Pornography and the Unmelancholy Danes

"Describing himself as a concerned grandparent," it said right there on page five of my Paris Herald Tribune, "Senator Barry Goldwater has called upon Congress to crack down on 'smut peddlers' using the mails to pander to children. While conceding that there are differences of opinion over what is obscene, the 1964 Republican Presidential candidate said: 'As a father and a grandfather, I know, by golly, what is obscene and what isn't.' "

Goldwater-bites-smut strikes the news-hungry traveler with less than moon-shot impact, but the Trib knows what it's doing. Its business is to reassure homesick Americans that Buz Sawyer, James Reston and Ron Ziegler are still on the job. There is nothing so reassuring, except an exact knowledge of which American Express offices have public rest rooms and which do not, as to sit in a cafè in Obergurgl or Puerto de Santa Maria and read that smut is still being expunged back home and that Barry Goldwater's "by golly" has not lost its cunning.

Another dispatch from the Trib's smut correspondent a couple of weeks later was even more fascinating, although less soothingly traditional. Its headline was one of those double-action whiz-bangs whose whiz part, in small italic type, was the teaser "As Blasé Danes Yawn." Right under that, in large, upstanding type, was the bang: "Foreigners Jam Copenhagen for first pornography fair."Bill, please! This was enough to pry the traveler from his cafè chair and propel him onto the next flight for Denmark.

An American heading for Copenhagen these days does so in a state of considerable bemusement. Three years ago, touring third-grade teachers whisper to one another on their charter flights, the Danes removed all restrictions on written pornography, except that it remained illegal to sell the stuff to children; and in July of last year, they removed all restrictions against dirty pictures, except that it was illegal to sell them to children or to display them in shop windows. The U.S. Congress was fascinated by these developments--I follow the vagaries of smut control the way other hobbyists trace refinements in Costa Rican postage stamps--and one of its committees ordered a detailed report. (Not, as it happens, the committee before which Barry Goldwater testified. That one is a House subcommittee dealing with the Post Office; the mailmen, as all are aware, have their network of muleback messengers so well organized that a letter sent from Manhattan will reach the Bronx in less than three days, and this efficiency gives them a lot of time to spend telling citizens what sort of pictures they may look at. There are other smut expungers in Congress who also work hard, however, and the bunch that wants to know about Copenhagen is called the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography.)

Strange news, by golly. The Danes are much admired by Americans, presumably including Congressmen. They are thought to be steady, intelligent, peace-loving but tough, good fishermen, wood finishers and cheese makers and workmanlike drinkers. An unseemly mania for sex is not part of the national image. In Sweden, it is well known, freckled blonde girls drag terrified male travelers into the wheat fields; but Sweden is another matter. The Danes are very sound. So what, the concerned citizen asks himself, can these good people be thinking of? The plane touches down and the gloriously pretty SAS stewardess smiles a lover's goodbye. The voyager averts his eyes.

As it happened, I had already spent some time in Copenhagen in recent months. I had discovered, for instance, that it's possible to buy dirty ballpoint pens there. This report had been disseminated by an American girls'-college professor who had spent a sabbatical in Denmark in an agitated condition, and it turned out to be perfectly true. You look through a hole in the side of one of these pens, click the button at the top and dirty pictures appear. Small and grainy, but definitely dirty.

Other reports are also true. At ordinary newsstands on perfectly normal street corners, you can buy pictures of laughing girls with semen all over their faces. In the streets near the central railroad station, in small, shabby shops called Intime Sex Kiosk or Weekend Sex, purchasable articles include dirty playing cards; battery-operated genitalia ticklers; plastic phalli, some capable of ejaculation; a few dirty paperbacks, most of them in Danish but one or two in English or German; burnable candles in the shape of penises; dirty 35mm slides; dirty 8mm movie spools; and a very large selection of dirty-picture magazines in four colors and several sexes (Iron Boys, Color Climax, Animal Orgy). The magazines are of 32 pages each and cost 10 to 20 kroner--$1.50 to $3.

