Hundred years of pornography: A Swedish story

[gorgik9]

Introduction

As a Swedish citizen interested in the history of pornography the year 2021 is special with two important "anniversaries": The first is the 50th anniversary since pornography was decriminalized and made legal in February 1971 as the second country in the world. Denmark was the first in 1967 (print) and 1969 (pictures / movies).

The second is the 100 years anniversary since the first legal indictment of a pornographic movie exhibited in public in 1921.

So four Swedish scholars (Klara Arnberg, Elisabet Björklund, Tommy Gustafsson, Mariah Larsson) who have published a lot of research about porn in Sweden came up with the idea to celebrate the 2021 porn-anniversaries by making a synthesis of their research and publish a book for a wide readership titled Såra tukt och sedlighet. Hundra år av pornografi i Sverige. (the title is a bit tricky to translate into English but I'll have a try: "Offending decency and morality. Hundred years of pornography in Sweden.)

I started thinking about posting this new thread when I had posted another thread a couple of weeks ago: "What makes me feel excluded as a gay man?" (link:http://www.gayheaven.org/showthread.php?t=641044 )

Regrettably I was quite unclear about what and why I was so angry, and the main reason was that the scholars behind the new book had been invited to a couple of media venues to talk about what they had just published - but what happened wasn't any serious conversation but rather the deliverance of an indirect message: "new research on the history of pornography is isn't any good, we'll just chant "Objectification!!!" for the umphteenth time!"

And that's when I started thinking about that maybe I should post about this book on GH when I've read it and had some time to think about it!

A few things needs to be clarified from the beginning: 1) It's NOT a book about gay porn, but gay porn isn't excluded from this historical survey.

2) I'm putting a gay angle on this Swedish history to make it relevant for GH.

3) I've already written most of my own posts in the thread, but anyone is of course welcome to ask questions and make comments.

I just hope that this Swedish history will be of interest for others than myself.

 

[gorgik9]

Legal frameworks and different media.

The legislation to be repealed in February 1971 was the Swedish Criminal Code, chapter 16: §11 (originally introduced in the 1864 Penal Code): "Anyone offending public decency and morality by means of representation in writing or picture or by offering for sale, exhibiting or otherwise circulating writing or picture, will be sentenced for offending public decency and morality to fines or prison up to six months."

So all sorts of media could be indicted but at the same time there were important legal differences between print media and movies. Print media were protected by the constitutional law of freedom of print (Tryckfrihetsförordningen) which meant that books, magazines and newspapers never could be objects of censorial examination before publication; confiscation and indictment could only happen after publication.

When movies became the big new thing at the turn of the century 1900 this also provoked intense anxiety in Swedish society as in so many other countries. The result was new legislation - the Cinema Ordinance - and the founding of a new authority, the National Board of Film Censors in 1911. ANY movie intended for public exhibition had to undergo beforehand examination by the censors and there could be three different outcomes: 1) the film would get an exhibition permit; 2) it would get a permit but only after the censors had made cuts in the movie; 3) the movie wouldn't get a permit and became totally banned from public exhibition.

 

[gorgik9]

"Offensive Publications": Sweden 1910-1950

The posts to follow in this thread will be in roughly chronological order starting with the situation in the first half of the 20th century.

Among the more remarcable things I learned about the public discussions in Sweden on offensive publications/pornography in the early 20th century was the general use of a profoundly nationalist rhetoric: Sweden is the country of moral purity, innocense and beauty, so anything dirty, immoral or ugly must have its origins abroad. We find "privileged" rhetorical origins for pornography in big European cities like Paris, London and Berlin, but also in America.

So postcards with sexual motives were called "French cards" and some were definitely made in France, but the cards made in Sweden were never called "Swedish cards".

We find funny examples of this use of nationalist rhetoric in connection to illegal exhibitions of pornographic films:

In a 1921 case it was stated that the movies exhibited were "made in America" - and maybe they were, but there weren't any proofs that they weren't "made in Sweden". We'll have to take the exhibitors words for it - that's the only "proof".

And in a 1932 case the exhibitor said that the movie he had shown was "French", but he later confessed that it was made in Stockholm, Sweden, by himself!

There were a handful of media genres where offensive content occured more or less regularly:

- Pornographic literature

- Pornographic films (we're of course talking about what has often been called "stag films": 5-10 minutes long black and white silent movies).

