patrick.net

While riding a municipal bus in Uppsala, I had the opportunity to observe a group of high school students. In one seat were a few Swedish boys, of the bespectacled, well-behaved, and soft-spoken variety typical of Sweden’s intermediate professional classes. In the seat next to them was a small group of Swedish girls. Behind the girls were some Arab boys, who were engaged in pulling the girls’ hair and otherwise tormenting and teasing them, much to the girls’ displeasure. In other circumstances this might have been an innocent, even light-hearted scene, and there was a part of me that was amused by the Arab boys’ antics and the girls’ protests, but the rigid posture of the Swedish lads, the way they carefully looked anywhere but at the Arab boys, gave the scene a tense, dark aura.

Here in microcosm was a holographic fragment of Sweden’s peculiar sociological madness. The Swedish boys were clearly deeply uncomfortable with the way the Arab kids were treating what they could not but instinctively think of as their women; whether their discomfort was due to the Arab boys’ discourteous behaviour, or due to displeasure at these foreigners getting the attention of girls the way boys have always done, the fact of their discontent was obvious. The lads radiated a desire to intervene, but their inaction turned their anger into a futile and pathetic thing.

These boys had been raised to be good feminists and anti-racists. Whether they personally bought into these ideologies was immaterial, for they certainly understood the consequences of transgressing them. As good feminists, the girls were meant to be able to take care of themselves. If they wanted help, they’d ask for it; moreover, they certainly weren’t anyone’s tribal property, so the Swedish boys had no standing to protect their women from foreigners. As to the Arabs, the Swedish boys were trapped in the double-bind of anti-racist multiculturalism, in which they must simultaneously ignore race and be acutely conscious of it: they must not think of the Arabs as members of a foreign and hostile tribe, but simply as Swedes just like themselves; yet at the same time, should they assert themselves against the Arab boys, they would certainly be harshly punished for this expression of racism.

For the girls’ part, I had no doubt that they would have much preferred the Arab kids to stop. Their body language was not of the sort that teenage girls use when they’re being teased by boys whose attention they are pleased to have. Yet they too were trapped by the antiracist imperative to avoid offending New Swedes by any means necessary, while also being prevented from asking for the help of the Swedish boys because, after all, they had been raised to be strong, independent women. Possibly some part of them felt angry at the Swedish boys for not standing up for them.

As for the Arabs, neither the strictures of feminism nor those of anti-racism applied to them one bit, and they knew this quite well. Thus they felt no compunctions about taking liberties with the girls. Doubtless any attempt to stop them would have been met with unabashed racial verbal abuse and quite possibly physical violence. From the point of view of the Arab boys, the Swedish girls were nothing but whores, and as for the Swedish boys – who were required by feminism to defer to the girls – well, they were obviously even lower than whores, contemptuous creatures of no account.