[The Pro Circuit] Porn in Germany
One of the enduringly strange things about the relationship between the United States and Germany is the urban-legend status of German porn. The most dramatic expression of this misperception comes in 1999’s South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, in which the fart-joke-loving boys stumble upon a German sheisse (shit) video online; hilarity ensues. South Park’s lampooning of German sexual proclivities does not exist in a vacuum; talk to otherwise reasonable people and they’ll say things like “Germans are into some weird porn” and “Isn’t German porn all about shit?”
How this myth began I’ll never know, but if I think about it too long I start making weird Freudian speculations. But twice per year at my teaching gig at San Francisco Sex Information I end up watching a lot of porn (a lot of porn), as part of a curriculum meant to create in students a passing familiarity with the variety of pornographic representation. Much of it falls well outside the mainstream, if that’s because it’s FTM porn, or three quarts’ worth of spirited urolagnia or some weird ball-hammering sequence from ’70s leather porn. Let’s just say this program has included a certain amount of pretty freaky stuff over the years, and as far as I can tell none the truly odd things have ever been German.
Now don’t get me wrong; Germans are, in fact, into some weird porn. Every nationality is into some weird porn, but in particular if you want to gape in awe at freaky German erotic creativity, you should go no further than the videos and magazines published by German company Marquis, which includes inflatable boobs and latex-rubber contraptions of a complexity that absolutely boggles any reasonable mind. Marquis auteur Peter W. Czernich, founder of the company and before that of the legendary fetish magazine O, thrives on the strange, beautiful, futuristic, and artistically mind-tweaking. So do many other artists in the thriving German fetish arts scene, and many German and German-speaking practitioners of BDSM. The German porn that makes it to the U.S. tends to be expressionistic in much the same way you’d expect from a country that gave the world Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. But dude . . .. that’s hardly sheisse porn.
In fact, porn available in Germany by all accounts is fairly straightforward and familiar from an American perspective. Laws against making porn reportedly keep a lot of hardcore production companies from operating there (Czernich’s work does not include intercourse). From what I understand, pretty typical European porn (including hardcore sex) is pretty freely available in Germany.
But on November 5, a new German law went in to effect that, according to a story in XBiz, criminalizes porn with “adult actors who show a youthful appearance.” Hustler Europe, a property of sleaze purveyor and free-speech crusader Larry Flynt, takes this kind of personally, since one of Hustler’s best-selling properties is the Barely Legal series, in which 18-23-year-old actresses (or 25-year-old, or 28-year-old with lots of makeup) wear pigtails and schoolgirl outfits, suck lollipops, and generally cavort like college-age girls who have not yet gotten the memo that it’s time to give up childhood things, get obsessed with Derrida, queer politics and tequila. The law, 184c of the Criminal Code, is being challenged under a complaint from Hustler Europe that says it violates constitutionally protected freedoms of opinion, occupation and property.
This is essentially the same legal prohibition that, in the United States, was struck down by the US Supreme Court. In this country, it’s perfectly legal, if barely so, for an adult woman to evince a youthful appearance for the purposes of encouraging turgidity in porn consumers; essentially, to outlaw such a thing would be an abridgement of the 1st Amendment’s free speech provisions. It doesn’t matter what age I am; if I want to act younger (and I often do — big fan of Jean Claude Van Damme movies, for instance) I’m engaging in protected expression.
You might think the German legal system, essentially the West German system with its civil rights modeled on the U.S. system in the years following World War II, would have the same attitude. But when it comes to constitutional speech protections, the problem is that interpreting those laws falls to the courts. The opinions of the courts change frequently, and German courts are far from guaranteed to have the same attitude as the 2002-era SCOTUS. Who even knows if a similar case in the US would render the same verdict today?
In Germany, it’s anybody’s guess at the moment what the outcome of the case will be. But I, for one, will find it fascinating to see if Larry Flynt, who’s done plenty for free speech in the adult industry in the U.S., can score one for German porn.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, 11 November 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Friday, 21 November 2008 at 4:28 am TobyR wrote:
You might think that Germany has civil rights modeled on the US, but this is not actually the case.
Indeed, there is no constitutional protection for Freedom of Speech, in the US sense, in Germany.
Article 5 of the German Basic Law protects “Freedom of Opinion”, but even that is qualified by several restrictions: “General laws, protection for youths and the right to personal honor” can all be used to restrict it.
Essentially, Article 5 is worthless. It’s kind of a “Freedom of speech as long as you play nice and do nothing offensive” thing. That’s why I don’t think Hustler stands much of a chance here, although I am certainly cheering for them.