Norway

Norway's oil fund — the world's largest sovereign wealth fund — has made the country astronomically wealthy, and this wealth has become a silencer. How can a Norwegian man claim to be suffering when his country has no poverty, universal healthcare, and a social safety net that would be the envy of the entire world? This wealth-as-gag creates a distinctive form of male isolation: the feeling that your pain is illegitimate because your circumstances are objectively privileged.

The Breivik attacks in 2011 created a cultural wound around the topic of male anger that has never fully healed. Discussing why men become violent, what drives male radicalization, or what goes wrong in male development became politically charged in ways that shut down nuanced conversation. Norwegian men who feel angry, frustrated, or purposeless now carry the additional burden of knowing their emotions are culturally associated with the worst act of domestic terrorism in Nordic history. Meanwhile, the Sami men of northern Norway face a crisis within a crisis: their reindeer-herding masculine identity is threatened by climate change, mining interests, and wind farms, and the suicide rate among Sami men significantly exceeds the national average — a fact that Norway's self-image as an indigenous-rights leader makes uncomfortable to discuss.