Defying Preconceptions

OOH, I got one.

I'm male, quite effeminate at times, yet I'm strictly straight. Rather sexist against men, actually. You could spin my aversion to men as me being a closet homo, but I don't think I am. I think I'm quite secure in my beliefs of female supremacy and.. well, my love for acting like what people associate with women!

I mean, I don't exactly cross-dress, I don't want to be a woman, and I do still have some very.. masculine quirks. But I mean, people often assume I'm gay or something. I'm not! Just overly and enthusiastically submissive. Hell, the fact that that's associated with women at all makes me sick. Or maybe I just grew up around all the wrong people!

It's not just you. I love metal. I've been into metal ever since my mom suggested that I start listening to Iron Maiden and Judas Priest when I was 10 or something.

Finland is on the edge of Europe, and I live about 500 kilometres from Helsinki (which is where the big bands usually bother to go,) so I haven't seen all that many metal gigs from international bands. Still, I've seen Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Deep Purple, and some other, slightly smaller groups (and many much smaller ones.)

Oh, and since I'm Finnish and we're talking about metal, I guess I have to mention that yes, I've seen Nightwish, and no, I haven't seen HIM.

Whenever I mention Finnish metal on these fora, I always have to include a youtube vid from Finntroll, a Finnish "troll metal" (a variant of folk metal) group that sings in Swedish:

/derail

edited 7th Apr '12 12:03:38 PM by BestOf

Please report to your nearest local authority office for re-education.

Folk metal be awesome, yo.

So the Finnish stereotypes I can think of are: race drivers, winter sports specialists, metalheads. The others you mention are relatively little known to me, though I know of a link of you guys to vodka. So for me, so far it depends on your driving skills whether you're stereotypical or not.

I never learned to drive and I currently have no plans of getting a driver's licence. My girlfriend is currently learning to drive, so even if there came a time when we'd want to own a car, I wouldn't necessarily have to learn to drive.

As it is, neither of us wants a car. The public transportation in this city could be better, but it's adequate for us and the 5km to the city centre isn't too much to take when buses aren't available.

Where I live, we have pretty good public transportation.

edited 7th Apr '12 3:01:48 PM by inane242

Unfortunately, I have yet to wrestle a polar bear and ride it to school. I blame my parents, who also failed to build an igloo when they moved here and instead bought a house in the suburbs. I do fit a lot of other Canadian stereotypes, though: I'm used to the cold and snow, I drop the occasional "eh", I like hockey, I love maple syrup and poutine, etc etc.

I'm also much worse at badminton and ping pong than the East Asian stereotype would lead you to believe.

@Best Of, previous page: Finland more obsessed than Canada over hockey? LIES!

edited 8th Apr '12 9:55:28 AM by czhang

D Jay - Perchance, are you a Mama'sBoy?? I'm only asking because having a predisposition to the awesomeness of women while not exactly wanting to be one would be explained by that.

Well, I suppose that I am rather effeminate, but still straight, I rather don't enjoy sports, and prefer pink, orange, purple and bright colours as to the darker colours.

Also, as a South Asian, I do not enjoy Bollywood or the music associated with it. More rock is my kind of stuff.

Oh! And as a South Asian, I can't stand spicy foods.

And as a Briton, I'm not into tea.

And as an Englishmen, suddenly changing the subject to how we have "two world wars and one world cup."

edited 8th Apr '12 8:29:38 AM by Inhopelessguy

Well I'm as straight as they come, but....

First off, I have no problem telling a handsome guy he's handsome, to the point I've joked "Well, I wouldn't fuck [insert guy's name] but I could see why somebody would."

Also, I'm not an invasive guy. If I'm talking to a girl I find attractive, I'm not going to press her if she's uninterested.

Both of these have gotten me labelled as gay before.

That would be a lie, yes; as I said, Finns are even more crazy about ice hockey than Canadians.

There's a t-shirt design that's very popular among the nationalist types: "Kiitos 1939-1945." ("Thank you 1939-1945.") There's usually a flag or a picture of a Finnish soldier above the text. The "thank you" is of course directed at those who fought in the wars against the USSR.

When we won our first ice hockey world championship in 1995, "Kiitos 1995" shirts started turning up, usually with a picture of Saku Koivu. Of course, the comparison to the wars was partially humorous, but it really did become a very important source of national pride for those who care about such things. When we won again last year, shirts with "Kiitos 1995-2011" started turning up, but by now I think the joke is really old.

