FURIOUS debate has erupted in Sweden about a former beauty queen’s attack on the country’s drive for a genderless society, which she claims has turned men into “nappy-changing” sissies and women into frumps who “neglect their husbands’ needs”.

Comments posted on the internet by Anna Anka, a former Miss Sweden living in California with her husband Paul Anka, the singer and songwriter, provoked howls of outrage from women. There were also cheers from men who agreed that the Scandinavian push for gender equality had gone too far with the recent emergence of males wishing to breastfeed their babies.

“Swedish dads are tragic with all their nappy-changing and equality,” wrote Anka, 38, the star of a television reality show about Swedish women married to wealthy Americans. “American dads do not prepare dinner and do not iron, they work and provide for their families.” In America, “men are men and women are women”.

She added that it was the woman’s role to keep the man sexually satisfied. “If she does not, then she only has herself to blame if he is unfaithful,” said Anka, whose husband is 29 years her senior.

This was a red rag to a bull for feminists. One called her “an insult to women”. Another saw her as proof that “there is something seriously wrong with the Swedish gene pool”.

Not everyone was hostile, however. “Bravo! Finally a sensible Swedish woman,” wrote “Jack Sprat”. Swedish men had allowed themselves to be “castrated . . . The Vikings must be turning in their graves”.

Anka’s intervention coincided with reports of a man using a pump on his nipples to stimulate lactation in the hope of being able to breastfeed.

“The emasculation of men has gone too far,” said another commentator. “The Vikings used to go to foreign lands, fight and bring back the bacon. Today they are a bunch of salad-eating, tight-pants-wearing homo sapiens.”

Anka moved to America in 1995. She had a brief role, in a bikini, in the film Dumb and Dumber, before being hired as Paul Anka’s personal trainer.

They had a son, Ethan, in 2004, and were married three years later but Anka does not appear to have always practised the wifely support and submissiveness that she preaches.

True to her Viking roots, perhaps, she hurled a chunk of ice at her husband during a dispute in their California mansion last year. The missile gashed his skull, requiring stitches, and led to her spending the night in jail. “It was a stupid little event, it was nothing,” she said later.

It will make for spectacular viewing if anything similar happens again: Anka is one of three women being followed for a television series called Svenska Hollywoodfruar (Swedish Hollywood Wives) which started last Monday, attracting 600,000 viewers in Sweden.

After Anka’s outburst, this week’s episode will no doubt attract even more.

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