Rod Dreher

With Compliments Like These…

‘Hen’ Party With Modern Vikings

By Rod Dreher • November 14, 2012, 8:01 AM

It doesn’t get much more Dreher-Baity than this NYT dispatch from ~~Cloud-Cuckoo Land~~ Sweden:

At an ocher-color preschool along a lane in Stockholm’s Old Town, the teachers avoid the pronouns “him” and “her,” instead calling their 115 toddlers simply “friends.” Masculine and feminine references are taboo, often replaced by the pronoun “hen,” an artificial and genderless word that most Swedes avoid but is popular in some gay and feminist circles.

The rest of the story writes itself. Perhaps they should stick electronic tails on the childrens’ rear ends and call them tigers.

And to think the ancestors of these people once were Vikings. Good luck getting that Malmo situation under control, hens.

Posted in Diversity, UK/Europe, Whatever!. Tagged gender, hen, Malmo, Sweden.

42 Responses to ‘Hen’ Party With Modern Vikings

stef says:

November 14, 2012 at 8:13 am

It’s not unusual for languages to not use gendered pronouns. (English was that way centuries ago.) And some languages like Japanese have very different pronoun structures, as well as non-gendered nouns (for instance, the noun kami can mean either ‘god’ or ‘goddess,’ in short, a non-gendered ‘divine being.’)

Languages evolve, just like biological systems.
R.S. says:

November 14, 2012 at 8:14 am

So Sweden has become a feminized multicultural state and we’re supposed to worry about anti-Semitic incidents in Malmo?

Or are the descendants of the Vikings supposed to stay masculine and virile only to fend off Muslim attacks on one tiny community of Swedes (0.2% of the population)?

The real issue here for conservatives is defending Swedish and European culture and heritage, just as Muslims and Arabs have the right to protect their own traditions in their lands.
Christopher Larsen says:

November 14, 2012 at 8:34 am

To think I share most of my DNA with these people is frightening! Very very frightening!!
john personna says:

November 14, 2012 at 8:42 am

That’s funny, I just pulled a similar Viking thought in another thread. Douglas Adams could do much with this.

Other than that .. Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden are still tied for tops on national happiness. And Sweden is still top ten for life expectancy.

So by all means, cherry pick a preschool. It will make you feel better.
Carlo says:

November 14, 2012 at 9:02 am

Stef wrote:

“Languages evolve, just like biological systems.”

Yes, and sometimes language “is evolved” in the service of ideology and power. I am sure you remember the lovely “evolution” of language in Orwell’s “1984.”
Sam M says:

November 14, 2012 at 9:07 am

Saying “rear-end” seems needlessly directional-normative.
Christopher Larsen says:

November 14, 2012 at 9:08 am

Actually all joking aside, the Nordic cultures rival Japan in terms of enforced social conformity. Sweden’s social makeup and economy are ideal for the imposition of very high taxes, lavish social benefits and a mania for regulation by the government. Globalization and immigration have changed the country a bit and there has been some liberalization of the economy but I suspect that soon this will be official government policy regarding education. I imagine that this gender neutral language and schooling regulations will soon wreak its havoc like a mead intoxicated berserker in battle. Soon Denmark and Norway will follow suit.
john personna says:

November 14, 2012 at 9:09 am

Christopher, I’m of Icelandic and Danish stock. I find those countries modern choices curious. I would neither adopt them nor reject them all wholesale.

If we have one problem here though, it is that we seldom consider those choices calmly, coldly, with an ax in our hand … sorry Douglas Adams moment.

If we share family and culture with these people, and they are happy, we should be open to understanding why. The worst argument I’ve heard on the internets is “But we aren’t Danish!” as if Danes were some other creature entirely.

Actually, they are closely related. I’m sure an educated crowd such as the one here knows about the Angles, etc.
Ethan C. says:

November 14, 2012 at 9:12 am

R.S., I think Rod’s point was that a culture of “hens” lacks the masculine virtue necessary to oppose Muslim predation on the Jewish minority. They will fail to protect the weak and vulnerable because they’re too afraid of the gender differences that generate that virtue.

Whether he’s right or not only time will tell.
Scott in PA says:

November 14, 2012 at 9:17 am

Coming soon to a country near you.
Carlo says:

November 14, 2012 at 9:21 am

John Personna:

“Other than that .. Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden are still tied for tops on national happiness. And Sweden is still top ten for life expectancy.”

