A hundred and eight years ago, the International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen voted to honor the struggle against male oppression by creating an International Women’s Day, now held every year on March 8th. If the celebration represented a dream, it was one that emerged from centuries of women’s individual and collective nightmares. Today, as the trial of the man charged with the murder of the Swedish journalist Kim Wall gets under way in the City Court of Copenhagen, the irony of the anniversary is painfully evident to women the world over. This is especially felt in Scandinavia, where the journalist’s fate, in a submarine, highlights the fact that, even in a progressive and egalitarian region, women remain unsafe.

The alleged torture and killing of Wall—to which the Danish inventor Peter Madsen pleads innocence—has garnered huge international attention, much of it prurient. She went missing after boarding Madsen’s submarine—a cramped iron box—and diving deep beneath the surface of the Baltic. Divers later found her torso and body parts. It’s hard not to be queasily aware of the tragedy’s parallels to the début episode of the Scandinavian TV series “The Bridge,” in which a woman’s dismembered body is planted strategically on the mid-point of the sea bridge that connects Denmark and Sweden. Yet, while the show is part of a thriving Scandi-noir industry, crimes like the murder of Wall are actually rare in high-trust, low-crime Scandinavia.

Denmark and Sweden are both small countries, and Wall and Madsen were well known. By the time of her death, at thirty, Wall had published in the Times, the Guardian, the Independent, and The Atlantic. Her parents are Swedish journalists. Madsen’s tireless promotion of his crowdfunded submarine and space projects, and his ambition to be the first man to enter space in a D.I.Y. rocket, has made him a folk hero and a media darling. That Madsen and Wall should meet was no surprise. But the divergent reactions to the alleged murder committed in the Øresund—the stretch of water that divides Denmark and Sweden—reveals the gulf between the two countries.

Denmark and Sweden play very different psychological roles in the Scandinavian family. While Swedes generally find Danes uninhibited to the point of rudeness and relaxed to the point of laziness, Danes regard Swedes as uptight, reserved, and moralistic. Denmark is the cheeky, mischievous little brother, aggressively asserting his freedom of expression at every opportunity; Sweden is his joyless, finger-wagging, self-censoring big sister. The Danes, embracing their image as “the Italians of the North,” like to invoke the concept of frisind—the nineteenth-century anti-authoritarian “free-spirit” movement that paved the way for women’s suffrage, in 1915; the pioneering legalization of porn, in 1969; and, more recently, same-sex partnerships, in 1989.

Danish frisind has also allowed for a string of unconventional “maverick” personalities—usually male—to thrive as colorful exceptions to the joyless, militant egalitarianism that dominates cultural life. In 1973, the artist-provocateur Jens Jørgen Thorsen ignited a global scandal when he announced plans to shoot the government-funded film “The Sex Life of Jesus,” prompting a denunciation from the Pope himself. Around that same time, the flamboyant airline tycoon Simon Spies provoked feminist ire by referring to female staff as morgenbolledamer or “morning-fuck ladies.” His contemporary equivalent is the film producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen, who, until very recently, spanked his interns at Lars von Trier’s film company, Zentropa, as “punishment,” in front of their co-workers, and has often posed naked for the media.

The man known popularly as Rocket Madsen can be added to that roll call. For years, Madsen was portrayed as the twenty-first-century embodiment of the beloved, bumbling Hans Christian Andersen character Klods-Hans—a clumsy amateur who wins the princess’s heart through charm and cheek rather than worldliness and sophistication. When Madsen’s submarine went missing, in the early morning of August 11, 2017, concerned friends and fans flooded Facebook asking for help. Soon, “the mystery” became breaking news. At first, some suspected a typically Madsen-esque media stunt. Even after he was rescued from his sinking submarine, held in custody by the police, and charged with manslaughter, many believed Madsen’s claim that Wall had died accidentally after a heavy portal hit her on the head and Madsen had given her a “sea burial.” An intruder gained access to the recovered submarine and sprayed the words “FREE Madsen innocent” on the side. It was as if high-trust Denmark couldn’t imagine one of its own citizens capable of such violence.

In Sweden, by contrast, the media saw no “mystery.” Instead, they feared that a fellow-journalist had become the victim of a crime, as the headlines reflected: “Woman from Scania Missing Since Submarine Trip: A Crime Is Suspected” (Sydsvenskan), and “Submarine Owner Is Suspected of Killing Swedish Woman” (Kristianstadsbladet). A few days later, the journalist Victoria Greve concluded, in Expressen, that the suspected death of her friend and colleague Kim Wall “speaks to the vulnerability of female freelance journalists.”

Wall’s alleged murder opened a debate in Sweden about women’s vulnerability in the workspace—two months before the revelations of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct in Hollywood. Since then, Sweden has embraced the ensuing #MeToo campaign. In early November, the Stockholm newspaper Svenska Dagbladet published more than four hundred personal, anonymous accounts from Swedish actresses of sexual harassment they had experienced in the Swedish and Danish film industry. Meanwhile, several figures in the Swedish media—including a female radio host—were fired for allegations of sexual harassment. Swedes working in the trade unions, the legal system, the music business, the media, and the sex trade all signed statements denouncing workplace sexual harassment.

In late January, more than a thousand members of the Danish film industry went public with a similar declaration, but, until then, #MeToo had little impact or follow-through in Denmark. Instead, several high-profile men have belittled and ridiculed the campaign by presenting their own misogyny as freedom of expression. The writer and director Christian Braad Thomsen calls #MeToo a “witch hunt” in which the activists are the “transgressors” and the men victims, and the film director Ole Bornedal has depicted #MeToo as an “inquisition” and a form of oppressive “socio-fascism.” In the leading Danish film magazine Ekko, the biologist Kåre Fog and the director Søren Grinderslev scoffed at the Danish actors and actresses who chose to wear black at the Danish Film Academy Awards “in sympathy with self-appointed MeToo-victims.”

In the months leading up to the trial, the Danish tabloids, capitalizing on the Danish judicial system’s openness and transparency, have let rip with the grisly details of Wall’s alleged torture and dismemberment: “This Is How Kim Wall’s Panties Fell Off” (Ekstra Bladet) or “She Has Been Sawn Into Pieces” (Berlingske). Meanwhile, the Danish journalist Thomas Djursing seized the opportunity to re-issue his laudatory three-year-old profile of Rocket Madsen, though, after much criticism, the book was recalled. In an interview with a woman’s magazine, Femina, the celebrated Danish author Jens Christian Grøndahl, commenting on a photo of Wall on Madsen’s submarine, said, “It’s never the woman’s fault if a man decides to attack her. But, that said . . . well, when I look at the picture of the victim, the way she has let herself be photographed, the look she gives the camera . . . I can’t help but think that this is a girl who’s looking for trouble.” He withdrew his statement and apologized, but, with gut reactions like these, it’s hard not to feel despair for women in Denmark.

As the trial of Madsen continues in the weeks to come, Denmark will face a time of reckoning. With its “utopian” reputation under an international spotlight, can a small, nationalistic country recast frisind in a way that will truly honor the spirit of independence, curiosity, humor, and openness that Kim Wall’s life embodied? That would be something.

A previous version of this post misstated the name of the Swedish newspaper Kristianstadsbladet.