A Look Back At 1969’s Copenhagen Pornographic Fair

Throwback Thursday. Flashback Friday. What The Hell Was Happening Last Wednesday. Nostalgia is in. It's like the late 90s SNL sketch with Goat Boy hosting "Hey! Remember The 80s" which was literally a collection of "hey, remember this" nostalgia with no in-depth discussion or connective tissue. 

The Guardian (link below) touts themselves as "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize," yet even they're not immune to nostalgia as proven by their latest article, which is a straight excerpt from a piece The Observer ran 45 years ago. The piece covered the very first Scandinavian Pornographic Fair held in Copenhagen in 1969, and even I have to admit that it's an interesting read.

Charter flights from as far away as Tunisia and Egypt have been arriving here to catch the closing days of the first pornographic fair – Sex 69, as it’s called. Its success has been phenomenal and the organisers are obviously making themselves a fortune.

What would normally be called obscene is now allowed and even public cinemas will shortly be putting on blue filmsprovided they do not have a “story line”, presumably because this would humanise them. In rationalist Denmark, no one minds that porno films are making money. But in Britain it would no doubt be raised as an objection to any greater freedom for films or the printed word.

Otherwise, the bad effects of the experiment so far are regarded by officials as negligible. Minor sex crime has dropped by half and serious crime has not increased. There have naturally been stories about possible effects on young people. But teachers and most parents insist that after pornography has been openly on sale in the shops for a few months one tends to forget about the existence of it.

You can read the whole thing over at The Guardian