Another non-sequitur. To add another literary reference, if you could poll people in Aldous Huxleys “Brave New World” you would find perfect “happiness” and excellent life expectancy. Is that the kind of society where you would like to live in?

Sorry for being snide, but your “appeal to happiness” is truly representative of the shallowness and ignorance of contemporary liberalism. Hey, just put everybody on “soma” and they will be happy. A great notion of what it means to be a human being…
MEH 0910 says:

November 14, 2012 at 9:29 am

What I want to know is what the latin@s think of all this.
KateLE says:

November 14, 2012 at 9:33 am

“Man, this really gets to me. The media have a habit of finding some crazy thing a pastor at a small, out-of-the-way church says, and blowing it up as if it were representative of Christian thinking. ”
Rod Derher, Nov 12, 2012.
MH - Secular Misanthropist says:

November 14, 2012 at 9:33 am

To think I share most of my DNA with these people is frightening! Very very frightening!!

We also share 50% of our DNA with a banana*, so you can either relax or get even more anxious.

* Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics at University College
Patrick Harris says:

November 14, 2012 at 9:50 am

“National happiness” is a concept so tendentious only an economist could take it seriously.
William Burns says:

November 14, 2012 at 9:52 am

Personally, I view gender-neutral pronouns as an improvement over sacking monasteries, but views differ.
Jeff says:

November 14, 2012 at 10:01 am

Steven Pinker wrote a whole book demolishing this kind of foolishness years ago called The Blank Slate. I guess it wasn’t translated into Swedish.

The utopianism: it burns.
Amarus Cameron says:

November 14, 2012 at 10:02 am

@John Personna

A happiness rating can change in the blink of an eye. You are basing the efficacy of an entire national system of thought on whether or not people consider themselves happy? That could have been determined by the fact that they just got married or they bought a new computer or that they just had a family member die or that they just lost their job.

Situational polling does not and will not show through for the actual effectiveness of their government. They may say they are happy but with speaking to the folks I know (in Washington DC) that happen to hail from those countries, and those further to the south, there is a veneer of happiness with a base of roiling discontent for one reason or another. Then again maybe my friends are just upset about one thing or another, but then again I find that people who have little real personal independence normally think they are happy but in the end find that they have little fulfillment.
Michael Sheridan says:

November 14, 2012 at 10:02 am

This was not a post I expected to see from you, Mr. Dreher, betraying substantial ignorance about the history of Scandinavia. The only ways in which Vikings could possibly be seen as hypermasculine was in their size (and Scandinavians of both sexes are notable for their above-average height) and in the fact that when they did go a-Viking they did what armies of all ethnicities are known for. Of course, they did plenty of peaceful trade too, but that isn’t part of the mystique, for some reason. Actually, Scandinavians culture has for centuries had considerably LESS ingrained rigidity regarding sex roles than the rest of Europe. Read some of the Eddas sometime if you want to see early and vivid portrayals of strong women.
Jeff says:

November 14, 2012 at 10:03 am

We also share 50% of our DNA with a banana*, so you can either relax or get even more anxious.

At least the banana doesn’t peddle sanctimonious nonsense.
MBunge says:

November 14, 2012 at 10:23 am

“You are basing the efficacy of an entire national system of thought on whether or not people consider themselves happy?”

As opposed to what? When did the concept of false consciousness migrate from the militant left to the paranoid right?

Mike
john personna says:

November 14, 2012 at 10:48 am

Read some Daniel Gilbert on Happiness. Self-reported measures, like say Democracy, the worst …. except for all the others. There really is no better measure. For that reason, I consider the hand-waving to be an agenda. It isn’t that you have a better metric. You want to defend a poorer outcome.
John E_o says:

November 14, 2012 at 10:55 am

“Man, this really gets to me. The media have a habit of finding some crazy thing a pastor at a small, out-of-the-way church says, and blowing it up as if it were representative of Christian thinking. ”
Rod Derher, Nov 12, 2012.

Yeah – that…
Roland de Chanson says:

November 14, 2012 at 10:59 am

A furore Normanoarum libera nos Domine.

You can sure learn a lot on this blog. I now intend to give up bananas out of a sense of semi-cannibalistic queasiness.
Vina says:

November 14, 2012 at 11:00 am

There are several languages, including Mandarin and Farsi, which do not have gender-specific pronouns. China and Iran however are not exactly feminist paradises.
Beyng says:

November 14, 2012 at 11:30 am

john personna and MBunge:

You both seem to be missing the point. Even if we assume that it is possible measure “happiness”–whatever the hell that means–via situational opinion polling, it’s spurious and careless in the extreme to assume that Scandinavians are “happy” because of their oh-so-yummy democratic-socialist government, their “free” healthcare, or their political circumstances in general.

