Nordic Prostitution Policy Reform Project The “promiscuous” and the “shy”: Denmark and Norway – A historic comparative analysis of pornography legislation Inga Margrete Ydersbond The NPPR Working Paper Series: The Politics of Commercial Sex 2012:01 March 2012 NPPR Project http://nppr.se Division of History & Politics University of Stirling Stirling FK9 4LA UK ISSN pending This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. 1 ! The “promiscuous” and the “shy”: Denmark and Norway - A historic comparative analysis of pornography legislation Inga Margrete Ydersbond University of Oslo, Norway
[email protected] ABSTRACT This paper seeks to explain why the two neighbouring Nordic countries Norway and Denmark, despite many political and cultural similarities, have had very different legal frameworks regulating pornography. Denmark was the first country in the world legalizing both literary (1967) and pictorial pornography (1969). Norway, on the other hand, to this date has had one of Europe’s strictest regulations, and legalized “hardcore” pornography as late as in 2006. Through combining the method of “most similar designs” with process tracing, this paper makes a historical comparative analysis of the political development leading to the different legislative outcomes. The paper argues that there are several reasons why the countries’ legislations represent opposite ends of the spectre in Europe. First, Christian conservative values have been much more widespread in Norway than in Denmark, as seen by an influential Christian Conservative party and massive popular resistance against liberalization in the four decades after World War 2.