The sex portrayed is fairly suburban. There are a few oddities available--a picture spread of a chunky woman's largely unrequited passion for a puzzled-looking German shepherd dog, a booklet showing the caperings of several girls gotten up as nuns, here and there a bit of very faky sadomasochism, and one magazine called 8-1/2, because the heroine is eight and a half months pregnant. There is a good deal of male homosexuality, not faked, and Lesbianism, rather unconvincing. Interestingly, the heterosexual porno may have a sequence or two showing Lesbianism but never any male homosexuality.

Games played run heavily to fellatio and, less often, cunnilingus. As many as five may (text continued on page 154)The Unmelancholy Danes(continued from page 142) compete. The sex act least often photographed is heterosexual coupling in the missionary position, perhaps because the genitals don't come into view. Because much of the photography is done from a perspective of six inches or so, it's often difficult to relate the areas of pinkish-gray and brown to each other or even to sex. The focus is always sharp--impressionistic blurring and low-register prints don't appeal to porno fans--but the effect, nevertheless, is sometimes totally abstract.

Seldom is there any attempt to arrange the pictures into a story. One exception, a booklet put out by the Weekend Sex people, shows a photo sequence of a Lesbian seduction, with speech balloons in Danish, breaking off with a sly "to be continued" just as the ingénue has swallowed her drugged coffee. The classified-ad section carries an offer to send the reader, for 30 kroner, "the most perverted book you ever read." Models are young and fairly good-looking, but rarely beautiful. Many are students at the University of Copenhagen. The pay is about $50 a session, but only the best models are used more than once. Negroes are in considerable demand. Black U.S. Servicemen vacationing in Copenhagen have found their way into porno films, but black female models are hard to find. The dirty-picture profession apparently attracts no Asians.

An American wonders, naturally--it's very nearly his first thought on the matter--how the Danes who legalized porno managed to muzzle their mothers' groups, veterans' bunds, police chiefs, P.T.A.s, ministers, miscellaneous wowsers and politicians hard up for an issue. "Puritans, that is what you mean?" asks a young Dane, a lawyer with the Department of Justice. He's puzzled. Certainly Denmark has puritans, but he doesn't understand the question. What could puritans do, he asked, to prevent the legalization of porno?

"Well, weren't they against legalization?"

Yes, of course, he says, shrugging, but there are very few of them. His manner is that of a man saying there are very few snake worshipers. The state church in Denmark, which is Protestant, has no large social influence, he continues, but most of its leaders favored legalization or said nothing against it. Possibly, he thinks, legalization would have been turned down if it had been put to a nationwide popular vote, as important questions sometimes are in Denmark. Pornography just didn't seem important enough, however, and after the conservative-dominated parliament voted to lift restrictions against it, there was no outcry to speak of.

This Dane, like others who haven't visited the U.S., is astonished to hear that bluenose reaction is so strong in the States that no elected official could risk voting for legalization of porno. He comes very close to disbelief when I say that an American I know (Ralph Ginzburg) faces a five-year Federal prison term for, in effect, publishing a magazine (Eros) that bore no resemblance to hard-core pornography. Restrictive laws in Denmark, when they existed, called for only moderate fines. "Jail?" says my acquaintance. "No, of course not; no one ever went to jail." The tone is one of patience and, perhaps, mockery.

A young Copenhagen psychiatrist, Dr. Anders Groth, suggests that puritanism, "an alienation from humanity, an aberration," in his words, never became an important element in Danish society partly because the Christian church, with its characteristic abhorrence of sex as pleasure, came very late to Denmark and never achieved rigid political or social control. Another reason, he thinks, may be that since Denmark's population has always been small and homogeneous, it hasn't had the competing racial or religious groups that elsewhere have maintained their separateness by insisting on adherence to elaborate codes of behavior. A Dane who behaves differently from the rest is not a potential defector; he is merely an eccentric Dane.

Whatever the case, a bedrock belief seems to have developed that everyone has the right to behave as he likes, sexually and otherwise, provided he doesn't hurt anyone else. This notion, which has never had a wide following in the U.S., was expressed in one way or another by every Dane I questioned about pornography, including a fair number to whom the stuff is loathsome. It is difficult, at first, to absorb the fact that Danes really think this way, but a visitor at last decides that they do.