I mean, I live in a country that I think, to put it mildly, is going to hell in handbasket, but that has absolutely nothing to do with my self-perceived “level” of personal happiness. Insofar as I am happy at the moment, it is because I am having some professional success, enjoy a stable marriage, am about to give birth to a son, and just ate a delicious sandwich. The fact that my government sucks (or doesn’t) isn’t even a variable in my calculus. In fact, I would regard most people who do regard politics as a relevant variable to be somewhat pathological.

And chances are politics isn’t the metric Scandinavians are using either. Maybe they’re happy at the moment because their employment rate is high. Maybe they like the weather. Maybe they enjoy high rates of marital stability. Maybe they’re just nice people. The point is that we don’t know, and it’s just silly to assume that a survey of self-reported “happiness-levels” is somehow an endorsement of their particular style of governance.

Note: I’m not critiquing Scandinavian government here. It’s just irrelevant.
Carlo says:

November 14, 2012 at 11:40 am

John Personna:

“Read some Daniel Gilbert on Happiness.”

ooooh! It’s scientific! It is even quantitative! wooow! It is not based on any philosophical or metaphysical assumptions about what happiness means! Noooo…

Sorry, I will stick with Socrates and Plato.
Backe says:

November 14, 2012 at 12:04 pm

I am a long time swedish reader and I have to agree with KateLE and John E_o. For some reason american media likes from time to time to write about the “wierd” gender politics of Sweden. Sometimes they actually describe a larger trend, if I remember correctly The New York Times serie about the rise of fathers taking parental leave would fall in this category, but very often they describe situations that are not true for how most swedes live their lives. This article falls into this latter category. There simply is not great movement in Sweden that wants to ban the usage of female and male prononum in preschool. This is just an outlier.
Christopher Larsen says:

November 14, 2012 at 12:36 pm

“Personally, I view gender-neutral pronouns as an improvement over sacking monasteries, but views differ.”

William.

I gotta protest here. That whole Lindisfarne incident was blown way outta proportion. You try rowing across the North Sea in bad weather only to find that you rooms at the hotel/monastery were not booked, then find out that they don’t take Master Card, and on top of it all the abbott/concierge was French! What would you do??? Pillage loot and burn I bet. My cute and cuddly ancestors expanded trade, mixed up the gene pool a bit, and drank a bit much. Tourists get bad press all the time!
SusanKG says:

November 14, 2012 at 12:38 pm

The Swedes welcomed Jewish refugees during and after WWII. The reason that nearly all of the Danish Jews and half of the Norwegian Jews were saved during WWII was because Sweden gave them a safe haven. Those same values resulted in Sweden giving many others a refuge, many of whom don’t share Sweden’s values of tolerance and equality. These are tough issues, ones that deserve better than a snarky attitude of “There go those crazy Swedes again.”
Siarlys Jenkins says:

November 14, 2012 at 1:17 pm

Eventually the teachers will butt their heads up against the brick wall that these kids ARE either

a) male, or

b) female.

They just are, whether we like it or not.

Even the concept “homosexual” has no reference if each individual person is not either male or female.
J says:

November 14, 2012 at 1:41 pm

Yes, and sometimes language “is evolved” in the service of ideology and power. I am sure you remember the lovely “evolution” of language in Orwell’s “1984.”

I have a suspicion that if all dystopian works of fiction were barred from being cited as ‘evidence’, conservatism would evaporate.
Andrea says:

November 14, 2012 at 2:28 pm

I don’t see anything all that objectionable in the article. It’s one preschool among many that is trying to deemphasize gender among preschoolers and toddlers. They apparently call the kids by first name or address them as “friends” most of the time and don’t encourage or discourage them from playing with dolls or blocks and try to treat the kids as individuals. There are variants of the idea in use in the United States too. I would assume Sweden has its share of more traditional preschools as well. I also have my doubts that the enlightened preschool will have much of an impact; most of the girls will play with dolls and most of the boys will be more aggressive.

