#Swedengate

[neon-jackalope]

Käärijä, our baby, won the public vote by a landslide and he was dethroned by a FUCKING BORING BALLAD I WILL NEVER FORGIVE THIS DONT TOUCH ME.

[magicaleurovision]

I propose that, in order to make up for this, Europe mandates all Swedes to greet people who came to watch Eurovision - so guests - in their own homes next year.

And to feed them.

[two-sheep-in-one-wolfs-clothing]

going through the sweden tag and whyyyy is literally every second post about esc or not giving guests food (not true). like. focus on our ACTUAL problems instead. like how we occupied finland, how we treated the sámi population, how we are STILL treating them, etc etc. there are soooo many horrible things to hate us for, that i hate us for as well (as much as i love my country), that aren’t just an unfair competition and an assumption made from one reddit post

[onaa-ohokthen]

Alright, as heard of/remember swedengate, right? Someone posted about how as a kid, they waited in their friend's room while the family ate dinner. Cue, a country of stingy assholes who should be shot, how dare you not stuff six servings of food info any child that goes within a mile of your house that's what we do in my country you are WRONG, outrage etc. So what's going on?

As someone born in the mid-80s, I have definitely experienced this and find it completely normal. I can also say, after asking around, that it's not really a thing anymore, for reasons that will become obvious. 

Ok. So why is this happening and why aren't Swedes "feeding their guests" ?

1: In these cases, children aren't really guests: Guests are invited ahead of time, and you know they're there. Unlike in the US, where distances and social norms seem to have required play dates from pretty early on, kids in the sixties through nineties moved really independently. Often you would just show up, either after stopping by your own home or just joining your friend on the way home from school. You, much less your friend's parents, wouldn't know ahead of time that you were going to be around.

2: Family structures where both parents worked: Women joined the work force earlier and to a greater extent in Sweden compared both to the US and the rest of Europe (for a number of reasons, not the least a population decline forcing the state to offer more generous parental leave), so it was likely that both of your parents worked away from home. Smaller children may be in after-school daycare, but latchkey kids were numerous. You couldn't call your mom and ask if you could eat at your friend's house, because she was at work, or on her way home, and already had dinner planned. Both parents working also meant that dinner may be the only time on weekdays the whole family was sitting down in one space and spending time together. 

3: A history of poverty and self sufficiency: Sweden is wealthy now, but that has only been true since after WWI. Historically, there was a very real pride in one's own independence and ability to feed one's own family - to feed someone else's child dinner was insulting to them, since you were implying they weren't capable. Also, you now owed them one (there's an interesting reason behind this too, which involves both religion and land reform, but it would be a giant digression.) 

4 Food Culture: Swedes tend to eat a cold (as in not cooked) breakfast of soft or hard bread with toppings like cheese, boiled eggs, or lunch meats, and yogurt or fermented milk with cereal of some kind, etc. Lunch tends to be warm/cooked. Restaurants are often open for lunch, serving "dagens rätt" (today's dish), one or two options of a main course, a drink, coffee, and a salad bar, at a set price. Employers used to offer "lunch coupons" as part of benefits, which could be used to pay for it. In the days prior to the microwave (and it didn't become common until the late 80s), leftovers for lunch was not really a thing for the average office worker. When you cooked dinner, you made exactly the amount your family was going to eat, no more and no less.

So imagine you're an 80s parent. You and your spouse work until 5, pick up groceries on the way home and cook a pre-planned dinner. You're going to sit down, all of the family, and eat and hear about everyone's day. And then your kid comes home and tells you they already ate at their friend's house? Wouldn't you be irritated? At both your kid and at their friend's parents? 

The unwillingness to feed other people kids was out of respect for their parents and their own dinner setup.

"Ok, but if your friend was going to eat, why didn't you just go home?" That was an option! Usually an undesirable option, because if you paid the price of waiting for 20 minutes, you could buy another half an hour, or even hour, of play time, depending on your parents' hours and commute. Once you left and went home, play time was over and you had ceded fun for the day.

So Swedes never feed people who are at their house? Of course they do. In high school, my best friend's commute was 30-45 minutes in the opposite direction of mine, so we couldn't hang spontaneously. We would join the other on the train home on Fridays and spend the night. Since it was pre-planned, we ate dinner as well as breakfast at each other's houses. When I was younger, planned events such as sleepovers obviously involved food.

And, of course, there's fika. Fika is coffee (lemonade for the children) and baked goods (cinnamon buns or cookies or maybe small sandwiches) and can be had at almost any time other than before breakfast. Everyone always has coffee, the lemonade is bought or made as a syrup, and buns or cookies can be warned up from the freezer in minutes. Fika is small enough not to prevent you from having dinner later, or at least provide plausible deniability, and doesn't require planning. Everyone is invited for fika, even if they happened to stop by when everyone was already eating. In the summers, when we had fika outdoors, the neighbors were invited (by means of shouting) just because they happened to be out in their garden, within visual range.

In the 2020s, children don't roam quite as freely, cell phones mean that they can access their parents before dinner is already made, and microwaves in lunch rooms mean that dinners have to be less precisely planned. As a consequence, the dinner wait isn't nearly as common anymore. But it was never that strange. 

[vizzly-sama]

You leave cookies and milk for Santa.

In Sweden we just throw some candy on the trash bin...

