The Truth About "Swedengate"

[marmar]

The Truth About “Swedengate”
Are Swedes the strangest people walking on the Earth? Yes and no.

BY IMOGEN WEST-KNIGHTS


(Slate) As someone who lived there for a couple of years, I always find it funny when the internet kicks the door open and reveals Sweden, standing with its pants down round its milky white ankles looking affronted. It’s a country people think they know about but don’t, really. ABBA, midsommar, Volvos, and pop music don’t give you a good sense of what life is like there—and life is undoubtedly, I can report as a former live-in foreigner, a little odd.

So it was recently following an incident that has come to be known as “Swedengate.” Someone posted a response to an innocent question on Reddit: “What is the weirdest thing you had to do at someone else’s house because of their culture/religion?” A user reported that they remember going to a Swedish friend’s house as a child and being asked to stay in another room while the family he was visiting ate dinner together. Many Swedish people replied saying: Well, yeah, that’s the way we do it here.

Sounds bad, doesn’t it? People on the internet from all over the world erupted in protests that not giving someone food in their home in their culture was at the very least incredibly rude and at worst tantamount to abuse. Among my own friends, I heard strong reactions, and particularly from people who are not white. One said that she was rocked by reading about Swedengate because for an Asian family, not “force-feeding” your guests is an abomination. A British Indian friend said she felt actively guilty that she didn’t have enough different types of milk to offer someone who stayed over at her house recently, a person she didn’t even invite to do so.

The sheer flabbergasted horror people brought to the conversation seemed to take the Swedes by surprise. So I went to the source: What is going on with this food thing? Are we just interpreting it uncharitably? Swedish media people have had various slants on this. A food writer claimed that the phenomenon is about Swedes having modest eating habits: what is good enough for them to eat in their homes is not considered good enough to offer to guests. One commentator in Dagens Nyheter, one of Sweden’s big papers, suggested that it’s because Swedes are “a little stingy, and perhaps don’t have great social skills.”

....(snip)....

Swedish people have an unusual relationship with their homes, too. When Swedes turn 18, they generally seek to move into an apartment on their own. Sweden has one of the highest proportion of people living alone of anywhere in the world. They run their building laundry rooms with military precision, a special booking system ensuring you never have to cross paths with anybody else while handling your dirty bedsheets. The occasions on which I got this wrong and accidentally walked in on somebody holding their underwear were some of the most awkward encounters of my life to date. The home is a private space for an individual, or a small family unit. You come over, you take your mangy shoes off, and you don’t stay too long. One of my closest friends, a person I would die for, is someone who took several months of hanging out multiple times a week to invite me to their apartment, and even then didn’t make a habit of it thereafter. .............(more)

https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/06/swedengate-reddit-sweden-scandal-food-explained.html