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question 26: Is there really such a thing as Swedish Sin?

Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus shocked his time with his sexual classification system for plants. Botany was no longer a suitable subject for young ladies! Three centuries later, a complex global reputation evolved around Swedish attitudes to sex. What subject could be more appropriate as we celebrate Midsummer, the ancient ritual that is all about fertility - or sex, to put it more bluntly.

Text by Claes Britton

The answer to the question posed above is ‘no’. Swedes are no more obsessed with sex than the people of any other nation, and we are certainly no more ”sinful”. In fact, I´d say, quite the contrary; Swedes simply have a more relaxed and natural attitude to the whole sex complex. We don’t necessarily associate nudity with sex, and why should we? We can still see naked children at the beach, people skinny dipping after saunas and women breastfeeding in public without thinking in sexual terms. I would go further and claim that it is precisely our lack of obsession that explains the powerful and enduring myth about Swedish Sin.

The direct origin of this global myth can, however, be traced back to a series of motion pictures by Ingmar Bergman and other film directors, featuring mostly innocent scenes of nudity and sex, that swept the world in the fifties and sixties, when the mere sight of a bare female breast was enough to send shock waves around the world.

Equality of the sexes had even then progressed further in Sweden than in most countries (even if today we’re still very far from equal). Swedish women have long been open and natural about their sexuality. And when we look at hard facts, such as the statistics for teenage pregnancies and venereal disease, for example, Sweden ranks impressively low in international comparisons.

I think it’s fair to claim that it says more about the rest of the world’s attitudes than our own that the myth is still very much alive and thriving today, almost half a century later.

So what, then, are the reasons for the typically Swedish relaxed attitude to sex and nudity? One is probably our simple agrarian roots. As recently as a century ago, Sweden was still basically a poor and underdeveloped peasant society, and many of the attitudes from this past are still alive today, including a natural, undramatic attitude to nudity. Another reason, most certainly, is the fact that Sweden is one of the world’s most secularized nations, where church and religion started to lose their grip on people’s minds already quite early in the 20th century.

Maybe even Carl Linnaeus has played a role in the story – or at least symbolizes the long history of Swedish attitudes. He wrote extensively about sex throughout his career. Indeed he has even been referred to as a ”peeping Tom of nature”. Not only did he base his whole pioneering classification system on the perceived sexuality of plants but he also had many theories about human sexuality, which he wrote about in the famous essay ”Om sättet att tillhopa gå” (”On how to get together”), a text which is most entertaining in its matter-of-fact explicitness.

Ultimately. though, we Swedes are far from being as relaxed as the myth would suggest. The pendulum seems to have swung back in recent times. It is less common today to see nude sunbathing and more common to see toddlers in bikinis.

An apparent uneasiness was also revealed when we were working on this website. We had prepared three questions in which Swedish scientists addressed subjects such as unfaithfulness, sexual pleasure, differences between the sexes, and homosexuality from a biological perspective. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that these three questions were the only ones – out of some fifty – that were withdrawn by their authors before publication.

We will, however, return undeterred to these subjects on www.linnaeus300.com later in the year. For now, though, it’s high time to get out into the magic Nordic summer to dance around that Maypole...

Happy Midsummer!

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