Golden ages? Media, space and transnationality

Porn Travels

This special issue is born out of a growing need to begin looking coherently at how national histories of the pornography business compare and interconnect. Whether it is across geographical borders, formal and informal networks, technological formats or through legal systems, one of pornography’s most vital characteristics is that it travels. This has become particularly apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite national quarantines, travel restrictions and self-isolation, pornography has still travelled via the World Wide Web. If media reports are to be believed, such as The Economist’s 10 May 2020 article ‘Pornography is Booming During the Covid-19’, the site Pornhub saw a 22% increase in traffic in the space of two months, while OnlyFans’ pre-tax profits grew from £6 million to £53 million (Financial Times, 28 April 2021). Although pornography has increasingly shifted from a physical commodity to a primarily digital, immaterial commodity globally distributed through streaming aggregator sites, pornographic materials have always had an exceptional ability to travel across national borders. This was evident in the pre-digital era, with entrepreneurs utilizing clandestine distribution routes as many countries had laws regulating or forbidding ‘obscene material’. ‘Golden Ages? Media, Space and Transnationality’ demonstrates how transnational trade has been a fundamental aspect of the global pornography business and can provide further insight into how pornography has been produced, distributed, consumed and regulated.

Over the past several years, there has been a surge in academic interest around the history of pornography, prompted, in part, by the introduction of the Porn Studies journal, but also the Adult Film History Scholarly Interest Group, founded in 2014 (Church and Schaefer 2018). Many of these scholarly studies focus on particular events and periods within a specific national context. The field is dominated by work exploring America’s porn history, such as the advent of adult video (Alilunas 2016), the years of ‘porno chic’ in the 1970s (for example, Bronstein and Strub 2016) and the sexploitation period (for example, Schaefer 2005; Gorfinkel 2017). In comparison, the European context remains underexplored. There have been studies of the 1950–1980 pornographic press (Arnberg 2010), sex education films (Björklund 2012) and the exhibition contexts for 1971–1976 pornographic films in Sweden (Larsson 2017); the 1970s Bedside and Zodiac films in Denmark (Thorsen 2014); early pornographic photography and films (Tachou 2013) and gay pornography between 1974 and 1983 in France (Callwood 2017); British 8-mm pornography (Carter 2018); and memories of pornography in Finland (Paasonen et al. 2015). Despite this interest in the historical foundations of the pornography business, surprisingly little attention has been given to its transnational context. Exceptions to this include Stoops’ (2018) study of Britain’s trade in the early twentieth century and Larsson’s (2018) consideration of Italian pornographer Lasse Braun/Albert Ferro’s ‘opportunistic transnationalism’, exploring how his regular movements across borders enhanced opportunities for enterprise and mitigated the risk of prosecution. Here, transnationality moves away from its current conceptualization in film studies to encompass ideas from fields such as economic geography (Hughes 2006; King-Savic 2021) and criminology (Reichel and Albanese 2013), furthering understanding of how pornography operates as a transnational trade. In addition to this, there has also been work examining transnational receptions and the construction of national stereotypes abroad (for example, Schaefer 2014; Heffernan 2016; Paasonen 2017). Given that divergent national legislations have provided very different and specific conditions for the production as well as the distribution and consumption of pornography, a transnational approach can further our understanding of pornography’s cultural and economic development.