Yet these rather staid respecters of individual whim are not entirely easy about their new renown as pornographers to the world. "I think the name of Denmark is a little compromised," said Jens Jersild, a police inspector in charge of the Copenhagen vice squad. "There are more tourists this year and they come for the picture books." (Jersild is a slight, elderly man with the face of a judge and he is regarded by the city's homosexuals, for instance, as a man of aggressevely conventional views.) He is not enthusiastic about the lifting of censorship, but even he agrees that the move was necessary. "Oh, yes," he says, somewhat glumly. "I'm sure that complete freedom is best."

Other Danes say, often convincingly, that they are untroubled by porno and uninterested in it. No, they don't worry about its effect on children; the young ones are bored and the teenagers have been taught that sex is natural, not to be feared. "Of course, the children will be exposed to it," said one economics professor, smiling patiently. "My nine-year-old son cut some porno pictures out of a magazine and he and the four-year-old and the six-year-old spent a couple of hours looking at them. The nine-year-old asked why the people in the pictures were doing that and I said because it made them happy. The boy said he thought it was silly and soon they all forgot about porno and so it was finished. No harm to them, I think."

The economics professor then went on, however, to repeat two widely and wistfully believed untruths. A reporter, joshed by amused Danish friends about his fanatic American interest in pornography, hears these myths several times a day. They are that after a first surge of curiosity sales (the professor said yes, of course, he had bought porno, and yes, it aroused him, but each book is the same as the last and the interest fades), it has become very difficult to sell the stuff. The second is that porno is sold only, or mostly, to tourists. "Blasé Danes Yawn," as the Trib's headline writer put it.

These notions seemed almost plausible before the celebrated Copenhagen pornography fair. A good believer could, by gritting his teeth, believe that porno might wither away, like the ideal Marxian state. During the summer high season, Tivoli was full of happy Danes, Krogs seafood restaurant on the N?rre-gade was full of happy Germans and Americans, the pedestrians-only street was abob with sullen, braless chicks in Cornell sweat shirts and reefed with stoned Danish shaggies. The tourist season was in full muddle. Yet the crotch boutiques behind the railroad station were not crowded. They were doing a business but not enough to justify replacing the pre-War linoleum on their floors.

There would be four or five customers, or two, or none, in a shop. Most were men and about half spoke languages--usually German or English--other than Danish. The tourists, first-time buyers who had never seen pictures of people munching on each other's genitalia before, would leaf nervously through half a dozen booklets, often too embarrassed to notice that the figures on the pages were tangled in the wrong kind of sex (a curious discovery is that flesh is flesh and all sex looks pretty much alike). In each shop, a clerk watched (male or female, null-sex), placid as a lavatory attendant.

The same seedy suspension between prosperity and unpaid rent sours the air in the shabby hutches where dirty movies can be viewed. The new Danish freedom stops short of completely free cinema and customers are supposed to buy "membership" cards at least 24 hours before they see stag movies. In practice, no one pays any attention to this, but the law has so far prevented the conversion of large commercial theaters to pornography. At an armpit called Sexyland, a party of five nonmembers was let in for 100 kroner (about $15, down $7 from the asking price). There was a small lobby, with a display case offering the usual vibrators, fake penises and sponge-rubber breasts. Two curtained doorways led to two small viewing rooms, one homo and one hetero. In the hetero parlor, a scratchy color film was being projected through a hole in the cement-block wall that looked as if it had been drilled with a sledge hammer. A tape was playing Billy Eckstine's The Nearness of You. Three men, seated separately, were watching. On the screen, a squat youth whose eyebrows met in the middle was running through the usual repertoire with a doughy, indefinite girl. Particularities obtruded: He wore an identification bracelet; she wore a blue-plastic barrette. For some reason, these seemed odd. The viewers felt the usual effect of bad pornography--arousal short-circuited by falsity, producing a lingering, sickish edginess.

"It looks like a training film for veterinarians," one of us said. The remark was funny and apt, but our laughter was nervous. As the reel's ten minutes ended (there were other films to come; we had signed up for an hour's worth), the squat man pulled a series of magician's silks out of the blobby girl's vagina. The last silk was the French tricolor. Later, as we left, two American sailors on screen in the homosexual viewing room were blowing each other. Eckstine's taped voice sang, "Down and down I go."

