The Swedish Porn Scene

Mariah Larsson

Description

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.

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

Sujets

• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinema
• Europe
• Film
• ART
• Cultural Studies
• Pornography
• History of film
• Video
• HISTORY

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783206841
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2017 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2017 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Emily Dann
Copy-editor: Michael Eckhardt
Production manager: Katie Evans
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-682-7
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-683-4
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-684-1
Printed and bound by 4Edge Ltd, UK
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
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
Acknowledgements

This project was conceived at Lund University, carried out at Malmö University and continued at Stockholm University. The results have been discussed at a number of seminars and workshops in various contexts, and the final push in finishing a draft manuscript was made at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Accordingly, there are many scholars and colleagues who have been involved along the way and to whom I am indebted. First and foremost, I would like to thank Professor Sven-Axel Månsson who generously invited me to become a postdoctoral researcher in the research group Gender, Sexuality and Social Work at Malmö University. Thanks to this invitation, I was eligible for and later granted funds from the Swedish Research Council. My years working with this group have been among the best of my professional career. I would like to thank Sara Johnsdotter, Aje Carlbom, Lars Plantin, Pernilla Ouis, Lotta Holmström, Eva Elmerstig, Lotta Löfgren-Mårtenson, Pernilla Nigård, Gunnel Brander and Niklas Eriksson, and last but not least Sven-Axel Månsson, for not only providing valuable feedback, access to empirical data and advice on my work, but for simply being great colleagues.
During the project’s conception at Lund University, my closest colleagues met my idea of working on the history of Swedish pornographic films with much enthusiasm and little prejudice. Lars-Gustaf Andersson, Ann-Kristin Wallengren, Erik Hedling, Olof Hedling, Mats Jönsson and Anders Marklund encouraged me in my scholarly pursuits. At Stockholm University, I had the benefit of working at the largest Cinema Studies program in Northern Europe, thus encountering several excellent international researchers. In particular Maaret Koskinen, Malin Wahlberg and Laura Horak (now at Carleton University) were very helpful, as were the rewarding scholarly exchanges with Ingrid Ryberg. Other scholars with whom I have worked, and who share my research interests, are Klara Arnberg and Elisabet Björklund, whose interactions have always proved fruitful.
I spent the spring semester of 2014 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, as a visiting scholar at the Media and Cinema Studies department and scholar-in-residence at the EU Center. I would like to thank Anna Stenport, who not only made this stay possible but also helped in numerous other ways and gave me vital feedback on the Introduction. In addition, Angharad Valdivia, James Hay, Sasha Mobley, Paula Treichler, Larry Smith and several others were kind enough to offer feedback on my work, and were generally very welcoming (for instance, recruiting me for the soccer team Hot Mamas). They provided such an invigorating environment that it became possible for me to make that final leap and finish the first full draft. Moreover, Tommy Gustafsson (Linneaus University) and I exchanged reader comments on our respective work, and his suggestions for my manuscript were extremely valuable.
I would also like to thank those interviewees who are anonymous but whose stories were vital for this project. If you read this, you will know who you are and that your memories were invaluable. Archivists and librarians have also been instrumental, with special mention to Shawn Wilson and Liana Zhou at the Kinsey Institute, and Magdalena Salomonsson at the Swedish National Archive. Erick Janssen helped me apply for access to the Kinsey Institute’s archive, and Ulf Dalquist at the Swedish Media Council answered all my questions regarding the censorship processes of the National Board of Film Censors
Funding for the project came initially from the Swedish Research Council, and I have also been supported by Stockholm University.
Finally, and as always, my most sincere love and gratitude go to my family: Olle, Albert, Martha, Pinge and Kinsey the boxer dog.
Introduction
T he history of pornography in the 1960s and 1970s may seem a simple narrative of increasingly liberal censorship and obscenity laws; a developing industry producing ever more (both in terms of numbers and explicitness) films, advancing both technically and in relation to its content, its distribution and exhibition; and a pornography that enters the public sphere only to eventually withdraw from it. However, this study tries to draw attention to the complexities in this history to discuss issues of genres and formats; of exhibition contexts and gendered sexual space; of censorship, content and ideology; and of highly permeable national boundaries.
During this time period, two Scandinavian countries became emblematic of being liberal in relation to both sexual morals and moving images capturing these liberal sexual ideas. 1 Denmark and Sweden had already begun to gain this reputation in the 1950s, with the much publicized sex reassignment surgery of American Christine Jorgensen performed in Denmark in 1951, and with mandatory sex education in Swedish schools starting in 1955. In 1969, Denmark legalized pornography and in 1971, Sweden followed suit. In the 1970s, both countries can be said to participate in what is sometimes referred to as ‘the golden age of porn’, producing narrative, feature-length porn films (both softcore and hardcore) as well as 8mm hardcore porn.
The focus for this book is Sweden. However, the history of Swedish sex films, 8mm pornography and their respective exhibition contexts is inextricably entangled with the development in Denmark and, accordingly, cannot be written without keeping at least an intermittent eye on the development in the neighbouring country. The perception of these two Scandinavian countries had to do with several things. Of course, the news of sex reassignment surgery and sex education in schools were two reasons. Other reasons had to do with the dissemination of ideals of Scandinavian beauty in Playboy , where tall, blonde women who were both elegant and sexual embodied a Nordic feminine ideal, 2 with exported films like Hon dansade en sommar/One Summer of Happiness (Arne Mattsson, 1951), Sommaren med Monika/Summer with Monika (Ingmar Bergman, 1953) and Jag är nyfiken – gul/I am Curious (Yellow) (Vilgot Sjöman, 1968), but also with American films like Sexual Freedom in Denmark (John Lamb, 1970) or the Italian-American Svezia, Inferno e Paradiso/Sweden, Heaven and Hell (Luigi Scattini, 1968). 3
Still other reasons had to do with the fact that Sweden and Denmark actually had a scene of sexually explicit material and entertainment. Sex stores had been established already in the 1960s, and more or less clandestine sex clubs offered entertainment in the form of striptease, live shows (couples performing intercourse onstage) and screenings of pornographic films. Swedish politicians complained that foreigners came to Stockholm for sex tourism, and in Denmark, the first porn trade fair, Sex 69, was held in October 1969. 4 One example of the notoriety of the sex clubs in Scandinavia is the somewhat famous photograph of classic rock group Led Zeppelin standing around a podium on which a live-sex couple is performing. It is taken at Chat Noir in Stockholm in 1973. In the picture, the band members seem a bit uncomfortable or even bored with the situation. Notwithstanding the liberal 1970s and, in this case, the ostensibly abundant sex lives of rock stars, the notion of making public something that is regarded as private might still be experienced as awkward, embarrassing and shameful; a kind of paradox inherent in this time period’s relation to sexuality, pornography and sexual consumption in the public sphere.
Perhaps somewhat surprisingly considering the reputation generated during this time period in Scandinavia, this particular section of the history of pornography has not been thoroughly researched. One of the objectives of this study is to begin to remedy that. This will be done through two micro-historical case studies: one on the exhibition of pornographic films in the city of Malmö, in southern Sweden, between 1971 and 1976; and the other on the hardcore 8mm films that were produced, distributed and exhibited during this time. These two case studies are framed by more comprehensive chapters that detail both the stratification of sexually explicit moving image material (in accordance with format and degrees of explicitness), and the historical situation for the relationship between the sexually explicit film and the Scandinavian welfare states, as well as a discussion of pornographic and sexually explicit film as a regional, national and transnational cinema. By moving from the macro to the micro and then back to macro level, the purpose is to map out the Swedish