On May 30, 1969—50 years ago this week—the small Scandinavian country of Denmark, with its population at the time of fewer than 5 million inhabitants, undertook a decision that changed the world. Half a century ago, Denmark became the world’s first country to legalize porn.
To be specific, Danish politicians introduced legislation to legalize pornographic visual images, with the ban officially lifted on July 1, 1969. Two years earlier, Denmark also led the way in legalizing written porn, and was the first nation to withdraw from the 1923 Geneva Convention treaty for the suppression of obscene literature.
When Denmark lifted the ban on “obscene” prose in 1967, the idea behind the move was not to make pornographic literature widely available, but instead to kill the demand for the taboo books—which despite the ban were widely available on most bookstore shelves at the time.
And according to Danish historians René Løkkegaard Jepsen and Kasper Reggelsen, lo and behold, it worked. The so-called “obscene” books lost their appeal and gradually vanished from stores that had peddled them despite, or perhaps because of, their outlaw status.
Two years later, when Denmark’s conservative Secretary of State for Justice Knud Thestrup proposed legalizing visual pornography as well, he had the same idea in mind—once the taboo is broken, demand will drop, he believed.
Needless to say, things didn’t work out quite the way he hoped.
Instead, the country’s porn industry exploded, as Danish porn historian Jon Nordstrøm wrote last week in the Danish newspaper DR. And not only did the legalization of porn set off a boom in production of adult material—which had long existed in Denmark but was now free to go mainstream—the new legislation also supercharged the sexual and “free love” revolution that had steadily been taking hold throughout the latter half of the 1960s, but now would move at warp speed into the ’70s.
“Even before the ban was lifted, the hippie movement, thoughts about free sex and nakedness mixed together with porn, because it was a youth culture that was against all forms of censorship,” Nordstrøm said.
Thestrup himself later expressed regret, admitting that his hope that Danes would suddenly lose interest in explicit images of other people having sex was misplaced. But the decision nonetheless reshaped the country not only internally but also in the eyes of the world community, and opened the door for other countries to liberalize their anti-porn laws—giving rise to a new industry that had previously existed only on the shadowy fringes of society.
“Pornography became a piece of Danish cultural history, which made Denmark known for its open-mindedness,” wrote Jepsen and Reggelsen. “And which quickly made a group of men, who understood this new interest of society, rich. And some, very rich.”
Photo By Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons
