The utopian land of Sweden reserves two of the government-mandated 13 months paid parental leave for fathers. This has turned men into hunky he-dads who slaughter game as well as they change diapers.
Women have long complained that the aging process is unfair to them whereas even the homeliest boy can expect to have the adjective "distinguished" applied to his appearance later in life. The feminine compensation for this trick of cruel nature is that men may get better looking as they get older, but they also get maudlin, verbose, and cranky. Claire Armistead considers the literary genre of the mid-life crisis in the Guardian and concludes "it does seem to be an exclusively male genre. Perhaps this is because 42-year-old women tend to be too busy grappling with ageing parents or troubled teenagers to indulge in thoughts of their own mortality. Or perhaps there's an emerging female equivalent - the memoir mourning the loss of fertility, like Hilary Mantel's haunting Giving Up the Ghost."
