Jacob Christensen

Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s speech from Saturday is available here (pdf document).

Pundits will note that the Danish People’s Party is thanked before AFR mentiones the Liberals’ partner in government, the Conservative Party.

Steely Dan got it wrong: The song should have had the title Monkey in Your Brain, not Monkey in Your Soul.

I think these films have already been screened on Swedish and Danish TV, but the French-German TV-station arte decided that a Friday evening was the perfect time to enlighten the Continentals about the strange behaviour of their Scandinavian brethren and sisters. (Also: Information from arte’s homepage).

In case, you have no idea what I’m talking about: For a few years at the end of the 1960s, Denmark and Sweden happened to find themselves at the front of the pornographic revolution. The particular irony in the Danish case was that it was a Conservative Justice Minister who legalised graphic pornography in 1969.

This incidentially had major political consequences in Denmark as Christian Evangelicals and fundamentalists left the Conservative and Liberal Parties – abortion policy also played a major role here – to form the Christian People’s Party which played a pivotal role in parliamentary politics from the 1973 earthquake election until 1994.

Why did the government legalise pornography? I think there are two answers to this.

First, the attitude towards sexuality and pornography had changed during the 1960s as a consequence of the major economic and social changes of the post-war boom. In rural areas and small towns displays of open sexuality would be a problem, in big cities like Copenhagen, Stockholm, Gothenburg or Århus it was part of everyday life and in any case less visible.

Second, the government had to prioritise the use of police resources and it is safe to say that pornography was seen as a minor evil compared to the hard drugs that also became a common phenomenon during the 1960s. Instead of fighting pornography and lewd behaviour in general – the gay community also benefitted from this – the police now set up squads to monitor drug dealers.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any good evidence about the situation today, but it seems that there is in fact a difference between Sweden and Denmark with regard to pornography and sexual behaviour in general. One the one hand, Swedes are much more uncomfortable about sexual imagry in the public space than the Danes, on the other hand Swedish TV channels – usually owned by the same companies as their Danish sister channels – with the extensive aid of the tabloids excel in screening reality shows which leave very litte to your imagination.

In contrast, pornography is really a non-issue in Denmark – especially compared with Sweden or the U.S.

If you are interested in urban decay, abandoned places or just in a plain sadistic mood, I’d recommend these two sites:

Övergivna platser by Jan Jörmark who teaches economic history in Gothenburg. Demographic and industrial changes have meant that Sweden has an abundance of abandoned plants, housing estates, highway motels and the like. I think that the series from the abandoned metro in Charleroi, Belgium, must be a personal favorite, though.

Some of the galleries need registration but Jörmark is not spamming, so it’s a safe option. And as Jörmark is a historian, the comments to the galleries are also quite enlightning.

The Dutch site Urban Exploration takes on the same topic but deals with urban decay in the Benelux.

Edit: More on the Charleroi metro here: In Search of King Louie – The Lost Rail Vehicles of Charleroi. The Dutch (!) wikipedia has a good section on the Charleroi adventure, including map.

Also: The Urban Exploration Ring.