Sweden is home to many lovely people and many deranged ideas. The Swedish town of Övertorneå, located near the Finnish border and meaning “Upper Torneå” rather than referring to an eye injury as your host still strongly suspects, includes less than 5000 people, one of whom brought attention to his home with an odd proposal.
Or proposition, perhaps.
Councilman Per-Erik Muskos introduced an idea to the town council for a new perk for all 550 city employees: they would be allowed 1 hour per week to go home and have sex. Naturally it got a lot of attention all over the country, and generated all sorts of commentary – for, against, and straight-up humorous.
The first thing to occur to your humble host, after easily predicting the various reactions, was that Sweden already has a startlingly large collection of time-not-working benefits, and this is another. Also that the number of people working for the town is about 1/8 of the people actually in the town.
The links above are to Swedish-language newspapers, so for the benefit of all here (one hopes for Swedish readership but does not necessarily have it yet), here is the New York Times article on the subject. I tried mightily to excerpt properly the most entertaining bits of the thing, but it’s too scattered. You’ll need to go read it yourself.