Norway: Trying to tame a wild teenage tradition
April is party time for Norwegian high school seniors, said Sigrid Hvidsten in Dagbladet, and we’re not talking about run-of-the-mill keggers. Each spring, tens of thousands of students—known as russ for the red graduation caps they traditionally wear—mark their final semester by embarking on the russefeiring: three weeks of ritualized, booze-soaked revelry. The high schoolers pool their cash to buy and trick out an old bus, then tour the town while blasting music and completing as many dares—wear loaves of bread as shoes for a day, chug a bottle of wine—as possible. For some students, the russefeiring is a“beautiful adventure,” a time of “friendship, solidarity, carousing, falling in love, and maybe sex.” For others, it’s a “nightmare” of enforced spending, binge drinking, and hooking up. Growing concerns about this rite of passage exploded last month after boys in the southern town of Bryne painted a massive and explicit image of “a couple having sex” onto the side of their russebuss, which was also fitted with “52 feet of LED lights, a snow machine, three smoke machines, and five lasers.” A women’s group reported the image to police as pornography, setting off a frenzied nationwide debate. Have grown-ups lost their sense of fun, or has russ culture “gotten out of hand”?
There’s nothing fun about the “sick perspective on sex and gender” revealed by the Bryne bus, said Elin Vargervik in Stavanger Aftenblad. Warped by internet porn and failed by parents who are “unable to set boundaries,” it’s no surprise that the high school boys thought their graphic image—in which a sexually submissive woman is dominated by a heavily muscled man—was acceptable. The “porno bus” is just the latest in a long line of russ ugliness, said Eirin Eikefjord in Bergens Tidende. Seniors have been dared into having sex with inanimate objects— and each other—drug use is rife, and so is misogyny. Russ songs are littered with “derogatory language about girls,” and a group of boys in Bergen declared a few years ago they wouldn’t let “whores over 130 pounds” on their bus. Thankfully, the outrage over the Bryne bus has stirred the government into action. Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store says local councils will be tasked with making russefeiring “more inclusive” starting in 2026 and that officials will investigate russebuss safety. Store insists he’s not canceling the festivities. Yet it’s hard to think of a bigger buzzkill than parties held “under the auspices of the county council, with middle-aged ministers as beautiful russ princesses.”
Russ celebrations are “by their very nature childish, annoying, provocative, and immature,” said Stavanger Aftenblad in an editorial. Reporting “a slightly tasteless bus” to the police—who wisely dismissed the complaint—is a wild overreaction. This festivity marks a delicate juncture, when “the last gasp of childhood collides head-on with adulthood.” It’s a time when bad decisions are inevitable. Still, most of the partygoers are 18 and about to strike out on their own as adults and so should “be taken seriously and held responsible for the choices they make.” To cure the problematic parts of russ culture, “politicians and schools must take action, but so must the russ partiers themselves.”