I’ve heard that in Italy, hard-core porn is shown on regular old television. Not soft-core, but hard-core–penetration, money shots, the works.
This prompts a question that I’m sure can be cleared up in Great Debates, but I want to make sure it is true before I ask. Can anybody verify this? Is it on all day? XXX porn? Broadcast over the airwaves, or just cable?
Curiously yours,
js_I swear I’m not moving to Italy because of this_africanus
I don’t know if it is to any importance that it is Italian TV.
When I lived in Finland 2001/02 there used to be a local TV station showing hardcore porn at night.
I don’t know if it was cable TV or terrestial. Probably cable, as we had about 12 different channels, including the French, German and British international stations (TV5, DW-TV and BBCworld).
You betcher bottom dollar.
When I was on an aircraft carrier floating in the Mediterranean, we would pick up foreign TV stations on our satellite dishes. When we floated near Italy, we would pick up Italian stations. More than one of them would show hardcore porn on a prime time station. But I remember it being only at night.
From what I remember, they were of a higher quality than our American porn. I couldn’t understand the Italian, but the acting seemed good. The storylines seemed deep, and the production values were better. It would be put on par with our daytime soap operas.
I spent a summer in Florence a few years ago, in a pensione (like a small hotel). I didn’t see any hardcore porn, but every night several channels began to play incessant commercials for phone sex lines with naked women lying around seductively and talking dirty (I assume – my Italian is pretty poor). These clocs would last for probably about six hours. (No, I didn’t sit there staring all night – we did a lot of clubbing and bar-hopping and whether I got home at 10 or 4:30, the phone sex ads would be on.) Occasionally these would be interspersed with what were clearly clips from porn films (with the phone-sex number superimposed on the screen), but my vague recollection is that these were exclusively lesbian scenes and that any penetration was pixellated.
–Cliffy
I can’t speak for Italy. But, I was in France some years ago. It was about 1:30am when I arrived at the hotel. I flipped on the TV and was greeted with hard-core porn.
When I’ve travelled in Italy (from Milan down to Sorrento), I’ve never seen hard-core porn on TV. However, none of the hotels I’ve stayed at had cable/satellite TV, to my recollection–only terrestrial TV.
So I suppose it’s possible there might be a hard-core channel or two on satellite, but I have yet to see one.
FWIW, it’s going to depend on where you are.
I spent a semester living near Rome, and some of my friends and I would turn on the tv at odd hours and flip the channels just to see if we could find anything “interesting”. The only skin we ever saw was in an unedited showing of The Terminator. Which, by the way, had the worst dubbing job in the history of cinema – whoever dubbed Ahhnold’s voice sounded like a whiney drag queen.
When we visited other cities, though, the tv broadcasts were somewhat more provocative, though I never saw anything hardcore. It was interesting, though, to see full-frontal nudity in movie previews.
I recall hearing a story once that someone started a 24-hour hardcore porn channel in Italy. It was shut down after a few weeks because of protests from citizens’ groups, but had managed to get the highest ratings of all the stations at the same time. Any truth to this?
Can’t speak for Italy, but I can confirm the hardcore porn on French network TV. Sunday night, freshly arrived at a bad hotel from the Eurostar, switched on the TV, hello matron!
And yet, the old Ninja Turtles cartoon had to be heavily edited for European release, because it showed robots being hit with sticks. 
Culture clashes…gotta love 'em.
When I did a stint in Kuwait for a few months, we had a channel feed from Athens, Greece. Dutifully, every midnight Athens time (which was 3:AM for us), hardcore American porn was on.
The Comm squadron never did figure out why the telephone switchboard lit up at that time every night.
Tripler
Aaaaah, free porn.
Yes, late night, La Sicilia.
So are you saying that scenes of violence are acceptable, and should NOT have been edited, but scenes of sex are not acceptable, and should have been edited?
Culture clash indeed, even in the same culture!
Let’s not do this here.
Hungary has hardcore porn on your basic cable package, and pretty much everyone (that I knew, at least) with a TV has some form of cable, as the terrestrial stations are fairly lame. In my district it was the Travel Channel which made the switch at 11 pm over to Private Gold. All the porn was in English, but Private is a pretty famous Swedish company, and most of the actresses seem to be either Hungarian or Czech. Occassionally, a Scandi, Brit or Italian would get thrown in. It’s far higher quality than American porn. The actresses are all top-notch, model-quality girls. But after the first twenty or thirty times you see it, you don’t even blink when you channel surf past some sweaty DP action.
As for normal terrestrial TV, on weekends there’s often some soft-core action going on, but you can find that everywhere in Europe.
No, I’m saying that it’s funny how things considered “obscene” in one culture wouldn’t cause a batted eyelash in another. :rolleyes:
And, personally, I don’t have a problem with graphic sex or violence being in broadcast TV. They could schedule “Caligula” opposite “Faces of Death” during Prime Time, for all I care. I’m cool with it.
I can’t testify that they show porn late night in Europe. However, once upon a time, a long time ago(early '90’s), I had sattelite TV(the big huge dishes, not the little ones you see nowadays. ) On those big dishes, you would see the strangest stuff on the fringe sattelites. Anway, one time I saw a European porn movie. I can’t remember whether it was dubbed or sub-titled(probably dubbed, as I can’t imagine sub-titled sex noises.) The plot, acting and production values were 10x better than American porn movies.
There were a few not-too-brief full frontal nude shots (bush and all) in the preview for Scarlet Diva, a preview which I saw in theatre in the good ol’ U.S. of A. 
(This was the first time I have ever used a smilie, but when you get a good bush shot when you weren’t expecting a bush shot I think a smilie is warranted. )
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