50 Years Ago Denmark Became World’s First Nation to Legalize Porn (AVN)

Read the full article by Michael French at AVN.com

The conservative politician behind lifting the ban thought that would make people want porn less.

On May 30, 1969—50 years ago this week—the small Scandinavian country of Denmark, with its population at the time of fewer than 5 million inhabitants, undertook a decision that changed the world. Half a century ago, Denmark became the world’s first country to legalize porn.

To be specific, Danish politicians introduced legislation to legalize pornographic visual images, with the ban officially lifted on July 1, 1969. Two years earlier, Denmark also led the way in legalizing written porn, and was the first nation to withdraw from the 1923 Geneva Convention treaty for the suppression of obscene literature.

When Denmark lifted the ban on “obscene” prose in 1967, the idea behind the move was not to make pornographic literature widely available, but instead to kill the demand for the taboo books—which despite the ban were widely available on most bookstore shelves at the time.

And according to Danish historians René Løkkegaard Jepsen and Kasper Reggelsen, lo and behold, it worked. The so-called “obscene” books lost their appeal and gradually vanished from stores that had peddled them despite, or perhaps because of, their outlaw status.

Two years later, when Denmark’s conservative Secretary of State for Justice Knud Thestrup proposed legalizing visual pornography as well, he had the same idea in mind—once the taboo is broken, demand will drop, he believed. 

Needless to say, things didn’t work out quite the way he hoped.