Swedish culture and mentality.

I read something today that annoyed me quite a lot. This is nothing spectacular, I'm very easily annoyed, but I thought I'd mention it anyway. In Sweden we have this highly unpopular person or phenomenon called "Blondinbella". She is a 19-year-old girl from Stockholm who has been writing a blog of her own for a couple of years, and who turned it into a company, making quite some money off of it, and who has consequently been seen all over the newspapers and on television. All good, you say? Well it does sound quite ideal! But no...

The problem is that she writes a blog about her life (how dare she?) and about feminine stuff (HOW dare she??). You know, makeup, clothes, fashion... and she gets merchandise from companies who want her to write about them on her blog. Her blog gets an incredible amount of visits, mainly from teenage girls and from jealous Jante-lag infected women and men. This infuriates people something awful. As a result, she gets murder and rape (and mutilation...) threats, stuff thrown on her in public (like a bottle, a skinned mink...?), unpleasant phone calls, and has to live at a fake address, change her phone number all the time, and so on.

But now, how can we blame people? I mean, she's 19, rich and famous. And female! And how dare she become famous for writing about nothing? Of course "girly stuff" qualifies as nothing, since it is of no interest to anyone, the norm of "anyone" of course being male. If this had been a 19-year-old guy writing about sports, there would of course have been no problem at all. If he had received fancy shoes from Nike I'm quite sure no one would have had anything against it. But unfortunately for Blondinbella, she's female. And ugly (really, how can people stand to look at her?), and stupid (I'm not really sure why, but people say so, so I guess they must be right and they must know what they're talking about) and surely not successful, since she's famous for nothing. She therefore deserves to be stalked, ridiculed, threatened, and so on.

Wait, what was that we said about gender equality in Sweden?