The shabbiness of these enterprises suggests that porno is, indeed, dying in Copenhagen. But the assumption is too hastily made. Certainly Denmark lacks anything like the gaudy chain of sex-paraphernalia supermarkets that have sprung up in West Germany. The temptation is to take half a truth for the whole and conclude that sex supermarkets prosper in Germany because Germans have less sexual freedom than Danes and, hence, are more frenzied in their interest in sexual matters. It may be equally true, however, and just as relevant to say that Denmark's porno trade lacks the appearance of prosperity because no Danish entrepreneur has appeared with the merchandising talent of Beate Uhse, the German Frau who started the German sex shops. In the past few years, any amateur with a camera and a jar of petroleum jelly could make money in Denmark peddling porno; pornogogs with business sense are only now beginning to emerge. For the rest, the habits of old linoleum and hole-in-the-wall illegality are hard to break.

An outsider soon discovers, however, that no explanation of Danish porno can stay narrowly focused on the dirty-picture trade. When the Danes in 1966 announced their withdrawal from the international convention governing pornography, they were declaring far more than an unwillingness to argue any more about how much redeeming social value could dance on the head of a pin. The Danish people had already moved on, in a remarkably concerted way, from a camping grounds tenanted for hundreds of years by almost the whole of Western society. Danish sexual views and habits may not have been changing more rapidly than those of Kansas--other tribes were moving on, too--but the changes in Denmark occurred with a lack of public hand wringing that astonished even other Scandinavians.

"Wait till contractions and bleeding start. Then your helper should call the doctor. If there is too much bleeding, don't wait. Have yourself driven to the hospital and tell the doctor exactly what has happened." These instructions are part of an accurate, detailed, text-and-photo instruction sheet on how to perform your own abortion. It was compiled by a group called The Individual and Society that had been lobbying for freedom of abortion, and last year the instructions were reprinted in the center spread of a respected left-of-center journal, Political Review. There was no legal trouble as a result of the publication. It was generally understood that the instruction sheet was a lobbying tactic intended to move the Danish parliament in the direction of unrestricted abortions. In fact, abortion laws were much liberalized this past spring, but complete freedom probably won't be granted for a year or so. A medical man explained that one reason for the delay was the necessity of devising a mandatory counseling provision for the law, to make sure that embarrassed parents, for instance, were not forcing unwilling daughters to have "freewill" abortions.

It is considered normal that teenagers get into bed with each other. Birth-control pills are available to all girls aged 15 or over, with no parental permission necessary. The age of consent is 15. To Danes, this age seems a natural compromise between biological realities and their strong distaste for child abuse. One mother, in her mid-30s, told me that her 14-year-old daughter mentioned one day that she had had intercourse for the first time the night before. Mother and daughter discussed this development with cheerful interest, the mother reported, then went on to talk of other things. A few days later, the girl brought the subject up again. She had been thinking, she said: Wasn't it possible that her boyfriend could get into serious trouble because she was only 14? Yes, that was true, her mother told her. Well, the girl said solemnly, she would try to wait till she was 15: "Otherwise, it's not fair."

"She's growing up," said the mother, pleased. She meant the decision, not the loss of virginity. As this discussion was going on, the girl and her 12-year-old sister wandered into the room. The younger girl had seen an exhibitionist expose himself a few weeks before and the mother asked her to tell about it.

"It was just funny," said the girl. "I mean, it looked so silly. Of course, it was sad, too, for the man." Her manner was quiet but not at all embarrassed. She had learned at school that exhibitionists were almost always shy, harmless men, she said.

Her mother showed me the widely used sex manual both girls had studied in school. It began with the statement, "This book has a moral; namely, that it should be every human being's right to satisfy his sexual needs, regardless of age or sex. Provided he doesn't violate the rights of other people, he can choose any way of expressing his need.... I have chosen to use our language's most understandable words, such as 'prick,' 'cunt' and 'luck.' I have tried to avoid modesty."

