ABSTRACT
Historians emphasize the importance of Joe David Brown’s widely circulated Time magazine article, “Sin and Sweden,” published in April 1955, in affecting popular American attitudes toward Scandinavian sexual practices. According to Brown’s article, Sweden’s overtly progressive stance on birth control methods, abortion, and promiscuity challenged the position of the Lutheran Church of Sweden, creating a conflict of church and state. The concept caught on that Sweden was the land of “unlimited free love,” and while some Americans began to conceive of Swedes – and Scandinavians at large – as sexually immoral, others perceived “Swedish sin” as the personification of a new sexualized fantasy. Americans formed gendered impressions of Scandinavian men and women from blue films, news articles, and Playboy, which focused on imagined, sexualized Nordic features. The legacy of such portrayals of whiteness in American culture is vital to our understanding of the construction of ethnic and racial preference in history.
