Porn Perspectives

As some readers may know, your dedicated porn bloggeur, your your Porn Baby (as known to some) recently relocated to an undisclosed location in Eastern Europe. It has now been one month into what is likely to be a year-long relocation.

During the week, I work in this Eastern Europe location, and on weekends I try to get around to see the various European cities within easy reach.

While I realize I have only been here a short time, I have begun new insights based on this geographical shift. It may be a cliche to say this--and granted, I have always been aware of the differing levels of permissiveness in Europe vs America--but for the first time I am really feeling the difference between America and Europe in their respective positions on sex/porn.

For example, I am writing this from a cafe in Copenhagen. Just down the street is a sex shop:

This is the view from the street. In Denmark, sex shops do not have to cover their windows, as they do in the US (and other parts of Europe). You'll just be walking down the street, looking for a cappuccino, and BAM!--dildos and whips are in your face.

By contrast, I'm taking advantage of being in a predominately English-speaking country to take in a little (ok, a lot) of American television. The shows' provincial plot lines, while vaguely disturbing when I was living in the US, are now shockingly conservative.

Last night, I flipped the channel to Desperate Housewives in time to catch this gem:

And then on Judging Amy (for the record, I watch neither this show nor DW except when pathetically jonesing for American TV), a key plotline followed an artist foster mom who took black and white photos of her kids for an art book. The kids were only partially clothed in some photos, and a social worker (a character we're supposed to sympathize with) threatened to take her kids away, calling it sexual exploitation. Triumph of the system!

I look at this from my dildo-and-S&M-infused perch and remark to myself how small this all seems. Yesterday I walked past a large ad showing a topless woman on the street near the main train station.
How can Americans be freaked out about kids stumbling upon pornography on the Internet, when this woman's nipples are the size of my head? It just seems a hell of a lot easier to loosen up about this stuff. Denmark does not seem to be experiencing ill effects from being so permissive--there is no epidemic of Danish teen pregnancy, underage sex parties, or broken marriages. I don't really know what we can do in the US to help people losen up (more dildos?), but it would really be great to be able to focus on something else besides freaking out over sex.