My parents bought me trucks, which I gave names to and played with as if they were dolls; they gave my brother dolls and he turned them into guns. My brother frowns on any “girly” presents for his sons, so I’ve avoided buying them anything pink or giving them dolls, etc., but even if I had I doubt it would have made a difference. They wrestle, shoot at things with their fingers, talk about “killing the bad guys” and generally act like stereotypical little boys at ages 3 and 6. Kids are themselves, including gender roles, at a pretty early age.

As I recall, my lesbian cousin was a pretty typical little girl and didn’t have noticeable tomboyish interests at the age of 6, so gender preference probably isn’t always something you can pick out at that age or have much of an influence on in childhood.
BN says:

November 14, 2012 at 3:20 pm

There are several languages, including Mandarin and Farsi, which do not have gender-specific pronouns.

Mandarin has three different words, one for he, one for she, and one for it. They are written differently but pronounced the same, so in speech there is no gender specificity but in writing there is.

This pattern repeats itself in the plural, with a suffix appended to each singular form, thus they(male), they(female), and they(neither).
KateLE says:

November 14, 2012 at 3:27 pm

Oops, I typo’d Rod’s name. Apologies.
Carlo says:

November 14, 2012 at 4:41 pm

J:

“I have a suspicion that if all dystopian works of fiction were barred from being cited as ‘evidence’, conservatism would evaporate.”

I am not sure what you mean by conservatism. Anyway, sorry, calling Orwell’s work “dystopian” is just an ignorant cliche, since essentially it was a reflection on well-documented phenomena in 20th century Europe. Or in fact, on well-documented phenomena that date back to the “republic of letter” of the XVIII century. Do you have any doubt that language can be used to obfuscate the truth and manipulate people? And that certain “evolutions” of language reflect ideological trends? What’s your point?
JonF says:

November 14, 2012 at 6:51 pm

Stef,

English has always had gender– more so 1000 years than today when its nouns were also gendered as German still is. The 3rd person pronouns in old English were hē, hit, and hēo– you can guess the first two; the third was the feminine pronoun (and it also doubled as the general plural “they”). There’s very good reason to think the proto-Germannic had gender as all the European languages (in the IndoEuropean family) do. You have to go all the way back to Hittite, the first IE language recorded in writing, to find a language in the family tree that did not have sex-based gender (Hittite had an animacy gender, animate vs inanimate).

You are right that there are lots of languages without gender, and then again there are languages, such as many in Africa, with an even more complex system of noun-classes than anything as simple as gender.
It’s an interesting topic for linguistics, but there really isn’t much evidence for any claim that gender in languages has much to do with gender is sociological matters. As others have pointed out, there are plenty of languages with no gender classes, which were and spoken by fiercely patriarchal people.
EngineerScotty says:

November 14, 2012 at 7:48 pm

“Ten tousand Svedes ran tru da veeds,
Being chased by vun Norvegian…”

But seconding John E_o: If you are gonna complain about right-wing nutbars being held up for ridicule as though they stand for conservatism or Christianity, don’t do the same thing with the nutbars on the left.

Or at least provide some context.
stef says:

November 14, 2012 at 8:18 pm

@Carlo: All language is “manipulation” in one sense or another. As Chomsky said, the map is not the territory.

And I doubt Sweden is going to fall apart because one preschool is trying to be more gender-neutral in its day to day school activities.
Don Quijote says:

November 14, 2012 at 10:06 pm

The fact that my government sucks (or doesn’t) isn’t even a variable in my calculus. In fact, I would regard most people who do regard politics as a relevant variable to be somewhat pathological.

I would consider the fact that a country is at war and that some clown is very likely to drop a couple of tons of explosive on my head or that of my neighbor very relevant to my level of happiness.

I would also find the fact that a bunch of brown shits could be knocking on my door in the middle of the night highly relevant to my level of happiness,

Both of which are politics…
TWylite says:

November 14, 2012 at 11:25 pm

Stan/Loretta would be proud.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBOQzSk14c
Christopher says:

November 15, 2012 at 10:46 pm

@Stef: “Languages evolve, just like biological systems” But this isn’t actually language evolution, but (supposedly) intelligent design. Note it not the first time people have tried to invent a new genderless 3rd person plural (for languages with such a distiction) – there have been several invented for English – and obviously they have all failed. I find it annoying for that reason – it is so evidently doomed to failure.

Also, that wasn’t Chomsky, that was Alfred Korzybski.

@BN: IIRC, those gendered pronouns in Mandarin Chinese were invented under Western influence, which would be why they aren’t spoken, only written.