The transnational turn in film studies has come to signify something politically and ideologically good (see Hjort 2010). As Ezra and Rowden (2006, 1) point out, ‘transnational comprises both globalization – in cinematic terms, Hollywood’s domination of world film markets – and the counterhegemonic responses of filmmakers from former colonial and Third World countries’, but the focus is often placed on the ‘counterhegemonic responses’ in a quest to find the transnational as a positive political force. Nonetheless, transnational in general holds both a promise (of unity and communication across borders) and a threat (that such a communication shall involve criminal activities such as trafficking in drugs, human beings or documentation of sexual abuse of children). When looking at pornographic material, it is quite clear that such material travelled widely via both formal and informal means. Sexually explicit, 35-mm, feature-length films were cumbersome to export and had to be dubbed or subtitled but usually had established, formal networks for distribution domestically and abroad. These were not always hardcore. They were edited into various versions in relation to particular national market considerations, as Christian Isak Thorsen’s contribution to this special issue ‘Kingdom of Everything’ highlights. Thorsen looks at the export of Danish sex comedies to Britain, considering how they were censored and received in Britain. Here, sanitized versions of the films were distributed in cinemas, seeking to profit from the demand for pornographic film in Britain. Thorson also acknowledges the challenges when researching how these films travelled. Yet more difficult to trace are the itineraries of the 8-mm/16-mm hardcore film, magazines and other merchandise such as decks of cards, individual photographs, and pornographic short stories and novels (see Larsson 2017). In contrast to their larger-scale counterparts, these were relatively easy to pack in a suitcase, put in a pocket or send off in a padded envelope. Often, such material was exported and imported informally for private consumption by individuals or in illegal smuggling of large quantities across borders.

However, understanding space solely in terms of national territories underestimates the general transmutability of pornography, as well as its ability to shape the spaces in which it is marketed, sold and consumed. Pornography not only travels across borders, it travels across media and through history, and it transforms its own spaces into places of sexual display or consumption. In this special issue, we revisit the golden ages of pornography with the particular purpose of addressing questions about the instability of categories such as nation, media, time and space. We do so by consolidating two separate but intertwined projects.

The transnational trade in hardcore pornography

In 2018, Oliver Carter was awarded a British Academy Small Grant titled ‘The Transnational Trade in Hardcore Pornography Between Britain, Scandinavia and the Netherlands’. This project built on Carter’s (2018) ongoing research into the post-war British pornography business, which focuses on its illicit period before the liberalization of the Restricted 18 certificate in 2000 (Petley 2011; Perkins 2012). Previous histories of the pornography business, particularly the adult film business, tend to privilege the North American context, but also acknowledge Scandinavia’s role as pioneers of post-war hardcore pornographic production. This is likely due to Sweden publishing the first full-colour hardcore magazine Private in 1965 (Arnberg 2012) and Denmark being the first country to fully legalize pornography in 1969 (Kutchinsky and Snare 1999). However, before this, Britain had an established economy of hardcore production, despite the distribution of pornography being outlawed under the Obscene Publications Act 1959, selling products in the bookshops of Soho, London and via mail-order businesses. Stoops (2018) has shown that this economy can be dated back to the first half of the twentieth century, demonstrating that pornography producers have always been transnationally minded in the pursuit of profit.

By the early 1960s, Britain was regularly exporting domestically produced photographs and 8-mm films to Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany and America through informal channels, contributing to the development of hardcore production in these countries and others. This became a two-way trade, with Danish-produced films and magazines smuggled to London, sometimes concealed in cargoes of Danish bacon and other commercial goods. Many pornography couriers were regularly arrested for transporting ‘obscene’ material across borders. For instance, the Anglo-German pornography entrepreneur Walter Bartkowski – also known as Charlie/Charley Brown – was an agent for London’s pornographers, taking advantage of his job as a steward on cross-channel ferries (Hebditch and Anning 1988, 212–213). Transnational trade became a key feature of his own enterprise when he introduced his own Tabu brand in late-1960s Frankfurt, Germany.

The British Academy project specifically focused on such instances of illicit transnational trade. Its objectives were to examine Britain’s relationship with Scandinavia and the Netherlands and its political economy, informing further academic study of the history of the pornography business. The co-production of primary research was central to meeting these objectives, collaborating with other academics, archivists, industry and audiences. This was achieved through public events held in Copenhagen on 9 June 2019 and Amsterdam on 10 October 2019. The Danish event was carried out in collaboration with the Danish Film Institute as part of their season acknowledging the 50th anniversary of Denmark’s legalizing of pornography and included a screening of the film Det kære legetøj (The Dear Toy/Danish Blue; Gabriel Axel, 1968). Panellists included Prof Mariah Larsson of Linneaus University, Dr Christian Isak Thorsen of the University of Copenhagen and adult filmmaker/historian Nicolas Barbano. The later Dutch event was held at the Cavia Filmhuis – a former porn cinema – and included adult filmmakers Willem van Batenburg and Terry Stephens and distributors Patricia Clark and Jayson Pannell. Screened at this event was the British documentary The Porn Brokers (Laurence Barnett and John Lindsay, 1973), which speaks to the growing transnational relationships in the 1970s pornography business, featuring interviews with its entrepreneurs, such as Braun, Joop Wilhelmus and Berth Milton, amongst others.

