Scandinavian Sex Poem by gershon hepner

For Eisenhower, lack of moderation
discernible on every front
was typical not for our chosen nation,
but Scandinavia, where the c-t,
before we found best sex was epiglottic,
was once thought to be more hot and torrid,
inspiring, and arousing and erotic
than over here, where sex is horrid.

More comparable to herring that is pickled
than to a treasure that’s a chasm
it’s where as lot of hammers now are sickled
if they do not provide orgasm,
in Scandinavia like the USA,
and so today, which is Thanksgiving,
since I am feeling somewhat perky,
I’ll thank the Pilgrim Fathers that I’m living
with someone who is not a turkey.


Despite the come-on of its irresistible title, the show here called “Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia? ” turns out to be not quite as advertised. It’s as erotic as pickled herring. Two 30-something men looked crestfallen recently at the sight of so many documents and so much high-minded art. Noticing a lone naked young woman in a video across the room, they positioned themselves discreetly before it, full of hope, then realized it was a German documentary about the making of a Playboy photo shoot, meant to deflate all erotic illusions… But I digress. While Eisenhower was taking his swipe at Scandinavia, Federico Fellini was casting Anita Ekberg as the wet wench in the Trevi Fountain in “La Dolce Vita.” Even Bob Hope, in the mid-1960s, flirted with Scandinavian free love. In “I’ll Take Sweden” the eternally square Hope played a single father who brings his daughter (Tuesday Weld) on a trip to Europe to separate her from her boyfriend (Frankie Avalon) , only to decide that marriage is better than time in swinging Sweden. Too bad the show doesn’t slum a bit in sexploitation films like “The Seduction of Inga, ” “Maid in Sweden” and “My Swedish Cousins, ” which flooded the American marketplace, alongside pornographic movies, like “The Language of Love, ” presenting themselves as sex educational. Now dimly recalled for the censorship ruckus caused by its full-frontal male nudity, “I Am Curious (Yellow) ” became the ultimate Scandinavian sex film. Its naked couplings, involving notably ordinary lovers, were punctuated by ponderous disquisitions on Swedish labor law, interviews with Olaf Palme, the Swedish labor minister, and a section with the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Norman Mailer championed it as “one of the most important pictures.” There you go. Even “Bonanza” was sexier, in retrospect… But already by the late 1970s, as Wencke Mühleisen, who teaches women’s studies at the University of Oslo, pointed out, “feminism in Norway turned against sexuality and toward the family, the winning political line cooperating with the state in looking for equality laws that meant a gradual cleansing of sexual promiscuity.” Culture generally became more globalized in the following years, along with patterns of social behavior, meaning that “while it was normal to see women here in the ’70s on the beach without a bikini top, now it is very seldom, ” Ms. Mühleisen added. “The commercial ideal body has replaced the desexualized healthy body.” Scandinavian parents today think twice about bathing nude with their children. And at the same time the role of the blue-eyed blond in the sexual pantheon of pornographic commerce has been diluted by the Web and multiculturalism. Which is to say that Scandinavia has become more like everywhere else. As further proof there has been a fuss here lately over the influx of Nigerian prostitutes. They fill the main street in Oslo at night. Sexual freedom today is bound up with immigration and nationalism, the big issues across Europe. “Suddenly we are very proud of our native prostitutes, ” Ms. Mühleisen said, shaking her head. “They’re supposedly cleaner, more law-abiding, they stay out of the tourist center in Oslo. So a whole new discussion about good Norwegian sexuality — which, this being Scandinavia, includes equal rights for women — has arisen in contrast to bad sexuality, which is now the sexuality of the ‘other.’ ”


11/27/08