn’t Bogart. No, it’s the quavering, vulnerable expression in the eyes of Ingrid Bergman as she gazes at Bogart, her former lover and potential savior.

I was beginning to have the eerie feeling that I was in some kind of gender-reversed movie—not a forties movie like Casablanca, but more likely from the fifties, where all of the men insist that they are getting happier and happier as they change the baby’s diaper. Despite the fact that in the 1950s, women—often young mothers—were being hospitalized for “nervous breakdowns,” very few women actually thought, let alone said, that they were unhappy. How could you be unhappy when you had everything that the culture said was supposed to be fulfilling, good, and right? In the mid-1960s the sea change began when Betty Friedan wrote an article about how, under all the lipsticked smiles and sweet gazes, women were stifled and depressed. She called this phenomenon the “feminine mystique.” Her book by that name enabled educated middle-class women to identify the vague discontent that was marring their picture-perfect lives, and it ignited a social revolution. Perhaps I was seeing the first cracks in the placidly happy Scandinavian façade. Could this be the beginning of the masculine mystique?

Liberation from Masculinity?

The more I thought about what I was seeing and hearing, the more uneasy I felt. Oddly enough, these most sexually progressive countries that aspire to gender neutrality have very strong ideas of masculinity and femininity. Traditionally, “feminine” refers to the values expressed by women in the domestic sphere of caretaking and child rearing, while “masculine” refers to the traits needed by men in the public sphere of politics and business. Surprisingly, this is true in Northern Europe too. But whereas in modernity the male sphere was given priority, in these progressive postmodern cultures, the value has flipped. They now equate masculinity with all of the ills of modern society—domination, disconnection, and a dangerous disregard for life. Rather than creating an equality between the two spheres of life, all things masculine are considered less valuable than the feminine. Moreover, masculinity is seen as negative and problematic. Which, if you are male, is in itself a problem.

Thus, gender roles are changing—most particularly for men. In the center of Copenhagen, men push baby carriages as long as Lamborghinis. On any given afternoon, baby carriages frame the entrance of my favorite café, each one bigger, blacker, and with more chrome than the next. Inside, more men than women are taking care of babies. In fact, the Norwegian researcher Jørgen Lorentzen told me that men, because they are still expected to be the primary breadwinners and take responsibility for child rearing, are now even more entangled in work-family conflict than women. “The latest statistics show that more men say they have more difficulties trying to combine work and family than women do,” he told me. As I told Jørgen, it seems that the value placed on being a mother—the one who takes care of infants and very young children—is putting men in a funny position. No matter how hard men try, they can never be mothers and so are bound to fail. He acknowledged this as “a danger,” but insisted that “men have to develop their interest and competence in intimacy and caretaking.”

There was a pervasive sense that men are not doing what they have to do to assume the burdens that would create equality, that they are still oppressors and have a long way to go to set things right. From the attitudes expressed in the media and by the researchers I spoke with, I often had the strange sense that time had stopped in the early sixties, and the women’s movement hadn’t really begun. At KVINFO, Denmark’s Center on Women and Gender, I picked up a magazine, MK, about gender and employment. Its headline read: “Unbelievable but True—Everything Is as It Always Has Been: Women, Men, and the Gender-Divided Job Market.” An article on the KVINFO site about the 2007 parliamentary election notes that “women are a rare breed on executive suites and only make up slightly more than four percent of CEOs in Denmark. Norway has threatened business with gender quota laws in order to get more women into the board rooms.” (They have since done so, mandating that forty percent of corporate boards be made up of women.) In 2005, Swedish women started a feminist political party because they felt that they were still being marginalized—in other words, women are still being held down.

The vilification of all things masculine and the ever-present assertion that men aren’t doing enough to end oppression (which flies in the face of the fact that so much has changed) seem to have created a perfect storm that is bound to run anyone’s Viking impulses into the ground. As a result, men—particularly educated, intelligent, sensitive men—seem increasingly divided against themselves, cut off from the authority of their own experience lest they offend or be seen as dominators. It is a bizarre inverse of women’s traditional self-effacement and lack of authority that is a response to patriarchal domination. As Henrik Jensen, a cultural historian at Roskilde University told me, “There’s not much will any more. No man wants to be mixed up with the old [patriarchal] father, because there is a fear that you would be thrown out, even eliminated from the family. That happens; there are a lot of divorces.”