The book used photos instead of the often unfathomable diagrams (a vagina or the cross section of an avocado?) familiar to U.S. school children. The first photo showed a young man and woman, both smiling, happy and naked, standing side by side in a field. A later photo showed the couple fucking (to use a word thought proper for Danish 12-year-olds). The caption suggested that since "three quarters of all young men" and "nine tenths of all young women" will be in this situation before they are 20, it is sensible to learn what to expect.

As it happened, the photographer who had illustrated the children's sex manual was involved in a project that was the nine-day wonder of Denmark while I was there. This was a paperback book called Den Der, a text-and-photo record of a group-sex experiment that he and 14 other young Danes had conducted earlier in the year. The publisher, Hans Reitzel--who is no pornographer--explained that the title means "that one there" and is an ironic reference to the bashfulness of customers choosing books on sexual subjects; they say, "I'll take that one there," without mentioning the title. Danes had been pointing to Den Der in gratifying numbers; in the four days since the book had been issued, 10,000 copies had been sold and citizens were wandering from shop to shop trying to find one. Danes were, apparently, not so blasé as some of them imagined. (continued on page 196)The Unmelancholy Danes(continued from page 156) Gregers Nielsen, the young photographer, said his friends had become interested in the group sensitivity experiments being conducted in the United States. "But I'm not interested in hard porno," he said. "I don't read it; it doesn't show how sex really is. We had read Bernard Giinther's Sense Relaxation and we thought sight was too much the dominating sense. So we decided to wear opaque masks: we hoped to jump over barriers." The floor of a room was covered with mattresses. There were five girls and seven men in the first session. One girl arrived without her husband. No, Nielsen said, the husband didn't object; he joined the second session. The experiment seemed to cause no particular marital or psychological problems, he went on: one couple, whose marriage had been shaky, parted for a time but later made another try together.

The Den Der project appears to have been fairly serious, although assuredly not solemn; and despite the fact that its cover features a goofy floor-level view of a naked man's big feet, splayed legs and genitals, it should not be classified as pornography. (A police lieutenant whose bureau had dealt with porno said, however, that Den Der would have been prosecuted "without question" before censorship was lifted.) The Danish text mentions that in the first session, everyone paired off. "I stayed with the first one I found and didn't dare go out into the black empty space again." said one man. Another thought that "What we did with the masks was a bit dangerous. I worried that we were trying to skip too much."

I spoke with a married couple who had taken part. The girl was a lank, dark psychology student in her late 20s, quite beautiful and not at all embarrassed. Yes, she had a child, she said, a small son. She had liked the masks: "You are like a newborn, your universe is as small as your arms can reach." A kind of group warmth, or paired warmth, developed; but later, she said, "We put on our clothes and we were strangers to one another."

Her husband, also a student, didn't think the experiment had been really successful, although he likes group sex as a rule. There was a surprisingly naïve quality to his reactions. The purpose of the experiment was to communicate, he said, "But we held a meeting later and we found we could say more talking than fucking." All of the men had trouble with erections, he said, perhaps because of the cameras. "And it was very difficult to fuck people I didn't like." Not being able to see was bothersome, too. "I got a knee in my balls and an elbow in my eye. It wasn't sex. I gave up, took off my mask and just found a girl." But the pictures, he said, told a very human story. He showed me a photo of a man and a girl coupling. The man was holding hands with another man, who was masturbating.

How did the husband feel when his wife made love to another man? "It's all right if it doesn't keep on too long and get serious," he answered.

I asked the girl whether she had posed for hard porno (her husband had said that he sometimes photographed porno, for about $70 a session). She didn't answer for a moment, then smiled in an odd way and said, "No, it's too ugly." I didn't believe her and I don't think she intended that I be convinced. As I left, she asked that I leave their names out of my article. I agreed but asked why. Well, her friends knew all about Den Der, she said--she sometimes had group sex with them--but her parents would be shocked, and there was no point in trying to explain things to them.

Group sex is, indeed, shocking to many older Danes. A week after Den Der appeared, one of the participants, a well-known athlete named Palle Nielsen, was fired from his teaching job at a Jewish private grammar school. He complained that the firing was "fantastic." People are afraid of the unknown, he said. "I don't like their 'knowing better" and their lack of doubt about their own values. In three years, people will laugh that a teacher would be fired because of naked pictures." Nielsen is probably right. Conventional Danes may not approve, for instance, of the collective mega-families that are forming, but they are no longer astonished to hear of group living. Among students, a girl who takes part in a porno filming session may be considered a trifle wild--like a U.S. coed of 20 years ago who was known to sleep with her boyfriend--but her behavior is not thought disgusting or whorish.

