Present Imperfect

Svømme, you bastards! | September 30, 2004

So, I’m eating my lunch and reading an NYT article about Danish sperm banks, and one paragraph positively leaps out at me as yet another reason to move to Copenhagen:

In Denmark, sperm banking has become a powerhouse industry for several reasons: it has a high success rate in producing offspring; its culture, which is famously secular and sexually liberal, holds an uncomplicated view of sperm donation; and its laws continue to protect a donor’s anonymity.

Oh, how I long to live in a country that is famously secular and sexually liberal! Plus, everyone speaks three languages! And all that cheese!

Then I get to this part: “Denmark, despite its sexual permissiveness, has a law barring unmarried women from buying sperm from a doctor.”

Personally, I don’t get the turkey-baster method of offspring procurement when there are millions of orphaned children in the world, but dammit, if you want a freeze-dried Thor, you should be able to get one.

Of course, even an arctic, Thor-free, single-girl environment beats the heck out of a country whose slack-jawed, right-wing, war-mongering president is described as having the “moral clarity of an old-fashioned biblical prophet” in a recent documentary.

But I digress. Speaking of Danish things, how about “Festen” on the West End? The movie is one of my all-time favorites. I just bought it on DVD, in fact. Anyway, who doesn’t love a stirring tale of incest and suicide?!