- "French" postcards

- Then we had four different magazine genres often considered immoral or "trash literature": 1) comic magazines (a genre emerging in the 1860s and extremely popular in Sweden at the turn of the century 1900). The following three genres didn't emerge until the 1930s and were all illustrated with photos while the comic magazines had drawings: 2) Nudist magazines; 3) Sex Education Magazines; 4) Pinup Magazines.

It's getting late so I'll have to continue posting in this thread tomorrow!

 

[slimjim]

Well there are comparisons with the UK in that in 1912 the "British Board Of Film Censors" came into being and it acted pretty much the same as the Swedish one. Likewise the "dirty postcards" and what were refered to as "top-shelf" magazines (because thats where you found them in newsagents, and in some shops they chose to put them inside a brown paper bag too). Interestingly I seem to recall that the more hardcore stuff was generally referred to as Scan-Mags or Swedish mags, with these being available either on mail-order on in licensed sex-stores but I cannot say if this was due to any nationalistic sentiment.

 

[gorgik9]

Among the more interesting things I found in the early years of the 20th century were two photo illustrated magazines from the 1920s, Gazetten and Cajus Gazett, both of them indicted and/or confiscated more than once.

In political terms both could probably be described as right-wing populist publications, but what struck me was, that they both published articles about male and female homosexuality with astonishing sympathy.

These magazines were usually illustrated with photos of naked or scantily clad women, but sometimes also with handsome muscular naked men. The 1920s were the times when modern physique culture and physique photography emerged and where a person like Bob Mizer had his cultural roots.

* * * * * * * * *

Legal indictments of pornographic films didn't occure more than five times in Sweden in the years 1910-1950 but this fact probably tells us more about peoples ability to keep their mouths shut about illegal public exhibitions than about the actual frequence of such events.

 

[gorgik9]

When sin became Swedish, 1950-1970: New problematic genres and the sexual revolution.

I think it's almost impossible for a gay man like myself not to have deeply ambivalent feelings about the period in Swedish history from the late 1940s to the early 1960s: On the one hand homosexuality was decriminalized in 1944, but what followed in the 1950s was - on the other hand - the worst persecution and victimization of homosexuals ever in the so-called Kejne-affair beginning in the early years of this decade. The persecutors argument was quite simple: it doesn't matter if homosexuality is legal or not - homosexuals are a grave danger to society, in particular a danger for children and youngsters.

The legal situation concerning pornographic publications was formally the same as before WWII, but at the same time the desicions of the film censors were obviously becoming more liberal regarding nudity and eroticism in movies, so we got Swedish movies - some of them to become internationally famous or infamous - like Arne Mattsson's Hon dansade en sommar (1951, One summer of happiness) and a number of films by Ingmar Bergman: Sommaren med Monika (1953, Summer with Monika), Jungfrukällan (1960, The virgin spring) and Tystnaden (1963, The Silence).

The most furious public debate about film censorship in the 1960s was about director Vilgot Sjöman's 491 (1964) which didn't get an exhibition license from the censors, but the government changed the desicion and gave Sjöman a permit after the movie had been somewhat cut . Vilgot Sjöman would later make other controversial films like Jag är nyfiken - gul (1967, I am curious - yellow) and Jag är nyfiken - blå (1968, I am curious - blue).

* * * * * * * *

The so-called "sexual revolution" was a strong wave of of sexual liberalism questioning oldfashioned sexual morality and often discussed as if it was something only happening in the 1960s, but it actually slowly started already in the 1950s. What changed international opinion about Swedish society regarding sexual morality more than most other things was the governments desicion to introduce obligatory sex education in primary school in 1955, which made American journalist Joe David Brown launch the myth of Swedish sin with a very famous article published in Time Magazine that year.

 

[gorgik9]

When sin became Swedish, part II

In the mid 1960s there were obvious signs that the legal situation would probably change relatively soon. In 1965 the government appointed a commission to make an official report to prepare for new legislation on publications offending decency and morality which was published in 1969 : SOU 1969:38 Yttrandefrihetens gränser (The limits of the freedom of speech).