[bogkeep]

ok this is a very niche and meta peeve but. when you live in a country that's not the US or the UK and especially if your native language is not english. there's a lot of ways people from the aforementioned countries may disregard your existence or experiences, grading from Harmful to Annoying. like i think everyone outside of usa can attest to how grating it can be that people from the protagonist country will forget that a whole world exists outside of it for realsies and not just on the news sometimes, with different languages and cultures and currencies and systems and peoples and politics.

countries like sweden and norway are extremely privileged and well regarded globally and don't need to be like, protected. white people from here are not gonna experience real life ramifications of mean sweden jokes online. but there's still a weird dynamic present if like, if the Big Protagonist Country is like, treating a different culture as Weird or Lesser, especially if the people doing it have very little clue about the cultural nuances or politics in question, while everyone Outside of Big Protagonist Country have to learn about THEIR political ongoings every single day, all the time. like, it's a pet peeve. it's annoying. i don't enjoy it. it's not the end of the world! it just sucks that it's so skewed.

so here's the meta aspect. if you complain about anything about norway in norway, especially about how maybe things could be better for marginalized groups, or how maybe some systems could be changed, you'll essentially be told "you live in the world's best country so sit down and shut up." like i genuinely think this attitude is a rot that runs through norwegian culture and something we need to reevaluate.

but something that ALSO happens, if you complain about pet peeves like people mispronouncing norwegian words or how swedengate sucked or when people think the Ø is just a fancy O, is that some people will tell you that you cannot complain about this because other people are ACTUALLY oppressed and sweden is not. it's just "norway is the best country to live in so sit down and shut up" but from the outside.

obviously this is not a big material problem in my real life as i live it. but it's annoying! complaining is a human right!!!

[smilesleepandspeak]

Remember guys every vote for Sweden is a vote not to feed your house guests :////

[cparti-mkiki]

and is the anti-swedish propaganda in the room with us right now

[penny-anna]

Ok the Swedengate feeding guests discourse is on my dash again and I have to ask. Are there genuinely people whose parents would not expect them to like. Come home for dinner every night unless arranged otherwise?? Is it actually normal to be like 'hi mum I know you cooked dinner for me but I'm eating at my friend's house instead'. What???

[minglana]

i cant believe sweden is gonna make everyone starve next year. literally people voted for them after swedengate????

[tamamita]

Hinga dinga durgen cunt (ref to Swedengate hope it makes you happy)

My fever is dissipating because of this. Thank you for your contributions to bullying the Swedes.

[pleatedjeans]

Apparently, Swedish People Don't Feed Their Guests, And The Internet Can't Handle It

[kittythelitter]

For the past year I have kept a sticky note on my phone listing memes I've seen on Tumblr.

I added them as i noticed them. So. It's not all of them and they might not be in the order you saw them. But here they are.

Plinko Horse

- Yoko Ono Ass Crack

- Blorbo from my shows

- Scrunglo

- L+Ratio etc

- it's me boy I'm the ps5

- live Slug Reaction

- my brother in christ

- get drinked

- (collective gay pirate brainrot tbh)

- ball shaving ads

- Tumblr blaze

- promoted Catholic posts

- dracula daily/ my friend Jonathan H arker

-morbius/morbin time

-swedengate

-mousegirl

-ai generated images and green text

-bad week for (former) prime ministers of island nations

-Hudson mohawk Reddit guy sex playlist

-crab rave (queen died) (and was reincarnated as Trisha Paytas's baby)

-tumblr achievements

-they brought porn back oh wait no they didn't

-the i love my wife guy of the Try guys tried cheating on his wife.

-spooky season begins

-its October 3rd

-posts that have 10k to me

-Tumblr original series????

-trans women /love/ pumpkins ig??

-hey sorry about your boyfriend

-the horrors

-666k notes to love myself

-firing cringe into the air to keep the Twitter users away

-happy destielputingeorgia anniversary

-tits are back

-end of dracula daily

-tumblr blue checks

-lynda Carter is here now

-return of so many people who left

-Goncharov (1973)

-Spotify wrapped

-old memes (like 2012 and before) revival

-tickets to barbie please

-lesbian wants five guys

-invasion of the pornbots

-AI is bad now

-everyone's really into Glass Onion

-cylinder

-Andrew Tate Pizza

[powersandplanetaries]

Okay the thing about the Swedengate "not feeding other people's children" thing is. I get not wanting the financial burden of feeding someone else's kid if money is tight. I get if dinner in your family/culture is a very structured event or personal family time. It is totally reasonable for you not to want people you did not invite to eat with you (digression on whether kids should have equal right to invite guests will be saved for another time).

However, what baffles me is deciding not to feed the kid, but also NOT SENDING THE KID HOME. If you know or suspect they didn't eat earlier, and they're staying late enough you know they'll miss a meal, how do you reconcile the fact that you just decided this kid didnt need to eat? Adults or socially competent teens I might expect to either take a hint and leave on their own, or decide they're fine with eating later. But with a kid under a certain age, if you're not feeding them, you need to either shoo them nicely out the door, call their parents for a pick up, or you take them home yourself.

[mccleans]

We need to bring back swedengate where they don't feed their guest so everyone hates them again and doesn't vote

i'll take any sabotage at this point we NEED to keep this win record

[svenskjavel]

Hittade en bra artikel som förklarade hela det här matdramat rätt så bra

https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/ALaE4x/etnologen-forklarar-teorin-bakom-swedengate

För den som inte orkar läsa, kort är det två anledningar - dels bondesamhället och ett land med långa vintrar som betydde att det var svårare med matförråd, sen är det jantelagen som handlar om att man inte vill sätta andra i skuld, "den familjen bjöd mitt barn på mat, nu måste jag bjuda tillbaka" etc. Istället så har vi ju vår fikakultur, där man äter mindre mål och dricker kaffe, men inte tömmer viktiga matförråd

Eftersom swedengate fortfarande håller på i sina kretsar så är det relevant även om den har legat i frågelådan ett tag