In my short stay, one example after another came to my attention. Each story alone could be seen as just another anecdote—like the well-known psychologist who studied “core masculinity” and was thrilled by my invitation to be interviewed but couldn’t because his girlfriend said that he would be too tired. Or the one that really left my head spinning: an interview with a prominent Danish researcher on male roles who is himself a staunch feminist. The interview careened all over the place, bouncing off the extremes of his internal division. In a boomingly clear voice, he spoke about the need for men to really take part in gender equality. But interspersed between his pro-feminist statements, he told the story of how his second marriage had fallen apart. (They had married after having two children together. Six months into the marriage, she told him that she had met another man—when she was pregnant with their second child—and wanted a divorce. She had married the researcher, which now gave her rights to his property, while knowing that there was another man in her life.) Whenever he came near anything close to anger or betrayal, he howled with laughter—so loudly that I could barely hear his words. He laughed when he told me that he had been “totally understanding about everything—I only shouted once on the telephone—and then gave her a half a million!” Then he would stop laughing and speak about “the pain in the faces of my children” and his own shattered dreams of family life. As he said right before he ran out the door to meet his new girlfriend: “I am dividing my life into smaller and smaller parts. I have my work; I have my children. I have to go to the gym four times a week. I have to eat. I have to have a sex life. In a way, there is a freedom that is fantastic.” But he acknowledged: “I have just accepted what has happened so that I don’t go bananas. I think about it in an intellectual way, and okay, well, life has to go on.”

As life went on and I walked the uneven stone streets of Copenhagen, I began to notice how many of these tall Viking men slouched, as if they were trying to take up less space. It was extremely disconcerting to see men expressing the kind of confusion, deference, and self-doubt that is so familiar and often tragic to me in studying women. Not simply because we don’t traditionally expect this from men, but because it is undignified and humiliating for anyone to have the fundamental sense that there is something deeply wrong with who they are and that they constantly have to seek validation from others for their existence. That is the horrible predicament that women have been struggling to free themselves from. Ironically, in Northern Europe, in trying to create gender equality, it seems a new form of domination is being created instead.

The Cost of Killing the Patriarch

Who among us spiritually awakening, progressive, and privileged human beings—male or female—doesn’t want to end patriarchy? If human civilization is going to survive on this planet, and if we have any hope of reaching our potential as conscious beings, we will have to move beyond the deeply ingrained societal pattern of dominating, patriarchal hierarchies—of men over women, nature, and anyone perceived to be “other.” The effort and commitment that these Northern European countries have brought to this task is unprecedented. And yet, because the pattern of dominance and subordination is such a habit, raising up the value and priority of the traditionally feminine sphere of life—home, children, relationship—and deprecating anything that has been considered masculine seems to result in a new form of domination. But it isn’t a domination that is based on brute force and the threat of physical assault. It works at a more psychological level—the constantly implied threat is the loss of intimate relationship. This left me reeling. I had thought that men would always have the upper hand because of their greater physical strength. But as psychologically sophisticated postmodern men and women, we no longer live in fear of impending physical brutality. In our secure, affluent, and secular cultures, where sexual intimacy is the highest value, our fears focalize on our need for meaningful connection with other human souls.  

I was beginning to realize that killing off the patriarch—the father in the home and in the culture—and validating the mother’s intimate sphere will not liberate us and society as we might have hoped. As the historian Henrik Jensen told me, “Culture is made up of two legs: one leg is duty and one is rights.” The culture of duty is associated with the authority of the father, or patriarch. And the culture of rights “only began with the emergence of the individual, which happened fairly recently.” The culture of rights is what we find in Northern Europe—where society tries to fulfill “mothering functions” and meet each individual’s needs. “But duty,” by which he means a sense of obligation and shared purpose, “was actually gluing things together. It created a mutuality of sorts. Once it goes, people get more and more isolated, thinking about their needs and their rights, but no one feels obligated to anyone or anything.”

It’s this point that I believe bears further and deeper consideration. The masculine—which Henrik calls the “father”—is not simply about men as individuals but is an essential aspect of culture. He sees it as the vertical dimension, which includes everything that human beings have looked up to, from God on high to ideals and excellence as well as the father’s traditional moral authority. That vertical dimension is the source of our higher aspirations. This upward reach needs a strong foundation of healthy human relationship—which the more horizontally inclusive world of mothering traditionally has provided. As Henrik said to me, there needs to be a balance between the two. I found it surprising and almost counterintuitive to discover that placing so much priority on nurturing and mothering functions—caring for the special needs of each child, ensuring that each person grows in his or her unique way—does not lead to a close-knit and deeply connected society. Not in our day and age. Ironically, and perhaps paradoxically, the result is hyperindividuation, which leaves us self-focused, isolated, and victimized.

Ultimately, isn’t the problem of patriarchy not that fathers—men—have authority but that it is a system of domination and victimization? If we are to end such domination, then we’re going to have to stop creating polarized hierarchies between men’s and women’s roles and values. To meet the challenges that face us as a species, we need to have women and men stretching to realize their highest potential across the various dimensions of human life, infused with that Viking spirit that defied the limits of the known world. My sojourn into Northern Europe strongly suggested that true gender equality—one in which both men and women are living to their fullest potential—can’t happen by giving greater priority to women’s traditional attributes and roles. Shifting the balance in that way ends up creating new dominator dynamics that lead to superiority and inferiority between the sexes. Only this time the feminine trumps the masculine. To me, that’s not gender equality but patriarchy in drag.