ABSTRACT
As a little girl from Stockholm in the 1960s, visiting relatives in northern Sweden, I was worried and embarrassed by the behavior of my grandmother and her friends. Why did these old women consistently comment on how "beautiful" (skon) any young man was, whenever they happened to mention them in their discussions? Grandfather and his friends, on the other hand, would at rare occasions at the most describe a woman as "fine" (fin) - a word with overtones of moral, social and economic qualities, rather than personal appearance. Later on, working in the area as an ethnologist interviewing old lumberjacks, or reading their nineteenth-century life stories, I was again astonished by the gentleness of these men. There was an evident absence of a "machismo" type of masculinity, as well as the strong, hard, silent manliness which constitutes a widespread stereotype of the typical lumberjack. These men met me with striking confidence and lack of pretence, expressing their admiration for women's capacity, giggling when recalling girls' rude and witty talk or weeping openly at the memory of the unfaithful fiancee whose betrayal.had caused their lifelong bachelorhood.
