Danish Tourism Board: You’ll Love Our Culture of Casual, Unprotected Sex

Denmark is apparently suffering a bit of a tourism downturn.  If I want to visit a winter wonderland of willowy, morally progressive blondes riding polar bears through rivers of vodka, I’ll visit Sweden.  If I want to visit the cored-out, decaying infrastructure of decades of Soviet mismanagement, I’ll visit Russia.  If I want to visit Finland, I’ll just do it, I guess.  And none of that matters because I don’t have any money anyway.  You see how this begins to look problematic for Denmark?

So their tourism folks started a campaign all the kids could get behind: a viral video that all but promises casual sex with attractive people to any old visitor of Denmark!  For whatever reason, though, not all Danes are pleased with this depiction of their people.  Video after the jump.  

In the video, a woman named Karen (tall, blonde, Nordic accent, agreeable facial symmetry) bashfully seeks the father of her infant son.  The guy was a tourist (just like you could be!), whom she met in a bar (you love bars!).  She does not know your name (you achieved sexual intimacy without even the most basic personal connection!), but she knows the baby is yours because she has not slept with any men since that fateful night (because you were different from all the other guys!).  The clip was supposed to be a “real” YouTube solicitation of the boy’s father, but it was outed as a fake ad pretty quickly, if you can imagine that.  Nonetheless, a member of the ad agency that produced the spot for Denmark’s tourism board defended the ad,

“It is the most successful viral advertising ever. We have cut through the media clutter. It has cost us the same as a 30 second commercial, aired a few times on TV2″ says Peter Helstrup from advertising agency Grey that has created the campaign.

But commenters on that article went more for this tack:

“Is this really how we want people to know Denmark? ‘I decided to show you what ‘hygge’ is all about so we went back to my place and had sex’? I’m ashamed!”

Indeed, the ad does play this hygge thing up, like it is some kind of unique and celebrated Danish tradition of unprotected, anonymous sex with visiting foreigners.  Whereas in fact, according to the Danish tourism page:

“Hygge is essentially a phenomenon of overabundance,” according to newspaper columnist Anne Brockenhuus-Schack. “You can’t hygge yourself very much if you’re cold and hungry.”

Other pundits profess that hygge is born of the climate: The Danish winter is notoriously long and dark, but summer nights can be remarkably bright and balmy. Anthropologist Henny Harald Hansen subscribes to this theory of hygge.

“It’s a term that has grown out of our cold and darkness, when we come together around a source of heat. Our ancestors surely didn’t decide to settle here in December!” she writes.

Certainly, Danish life is far more centered around home and hearth than in warm, southern lands. Try making hygge on a Mediterranean marble floor!

A critical ingredient in hygge is familiarity. This doesn’t suggest intimacy, however. That’s an entirely different word: råhygge, or literally “raw hygge.”

So it’s… not sex, but… usually leads to sex?  Any Danes care to weigh in?

Source: Adland.