MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
ESSAY


OSLO - Despite its irresistible title, the show here called“Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia-”turns out to be not quite as advertised. It’s as erotic as pickled herring.

It’s a good question, though. What did happen to the image of Scandinavia as the frigid tundra of hot sex?

The show is organized by the Office for Contemporary Art. Call it a virtuous mess, really an essay masquerading as an exhibition, unearthing a wealth of historic information. It tracks the roots of sexual liberation in Scandinavia to longstanding state-sponsored social movements, like women’s rights, sex education, health care and freedom of expression. Naturally, when the cold war arrived, the United States began casting an increasingly wary eye on this calm, liberal, peace-loving region of saunas, socialism and smorgasbord, neighboring the Soviet Union.

In some countries just the idea of showing naked sculptures in public would invite a scandal. Here, Gustav Vigeland filled a park in the middle of Oslo during the early decades of the last century with hundreds of his sculptures of naked men and women, young and old.

A “lack of moderation discernible on all fronts” is how Dwight D.Eisenhower assessed Sweden in 1960, seeing Scandinavia in general as a cautionary tale about extended social welfare.

“We don’t sin any more than other people, but we probably sin more openly,”responded an irate Swedish baker, when approached by a journalist. Other Swedes noted that the Kinsey Reports, studies of sexual behavior done in the 1940s and 1950s, exposed an America no less fixated on sex than Scandinavia, only more furtive and hypocritical about it.

But calling out American criticism of Scandinavia for its hypocrisy missed one point: to many Americans, procreation aside, sex was supposed to be naughty. Making it wholesome spoiled the fun.

While Eisenhower was taking his swipe at Scandinavia, Federico Fellini was casting the Swedish actress Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain in “La Dolce Vita.”

Too bad the show doesn’t deign to examine sexploitation films like“The Seduction of Inga,”“Maid in Sweden” and “My Swedish Cousins,” which flooded the American marketplace. Now dimly recalled for the American censorship battle over its full-frontal male nudity,“I Am Curious (Yellow),”released in 1967, became the ultimate Scandinavian sex film. Its naked couplings were punctuated by ponderous disquisitions on Swedish labor law.

How did Scandinavia turn from“Maid in Sweden”to Ikea, from the purveyor of earnest free love into the purveyor of affordable love seats?

Berge Ragnar Furre, a Norwegian historian, theologian and a politician in the Socialist Left Party, now on the Nobel Committee, offered this thought: “You have to remember that here in Norway we have also had a strong tradition of liberal democracy that is against sexuality, so we are historically divided as a liberal society.”

In other words, Norwegians have long split between being sexually liberated and puritanical, while remaining politically liberal in both cases.

Havard Nilsen, a fellow historian specializing in Wilhelm Reich, the psychiatrist and sexologist, nodded.“There has always been a moral highmindedness here about sexuality, connected, like the labor movement and teetotaling, with issues of reform and salvation,”he said.

But already by the late 1970s, as Wencke Muhleisen, who teaches women’s studies at the University of Oslo, pointed out,“feminism in Norway turned against sexuality and toward the family, the winning political line cooperating with the state in looking for equality laws that meant a gradual cleansing of sexual promiscuity.”

Culture generally became more globalized in the following years, along with patterns of social behavior, meaning that “while it was normal to see women here in the ‘70s on the beach without a bikini top, now it is very seldom,”Ms.Muhleisen added.“The commercial ideal body has replaced the desexualized healthy body.”

At the same time the role of the blueeyed blond in the sexual pantheon of pornographic commerce has been diluted by the Web and multiculturalism.

Which is to say that Scandinavia has become more like everywhere else.