One of the most important changes in Denmark is a very sharp decline in sex crimes. There was an abrupt drop of about 25 percent in 1967, the first year in which written porno was legal and the first in which dirty pictures, although illegal, were widely tolerated. In 1968, such crimes decreased by 10 percent and last year by a startling 31 percent. I could find no one in the Ministry of Justice (which initiated the legalization actions), the Copenhagen police department or the psychiatric profession who did not believe that legalized porno was the principal reason for the decline. Other factors are involved: The economy, for instance, has improved over this period and, presumably, some men who would have stolen sex have been able to buy it. And the availability of the birth-control pill may have made women more compliant. But these secondary suppositions can't account for 25 and 30 percent declines.

Prisoners and mental patients are routinely permitted to have pornography. Dr. Berl Kutschinsky, the psychologist who is studying the results of porno legalization for the U.S. Congress, says, "There is no evidence whatsoever" that porno is harmful to adults --"or minors, either, for that matter." Dr. Anders Groth, the young psychiatrist, mentioned earlier, says porno could be a strong and possibly harmful shock--to people raised in a highly repressive society. And the untruthfulness of porno--the lies it tells of super-potency and inexhaustible partners--could make insecure people feel inadequate. But these are not large dangers, he feels. A liking for porno is perfectly normal, he believes; it's not a minority twitch, like foot fetishism, but a way in which everyone can, from time to time, express himself sexually. Naturally, good porno--erotic material that is not too untruthful--is better than bad porno, the kind that tourists and solid Danish citizens buy behind the Copenhagen railroad station.

The Danish pornographers I met were unlike any I had known before. This is undoubtedly because the sun of public approval shines so radiantly upon them. Ralph Ginzburg and Sam Roth, two U.S. "pornographers" who have given their names to Supreme Court decisions, are decent and respectable men in my judgment, if not in that of various Federal jurists; but neither has ever been accused of being a force for mental health. (Roth, wretched loser, never published anything worse than bits of James Joyce and reproductions of Aubrey Beardsley. He was rewarded by being made the only man in history to serve time both for publishing porno and for not publishing it--the second charge being one of mail fraud, brought by the Post Office after he allegedly advertised dirty books but delivered clean ones.)

However this may be, Jens Theander, founder of the Rodlox-Trading Corporation and publisher of Color Climax magazine and Sex Orgies in Color, was a surprise. He is 25, freckled, cheerfully round-faced and red-bearded and his manner is that of a man who can't quite believe that the world is such a fine place. "Of course I do this for the money," he said, "but I think our magazines do some good. People understand this. Ekstra Bladet [a large Copenhagen newspaper] gave us a good review." Jens and his brother Peter started publishing in 1966. Although he speaks English well, he quit studying at 18 and worked as a ship's boy, a beer deliverer and an installer of intercom phones. His first venture in porno wasn't very successful, but only because the brothers didn't know much about photography or magazine production. There was only minimal trouble with the law. "The police would ban one of our magazines and we would sell it anyway," said Jens. "But we never had to pay a fine." I asked whether he'd ever had to bribe the police. He was shocked and said with great pride, "I have never heard about police corruption in Denmark."

Now, said Jens, grinning at the outlandishness of it all, he and his brother make about $40,000 a year apiece. He doesn't export porno, because there are too many problems with the smuggling that's necessary, but German tourists, particularly, buy his magazines "in the thousands"; what they do with them, he feels, is their business. So it isn't true that the porno business is dying, he said. You can't sell written porno or grainy black-and-white photos, but good color magazines sell very well. With porno legal, he's proudly added a masthand hearing his name to Color Climax.

