It's praised as a work of "feminism" written by a man. It's a great series of thrillers, well worth reading, but here's how Larsson's feminism is expressed:

All of the women in the book are infallible, near super-human, and better at what they do than any of their male colleagues. They are also all victims:

The "girl with the dragon tattoo" is Lisbeth Salander. She is the world's best hacker. She proved Fermat's last equation in her head (of course much more eloquently than the guy who did it in real life). She is 98 lbs. and not quite 5' tall, but she beats up a bunch of huge bikers because they are busy thinking that they are big strong men. She outsmarts the evil men in the book one by one. She is also the most victimized person in history - it took the Swedish secret police (ALL of the perps were male) and her evil Russian spy father and brother who is physically nearly invincible, to almost get her down.

The female police officers are the only ones who get anything right - and they get everything right. All of the male officers are bumbling idiots who are either too stupid to function or too misogynistic to do good.

The other main female character is Erika Berger - she is the #1 newspaper editor because she's so damn smart and works so damn hard - which is fine. But her marriage is treated as this lofty open-minded "equal" partnership. Here's how it works: she fucks anybody she wants to, which is mainly the main character, the boy toy Mikael Blomkvist. The only extramarital sex her husband gets is when she brings home another man to fuck him in the ass. He's extremely pleased with this, and is subservient in every way to her. Berger, despite being the world's smartest and hardest editor, is of course also plagued by evil men who just hate her because she won't fuck them.

There are 3 types of men in the book:

  1. The boy toy hero, who is a playboy but who really, really, really thinks women are all great. He is a great lover and perpetually unavailable, but is 100% behind all the womens' beliefs that almost all men are rapists and creeps. He's a dashing hero who likes it when women are stronger than him. At one point he is described as "not turned on by perky breasts and perfect bodies," because he is basically only into women who are middle aged and older, and is only turned on by their minds. He's the perfect man ;o)

  2. The 'good' men - asexual father figures, gay men, and extreme betas. Of course, these men live only to support a woman (except for the gay character who doesn't do much at all). While they all hold pretty successful careers, they are all portrayed as ineffective and incapable of doing anything - their strength is that they stand back and let the women run the show. They praise the women who break the rules, because it always turns out for the best!

  3. Rapists and murderers. Most all of the men in the book are rapists and/or murderers. Half of the police are actually corrupt and/or murderers (all of them male). A lot of them don't actually rape anyone, but they just haven't had the guts to yet - they look at kiddie porn and hate all women with a passion, calling them satanist lesbians and whores and stalking them and trying to get them locked up for false reasons. From the sounds of these books, something like 60% of men are rapists, murderers, or soon-to-be rapists/murders.

And every female is a victim of these men - of course the hopelessly patriarchal Swedish government won't do anything about it.

They are really great books, really suspenseful and well written. But the skewed view of society constantly irritated me. Not just the way men are almost completely treated as horrible or inept, but the relationships and situations that were held up as examples of "equality" or "fairness" were horrifying. Ridiculous!