A Danish travel agency has launched a feature to allow elderly parents to help pay for their unmarried, childless offspring to go on a sex holiday, in the hope they will return partnered up and pregnant.
Denmark has the lowest fertility rate in the Scandinavian region, and one of the lowest in the world – significantly less native Danes are born every year than die, and the official population of the nation only continues to grow thanks to mass migration. This is a widely understood but hardly discussed problem in Europe, yet a new advert for Thomas Cook owned holiday company Spies has humorously laid the problem out for all to see, by appealing to women who want to become grandmothers.
Opening to dramatic music, images of a woman writhing in pleasure and vistas of historic Copenhagen, the voice over states: “The Danish welfare system is under pressure. There are still not enough babies being born, despite a little progress, and this concerns us all.
“But those who suffer the most are perhaps the mothers who will never experience having a grandchild. You were there when your son learned how to walk. You were there when he learned to ride a bike. You were there when he learned how to read. But when it comes to making grandchildren, it might be a bit awkward to help out…”
The promotional then goes on to explain that people are more likely to have sex during holidays in hot countries than cold ones, and the kinds of activities partaken in during package holidays sold by the company are liable to encourage romantic sentiment. Against images of people engaging in sport and exercise on holiday, the voice-over adds detail: “exercise with your partner increases the sex drive even further because the brain released endorphins… the workout also increases the blood supply to the sexual organs, all things that increase the sex drive thus chances of conception”.
To encourage young people to go on these holidays, the company website now features a tool which allows desperate parents to financially contribute towards the cost of the holiday. As a further incentive, the company will give any holiday funded by mum a 1,000 kronor discount, and leave a free “activity package” in the hotel room consisting of champagne, massage oil, and protein bars.
Although the advert is decidedly tongue in cheek, Denmark seems fairly unique among European countries for waking up to its demographic crisis, with young people now thinking – perhaps for the first time in decades – about the importance of starting a family young. Breitbart London reported last year on a new initiative in Danish schools to reverse the side-effect of school sex education, which has taught generations of Europeans how not to have children.
The new campaign would not just teach pupils about safe sex – but also about human fertility. Of the campaign, a fertility clinic chief said: “Up until now, our biological expiration date has been overlooked in our zeal to avoid having children when we don’t want to have them.
“On average in Denmark, we began to establish a family when we are around 30 years old. By then half of our reproduction capabilities have disappeared and that means that some people have too short of a time span to have children or have the amount of children they’d like to have”.
Demographic collapse is changing the face of Europe faster perhaps than any other factor. When politicians speak of ageing populations and the need to import tens of thousands of migrants from the third world to pay the pension bill, this is little more than a polite way of saying Western adults have lost the taste for making children together. In Germany, for every two adults who die only 1.38 children are born to replace them. In Britain, it’s 1.9 – and of those migrant mothers account for almost a quarter of all newborns, hastening demographic change.
Whether this campaign, which follows another last year featuring a competition to win three years worth of baby supplies and another holiday if you could prove you fell pregnant while on a Spies trip, will be able to turn the Danish demographic tide is yet to be seen.
Watch: Spies Holidays ‘Do it For Denmark!’ Campaign
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