The Swedish Porn Scene

Exhibition Contexts, 8mm Pornography and the Sex Film

Mariah Larsson

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781783206827
• eBook ISBN: 9781783206841
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book presents a close look at the golden age of Swedish pornography in the 1970s, with a specific focus on pornographic films screened in Malmö between 1971 and 1976. How, Mariah Larsson asks, was that one small city's embrace of the era's sexual liberation both representative and unique in relation to the rest of Sweden?

Combining historical case studies with comprehensive analyses of advertisements, critical responses and censorship records, Larsson deconstructs the complexities and paradoxes of the Swedish porn scene. Looking as closely at the exhibition spaces where porn was seen as at the productions themselves and their audiences, Larsson reveals the conditions and social changes that allowed pornography in Sweden to flourish in the period.

Chapter 1

Sexually explicit films and the welfare state(s)

The international reputation of Scandinavian countries has been accounted for and understood in terms of an ambivalent sense of fascination with and anxiety surrounding sexuality and the welfare state – not to mention as mysterious countries in Northern Europe with midnight sun, Vikings and smorgasbord.¹ Sexuality became a symbol for how the welfare state – situated geographically, as well as ideologically, ambiguously between the blocs of the Cold War – removed all traces of individuality and privacy from citizens by appropriating and colonizing that which is most intimate and personal.² Conversely, from a progressive perspective, Scandinavian sexuality could be regarded as an ideal of modernity.³

Nevertheless, the national, internal logic of the development of a particularly liberal relationship to sexuality is harder to pinpoint. This is because the image of Sweden and Denmark as more or less void of sexual repression is paradoxically both incorrect (obviously, there was and still is repression in both of these countries) and the result of reflections on developments that took place mainly after World War II. In addition, and as I will try to demonstrate throughout this book, the notion of sexual liberation carries with it several inherent contradictions or tensions. Michel Foucault has criticized what he terms the ‘repression hypothesis’ – i.e. that sexuality is a natural force that is repressed in society and sexual liberation thus emancipates that natural force.⁴ Sexuality, repression and power are all produced in and by an intricate network of discourse; accordingly, ‘liberation’ is just as constructed by a social discourse as repression is. Although this is to some extent a problematic explanatory framework that does not really take sides with reproductive rights, gay rights or laws against marital rape and abuse, for instance, it has the advantage of being able to contain the various paradoxes that keep appearing as one continues to study the history of sexuality, obscenity and pornography.

One example is how homosexuality has been constructed institutionally. Although homosexuality was decriminalized in Sweden in 1944, it was classified as a mental illness until 1979, and the age of consent for homosexual acts remained eighteen until the 1980s, whereas for heterosexual acts it was fifteen. In 1987, as a response to the fear of the spread of HIV, the so-called ‘sauna law’ [bastulagen] was passed, criminalizing sauna clubs for men who had sex with men. This law remained until 2004.

As in the case of pornography, Denmark preceded Sweden by decriminalizing homosexuality in 1933, and making the age of consent for heterosexual and homosexual acts the same in 1977. Although Scandinavian legalization occurs earlier than in many other western countries (for example, Great Britain and East and West Germany did not legalize homosexuality until the late 1960s), homosexuality is quite invisible within Swedish sex films, which are blatantly heterosexual. Mera ur kärlekens språk/More About the Language of Love (Torgny Wickman, 1970), the sequel to the successful sex education film Kärlekens språk/Language of Love (Torgny Wickman, 1969), presented homo- and bisexuality as well as transvestism. However, as the first film exclusively represented heterosexual relations and the second film concluded with heterosexual intercourse, thereby ‘reestablishing the idea that heterosexuality is the signifier of natural sexuality’, the films still quite clearly follow a heteronormative logic.⁵ In 1977, a 21-minute documentary called Bögjävlar/Damned Queers (Gunnar Almér et al.) was produced, describing life in a gay collective in Stockholm. A few lesbian films were also made, but gays and lesbians were sorely underrepresented in feature-length films, except in girl-on-girl scenes in heterosexual material.⁶ Of the 8mm films, some titles among the censorship records indicate that they depict male-to-male sex, but these are quite rare compared to the mass of heterosexual films. While Sweden was perceived of as a sexual paradise (or nightmare), this perception was also heterosexual, and could even be described as an international male gaze at a femininely gendered nation/object, where female models and actresses embodied the projection of the national.

