Sex and Society in Sweden

"Yeah, speaking of romanticisation. This is one of these books that I’ve a strong feeling no one actually read. The preface by an American sex educator whose name was Lester Kirkendall underscores the real take-away message: despite all the curricular innovations in Sweden and its pioneering exploration of sex in schools (it’s the first country to require sex education and there’s a very elaborate curriculum), when you go into the schools and you talk to the students and the teachers you find out that a lot of them are either ignoring it or giving it very short shrift. To this day, when you interview teachers and students in Sweden they say ‘well I know it’s in the curriculum, but we didn’t teach it, or we didn’t learn it, or we learned very little, or it was a joke, or we already knew it.’ And so it’s a remarkable book in its honesty but I don’t think that honesty is actually captured in many of the reactions to the book, precisely because so many people were so invested in seeing Sweden in their way. At the end of the day, most historians are pretty rugged empiricists. So am I. I understand the impulse to distort Sweden, I understand the politics and the history of it. But, frankly, I think it’s profoundly unhelpful to do so, especially in our current moment. Because of this thing we call globalisation. Sweden itself has become a radically immigrant society. One of the caricatures I remember learning from my mother, who is—this is weird—herself a sex educator, is that Sweden had it easy because ‘they all descend from the same thousand Vikings’ or whatever. That wasn’t true, but it was very monochrome and almost everyone was Lutheran. Today there are about ten million people in Sweden, and we think that one million of them were born in another country. If we hold on to this myth of Sweden, we miss the absolutely critical recent developments. Now we get into the question of effects, and I think the most spare answer is we really don’t know. There was a really interesting study done in 2009 of the three countries in Europe with the lowest rate of teenage pregnancy and—at the time, this may have changed—they were Sweden, Switzerland and Italy. And the authors of this study pointed out that these three countries had radically different approaches to sex education. The sex education in Italy was horrible, by any standards, it was about two hours a year, and they surveyed kids and half of them think you can get AIDS from a toilet seat. But the teenage pregnancy rate was incredibly low which obviously shows sex education is not the relevant variable here. It’s an interesting question though because it segues into the most important difference between Continental European and American sex education, which is the difference in purpose. The very question is essentially an American one because historically, and I would argue right into the present, the major goal of sex education has been to prevent negative consequences. Namely, teen pregnancy and STDs. But that hasn’t been the main purpose of education in places like Sweden. I had an ‘ah-ha’ moment when I was in the archives of the major sex education organisation in Sweden. A sex educator from Ireland—which had very negligible and, so far as it occurred, very conservative sex education—wrote a letter to this sex education organisation, basically asking ‘why are you so awesome? why are your teen pregnancy rates so low and your teen STD and abortion rates so low?’ Well the guy in charge writes back a very nice letter, where he says two things. First of all: those rates are lower here, but we don’t know if that’s because of sex education. Second: that’s not the point, we’ve actually never studied the effects, of course no-one wants unwanted teen pregnancies and STDs, but our goal here is not to limit them but to help each individual develop and determine their sexual life. That is just a different orientation. But I think this is the disappointing part for many Western liberals. If you compare these two views—sex education for warding off evil and promoting good—the first view plays a lot better in the Developing World than the second view. The second view is totally alien. So when international organisations, like the WHO and the International Population Conference in Cairo in 1994, start to move towards this view—that sex education should help each individual determine their own sexuality, including sexual pleasure—a lot of countries in the world find that anathema. Specifically, the idea that an adolescent individual should choose their own sexual behaviour. I think it’s fair to say that, again, after the HIV epidemic almost every nation state develops a kind of sex education, but in most parts of the world it’s a lot closer to the American version. That is, be careful: danger ahead. “When people say ‘adolescents shouldn’t engage in sex’, they mean ‘adolescent girls shouldn’t engage in sex.” It’s poignant because Swedes are justly proud of their pioneering efforts in sex education and they sent emissaries around the world. The most fascinating part of my book for me was following Swedes to Latin America and to Tunisia and all kinds of other places promoting their point of view. And I think it’s fair to say it mostly fell on deaf ears. It’s just not—right or wrong—a match for the cultural presumptions of those places. Exactly, I think that’s a great parallel."