Bodil Joensen - Pornography Career

Pornography Career

Launched in the context of a failing business and attempts to remain solvent in order to keep her livestock and home, her career in pornography began at age 17 when she appeared in "light fetish" pornography before establishing herself in the bestiality subgenre at around age 25. She starred in a number of feature films and shorts for companies such as Color Climax Corporation, and for the pornographer Ole Ege, in which she and other actors had sex with various animal species. Between 1969 and 1972 she starred with animals in over 40 movies.

In this genre, Joensen drew special attention worldwide as the Boar Girl, a reputation earned from her live performances with swine, as well as her participation in films shot with pigs on her own breeding centre. The movies she appeared in combined a peculiar blend of the "tolerant contemporary Danish society" image and Scandinavian rustic nostalgia. Her Danish biography comments of her domestic life: "The scene is classic Rabelaisian more than anything else, harkening back to the Middle Ages when people and their animals often did live in the same house."

The award-winning documentary Bodil Joensen - en sommerdag juli 1970 (1970) by Shinkichi Tajiri, shows her living with her animals on her farm during this era, including their care, her affection for them, and her sexual life, entirely to the tune of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony (Pastoral)—an involuntary artistic choice that became necessary when the original soundtrack recordings became unavailable through a gaffe. At the time, she lived with "two rabbits, seven dogs, a dozen pigs, some cats, a guinea pig, a mare and a beautiful black stallion named Dreamlight." Her Danish biographer commented later that she seemed a very open, warm-hearted person, "very at home with nature," and that "when she plays her erotic game with the dog or horse, it is not only a sexual curiosity, it is an erotic play with animals she loves and who are devoted to her." It was the surprising winner of the Grand Prize of the Wet Dream Film Festival in Amsterdam, November 26–29, 1970, where it premiered. Joensen immediately was an underground celebrity and drew attention from other documentary makers as well as tourists towards her expanding farm.