Another sign was the vast 14 volumes anthology Kärlek (Love) of erotic stories published 1965-70. It never got confiscated or indicted though many of the stories really were pornographic. The anthology editor Bengt Anderberg who also contributed a relatively large number of stories, was an established novelist since the late 1940s and many of the other contributors were young professional writers, some of which soon would become among the most important writers in Swedish literature in the 1970s-80s-90s: Lars Ardelius, Svante Foerster, Anderz Harning, PC Jersild, Bengt Martin, Göran Thunström. And this anthology also had a number of important female contributors: Eva Berggrén, Maria Emanuelson, Loka Enmark, Nine Christine Jönsson, Annakarin Svedberg. So writing porn was the cool thing to do among younger professional writers in the 1960s and writers of both sexes contributed porn stories.

So people understood the signs of the times and the consequence was a strong upsurge of pornographic magazines, in particular in the years 1967-1969, thus a few years before the formal legalisation in 1971.

There also were a cluster of feature length movies from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s, sometimes called "the sex films". This isn't a formal genre designation and we are not talking about porn movies, but movies with sexuality as their thematic center, one way or another. Otherwise the films in this cluster are very different from eachothers: Jag-en kvinna (Mac Ahlberg 1965; I, a woman); Eva-den utstötta (Torgny Wickman 1969; Eva-the outcast); Ur kärlekens språk (Torgny Wickman 1969; Language of love); Mera ur kärlekens språk (Torgny Wickman 1970; More from the language of love); Kyrkoherden (Torgny Wickman 1970; The Vicar); Rötmånad (Jan Halldoff 1970; The Dogdays); Kärlekens XYZ (Torgny Wickman 1971; The XYZ of love); Flossie (Mac Ahlberg 1974).

A legendary porn publisher and two gay pioneers.

I think it's necessary to go back in time to the 1950s and talk about Curth Hson Nilsson (1924-1988) who would become a legend among Swedish porn publishers. He started working as an editor for a number of pinup magazines in the late 1940s, but went on to establish his own publishing house Hson Publishing in the early 1950s and brought out the first of his own pinup magazines Piff in 1954, followed by Raff (1957) and Paff (1962) and these Hson pinup magazines developed into modern porn mags in the late 1960s.

Nils Hallbeck

But Hson published a lot more than their own pinup/porn mags and a gay writer who had a number of his books published by this house was Nils Hallbeck (1907-1997) who often used the pseudonym Jan Hogan. Hallbeck published books with gay themes, including gay pornographic books, with Hson from 1951 to 1981,but he also brought out material under his own label Foibos which mostly was collections of his own poems, some of these maybe could be called gay porno-poetry. He also published his own Swedish translations of Constantine Cavafy's poetry (1960) and ancient Greek homoerotic love poems (1964).

Carl Rådemyr

Another gay writer who also founded his own publishing firm Akro-förlaget was Carl Rådemyr (b. 1930) who often published under pseudonyms like Carl Regman and Guy Hawkes. He started his firm in the early 1960s publishing his own novels and collections of poetry, but turned more and more into gay pornographic stuff from the mid 1960s.

Rådemyr's Män som mötas (1965; Men who meet) is a small collection including a novella and a short story. He explains in the introduction that it's a response to the first volumes of the erotic short story anthology Kärlek "which has made pornography impossible" since it didn't get confiscated.

Next year he brought out a sex education book about homosexual eroticism Konsten att älska annorlunda (1966; The art of loving differently) and then went on to publish gay porn mags in the following years: Homo International Magazine (1966-69); Gay Homo Special (1968); Homo-Kontakt (1968; Homo-Contact); Kärlek annorlunda i bild: loving the other way pictured (1968); Sex-Camp (1968) and Male Petting Art (1968).

 

[gorgik9]

Porn decriminalized: From 1971 to the start of Internet in the 1990s.

When porn had been decriminalized in February 1971, what kind of porn media could you find and where would you find it?

There naturally were large numbers of porn mags, but as I stated above, the big upsurge happened rather before 1971 (in 1967-69) and not after. The porn mag market in Sweden actually shrunk somewhat in the years just after -71.

When it came to movies there were naturally specific porn cinemas in big cities like Stockholm or Malmö, but "sexfilms" like Ur kärlekens språk (language of love) were exhibited in ordinary cinemas and this was also the case with films in the popular Danish "gladporr"-genre (cheerful porn genre) like director John Hilbard's eight Sängkanten movies (Bedside-movies) 1970-1976.

But there were also various semi-public venues like sex clubs and adult stores / sex stores where you could watch 8mm porn shorts in exhibition booths. As far as I know there wasn't much 8 mm shorts produced in Sweden in contrast to the large Danish production, in particular by the company C0lor Cl1max starting in 1967.

