<\/p>\n
Just back in the country after spending three weeks in Northern Europe with my partner, Helen.\u00a0 It\u2019s the trip I’ve been postponing for two years — a chance to visit the good folks at Cupido magazine on their home turf in Oslo, Norway, with some vacationing in Amsterdam, Norway, Denmark, and Germany thrown in.\u00a0 While this was more of a general vacation than a sex tour, I do keep my antennae up for sexual vibes, so here are some random reports and observations from points along the way.<\/p>\n
* * * * *<\/p>\n
We start out in Amsterdam, famous hub of liberality, marijuana caf\u00e9s, and legalized prostitution.\u00a0 After hauling our bags in from the airport and up three flights of ridiculously steep, typically Dutch, stairs we hit the streets and quickly fall in love with the city in all its picture postcard glory — a beautiful, relaxed, easy-going town of a city, more like San Francisco than New York or Chicago.\u00a0 Lovely old townhouses, canals with arched bridges and a hodgepodge of houseboats, artfully decorated trolleys, endless caf\u00e9s with all chairs facing outward for people-watching, flea markets full of Indonesian artifacts, museums devoted to Rembrandt and Von Gogh, bicycles galore, and good food.\u00a0 Everywhere we look there are sexy ads for a perfume called Mexx.\u00a0 A naked woman embracing a naked black man.\u00a0 A naked woman being embraced by another woman.<\/p>\n
In search of sexual Amsterdam, we wander around the main train station which feels distinctly and disappointingly like New York’s 42nd Street.\u00a0 Announcements over public loudspeakers warn of pickpockets, and everything reeks of shlock.\u00a0 Eventually we find our way to the nearby red light district, where prostitutes sit in their famous windows while passers-by wander around, looking them up and down.\u00a0 The oglers are a mixture of tourist families (often including children), and all sorts of men, more often in groups than alone.\u00a0 The guys in groups are more boisterous (and more offensive) than the ones alone, making salacious jokes while openly leering at or ridiculing the women, daring each other to actually talk to one, or even go have sex with her.\u00a0 The women for the most part are obviously bored to tears.\u00a0 Some pose seductively for the guys, many don\u2019t even bother to do that.\u00a0 Every now and then there’s someone who manages at least the pretense of a little real life or playfulness.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know what I expected, but the undeniable heaviness of the scene is disappointing.<\/p>\n
Helen gets bored and goes to the hotel, but I come back, determined to see if I can make something interesting of the scene.\u00a0 I check out the few peep shows (where they try to shortchange you every single time you try to convert a bill to coins), but the shows are virtually devoid of sexy energy, essentially hustles for one-on-one private shows.\u00a0 The live sex shows (\u201creal fucking\u201d) promise to be unbearably tacky and are expensive to boot.<\/p>\n
Wandering up and down the streets along the canals and the tiny alleys that go between them, I decide to go ahead and have this experience, even though the general scene is seriously uninspiring.\u00a0 I find a woman who seems decently friendly and go up to her door.\u00a0 The price is 50 guilders ($30) for sex; 50 guilders more if I want her to be nude.\u00a0 I give her 100 guilders and we touch a little, talk even less since her English is pretty poor.\u00a0 At least she’s not rushing me out the door.\u00a0 Eventually she sucks my cock with professionally distant attentiveness accompanied by the kind of appreciative murmuring that, coming from a lover, would indicate someone who was seriously enjoying what she was doing.\u00a0 She is absolutely fastidious about safe sex, putting a condom on me and not letting me so much as touch myself once the condom is on.\u00a0 Eventually I come, we make chit chat while I dress and she fixes her make-up, and I leave.\u00a0 A simple, direct, if generally impersonal exchange of sex for money.\u00a0 Q.E.D.<\/p>\n
* * * * *<\/p>\n
Leaving Amsterdam we rent a car, drive through northern Holland and Germany, take a two-hour ferry to the picturesque fishing town of Rudkobing in southern Denmark.\u00a0 Starkly constructed rural churches remind us that Scandinavia is, among other things, the home of staunchly proper Calvinist Lutheranism.\u00a0 Egeskov Castle, built in 1554, gives a sense of historical context.\u00a0 A \u201cvery rare\u201d Norwegian iron stove from 1693 shows a seated man embracing a woman from behind, his hands all over her breasts.\u00a0 The inscription, according to the guidebook, reads, \u201cBeware of touching things you do not know.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Odense (pronounced “Oont’-suh”), Denmark’s third largest city, I stumble on a local “sex kino” (shop) and go to check it out.\u00a0 Outside the shop are a series of tall, narrow, vending machines, selling a variety of products.\u00a0 It’s like the old Automat cafeterias in New York.\u00a0 You put a 20 krone coin (about $3.50) in the slot, and buy whatever you want.\u00a0 There are graphic fuck\/suck photo magazines, vibrators, dildoes, sex toys for sale, right on the street.\u00a0 Call it Dan Lungren’s worst nightmare:\u00a0 Vending machines flaunting the most lurid of images to gawking, vulnerable children.\u00a0 Magazines and sexual devices available to any young whippersnapper with 20 krone to spare.\u00a0 This sort of thing has been going on for some 25 years, ever since Denmark liberalized its pornography laws.\u00a0 Meanwhile, Danish children seem to grow up into perfectly functional adults.\u00a0 As I stand in front of the store, a mother and her three young children amble cheerfully by without so much as a wayward glance.<\/p>\n
