Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara

The more popular it is to worry over some organized threat, the less of a danger it likely is in reality. After all, if some group or institution was truly fearsome, most people would either be terrified into silence or admiration.

For example, Dan Brown made a fortune off his The Da Vinci Code pulp novel during this low ebb of the Catholic Church’s powers with a tale of how a nearly omnipotent Church conspires to cover up pagan feminism’s golden age.

However, actual pagans traditionally complained that Christianity was too female-friendly. But Brown is practically Edward Gibbon compared to his successor as a global publishing sensation, the late Stieg Larsson, author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (or as it was originally titled in Sweden, Men Who Hate Women). Himself a hate-filled lefty nerd, Larsson concocted an elaborate fantasy world for true believers in the conventional wisdom.

Although Larsson was a long-time supporter of the Communist Workers League, his politics seldom got in the way of his lust for Apple products. The Aspergery author penned such undying literary effusions as:

Unsurprisingly she set her sights on the best available alternative: the new Apple PowerBook G4/1.0 GHz in an aluminum case with a PowerPC 7451 processor with an AltiVec Velocity Engine, 960 MB RAM and a 60 GB hard drive.

You may have somehow garnered the impression that Sweden is a politically correct social democracy where the main problems women face (qua women) are oppression and rape at the hands of Muslim immigrants whose traditional misogyny is sometimes excused in the name of multicultural sensitivity. Otherwise, Scandinavia would appear to be a feminist utopia. As WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, currently appealing against extradition to Sweden on “sex-by-surprise” charges filed by two women scorned, has complained, “Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism.”

Nordic feminism has a thousand-year history since Leif Ericson’s half-sister Freydís Eiríksdóttir terrified the poor Skraelings in Vinland. And modern Sweden’s mild-mannered men are famous among the more aggressive sort of male tourists for their relative lack of apparent jealousy when their womenfolk amuse themselves by flirting with strangers.