When it comes to Iceland, there is no history of bourgeois living. Having courtships, going to institutions, restaurants, it’s so recent. There is no dating culture in an agricultural society, and our city culture has just not been around long enough to become dominant. We still do our own plumbing. Dating is kind of like hiring a plumber, you just don’t fucking do it.”
Sigurðarson spent 10 years living in Sweden. “You can’t compare Iceland to a culture of 10 million. Sweden is like a warm-blooded mammal, like a cow, with a bloodstream, and four stomachs. Iceland is more like an insect, where the food and the excrement and the oxygen all use the same hole.” I love this country.
Similarly, the patriarchy never got a chance to bed in. “If you think about a rural society, there were obviously different roles for the sexes, but not necessarily a one-sided power imbalance. Everyone carries what weight they can. There was no Victorian period, there was no stay-at-home-mum ideal à la 50s America.” There was a famous women’s strike in 1975 – known as “the long Friday” because men had to look after their own children, lol – and after that, the idea just took hold. Within five years, they had a female president, the world’s first: Vigdís Finnbogadóttir.
— Read on www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/aug/07/icelandic-love-secret-sex-before-coffee
Leave a Reply