such a comment regarding rape could only come from a terrified westerner. in sweden you?ll see kids walking home from sledding or skating in the dark (mostly because it is always dark) no problem!

My rape comment was a compliment about the safety of Sweden, not an insult to the Swedish women who walk around late alone. I’m saying it’s a wonderful thing that the country is apparently safe enough that a woman can walk around shitfaced drunk at 4 or 5 AM by herself with no fear, because in American big cities a woman couldn’t without facing a lot more risk.

Not to worry, though. We’re still being protected. After losing control over prices the government has decided to try regulations. I’m heading off to the grocery store and it’s fun to see if I again run into someone trying to buy beer at 8:30 – it’s legal for stores to open at 7 am on Wednesdays but it’s now illegal to sell alcohol until 9 am.

whiskey, for “urban anonymity” to have anything to do with it the rurals would need to drink less. NOT so. Especially teenage drinking is *vastly* easier there: we could put miles between us and adults, hell, it was easy enough that we could make our own stuff. (I’ve always wondered if there’s a good English expression for the crudest homemade alcohol. You know, teenager + cola bottle + sugar + baking yeast? We spent half of our English classes trying to find a translation for the all-important brew and never found one.)

England has now, and has always had unless rigorously socialized, a drinking problem. So it’s not unique to Sweden/Finland. Heck the Romans described the Britons as a bunch of drunkards, things got very little better with the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, or the Normans for that matter. During the Georgian era, gin was the drink of choice and people would be passed out as you describe at all hours of the day. Victorian reformers got people to switch to milder beer, and enacted strict closing laws.

Sexual assault is a problem in Sweden, but from the Muslim minority which finds the Swedes a bunch of degenerates, for obvious reasons. It is not discussed because of PC/Multicultural reasons.

I don’t think the monopoly or not is the problem — rather the deep seated inhibitions that PC imposes on interaction between the sexes, lack of mediating institutions for young people to get together (sober), and the isolating factor urban anonymity.

There?s this stereotype among swedes that finns are sauna bathing, knife wearing alcoholics and in Finland, it?s not that uncommon for people to insist that all swedish men are gay.

Haha, this is so true. Both sides really do characterize each other this way.

You know, your description of a sizeable Finnish minority makes a lot of sense to me looking back. I mentioned in my “partying in Stockholm” post that I met some cool guys in Sweden that didn’t fit in with the other Swedish guys and were cool and had a great swagger about them. I just thought they were Stockholm guys who weren’t metrosexual. But based on your description of the “Finnish look,” they may have been part of that sizeable Finnish minority. They had the stubble, long unkempt hair and weren’t as over-the-top stylish as the other Stockholm guys I was meeting.

The cultural differences between swedes and finns are pretty interesting. There’s a sizable finnish minority in Sweden – we’re talking about a few hundred thousand finns – and I belong to them, sort of. I’m born in Stockholm but my parents are finnish. There’s this stereotype among swedes that finns are sauna bathing, knife wearing alcoholics and in Finland, it’s not that uncommon for people to insist that all swedish men are gay.

During the last couple of years (I’m in my early twenties) I’ve intentionally emphasized the finnishness in me to discern myself from the typical metrosexual swede. I’m always walking around with a few mm of stubble, long & unkept hair and less than stylish clothes. I tend to have a just slightly more aggressive and non-PC attitude than the typical swede.

In any other country I’d be considered a pussy, but here among middle class swedes, it’s not unusual for guys that are way bigger than me (I’m small as fuck) to take an submissive attitude in their interactions with me. Something that I find hilarious as hell — I spent my early teens in front of a computer. It’s not an strategy that I plan to use for ever, but for now, my semi-faux badboyish attitude gives me pretty decent results and I plan to go on “looking like a criminal”, as one girl described me, for some years to come.

Stockholm rocks if you’re a guy and have even a modicum of balls.

At the same time, based on what the Finnish girl next to me on the plane said about Finns and their drinking, I know I’m going to be careful to never get really smashed in Finland dive bar.

“Having seen increases in binge drinking among youths in the months after it slashed alcohol taxes by more than 40 percent, the government of Finland is now reporting that alcohol has become the leading killer of the nation’s adults.

The Toronto Star reported Dec. 9 that according to data from the government’s leading health and welfare agency, more than 2,000 people ages 15 to 64 in Finland died from alcohol poisoning or alcohol-related illnesses in 2005. Close to another 1,000 Finns died from alcohol-related accidents or violent incidents.

For the first time in the nation’s history, alcohol surpassed heart disease as the leading killer of males ages 15 to 64, accounting for 17 percent of all deaths in this age group in 2005.”
http://www.jointogether.org/ne.....op-in.html

“Alcohol has become the leading cause of death in Finland for men, and is a close second for women, a study says.

Figures for 2005 released by the state statistics agency showed alcohol killed more people aged 15 to 64 than cardiovascular disease or cancer.

Almost as many women died of alcohol-related causes as breast cancer last year.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6106570.stm

“Systemet” sucks in many ways and the poor openings hours are hassle, but there’s a decent reason for it’s existence. On the plus side, Systembolaget belongs to the biggest buyers of wine in the world so the prices on wine are actually often pretty decent and the selection is usually good, even in smaller towns.

I don’t drink alcohol at all so it’s all the same to me.