This chapter looks at Swedish gender-equality models from outside, using mainstream public discourses about Sweden in the neighbouring Scandinavian country of Denmark as a lens for the discussion. Neoliberal ways of breaking down the welfare state and producing new inequalities and racisms have swept across Denmark since the 1990s in some of the same ways as they have in Sweden. Nonetheless, mainstream Danish public discourses regard Denmark as one of the most gender-equal countries in the world, and in this sense the mainstream national self-understanding in Denmark has similarities to the Swedish one. Also very apparent in Denmark are racist and orientalist constructions of a modern, nationalist Danish ‘we’, as contrasted to the ‘backward others out there’ who lack the highly praised gender equality that ‘we’ seem to have in ‘our’ national(istic) genes. This might lead to the expectation of a certain consensus in the mainstream publics of the two countries regarding equality. But this is definitely not the case. Swedish genderequality models are generally not considered positively in mainstream Denmark, and are certainly not seen as ideal models to be adopted. On the contrary, Swedish models are often ridiculed in mainstream public discourses in Denmark; they are considered old fashioned, and negatively connoted as exaggerated political correctness.

Along parallel lines, it should also be noted that from the perspective of the mainstream Danish public Sweden is said to overdo political correctness, in a negative sense, as far as anti-racist politics are concerned. A telling illustration is the ways in which the mainstream Danish media ridicule Swede's banning of racist language and episodes from classic children's books such as Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking (1945). To make the point, let me briefly give an example of how Swedish anti-racist politics figures in the Danish media. When a press release about the deleting of certain phrases from Pippi Longstocking was published in Denmark (Ritzau, 2015), Stig Thøgersen, a reporter from the Danish tabloid newspaper Extrabladet, invited Mattias Tesfaye, a well-known member of the Danish Social Democratic Party, on a so-called ‘racism safari’ to a supermarket outside Copenhagen and a library. Tesfaye is well known and high profile in the Danish media for his radical leftist rhetoric on class and manual workers’ perspectives.