In The Netherlands, you can pretty much see softcore porn on TV every evening. Especially RTL5, SBS6 and Veronica seem to be the networks that air at least a couple of “erotic thrillers” or somesuch per week. In addition, there’s plenty of “Behind the scenes of a porn movie” type documentaries, which are all American, oddly enough.
There do seem to be some rules with regards to what you can and cannot show.
Full frontal nudity, male and female: yes.
Genitalia: yes (although a “spread” shot of a woman is rare).
Aroused genitalia: no (unless it’s a really quick beaver shot, apparently - erect penii are very rare).
Penetration: no.
Oral sex: I have seen male-to-female-oral sex in some detail. Never the other way 'round.
Gay sex: lesbians yes, gay guys no. Gee, looks like they’re catering to the hetero male, huh?
In the mid-90’s, there was a whole slew of programs showing more and more (Sex voor de Büch will ring a bell with Dutch posters), upon which several stations (and most of them belong to just 2 media groups) agreed that they would take it down a notch.
So, although there are no legal restrictions that stop a station from showing hardcore porn on Dutch TV, both morality (yes, really) and the mentioned gentleman’s agreement mean that at the very most, you see softcore stuff.
Then again, us Dutchmen only need to ride our bikes to the Red Light District to get the hardcore stuff for a modest price, so who needs TV.
Damn distracting near highways, lemme tell you. The joke here is a play on words in Dutch: “billboard” is an accepted term, we just use it in every day Dutch. But, the Dutch word “bil” (plural “billen”) means “bun”, or “cheek”, ifyaknowwhatImean. So, it’s a board with buns on it.
I was all over Spain during the month of May, and this was my exact experience as well. I don’t remember the time exactly, but on the rare occasions where I flipped through the channels in our various hotel rooms, at least one hardcore porn could be found. No bondage, but certainly full, un-pixelated nudity, erect penetrating cocks, cunnilingus, etc. So there’s another data point.
I’ve seen ads for both sex toys (pictured, but not in use) and brothels in the Luzern train station.
I remember seeing explicit television ads at 1 am or so, but that was years ago. Since we got Netflix I spend less time flipping through the channels on broadcast tv.
one of my coworkers had to visit our sister plant in Hungary and according to him they had some really wild stuff on late night programming. It has been a few years but one night there was something about Chickens as sex toys.
Since this 20 year old thread has been bumped, back in 2006 I was flipping through the channels at a hotel in Germany and stumbled onto a channel showing actual hardcore porn. It wasn’t an actual broadcast or even a cable channel, though. It seemed like a preview of a pay-per-view channel the hotel was offering – if you watched for more than 30 seconds or so you got a screen saying you needed to pay to keep watching.
