Half a century ago, Denmark set off a worldwide revolution—of sorts. In 1969, the Scandinavian country became the first in the world to fully legalize visual pornography.
The country had legalized written porn two years earlier, but when conservative politician Knud Thestrup pushed to lift the ban on sexually explicit images, he firmly believed that by making adult films and magazines widely and easily available, porn would lose its taboo appeal, demand would plummet, and Denmark’s underground porn industry—a $3.8 million per year business in exports alone ($28.5 million in today’s dollars)—would simply die out naturally.
But that’s not quite the way things worked out—as an in-depth article published online over the weekend by the business magazine Forbes made extremely clear.
The Forbes exploration of porn history, which is readable online at the link above, traces the evolution of the adult industry from Denmark’s historic legislation in 1969 to the present day.
Denmark’s move had an immediate effect worldwide, Forbes contributor Franki Cookney reports. Just three months after legalization took effect in July of 1969, Denmark saw the world’s first adult industry trade show, Sex 69, which drew an impressive crowd of 50,000, In 1969, that was equivalent to more than one percent of Denmark’s entire population.
Of course, not everyone who showed up was Danish. As Cookney reports, in the crowd was filmmaker Alex de Renzy, who would go on to become one of adult cinema’s first great auteurs—but at that time, he was compiling a documentary titled Censorship in Denmark – A New Approach. Released the following year the film—mainly an excuse to show explicit sex behind a cloak of dry statistics and man-on-the street interviews about the subject matter—gave Americans their first real exposure to porn on the big screen, two years before Deep Throat was released and caused an immediate “Porno Chic” revolution.
But while Cookney traces the evolution of the adult industry through the booming business of the “Golden Age” of the 1970s and early 1980s, through the VHS upheaval, to the democratization of the internet and the glut of “amateur” porn that it spawned, she identifies one single year as the turning point that brought the industry to where it stands today: 2007.
“Three key things happened,” the Forbes writer recounts, of that crucial year. “Pornhub launched, the first iPhone was released, and Vivid Entertainment published Kim Kardashian’s sex tape.”
The synchronicity of those three events had the effect of making the viewing of explicit “sex tapes” a (more or less) mainstream activity, while also making porn more instantly available and portable than at any point in human history. According to Forbes, the adult industry now loses at least $2 billion to copyright piracy each year.
But despite the numerous upheavals, Forbes concludes, “every historic look at the adult industry must conclude: Porn isn’t going anywhere.”
Photo By National Archives / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