* * * * * * * * *

The new legal Swedish porn which probably meant the most for gay men were the magazines published from the early 1970s by the publishers Källs-Nöbbelöv Press and Revolt Press, both firms started by boyfriends Michael Holm and Geurt Staal. Their most important and influential mag was unquestionably Revolt mot sexuella fördomar (1971-1986, Revolt against sexual prejudices), a gay porn mag with - so to speak - the stamp of Stonewall on it. A porn mag using political language in its title! Revolt magazine did contain porn but also non-porn articles and political discussions. Other mags from the same publisher were were Killen (1974-1986, The Boy), Man-to-Man (1979-80), Revolt Bildserie (1970s, Revolt Picture series), Revolt Gallery (1976-77) and Pekka (1970s).

Since Denmark and Sweden were the only countries in the world in the 1970s where all sorts of porn were fully legal, this meant that a lot of Danish and Swedish mags were written and published in English - the publishers knew very well that they were catering to a vast international readership. Revolt Press in small town Åseda in the province of Småland was important for many gay men all over the world.

 

[gorgik9]

Porn decriminalized, part II.

I think that the period from porn legalisation to the onset of Internet could reasonably be cut up in two halves at the turn of the decade 1980 for a number of different reasons. A first reason is that from 1980 some sorts of porn wasn't legal anymore, since the the modern legislation on child pornography had been passed and implemented in Sweden this year.

Another reason is that many of the men and women who had been young liberals campaigning for the legalisation of pornography in the 1960s had become deeply disappointed by the development from - say - 1965 to 1980. You could argue that behind the disappointment was a quite naïve understanding of what would / should happen if and when porn was decriminalized: porn would suddenly undergo a magic transformation to become much less coarse and more artistic and attractive for women. This didn't happen in the 1970s and thus the disappointment.

One of the disappointed Swedish liberals was Hans Nestius (1936-2005) who a couple of years after having become the chairman of Riksförbundet för Sexuell Upplysning RFSU in 1979 (National Society for Sex Education) published the book I last och lust (1982, In vice and desire). Among the more important arguments in his book we find the idea, that it's possible to present an objective categorical difference between pornography (the bad thing) and erotic images (the good thing). Well, Nestius had actually started singing in the choir of the anti-porn feminists, in particular Gloria Steinem's article Erotica and Pornography from 1978, but this distinction had been made several times already in the 1950s-60s and harks back to - among other things - articles by Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence - SIC!!! - published in the 1920s.

But the distinction made the way Steinem and Nestius did it, what kind of distinction is it really? Aesthetic? Moral? Neither? Both? Or what? As a distinction with pretentions to state an objective categorical difference I find it ridiculous. It's just a pretentious way of shouting: I hate porn but I like erotica! And this love of erotica isn't much more than a way to say: Remember I'm not a prissy puritan!

A third reason for cutting up the period in half at the year 1980 would be the violent media panic concerning the video cassette recorder and the notion of "videovåld" (video violence) starting in early December 1980 in the evening show Studio S on Swedish public service TV.

There are a number of remarcable facts about this TV debate: In December 1980 less than 4% of swedish households had bought and owned a VCR, so the vast majority of Swedes still didn't have much aquaintance with the new machine and the sort of videos you could purchase or hire. (It should be noted that VCR:s were still pretty expensive machines.)

And then there's this akward situation where the well-stablished mass medium public service TV more or less tried to "murder" the new kid on the media block. The TV program was successful in connecting horrible violence with the VCR and almost making the new technology in itself the cause of violence. The program also managed to rhetorically connect pornography to violence by making the recently coined word "våldsporr" (violence porn) very popular. In the Studio S program violent scenes from movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper) and The Boogeyman (1980, Ulli Lommel) were shown, but not a single scene from any porn movie. Still the program presenters managed to treat porn together with violent horror films as typical examples of all the bad an immoral things we would drown in when everyone had his or her own VCR.

But setting the wild media panic aside, video did mean profound changes in the production as well as the consumption of porn. Before video became the dominant technology for porn film production, the porn studios hardly made more than 4-6 movies annually, but after the technological shift the annual production rose to 25-35 - so the total porn production expanded about 5-7 times in just a few years, let's say from 1983 to 1988.

Porn consumption before video usually meant going out to visit various public and semi-public venues. Video meant that you watched porn at home. And this is of course an important change.

 

[gorgik9]

Sweden in the world of Internet porn: from the late 1990s until today.

