Women Across the Globe

Svanhildur is an anchorwoman on IBC Channel 2 in Reykjavik, and she also says there's not a stigma attached to single moms in Iceland. "You don't need a husband to have some kind of a status," Svanhildur says. "I don't think sex is that big a deal in Iceland. It's probably just because everyone is having it. So it's not something you have to talk about and be ashamed of. If a girl is starting to have sex [at] about 15 years of age, she isn't looked at as promiscuous and the boys aren't looked at that way either. Icelandic women are very independent—they don't wait for someone to ask them out, they just phone them."

Asking someone out on a date is easy to do in Iceland because there is one phone book for the entire country—home, work and cell phone numbers for just under 300,000 people! "I guess we're a bit liberal about things because we have a much lower threshold for beginning new relationships," Savhildur says. "We don't have this kind of a dating thing. You don't have to go on a date number one and two and perhaps on the third date you ask him in. We don't have rules like that."

And what does Svanhildur think of American television? "We have a lot of news coming from America in Iceland," Svanhildur says laughing. "And we often have photos of obese people walking down the street—people that are so fat that you couldn't find a single person in Iceland that would be that fat. Anyway, even though you have really obese people, you've also got the rest [who are] really good-looking. I've been watching a lot of American television for the last days and I think you have too many commercials trying to make you lose weight."