I pick one of the more graphic magazines, drop my 20 krone in the slot.\u00a0 The door, alas, refuses to open.\u00a0 Certain things, I think to myself, are indeed cross-cultural.\u00a0 Inside the shop I complain to the manager (after the ritual recitation:\u00a0 “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Danish; do you speak English?”).\u00a0 He comes out to see if I’m trying to rip him off or what.\u00a0 When he finds my coin rolling around inside the machine, his attitude softens.\u00a0 We go back into the store to chat.<\/p>\n
I explain that I’m from San Francisco, and that I work for Spectator<\/em> (which he doesn\u2019t know), and Cupido<\/em>, which he knows quite well.\u00a0 His name is Morgen and he’s the owner of the shop which, he says, is the only shop in Odense with vending machines on the street.\u00a0 Does he carry Cupido<\/em>?\u00a0 No, he explains, Cupido<\/em> is only sold in regular newsstands and bookstores, not porn shops.\u00a0 He’s respectful of the magazine, but somewhat dismissive of its smaller-than-commercial-porn appeal.\u00a0 “Maybe 5% of my customers would be interested in Cupido<\/em>,” he shrugs.<\/p>\n He shows me around the store.\u00a0 Shlock sex toys, a variety of magazines and videos — both American and European.\u00a0 I ask him how the American stuff differs from the European.\u00a0 “It tends to be more boring,” he explains.\u00a0 “European magazines and videos are more exotic — they have piss, shit, bestiality, young girls, more ‘extreme’ s\/m.”<\/p>\n Downstairs, Morgen explains, he shows videos \u201con the house.\u201d\u00a0 I go take a look around.\u00a0 There are a half dozen areas with large screens and benches where a motley assortment of 40- to 60-year-old men are watching a variety of American and German films.\u00a0 The actors and actresses in the German films are decidedly less glamorous and older than their American counterparts — regular-looking people instead of hard-bodied, young superstars.\u00a0 The films get their charge from the sense of people doing something very naughty, in contrast to the general American porn ethos of “Gee, aren’t we having good, clean, wild fun.”<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Back at the Odense Plaza Hotel, one of the town’s finest, the pay TV includes two channels with sex movies just like in the U.S.\u00a0 In contrast to the U.S., though, these are fully explicit films.\u00a0 We have our choice of a German collection of gang bang scenes, and an unexceptional teacher-student-theme offering from the U.S.<\/p>\n Surfing the non-sexual channels from Holland, Germany, Italy, Britain, the U.S., and Scandinavia we find a BBC-produced feature about Good Vibrations.\u00a0 Nine time zones from home we watch Carol Queen explain in her familiarly matter-of-fact way how GV staff help the curious and the shy find the sex products that will make their life a little richer than before.\u00a0 Meanwhile, on a German channel, a sexy blonde prances around and bends forward to show off her cleavage.\u00a0 She turns out to be promoting a brand of chicken fryers available in the local supermarkets.\u00a0 An ad on a Danish channel dramatizes a middle-class housewife who has forgotten that her husband’s boss is coming for dinner.\u00a0 “Oh, shit,” she exclaims unapologetically in English before she remembers that she can run out and buy the advertised elegant take-out food to save the day.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Driving around Odense the next day, nude statues seem to crop up everywhere.\u00a0 A huge bronze reclining female nude dominates the square in front of Odense’s City Hall, its dark metal rubbed bright and shiny between the figure’s breasts, over her belly and cunt, and between her legs by the children who use the statue as an anatomical slide.\u00a0 A mother calls her three small children off of the statue just before I get my camera out.\u00a0 I think one more time how delightfully different it must be to grow up in a culture where appreciation of nude bodies is so normal that it is taken for granted.<\/p>\n We go to the Odense central train station, where Morgen said I could find Cupido<\/em> on sale.\u00a0 I want to see the sex magazine I have worked for\u00a0 eight years on a newsrack, one regular magazine among all the others.\u00a0 I tell the 60-year-old woman at the newsstand counter that I am looking for a magazine called Cupido; do they carry it?\u00a0 “Yes, of course,” she answers, taking me to where many copies are displayed, right along<\/em> with Elle, Glamour, and Seventeen.\u00a0 We will see Cupido<\/em> in all its unexotic normalcy at virtually every newsstand in Denmark and Norway — this magazine whose photos and stories are far more sexually explicit than anything you will ever see in Spectator.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n We drive to Copenhagen and take an overnight ferry to Oslo where we are generously hosted, dined, and generally shown around town by Cupido<\/em> editor Terje Gammelsrud and, and by Svein Peters, his partner of 33 years.