We were sitting in the parlor of his comfortable suburban house and I asked whether the neighbors objected to his profession. His pretty wife, who had come into the room to peel two young Theander girls off their father's neck, looked startled when she overheard my question. Jens was patient: No, why should they object? The obvious question arose and he said no, he would prefer that his daughters not become porno models. "I don't look down on the models, but I think most of them have trouble making contact with people. And there is some exhibitionism in them." How does he feel, personally, about porno? He smiled and said, "If I did not make porno, I might not be the biggest customer, but I would buy it."

Delight is epidemic in the Danish porno business. I asked another enterpriser, Tony Sorensen, if it were true, as I had heard, that he smuggled dirty magazines to the U.S. in crates marked Ceramics. Yes, yes, he said, but the best joke of all--here he slapped his knee in merriment and it was the first time I had actually seen a man do this--the best joke was that he shipped his dirty eight-millimeter movie spools in cans marked Danish Ham. A stocky man in his 40s, Sorensen was a waiter three years ago. Now he lives near Helsingör on a spectacular stretch of the Danish Riviera. His house, which stands among ancient oaks, is new, very large and in excellent taste. It's filled with elegant modern furniture and a large number of canvases and ceramic pieces by contemporary Danish artist Knud Michelsen. There is a sauna inside and a swimming pool outside. And there is a tiny room, hidden behind a false wall beneath the stairs, where Sorensen and his wife packaged porno when the police were still bothersome.

Sorensen's wife was embarrassed by her husband's trade in the beginning. Now she says, "Porno isn't bad; it's money." She showed me a summons they had received that day from a German court. They will ignore it. As a result of such legal difficulties, the Sorensens cannot travel in Germany, Switzerland or France and they think they would have trouble in the U.S. (Danish police are pestered by U.S. and German customs agents for information about Sorensen and his colleagues. The Danes don't cooperate, they explain, because Sorensen's profession is as legitimate as the king's.) The Sorensens send abroad films and at least 30 magazines (Color Orgy. Color Boy, Petting, and so on). Ninety percent of the business is export, and there are 20,000 regular customers. Most of them are in Germany, but Sorensen exports to almost every country in the world outside the Eastern bloc. (German customers like sadomasochism, he said with some malice, while Danes prefer straight sex.) Volume shipments to the U.S. go by freighter; "The captain is bribed to shut his mouth and the Customs agents also." Not long ago, Sorensen said moodily, a crate fell and broke and unbribed Customs agents came running. He turned his palms up and shrugged.

Business has never been better, he said. People who think it is dying are misled because they see the amateurs dropping out. There are between 200 and 300 firms of various sizes making porno in Copenhagen alone, he estimated, and of course most of these will disappear. Sorensen himself has splendid plans for the future. He will make pornographic records--"lots of sighing"--and he hopes to add sound tracks, with music and gasping, to his movies. Then, proud Dane, he set up his film projector and showed me the wave of the future: a slapstick and very pornographic version, in (and out of) full costume, of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale The Goose Girl.

I asked whether he ever felt ashamed about making porno. He looked at me and said, "In America, it is hard to get?"

"Fairly hard."

"But it's easy to get guns."

"Yes."

"Here it's almost impossible to get a gun," he said. "Please have some more aquavit." Outside the vast living-room window wall, the sun shone and his three young daughters and half a dozen neighbor kids splashed one another in the pool.

And so to the porno fair. Even knowing what I then knew, I found it startling that a country orderly enough to number its breakfast eggs (I ate numbers K22964 and K22201 one morning) should hold creation's first porno fair. It seems just as odd in retrospect. The fair was one of those phenomena that absorb illumination, instead of shedding it. The only aberration that matches it in my memory was a "festival of television commercials" I attended once. I remember writing vengefully that the only occasion I could imagine less festive than a festival of television commercials was a festival of anthrax germs, and the sentiment can stand well enough for the porno fair.

"Yes!" the motherly middle-aged lady cabdriver had said with warm approval when I whispered the words sex fair. She knew where to drive, all right. At five on a Saturday afternoon, hall of Copenhagen was lined up in fours in front of the fair building. The line stretched at least 100 yards down the block, and a cop posted by the entrance under the big Sex '69 sign said it had been like that all week. At a guess. 40 percent of the queued-up gawkers were foreign and most of the foreigners looked German.

