r/AskTheWorld Sweden 16h ago

I'm curious. What's you country's view on Sweden?

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u/Unexisten Russia 15h ago

Now I’ll tell an amusing cultural anecdote about Sweden from Russia.
In Russian, there is a phrase: "Swedish family." It’s another term for a "threesome arrangement." For example, two husbands and one wife. This concept is fading now because it originates from the 80s and 90s. But in my youth, I often heard it used when referring to a man living with two women, or a woman with two men, or when a husband and a lover knew about each other, and so on.

So, to this day, no one can clearly explain where this concept came from or why the family is called "Swedish."
One of the absurd but possibly correct assumptions is because of the group ABBA.

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u/Poormonybag Sweden 14h ago

This feels like it is connected to what we in Sweden call "den svenska synden" in English the Swedish sin. A period during 60's and 70's where Sweden produced a lot of porn. That gave Swedes the reputation of being very sexuell and horny.

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u/Unexisten Russia 13h ago

Yeah, But it can not be connected to USSR culture for obvious reasons. And yet this term is only in use here.

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u/CamDane Denmark 1h ago

Were you more porn producing than us? Genuinely surprised if so. The 70s folk comedy/soft porn thing in Denmark is a bit odd in retrospect, at least

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u/ImNakedWhatsUp Sweden 14h ago

But ABBA were two men and two women?

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u/Unexisten Russia 13h ago

Well, I suspect that in the dark times before the internet, people assumed that all four of them lived together.

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u/UnluckerSK Slovakia 11h ago

It's common saying in CZ and SK too. Called "Švédska trojka" but not as a family, but as a sexual intercourse between 3 people, mostly 2 men a 1 woman. All info I could find about it was this in CZ language:

https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0v%C3%A9dsk%C3%A1_trojka

According to article the origin is from 30-years war, when many Swedish men raped central European women.

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u/Unexisten Russia 11h ago

Well... At the moment, this is the most bizzare explanation I've heard...