Subscribe to the BrittonBritton newsletter! | Tell a friend about this page.

Inga from Sweden – still our most powerful international trademark

Inga from Sweden – still our most powerful international trademark

Forget Volvo, IKEA, ABBA, Borg, Bergman and that kinky ol´ Dalecarlean horse – Inga from Sweden is by far our most powerful global trademark!

Claes Britton | Jun 25, 2007 | 6 comments

I guess that Midsummer's Eve is as good a day as any for starting to tell tall tales from the wilderness of my youth...


The most recent, and, in all probability, last time I lived in Los Angeles, this strangely occured up in Covina, at that time, the earliest eighties, a predominantly white lower middle class town surrounded by half slums in smoggy San Gabriel Valley. Here, I had a dark black friend and teamate named Darryl, a fine but far from bright and much less well educated young lad. To be frank, Darryl was flat out stupid, on the basketball court and elsewhere, and thus quite logically nicknamed ”Dumb Darryl”. Playing mind games on him was no trick at all – like taking candy from kids. I remember one night, when we, as so often, had driven Mike’s mom’s VW Beetle down to Hollywood. We used to sit on a stone wall below a then deserted mansion, reminiscent of the house in Psycho, just above a billboard in a curve on Sunset Strip, drinking – Old English, Schlitz Malt Liquor and Peppermint Schnapps...urgh – and getting high while watching the ceaseless hooker traffic below. When filling up gas before driving back to the valley, I advised Darryl to take a sip of gas while he was at it – it would get him fucked up real good and was included in the price when you filled a full tank, I assured him (Yours Truly wasn’t always a fully fine and responsible youngster at that time, it must be admitted). At first, Darryl was sceptical but after some convincing he was all for it – we had to stop him from going ahead and taking a gulp, explaining that it was just a joke. He hailed from the slums of Newark, New Jersey, from which, as I understood it, he had escaped thanks to his mom who had met a lower middle class man and moved with him out to sunny California. I used to ask him about Newark – a major metropolis according to Darryl. When I pressed him about the city’s number of inhabitants, he had no idea, and tried to change the subject. I wouldn’t let it go so easily. ”Is it as big as Los Angeles?”, I asked mischievously. ”Fuck, much bigger, man!”, he answered. ”Well, shit, how many people live there, then? Just give me a rough estimate.”. ”Well fuck, a thousand, man!”, Darryl snapped, to put an end to my interrogation. Yes, he had dim ideas about numbers, letters and how things related to eachother in this world, and no clue at all about the phenomena of other countries and the outside world. He didn’t know nations like Great Britain, Germany, France or Italy by name, hardly even Canada or Mexico. It would actually surprise me greatly if good ol’ Darryl was even still alive i real time, some quarter century plus later. He did, however, have a crystal clear image of what Swedish women were all about, and nursed a hot dream of one day going to Sweden, this magic entity which in his fantasy appeared as one big paradisical sexual snakepit.

I often think of Dumb Darryl when I contemplate the seemingly perpetual vitality of the global myth and universal male dream of Swedish women and Swedish Sin, originating in a number of quite innocent films from the fifties and sixties, and still alive and thriving today, half a century later – to a point where the mere word Swedish is alluringly sexually charged in the ears of men in many lands. Volvo, IKEA, ABBA, the Dalecarlean horse, Borg and Bergman can go to hell – Inga from Sweden is still our most powerful global trademark!

I’ve dealed quite a bit with this phenomenon through the years, and written repeatedly about it on various commissions. In all the years we worked with our magazine, Stockholm New, we never stopped playing around with – yes using – this myth. Beautiful young Swedish women and elements of nudity and sexually undertoned Nordic magic were always staples in the magazine, causing constant agony and exhausting controversies among our partners representing official Sweden, the Foreign Ministry and others, both the women, for obvious reasons, and the men, for fear of their female colleagues’ reactions. Because of all this, Stockholm New never became politically correct during its lifetime.

My arguments when defending why we continued to contribute to keeping this dreaded myth alive were simple. From a communicion perspective, I just didn’t think that we, a small, peripheral nation with a low general international recognition, could afford not to utilize our strongest global trademark. I could never see it all as anything negative, but instead something very positive – a fantastic asset – as I’ve always regarded nudity and sex among the most natural aspects of human life, and never got the two mixed up. It has never been us Swedes, but the rest of the world that has been pathologically and aggressively obsessed with this whole entangled nudity/sex complex. That’s their problem, not ours, and if we could use our more relaxed and natural attitude in market communication while laughing at it all — why shouldn’t we? I particularly remember one occasion, at one of our release cocktails, when I was assaulted by an imposing lady, a real culture vulture sprung from the upper classes, representing the jumbo spectacle ”Stockholm Cultural Capital ´98”. She looked like she wanted to scratch my eyeballs out, screaming: ”Do you realize what you’ve done?!! You’ve taken the image of the Swedish woman back to the fifties and `I’m Curious Yellow´!”. ”Before you go any further,” I interrupted, ”are you aware of the fact that `I’m Curious Yellow´ is Sweden’s internationally most succesful motion picture of all time, in a league of its own?”

Oh yes. Should you by any chance want to know even more about my viewes on the global myth of Swedish Sin in an international perspective, read this week’s text, published on Midsummer’s Eve, of course, on our own laborously produced (on commission by the Swedish Institute), constantly growing mammuth website www.linnaeus300.com.

PS. You know, of course, that Swedish Erotica is a trademark founded in the early seventies in North Hollywood, California? DS.

Comments

Lägg till kommentar

Recent blog entries