No sex, please, we’re Swedish

Press, 10 September 1984, Page 20

No sex, please, we’re Swedish

By

Martin Linton

in

‘The Guardian,’ London

Sweden’s sexual revolution, which titillated the world for 20 years, is now — tentatively — taking a few backward steps. It started in the sixties and reached its highest point in the early seventies with the abolition of all censorship and the end of many taboos against sex before marriage. Now, both in the home and in the attitude of the State, there are significant changes. Censorship has not been reintroduced on sex as such, but a ban has been imposed on live sex shows and on child pornography. A committee of inquiry has recommended the censorship of sexual violence on film and video, a recommendation that the Government of Olaf Palme seems likely to accept. The ostensible reason for these bans has been to protect women from prostitution, and children from exploitation — not to protect the spectators. But the effect has been that Stockholm’s sex clubs have virtually disappeared. There are now only two left out of the more than 20 that existed in the mid-seven-ties, and the Swedes, by and large, are not sorry to see them go. They were never much more than a tourist trap to cash in on Sweden’s wholly undeserved reputation abroad as the country of sin and sex. An even more significant change has taken place in the last few years in the private domain — a change in atmosphere in favour of family and fidelity. It is the beginning of a moral backlash against the permissive and promiscuous philosophy of the sixties. “I cannot prove it yet, but I think there has been a clear change in the atmosphere in the last five years,” says Mr CarlGustav Boethius. He is the former chairman and now vice-chairman of the Sex Education Board, which runs a clinic and advice centre in south Stockholm. “We notice it here very strongly and I think it will soon start showing up in the statistics.

“The real explosion of sex liberalisation was in the sixties and the first half of the seventies. During that time there were some teenagers, a relatively small group, who had sexual relations with many different partners and a very extensive sex life. “In the last five years teenagers have found out for themselves, without much preaching from the older generation, that this type of life does not have much to offer — what you really want is someone you can be very close to. “The change we observe today is that teenagers, both boys and girls, now say that you should wait before you enter into sexual relations until you are sure that you have found the right person for you — not the right person for your whole life, but the right person for you today — and they also say that if you have sexual relations, you must be faithful to your partner.” There was a time, Mr Boethius says, when some of the boys and girls who had their first sexual experiences at an early age were really quite disturbed. But now, he says, when investigating young people starting at 12 or 13, one finds that they can be well bah anced, enjoying good relations with their parents and achieving good results at school. Follow-up surveys have also shown that even if they found their first sexual encounters at 12 or 13 to be “uninteresting” as half of them did, they suffered no ill effects and matured normally. “It is not as the extreme moralists always say that if a girl starts too early she has disturbed her whole life. That' is not true,” says Mr Boethius. What is happening, he says, is that more responsible young people are experiencing sex before marriage and they are beginning to do it in a more responsible way. At the same time living together before marriage is no longer an act of social defiance, but of conformity. If living together had become acceptable in the Seventies, it has

now become positively respectable. The Swedish equivalent of the Kinsey report found as early as 1969 that the percentage of young marrieds saying they had had no sexual experience before marriage was as low as 2 per cent. “I’m sure it is much less than 2 per cent * today and those who are left are < mainly Pentacostalists and Bap-. tists,” said Mr Boethius. There are now practically no weddings where the couple had not lived in the same flat or house before marriage. That is not just a matter of speculation, blit can be seen from income tax and census returns, which are publicly available. The fact has been even more obvious in church weddings, since the banns have to be read from the pulpit on the Sunday before the wedding. Unlike Britain, where the priest simply refers to the couple as a bachelor or a spinster “of this parish,” the Swedish priest has to give the full address of the groom and then the full address of the bride, which’ is very 'often the same. This has been very difficult for the more conservative priests to accept. f It has been even more difficult for such priests to accept the fact that most theological students and . even some younger priests in the . Lutheran State Church now live openly with their partners before marriage. It is not even considered unusual for a priest to be divorced and to live with his future wife before being remarried in church. Most theological students, according to Mr Boethius, have their first sexual experience outside marriage, and they do so with the blessing of many senior figures in the Church. The former Bishop of Stockholm, Dr Ingmar Strom, once said in an, interview: “I remember my own life during the last years at school and at university when I was studying theology and it was absolutely forbidden for me to have sexual relations with the girls I fell in love with. I remember that as a dark and terrible room.” He did not want young Swedish people to live in that dark and terrible room any more. This change in morality has been-

paralleled by a change in language. For Swedes to talk today about “pre-marital sex” would sound rather quaint, and "living in sin” more so. Instead .they talk about living together and they use the word for a cohabitee, “sambo,” to t refer to their partners. “You must meet my same,” they will say, , in just the same way that they might say “meet my husband” or “meet my wife.” This lack of self-conciousness stretches to the wedding pictures in Swedish newspapers where the happy couples are often pictured with their own children, who are usually aged between five and ten when the parents decide to relinquish their “sambo” status and get married. Out of 20 or 30 wedding announcements in the newspaper every day, two or three usually include children. Sociologists argue that this is not a new custom but a very old one. Church records go back further in Sweden than in almost any other country and they appear to show that it has been the custom for hundreds of years in many parts of Sweden for engaged couples to live together. The first child is often born less than nine months after marriage. According to one sociologist, ‘Young people in Sweden have always lived together before marriage. The Church tried to force them to get married immediately, but it never succeeded. The sex liberals tried to convince them they must be even more sexually free, and some even preached that Sromiscuity was a good thing. But ley did not succeed either, and young people are now reverting to their old customs.” The difference is that in the old days it was impossible for a young man to leave his girl even though they were not married. He would be ostracised in his village or forced to emigrate to America. But since people started to move off the land and into the cities about 100 years ago, the system of social control began to break down and young people began to experience sexual freedom. Even today the difference can still be seen between the cities, where 50 per cent of marriages end

in divorce, and the countryside, where the figure is 30 per cent. Many people believe that the divorce rate will decline as the children of divorced parents grow up and become parents themselves. “In the last four or five years we have had young people coming to us and saying something that they never said before," says Mr Boethius. “They say they have difficulties in their marriage, but they don’t want to divorce because they remember how they suffered as . children when their parents di- •• voreed, and they don’t like the idea of making their children suffer in the same way. “We also get teenagers telling us they are veiy upset by the infidelity of their parents, and are worried that the family will split up. They also say that they will never five like that when they grow up, though that is something which naturally they often cannot realise in their later life.” Dr Rita Lilestroem, one of Sweden’s foremost sociologists, has also issued a public warning over the high divorce rate which, she says, simply cannot go on. Children are often deeply hurt and it is a danger to the whole of society. “Many divorces are necessary. It was a terrible thing in the old days when it was impossible for a woman to leave a bad marriage,” says Mr Boethius, “But the hardest criticism today is directed at the type of divorce which is caused by the principle that love and passion is more important than marriage and family, and that if you experience new love and a new passion it is nearly your moral duty to leave your poor marriage. “These sudden passion divorces from marriages that have not been so bad are the ones that will decrease. People find that if they really work hard to overcome problems they find a better relationship than they had before and they can mature together. “These are old ideas that we are hearing about again, only this time it is not because marriage is the will of God, but simply the experience that rapid divorces are not a good thing. It is a practical reason that has changed their minds.”