\u00a0 At last I get to see the unpretentious office on a small street in the working class part of town where this delightful addition to the erotic publishing scene is created, month after month.<\/p>\n Showing us the sights, Terje takes us to Oslo’s famous Frognerparken, the largest park in the center of the city, where dozens of monumental nude statues by Norway’s famous sculptor, Gustav Vigeland, provide the backdrop as gaggles of local couples and families enjoy a sunny Sunday afternoon outdoors.\u00a0 Larger than life nude men, women, and children in all sorts of combinations cavorting together, fully alive and unashamed.\u00a0 Penises everywhere.\u00a0 A nude man embraces a woman warmly.\u00a0 Three nude teenage girls laugh together.\u00a0 A nude man swings his young son through the air.\u00a0 Two nude lovers caress.\u00a0 An exceptionally old nude man sits with his arms loving around an equally aged woman.<\/p>\n It is a monument to human physicality — not pointedly sexual, but not desexualized either.\u00a0 This is what Norwegian children see around them, without comment, while they are growing up.\u00a0 This is what they take for granted as the normal way of being fully alive.\u00a0 It is so utterly sensible, yet so far from what is possible in the U.S.\u00a0 The contrast is exhilarating and depressing all at once.<\/p>\n Terje also takes us to a less well known temple to the spiritual vitality and essential eroticism of the human body — the creation of Gustav Vigeland’s brother, Emil.\u00a0 The entrance to the arched temple is watched over by a twinkly old man, 80 years old if he’s a day.\u00a0 The wall bears the Latin inscription, “Quic quid Deus creavit purum est<\/em>.”\u00a0 (Everything created by God is pure.)<\/p>\n \u00a0* * * * *<\/p>\n Terje’s partner Svein, we learn, is quite influential in the Norwegian government — chief press liaison and information officer of the Labor Party which has governed Norway continuously ever since the end of World War II.\u00a0 He shows us around the inner sanctum of the Stortinget, the Norwegian parliament, with quiet pride, introducing us to various people we pass in the halls, including the Stortinget\u2019s vice-president.\u00a0 That Svein is openly gay, and partnered with the editor of one of Norway’s foremost sex magazines, seems to be of no concern or political liability whatsoever.<\/p>\n Now just imagine that sort of thing here:\u00a0 the gay partner of, say, the editor of the Advocate<\/em> being the chief public spokesman for the national Democratic Party.\u00a0 Not bloody likely!\u00a0 And Norway — as Terje, Svein, and past Cupido<\/em> editors Hanne Grasmo and Olav Andre Manum were quick to complain to us, is the most conservative and sexually inhibited of the Scandinavian countries, lagging behind more liberal Denmark and Sweden, not to mention Holland.<\/p>\n When they last visited San Francisco, Hanne and Olav were amazed at the open sexuality here — the experimentation, the variety of sexual subcultures, the openly sexual public entertainment and private parties.\u00a0 And yet we could never have the simple open acceptance of sexuality here that is so much a part of the culture in Scandinavia and Holland.<\/p>\n America, as Terje and Svein put it, seems to embody the best and the worst of the human spirit.\u00a0 On the positive side, they see all the openness of the American frontier — the innovation, experimentation, freedom from the restrictions of convention and tradition.\u00a0 On the negative side, is a basic American rootlessness and antisexual fanaticism, not to mention the omnipresent American imperial arrogance the imposes its perspective on the rest of the world whether the rest of the world likes it or not.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Back in Amsterdam, the sexy Mexx perfume ads have disappeared.\u00a0 Now the billboards are dominated by an ad from United Colors of Benneton showing, without comment, a black horse mounting and fucking a white horse from behind.\u00a0 Helen and I laugh.\u00a0 It\u2019s a funny picture, after all, and people in Europe seem to get the joke, but in America this image would be greeted not with a smile but with a snarl.<\/p>\n We pack our bags and make our way home from where people have been doing things a certain way for a thousand years or so, for better and for worse.\u00a0 Whatever sexual struggles are going on in Europe, they don’t seem to be ripping society apart the way the sexual wars are in the U.S.\u00a0 I wouldn\u2019t want to live forever carrying the weight of all that tradition and convention, but the feeling of grounded sensibility that comes from that long historical context offers a vision of how things could be if we could just get past the sexual hysteria — let bodies be bodies, sex be sex, love be love, and get on with the business of enjoying being alive.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n October 18, 1996<\/p>\n Copyright \u00a9 1996 David Steinberg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" <\/p>\n Just back in the country after spending three weeks in Northern Europe with my partner, Helen. It\u2019s the trip I’ve been postponing for two years — a chance to visit the good folks at Cupido magazine on their home turf in Oslo, Norway, with some vacationing in Amsterdam, Norway, Denmark, and Germany thrown in. 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