Danish Experiment Fascinating

Smut Capital's Crime Ebbs

By ROBERT C. TOTH

L.A. Times/Washington Post Service

COPENHAGEN -Is this the sex capital of the world? Measured by pornography, it certainly is.

Six to 10 million copies of sex magazines, grossing 13 to 26 million dollars, is the estimated annual output. The stuff is displayed blatantly and sold freely in dozens of shops, and when the shops close at 3 a.m., vending machines are outside for latecomers.

These magazines are almost exclusively of the photo variety, showing sex in all its specific detail. Magazines with pornographic stories have fallen off sharply in sales. There is a certain irony in this. for written pornography is legal and that of the photo variety is not.

In July, 1967, this country became the first, and so far only, nation to throw out statutes on written obscenity. When that happened. however, the bottom dropped out of the market. What was no longer forbidden fruit no longer was quite so desirable.

Publishers. however, quickly shifted to the publication of photo pornography, and sales in this part of the market have boomed. Now, a government committee is considering whether to legalize photo. as well as written, pornography, and it will be interesting to see what happens to sales then.

Are the Danes, in legalizing pornography. the vanguard of a world movement toward a healthier attitude toward sex? Maybe. for sex crimes have fell 25% from 1966 to 1967 with the rise in the distribution of pornographic material.

Good or bad. the garish commercialization of sex with all its permutations and deviations is shocking at first sight.

The shops. mostly in the seedy railroad station area of this city. advertise their wares with their names"Porno-Shop." "Sex." and "Go Go Sex." In the windows are photo booklets open to choice pages. It would take a blindfolded saint. or a satiated Dane, to ignore it all. Today, not one publisher is known to exist solely on written smut, according to the justice ministry. Leo Masden. a former publisher, complained last year that books which would sell 20.000 to 30.000 illegally are now selling only 2.000 to 3.000 copies.

"It's like beer," one bored Dane said. "After the war when beer rationing ended, beer consumption dropped. That's what happened with this written junk. Now that it is no longer forbidden, no one buys it. The same thing will probably happen to the picture booklets when they are allowed legally.”

THIS IS expected within the next few months. The

view of the minister of justice, Knud Thestrup, a conservative, which is the same as that of the former minister. a socialist, is that the government should not censor the reading matter of adults.”

The attitude of Danes to pornography must be seen not in isolation but as one thread in the larger fabric of Danish attitudes towards sex as a whole.

Homosexual relations between persons over 25 stopped being a crime here in 1931. Prostitutes are picked up only if prostitution is their sole means of support. And officials expect within the next year to wipe out all laws against prostitution.

Sex education in school, since 1946, has begun at the first grade. By the sixth grade the children know all about how they were produced. Sex lessons are interrupted during puberty, but in the final two years birth control techniques are explained.

DESPITE THIS climate. the law against written pornography was not repealed without a long study, at the government's request. by the Danish Permanent Law Committee in 1964, after courts dismissed the obscenity case against the novel. “Fanny Hill."

The most persuasive finding of the study, according to the law committee's secretary, A. A. Brydensholt, was that:

"All the experts consulted-psychologists, psychiatrists. sociologists. criminologists, educators-all said that there was no proof whatsoever that pornography was any danger to adults or to children.

"None of them had ever seen or heard, anywhere in the world. of a case where pornography caused damage to an individual.”

Whether pornography has done any good, it seems by all accounts to have done no bad so far. But it is really premature to judge its longer-range effects. One year's figures on sex crimes are quite inadequate.

Of particular concern in the future must be the young. Pornography's influence might make it difficult for young persons to lead normal adult sex lives.

Denmark has embarked on a fascinating social experiment which the world will have to watch for a decade or perhaps even a generation before deciding whether or not to applaud."