In Sweden Spiderman pushes a pram

The Swedes take liberalism so seriously, that toy catalogues there now show a boy Spiderman pushing a pram.

Swedish Spiderman happily carries a pink purse whilst pushing a pink pram

The justification? It's exactly what you would expect from those following liberal ideas:

Kaj Wiberg is the CEO of the company behind the catalogue, "Leklust", and claims that it is time to move forward from old-fashioned gender restrictions.

"Gender roles are an outdated thing," he told Metro newspaper.

Carl Emanuelsson, spokesman for Sweden's Feminist Initiative, welcomes the concept.

"It's great that this company has tried to show that people don't need to be stuck in gender roles," he told The Local.

"Examples such as these show other ways that we can break free from the roles that are forced on us, the roles that we are limited by."

In the catalogue, on a predominantly pink page full of dolls and prams, a child dressed as spiderman can be seen pushing a pink pram.

On another page, a blonde-haired girl with rolled up sleeves is pedalling what appears to be a racing vehicle.

Elsewhere, the catalogue features another boy standing in front of a toy stove, apparently cooking a make-believe meal.

"The problem with toy stores and their catalogues is that they're selling a concept; an idea about boys and girls and what kind of qualities and interests they should have," Lady Dahmer told The Local.

"It's about money because as long as they can fool us into believing boys and girls are fundamentally different, they can keep selling us twice as much."

That is the kind of thing you'd say if you were indoctrinated in a liberal ideology. Liberals believe that the overriding good is individual autonomy, a personal freedom to be a self-determining individual.

But our sex is not something that we get to self-determine, it is predetermined. Therefore, it is held to be a negative limitation on the individual, one from which the individual must be liberated. And so liberals talk about masculinity and femininity in negative, limiting terms as a fetter, or a prison, or a straitjacket.

And look at how Kaj Windberg justifies his pram-pushing Spiderman. He talks about gender being a "restriction" that people are "stuck in" and "limited by" and that they need to "break free" from. He treats sex distinctions as a negative restriction on the individual.

If you didn't start out from liberal first principles, you wouldn't think this way. You would recognise the importance of your sex to your self-identity and you would look on the fulfilment of your masculinity or femininity as something meaningful - as an expression of being that connects you as an individual to something larger than yourself.

But let's say you do accept the liberal first principles and you reject your own sex as something that is predetermined. In order to believe that you can be "liberated" from a predetermined masculinity or femininity, you will have to think of sex distinctions as being entirely socially constructed - as having no basis in nature.

That's why Lady Dahmer believes that it is the toy catalogues which are creating the sex distinctions; they are creating a "concept" in order to make money and "fooling" people into believing that boys and girls are different.

She believes that boys and girls are fundamentally the same and that capitalism is creating the concept of sex distinctions in order to be able to sell twice as much stuff.

That might not sound credible to those who understand the biological basis for sex distinctions, nor to those who understand the existence of sex distinctions across place and time, but it fits within a liberal ideology and so is accepted by those who support that ideology.

And one positive benefit of having Spiderman carry pink handbags and push prams? It might help cheer up Alex the Swede.