The Internet becoming the primary source for porn consumption depended on technical developments of various kinds: As long as you were content with downloading and storing texts and pictures, a PC with a harddrive memory of 2-4 GB (a relatively usual size of computer memory still in the second half of the 1990s) would be fine, but as soon as you're talking about movies - porn films and all other sorts of movies - you definitely needed much more PC memory (not just a few GB, but hundreds of GB) and a fast broadband connection, otherwise downloading a film file would take days.

These technical presuppositions didn't to my knowledge really emerge at costs affordable to most people until a few years into the new millennium, so it's significant that the new media panic at the turn of the century 2000 wasn't about Internet porn, but about a couple of cable TV channels broadcasting porn movies late at night.

In many ways the situation on 15 February 2000 when Swedish TV4 showed and discussed an alleged "doentary" about the contemporary porn industry titled Shocking Truth on the evening show Svart eller Vitt (Black or White) was a lot like the Studio S debate in 1980: we have an established mass medium trying to smash another less well established medium, but on 15 February 2000 porn actually was at the center of the discussion.

Anyhow! Concerning Internet porn the situation since about 2007 has been that porn films are mainly mediated via so-called video aggregator sites like P0rnH0b, XV1de0s, XH4mst3r and others, and since about the last 8-9 years the market has become heavily dominated by one large company, M1ndGe3k (former M4nW1n) based in Montreal, Canada. The economical power in Internet porn has moved from production companies to the firms dominating distribution. It's difficult to ask people to pay for porn when everyone has become used to get all the porn they want for free.

* * * * * * * * * *

For 100 years in Sweden porn has been considered and discussed as a danger or at least a sociocultural problem - this hasn't really changed. What has changed fundamentally is the dominant reasons why porn would be considered a danger / problem.

In the early 20th century if well-educated middle class and upper class men enjoyed porn on their own, this wasn't a serious problem. The real problem was when women, children and working class men got in touch with porn - that's what all the fuss was about.

The problem discussed today is that young boys consumes too much porn - that's why all bad things happen! And they become porn addicts - God allmighty!

Let me end this thread with an attempt to answer the question: Is there any gay porn produced in Sweden today?

I guess my first answer must be typically academic: Well it depends on what you mean. Sure there are Swedish guys showing and wanking their cocks on various webcam sites and there are of course Swedish guys uploading their own amateur videos to sites like P0rnH0b, but if we think about gay porn as videos and magazines produced by Swedish studios and firms, then I think that the simple answer must be: No there isn't.

The obvious commercial orientation of the Swedish gay press since the late 1990s meant, that pornographic content became more and more excluded from gay magazines and newspapers.

So pornography might be legal in Sweden since 1971, but it's still prblematic - one way or another.

 

[gorgik9]

Well there are comparisons with the UK in that in 1912 the "British Board Of Film Censors" came into being and it acted pretty much the same as the Swedish one. Likewise the "dirty postcards" and what were refered to as "top-shelf" magazines (because thats where you found them in newsagents, and in some shops they chose to put them inside a brown paper bag too). Interestingly I seem to recall that the more hardcore stuff was generally referred to as Scan-Mags or Swedish mags, with these being available either on mail-order on in licensed sex-stores but I cannot say if this was due to any nationalistic sentiment.

Thanks a lot for this informative comment Jimmy!

According to film scholar Gregory D. Black's book "Hollywood Censored" (1994) municipal and state film censorship boards were instituted in the US from 1907 with the Chicago censorship board as the first. In 1915 the film industry suffered a very heavy judicial blow: the US Supreme Court's verdict in Mutual v. Ohio meant that movies weren't included in the First Amendment protection of the freedom of speech. This wouldn't change until the early 1950s.

So the desire to censor movies was definitely a global trend in the early 20th century. I think it's fair to talk about a violent international media panic concerning movies during these years.

 

[slimjim]

Let me end this thread with an attempt to answer the question: Is there any gay porn produced in Sweden today? .....................

So pornography might be legal in Sweden since 1971, but it's still prblematic - one way or another.

Maybe they thought "Forget Scandi-Porn, there's no money in it anymore as people can get it for free online, Scandi-Noir is where the real money is! Let's make more like The Bridge; Stockholm Requiem; The Killing; Monster & The Valhalla Murders - all we need is a frozen lake; a snowy forest; drone footage of driving at night and a couple of corpses! Simples"