Carter conducted archival research at libraries and met with historians and experts. He was also given tours of the red-light districts Vesterbro, Copenhagen and De Wallen, Amsterdam, finding that traces of the transnational trade had all but disappeared. Attempts to locate the films, photographs and magazines that were once illicitly distributed across geographic borders proved futile, now residing in private collections and commanding high prices. This was especially apparent in Copenhagen, where the bookshops, adult cinemas and other sex-related establishments, such as Ole Ege’s Museum Erotica, have been erased from view. As Danish national media commemorated the 50th anniversary of legalization and the October 1969 Sex Fair that celebrated the economic potential of the newly legalized trade, the black-and-white photographs that documented the scale of Denmark’s industry demonstrated the extent of this erasure. Like Soho, it appeared that Denmark has attempted to erase their licentious past. Sanders-McDonagh, Peyrefitte, and Ryalls (2016) describe this process as ‘hegemonic gentrification’, resulting in sanitized spaces. This is often achieved through relationships between privately owned companies and local councils, with policy playing a pivotal role.

Furthermore, it proved difficult to track down people once involved in Denmark’s trade. For instance, Peter Theander, the co-founder of the transnationally distributed brand Color Climax, refuses to give interviews. This was also evident in the Netherlands. Although De Wallen is still synonymous with sex and sin, it also appears that its remaining days as a red-light district are numbered. Plans are being made to move sex work out of the city to an erotic centre. This proposal intends to reimagine Amsterdam as a tourist destination, dissuading unruly, unwanted travellers. As with most research projects, the outcome is rarely the one anticipated. It revealed the precarity of pornography’s history, illustrating the importance of documenting political and economic change within the post-war pornography industry while its participants are alive and enterprises still exist.

Pornography in the pre-digital era

The second project relating to this special issue was an international research symposium organized by Mariah Larsson and Tommy Gustafsson on 24–25 April 2019 at Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden. ‘Pornography in the Pre-digital Era: Distribution, Consumption, and the Law’ had the objective to initiate a loosely configured research network called Porn Travels, bringing together international scholars in order to generate more comparative research in the field of pornography history, looking at national differences as well as transnational movements of pornographic material before the advent of the internet. The symposium’s main focus was on the film and television history of pornography, with a particular emphasis on distribution, consumption, and legal and regulatory practices, as well as on space and locality as in ‘porn streets’ and video-rental stores.

The rationale for the symposium and the research network is the circumstance that pornography studies, despite its growth over the past 30 years, is still to a large extent an uncharted area when it comes to the history of pornography, even as close in time as the second half of the twentieth century. There are two principal reasons why this situation has arisen. First, research on the history of pornography means that the scholar almost inevitably examines a clandestine history surrounded by a hush-hush mentality that, usually, has created a situation where there is a lack of sources and/or where sources are unreliable or based on hearsay (Schaefer 2005). Second, a consequence of this is that much of the current research on pornography deals with contemporary issues where sources are more available. Therefore, there is a need for porn historians with different national expert areas to converge in a network to share and discuss their research with the specific objective to compare and combine their findings for a more coherent, transnational history of pornography.