EDIT: So I went looking for those shirt designs and found what is quite likely gonna be the most hilarious thing I'll see today: a shirt with the flag of the USSR and "You're welcome 1939-1945." ("Eipä kestä 1939-1945")

edited 8th Apr '12 8:48:44 AM by BestOf

Is it wrong to be a black American and more into rock and pop from the 80's and 70's? Everybody I know seems to be okay with liking funk.

Ah, yes. Same here, man.

It sends out a weird message to people.

To be honest though, it's almost like we're outside one standard deviation from the mean.

Er?

I don't know about you, but for me there's also this ridiculous idea that "black" are more sex-crazed. So to have a black dude playing it low-key...well, let's just say the amount of times I've gotten "but I didn't know you liked me!" And I'm like, "Was I supposed to send a text??"

I edited it. I meant more, dammit! In my defends, I wrote that post at around 2 in the morning on somewhat low amounts of sleep.

When I hear about finnish hockey obsession, I can't help but to think of humon. Oh, and this, of course.

Also, Finntroll sounds great. It also helped me to remind what this one funny song was I heard years back. It was by Korpiklaani.

I love Scandinavia And The World. Though I'm a bit disappointed that Danes apparently this that the Swedish are the tech-savvy folks here up North. Anyone who knows anything about anything knows that we Finns are much better at that tech stuff than our Western neighbours.

Korpiklaani? I've heard a couple of songs from them ('cause my brother used to listen to them) but I didn't think they were particularly good. That song is nice, though.

(As for Finntroll, I've only seen them live once, but they were awesome.)

edited 8th Apr '12 6:14:09 PM by BestOf

Hmm... other preconceptions. I once had a lab partner be rather surprised when he discovered I was religious (it only came up because I had a hymn stuck in my head and hummed it during the lab). He said "But you don't seem like a religious person".

Well, of course, you guys have Linus Torvals, so that should get points for tech savyness clichees. But alas, you also are the gun types, and there's only so many clichees you can stuff into one nation

Really, SATW is great for this topic in general...

.*sees own shirt, goes into catatonic shock*

Linux is from Finland, and so is a huge portion of the technology and protocols that your cell phones use (around the turn of the millennium, the then state-owned mobile network operator Sonera was doing bleeding edge R&D in information technology but that all was lost when there was a huge embezzling scandal that led to the company being fused with the Swedish Telia.) Nokia is a Finnish company and my understanding is that they still do most of their product development here, even though the manufacturing has largely moved out.

We also have a huge list of video game companies; the one that's popular right now is Rovio, the company that made Angry Birds.

And so on.

EDIT: I hadn't seen the Angry Birds article on this Wiki before so I checked it out. Apparently, the game has been downloaded more than 500 million times. That right there is about a hundred times the population of Finland.

Another edit: Wikipedia says that the game's been downloaded over 700 million times. Wow.

edited 8th Apr '12 6:32:03 PM by BestOf

.*looks at cell phone* You have a point there Of course, Nokia this day is the cell phone of choice if you don't want to pay too much...

Just for comparison: if Angry Birds, a product from a country of 5 million people, has been downloaded 700 million times, that gives a ratio of 140 Angry Birds downloads for every Finn.

Germany's population is about 82 million. For a German product to be comparatively as succesful, it'd have to be downloaded by about 11.5 billion people. The current population of the world is just over 7 billion.

I never even knew that Angry Birds was all that popular outside Finland! I would've thought that about half of its users would've been Finnish. Well that doesn't seem very likely if there are 700 million of them.

...And this is a derail. Sorry that I keep babbling about this. I'm just... astonished.

While we're on this tangent, I first heard of Angry Birds from a news item that stated that it was apparently the most popular videogame in the world.

And don't forget, in the developing world, Nokia is the top mobile phone brand. You literally could go into a marketplace, play the Nokia ringtone, and everyone would look at their phones with a puzzled look.

Also, another subversion!

As a British South Asian, I do not want to be a banker, accountant, lawyer, taxicab driver, doctor, dentist or optometrist.

Nah, I wanna be a psychologist. Totally different to all those other occupations my South Asian peers would take.

Never mind. It was an attempt at humour.

Hmmm...

Also, the idea that European countries are socialist havens.

Out of all the 27 States in the EU, many have a government that is right-wing, or has a right-wing party as the largest in a coalition government.

In fact, even in the European Parliament, the largest party bloc is right-wing!