Bodil Joensen - Early Life

Early Life

The daughter of a devout Christian mother and an absentee military father, Joensen grew up in the Copenhagen suburb of Hundige. Her mother was often physically abusive, sometimes violently so, and would whip her. At the age of 12, she was possibly raped by a stranger in a railway station — her Danish biography and 1980s interview say that they "just talked" or that she was "nearly raped", but her mother believed she had been actually raped. On returning home to tell her mother, she was beaten and blamed for the incident. Seeking a means to retaliate, she vowed to her mother that when she grew up she would have sex with boars, commenting in interview that her mother was "so shocked, she thought I was allied to the Devil". Turning to animals for affection, her dog became her best friend, companion and lover, and she wore a locket with his picture for the rest of her life.

Initially, after leaving home at 15, Joensen worked on a farm in a conservative area of Denmark. Her landlord, a farmer called Nielsen, commented, "She was passionate about animals", adding that she was entranced by the sight of animals breeding, an activity she stated she found "wonderful" to help with. She later left to set up her own breeding farm, "Insemination Central", which became popular for her ability to handle aggressive animals such as boar, and was then ruined by country gossip, spread principally by farmers' wives who were unhappy at the prospect of their husbands working with a young single girl on farm business. Friends commented that she "was never given much of a chance" by such people. She commented later that "9 out of 10 men wanted to fuck me, and their wives hated me."