Inside, the hall resembled the gym of an unprosperous Ohio college decorated for a dance. There were tiers of seats around the rim of the building, gymnasium style, and a flat space in the middle where booths were set up and samples of merchandise purchasable at the downtown groin parlors were displayed--genuine-rubber imitation buttocks, whips, cuff links with little interlocking silver figures and magazines titled Dog Orgy, Sucking and Fucking.

The building was aburst with people. A few spectators were themselves worth looking at--a splendid fairy in a leather jacket and white jeans, a beautiful girl in a mink, slumming--but mostly the crowd was as scruffy as a basketball mob at the Garden. Why were they there? Nothing inside the building could be bought--a city ordinance of some kind prohibited it--and there was nothing to look at that couldn't be seen better, and in a more leisurely way, without standing in line for four hours or paying $1.50, in the porno shops or the dirty-movie dens. No explanation helps. In the rows of seats, hundreds of pooped fairgoers sat waiting, but for what? I never learned. Perhaps it was merely time for the lumpen to make their move, and this was Bastille Day in Copenhagen's sexual revolution.

The best exhibit in the hall--and there was nothing in second place--was a thin girl with a shy face, a see-through blouse and pouting breasts, who stood passing out brochures at Jens Theander's Color Climax booth. She told me that she had twice been a model for Theander. There she was, in fact, performing fellatio on page 28 of the fair's program, in the very spot where Madison Square Garden would give you Bill Bradley's jump shot. She said her name was Susanne and that she was 25 and a second-year law student at the University of Copenhagen.

How did she like modeling for porno? "It was all right. It's just a job." She had gone to school with Theander, she said, and he paid her $100 a session, which was a good price.

How did her family feel about her job? "My husband didn't mind. We needed the money."

Jens Theander was standing nearby, talking genially with a mad-looking Swedish amateur photographer, who asked him questions about f stops and emulsions. What sort of lights did he use for porno filming? the Swede asked, his eyes glittering. Photolloods, said Theander. Weren't they very hot? asked the Swede. Yes, said Theander, but the models were naked. He greeted me happily, said the Sex '69 fair had been entirely his idea, that it would net him $50,000 and that he was going to call the next grander, expanded version Sex '69 Plus One.

I thanked him and wandered on to a booth that was screening bits of a porno film (the police had insisted that only samples be shown and this had led to some disastrous film editing). There were the usual stag-film musings. Are they really going to do it? Yes, by George, they are. And they continue, and go on, and on. Everything jiggles. It's hard to do this sort of thing well. A realization: This is not only sex, it's bad sex. And since there is nothing in the world more abundant than bad sex, why am I standing here, watching it? Seen one, seen 'em awl.

Nevertheless, it is one of the world's safest bets that no one will go broke soon promoting a sex fair in Denmark. Five months alter Theander's fiesta, the predictable occurs and an enterpriser named Ernst Penlau convenes a crotch exposition in Odense, a town known previously only as the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen. The usual busloads of agitated tourists arrive from Germany, Belgium and Holland. A chartered plane full of crotch enthusiasts arrives from Peru, two planes come from Beirut and four from Tokyo. As usual, inexplicably large numbers of Danes turn out. A $1.50 admission fee lets them see the usual exhibits of genital hard- and software and another $16 gets them into a "night club" where naked entertainers demonstrate, in the words of a disenchanted Danish journalist, "variations on the dear old theme." This inner nonsanctum is named, in Andersen's memory, the Little Mermaid Club. Promoter Penlau says he is making a lot of kroner.

He is not making any of mine, however. A sense of the absurd will serve, if necessary, in place of good taste. My mood when I heard of the Odense fair, with its live sex and blushing Japanese, was the same as it had been some time before, when Tony Sorensen asked if I wanted to watch the filming of a sadomasochistic movie. What was interesting, he had said, was that the masochist was real and, in fact, was paying for the girls and the filming. It was going to be very authentic. I said yes, but later I got to thinking of how the introductions would go. I got as far as imagining Sorensen saying, "Mr. X, this is Mr. Skow, who is very interested in watching you get whipped," and me saying, "How do you do, Mr. X, I've heard a lot about you." That's where my imagination stopped. I said to hell with it then and I say to hell with it now.