The welfare state’s relationship to sexuality, sexual liberation and sexually explicit film is the subject of this chapter. In Porno? Chic!, Brian McNair argues that the same development that legalized pornography led to greater progress with women’s and gays’ civil rights.⁷ Consequently, he argues, to be open to sexual imagery goes hand in hand with being open to gender equality and sexual citizenship. Trying this argument against the Swedish case, it is correct that the same discussions that led to legal and free abortion in Sweden in 1975, and to changing views on homosexuality, also led to the legalization of pornography. It is also interesting to note that the removal of the obscenity clause predated the other changes. However, when porn was decriminalized, many pro-porn intellectuals in Sweden were disappointed because they had thought that by being openly and legally available to everyone, pornography would somehow improve.⁸ The disillusionment with which they witnessed the expansion of clubs, stores, prostitution and pornography would colour much of the debate on pornography in the late 1970s and 1980s, and may have also contributed to the staunch anti-porn movement in Sweden during the 1980s and 1990s. When McNair contends – and, in my opinion, he is somewhat right – that the proliferation of pornographies today comes out of the legalization of porn and more liberal attitudes towards it, he seems to be confirming the utopian vision that the pro-porn intellectuals in Sweden had in the 1960s; it is just that it took much longer than they expected. Pornography became the catalyst for the women’s movement, which in turn, through its criticism of porn’s sexism, objectification and exploitation, eventually spawned a radical activist movement that attempted to create a feminist pornography. This process could be described as a kind of dialectics of pornography. As McNair observes, a climate that allows pornography also allows discussion about sexual issues in general. This discussion is not unusually provoked by pornography. As with the sex wars that took place in the United States in the 1980s, they were sparked by pornography but came to deal with many other things, such as freedom of expression, women’s, gays’ and lesbians’ rights, and various variations of sexuality such as fetishism and BDSM.⁹

In the Swedish context, the welfare state’s relationship to pornography initially developed through a rational yet utopian perspective by which sexual liberation is a good idea (at least theoretically) as long as it is accompanied by the dispersal of knowledge and common sense. In the early 1970s, legalization in itself led to disenchantment with how prostitution, exploitation and human misery seemed to follow in its wake. The women’s movement reacted strongly to the presence of sexual objectification in public space, and took on a struggle against pornography as the ‘most extreme deformed variety of oppression’ that extended over several decades.¹⁰

Sexual utopianism, film as art and the potentials of pornography

There is an element of utopianism in the Swedish sexuality debates of the 1960s. In the 1930s, when RFSU – the Swedish Association of Sexuality Education – was formed, the issues that concerned educators and activists were information and availability of birth control, limiting the spread of venereal disease and the right to sex education.¹¹ Although informing about birth control and distributing condoms or diaphragms remained illegal, the early sex debates focused to a large extent on incorporating education and access to contraceptives into the welfare state’s project for improving the lives of the poor and the working classes. The discussion led to changes in legislation. For example, in 1938, it became legal to inform about birth control and in 1946 pharmacies became obliged by law to carry contraceptives. In 1955, sex education in schools became mandatory.

However, in the early 1960s, Katarina Ahlmark-Michanek, in the book Jungfrutro och dubbelmoral/‘Virgin Belief and Double Standards’, attacked this education because, as she claimed, it disseminated a double standard regarding gendered sexual behaviour.¹² Ahlmark-Michanek was only one of several participants in the sex debates of the 1960s. As the topic of her book illustrates, these debates concerned different issues than those of the 1930s. Other books discussed the rights of sexual minorities, including Henning Pallesen’s De avvikande/‘The Deviants’, and Lars Ullenstam’s De erotiska minoriteterna/The Erotic Minorities: A Swedish View.¹³ Journalists, young politicians, students of medicine, sociologists and other intellectuals participated in these discussions, as well as discussions on the right to abortion and the censorship of sexually explicit material.

As historian of ideas Lena Lennerhed has observed, men dominated the debate about sexuality in Sweden in the 1960s. Ahlmark-Michanek was one exception. Another important exception was Nina Estin, who made an attempt at promoting a (softcore) porn magazine for women, Expedition 66. Expedition 66 can be regarded as an experiment that combined the sex debate with another public discussion that loomed large around the same time: sex roles. The liberal and emancipatory perspective of the sex roles debate would only be superseded a few years later by second-wave feminism,¹⁴ which grounded its analysis of patriarchy in socialist thought and Marxist ideas. Estin’s experiment questioned the notion that only men liked to watch, that only men were allowed to take sexual initiatives, and that men could not be objects of desire for women. The magazine combined photographs with articles discussing gender political issues, but struggled both with finding a readership and with finding male models, so was discontinued after only four issues.

Nevertheless, the sex debate was largely held by men. What can be added to this characterization of the participants in the debate is that not only were they men, they were decidedly educated, middle class and (at least openly) heterosexual – even those writing about sexual minorities. Again, there are some exceptions, such as Lars Görling, the author of 491, the 1962 novel that was adapted into the film 491 (Vilgot Sjöman, 1964). Görling had a criminal record and raged against the censorship of the film because it was, as he called it, a ‘prohibition of reality’.¹⁵ Nevertheless, Görling can be said to be at the margins of the sexuality debates, because although the film 491 became important in the liberalization of film censorship of sexually explicit material, his direct contribution to the debate focused more on the censoring of a raw and brutal reality than on sexuality per se....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Sexually explicit films and the welfare state(s)
• Chapter 2: Mapping the genre: The boundaries of pornography
• Chapter 3: Constructions of sexual space: The case of Malmö
• Chapter 4: Exhibition venues in Malmö
• Chapter 5: Size does matter: The substandard pornographic films of the 1970s
• Chapter 6: A regional, national and transnational cinema?
• Conclusion: The porn scene in Sweden, 1971–1976
• References
• Index
• Back Cover