I’d love to hear what the crowd’s response was to that presentation. Frankly, it was only yesterday that I realized just how egalitarian the Scandinavian countries were thanks to this article (Equal Rights for Women? Survey Says: Yes, But … – http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/world/01iht-poll.html), so I can’t take too much credit for being knowledgeable on that front. Hearing about their bumps would be great.

To your reader’s points above, I was speaking on this subject in Sweden last Fall and found the crowd’s response very enlightening. As you know, Sweden prides itself on being one of the most egalitarian societies in the world.Yet even they run into bumps in that grey territory between equality and sameness.

Think of this from a man’s point of view — we’ve been raised to reject nearly anything feminine, we were educated in systems mostly shaped by men and entered the workforce where, for the most part, men wrote the rules. I despise the word “equal” when it comes to people (there’s a future post on that one, I’m sure), but the need to create legal structures to address the challenges women faced in the workplace is a good indicator that they had little in shaping the rules of the game. In other words, what we consider normal, everyday life, women consider to be incredibly masculine.

The implications are huge. If men don’t get women, it really doesn’t matter what seminars you attend (they’ll go against what a man believes and be promptly ignored), and “walking a mile in heels” gives men a false sense of knowing what women need, which leads to even more disaster (think multicultural training where people are taught nothing more than “Chinese people eat rice”). The decision-makers, who are overwhelmingly male, will deny their blind spot (or not even know that it exists) and the cycle repeats. Because women have been neglected for so long, they’ve generally resigned themselves to the frustrating ways companies treat them (i.e. women are socialized, too).

Pick-up artist culture, I would contend, is a short-term strategy, and the skills to “win” are considerably different than the skills needed to have a successful relationship. There’s a good reason why women often say that “all men want is sex”, because, well, there are a lot of guys who embody that. It’s a whole hell of a lot easier to come up with a few tricks to get women to sleep with you than it is to figure out how you can be in a relationship with someone for the duration. And, in that case, I would say the challenges between pick-up artist vs. long-term relationship and traditional marketing vs. what we need going forward have a lot of similarities. The first is often thought of as a masculine trait, the latter is thought of as feminine. In the end, that disconnect is both the challenge and opportunity.

As for the tampons thing, I’d challenge that. I’d say most men are more comfortable buying tampons (as you said, though more artfully than I will, he’s probably getting laid) than, say, holding his girlfriend’s purse in public (another signal that he’s probably getting laid and, frankly, deserves to if she’s making him hold her purse in public).

The bottom line is that we’re not really ok with the conversation. The reasons aren’t illogical (like every other guy, I relentlessly guard against threats to my perceived masculinity), but they’re holding us back and making us less competitive.