The symposium invited seven speakers, all of whom have made significant contributions in the field of pornography history, and many of the presentations form the basis for this special issue, ‘Golden Ages? Media, Space, and Transnationality’. Peter Lehman (Arizona State University) gave a historical meta-discussion of how Hollywood remembers pre-digital pornography in films and televisions series like Boogie Nights (1997) and The Deuce (2017–2019), while Mariah Larsson (Linnaeus University) questioned what happens during the transition of analogue material to digital form, using Private magazine as a point of departure for a discussion of materiality, nostalgia and cultural memory, but also the changing legal context for pornography. Larsson’s presentation informs the article ‘The Pre-Digital in the Digital: Private’s Online Back Catalogue’. Peter Alilunas (University of Oregon) discussed video rentals of porn and how this practice changed locally due to regulation in different states in the USA during the 1980s. For this special issue, Alilunas’ ‘Contemporaneous Mundanity and Pornography Regulation by Indifference’ examines the historical legacy of video rental stores deciding to no longer stock adult videos. Alilunas relates this to contemporary debates around the circulation of sexually explicit content online during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Klara Arnberg (Stockholm University) explored ‘the porn street’ as a commercial and gendered space, looking at how Stockholm dealt with the reputation of becoming the ‘sex capital of the world’ in the 1960s and 1970s as pornography became legal in Sweden. Arnberg’s article ‘Capital of Sex: Porn Sales in Stockholm, 1965–1985’ extends this presentation, showing how local politicians opposed Stockholm’s porn scene, attempting to end Stockholm’s reputation as the sex capital of the world. Oliver Carter (Birmingham City University) and Tommy Gustafsson (Linnaeus University) gave presentations where legal proceedings were used to expand our historical understanding of pornography. Carter’s article ‘The Watford Blue Movie Trial: Regulating Rollers in 1970s Britain’ explores how the growing transnational trade in hardcore pornography affected production and distribution in Britain, eventually leading to a clampdown on the business. He focuses on a forgotten obscenity trial to show how the Director of Public Prosecutions used the Obscene Publications Act 1959 to control this growing trade. Carter demonstrates how legal documents relating to such cases can help shed light on the political and economic practices of pornographers, particularly within an industry that has historically had a long and difficult history. Similarly, Gustafsson’s ‘The Untrustworthy Transnational Origin of Illegal Porn Films in the Interwar and War Years’ uses three Swedish trials taking place between 1922 and 1943 to examine what notions of nation and nationality were connected to the early pornographic film and how this, in turn, was connected to the production and distribution of early pornographic films in Sweden. Unable to attend the symposium but contributing to this special edition are Giovanna Maina and Federico Zecca. Their article ‘Turn On the Red Light: Notes on the Birth of Italian Pornography’ draws on a survey of the Italian adult press of the 1970s and the phenomenon of hardcore cuts of Italian exploitation films to reconstruct the stages through which pornography was legalized in Italy during the second half of the 1970s.

Collectively, these articles are intended to stimulate a wider conversation around pornography’s travels across borders, technologies and legalities. Through the Porn Travels research network, we want to enable contact between academics across geographic borders, leading to greater cross-collaboration and shared expertise, especially in the areas of language and local culture. This conversation has been continuing during 2021. Fifty years ago, in 1971, Sweden legalized pornography. To commemorate this anniversary, a seminar series was arranged (on Zoom, due to the pandemic) at Linnaeus University, in collaboration with the university’s newly started Centre for Studies in Popular Culture. The seminar series was titled ‘Pornography, Obscenity, Democracy: Experiences from Half a Century’, and has, at the time of writing, included presentations by Klara Arnberg and Mariah Larsson, on the context of the Swedish legalization; by Whitney Strub on evolving discourses of pornography in the USA from the late nineteenth century to 2021; by Isak Thorsen on the Danish legalization; and by Susanna Paasonen on the de-sexing of social media platforms in the time of the distanced lives of the pandemic. In the fall, the series will continue with an additional three seminars. Although Sweden’s 50-year anniversary is the reason and starting point for the seminar series, one significant purpose is to highlight both national and historical differences and to compare historical censorship and obscenity laws to contemporary surveillance, control and monitoring of the internet. The histories of pornography can shed light on current developments, such as how online porn is concentrated to a few streaming aggregator sites while social media often exclude sex, following their own logic of community standards and debates about pornography as a ‘public health hazard’. Moreover, the histories of pornography can also bring perspectives to current issues that go beyond the pornographic, that have to do with sexual and reproductive rights around the world; democracy and free press and media; and transnational movements of people and ideas.