The Swedish Model and its discontents
This law is decidedly UNfeminist. One can’t watch this video and think the Swedes are progressive. It is so regressive! Imagine substituting “sex work” for “acting”. Or any other job. How dehumanizing and infantilizing. Is the answer really to shut women up? Honestly. Does anyone still believe that?
“We want to save you! And if you dont appreciate it you will be punished!”
July 24, 2009 at 5:23 pm
The current Swedish government is conservative, and this isn’t the only thing that’s changed for the worse since they were elected in 2006. Hopefully, feminism and social equality will be back on the agenda after our next election (in 2010).
August 21, 2009 at 2:37 pm
“This law is decidedly UNfeminist”
Oh, thank you for clearing THAT up. That is good to know since the law was introduced buy the social democrats and opposed by the conservative party. Then it was FEMINISTS who fought for the law while CONSERVATIVE MEN -who saw it as their god given right to have sex whenever they wanted- opposed it. I mean what would TEH POOOR MENZ do when there were no sex workers available to satisfy their urgent needs?! Sadly for the men the law passed anyway, and now it is illegal for the POOR MENZ to walk down to red light district and buy what they want.
The purpose of the law was not to save women who couldn’t think for themselves, but to change men’s attitudes towards women’s bodies. Women’s bodies should no longer be objects that men could buy for money.
It is interseting BTW how discussion around sex work seldom evolves about the clients, and why they find it ok to buy consent to sex.
/Christine
Swedish feminist
Ps. I hope that you very soon also let the other side -namely the many, many feminists that supported the law, share their views
September 14, 2009 at 9:54 pm
You– and the woman in this video– are speaking from a very privileged point of view. I don’t believe that all sex workers are ‘victims’– there are women who freely choose it. However, you– and this woman, and the ‘pro-sex’ feminist movement in general– are willing to throw countless more women under the bus for the privileged few to continue to do what they like. The ‘pro-sex’ movement is largely made up of the race- and class- and neurotypically-privileged, who seem to be forgetting that patriarchy is not the only system of oppression and that others have to contend with forces like racism, classism, and poverty, not to mention the powerful force that is mental illness. The majority of sex workers do what they do because sex work is their last option (or they feel it is their last option… which is the same thing). When women have sex because they have no other option, that’s called rape. There are countless numbers of women out there who will never be interviewed who are being raped, and this ridiculously privileged view (that the right to choose sex work outweighs the rights of many more women not to be raped) is perpetuating the institution that enables such rapes to occur. Don’t misunderstand that last sentence; the blame for rape rests entirely with the rapists. But perpetuating an activity, an INSTITUTION, that thrives on the rape of women is completely unethical, and doing so makes one guilty in the same way we’re all guilty when we ignore others’ problems and the privileges that allow us to do so. That is the opposite of feminism.
I’m going to pre-empt a few possible arguments right now. Helping the women who don’t want to be there get out is NOT enough. The system has to be radically changed, and punishing the real criminals (the rapists) is a good first step. Secondly, sex work is in no way comparable to other undesired jobs like flipping burgers and stocking shelves unless… you believe those activities are equivalent to rape. So don’t even go there.
September 14, 2009 at 10:08 pm
I’m going to come clean and say that I do have a personal stake in this matter. When I was younger, a combination of abuse and mental illness drove me to sex work, and I will never fully recover from the experience. I was violated, I was raped– because I went into sex work solely because I thought I HAD to. I’m still angry at myself for thinking this way, though I know it’s not my fault. Mostly, I’m angry at the men who helped me hurt myself– no, who hurt me, period.
And I’m also angry at all of the women out there who don’t realize that their voluntary participation in this system helped make my abuse possible; because if every woman who freely chose sex work chose another career, patronizing a sex worker would then unequivocally have to be a crime. And not a crime like ’soliciting,’ a crime like rape. There would be far fewer men out there committing these rapes if we actually called them such and actually punished them as such. Meaning, the men would go to jail for a long time and the women would be understood as victims and not criminals.
Sweden is taking the first step towards this scenario. It makes me furious that a site that is against rape would bash it.
September 14, 2009 at 10:23 pm
I’m also going to pre-empt the ‘then we would have to outlaw sex, because of the people who might not be consenting.’ This is way off, firstly because I think we can all get by without the sex industry, but we obviously cannot get by without sex. It’s also way off because it refuses to acknowledge the driving principle of the sex industry. This is where it gets philosophical. Reducing women– or female sexuality, if you prefer– to a commodity will always result in those women being mistreated, no matter how much progress we make in protecting sex workers from abusive pimps and clients. Regular sex also doesn’t have the monetary incentive and therefore is not exploitative of the underprivileged in a way that is close to sex work.
Responding to this with examples like ’some women get married and have sex because they’re poor’ are missing the point. I’m not arguing that such a situation isn’t awful, or isn’t sexual assault, or that we don’t need to work on dismantling the forces that create that situation. I’m saying that the sex industry is a much more concrete institution of oppression than poverty or any of the -isms, and there are abundantly clear steps we can take to delegitimize its power. And Sweden is taking a first step.
September 30, 2009 at 3:50 pm
The most basic idea behind the law–the abolition of an institution that is frequently harmful to its subscribers and supports a decidedly anti-feminist view of women’s bodies as chattel (notice that even Jacobsson admits that there is little dialog concerning male sex workers)–is a good one. No woman should ever feel that having sex is her last option to avoid a terrible situation, whether that situation is physical harm, harassment, abuse, or going without basic needs. Whether or not voluntary sex work is good/bad/ugly is an intricate debate, but involuntary sex work at least is definitely A Bad Thing.
However, outlawing sex work entirely is completely the wrong way to go about solving the problem. Instead of targeting those who exploit sex workers, whether they be pimps or clients, it casts a broad net over anyone involved in the business. This means that the woman who is barely surviving via sex work will have her livelihood taken away with no alternatives offered. She may lose her home or children, as in the example described in the video. These women who are in the business of selling sex because it is a last resort are the ones who need the most help transitioning into a life with a non-sex-based occupation, but they’re the ones most likely to be hurt by the law. They end up denied the only way of surviving they could think of, and there’s no one there to offer them counseling, education, or even basic human needs like food and shelter, all of which were the factors that sent them into undesired prostitution in the first place.
In addition, a law like this essentially demonizes those who participate in the sex industry–not only those who wrongfully profit from it, but those who are victims. They are all turned into criminals, or else pitiful people in denial about their situations–views which conveniently also make it harder to get a “real” job, or any social respect. It is not enough to recognize someone as a victim of a crime if one’s treatment of the victim is to go “Oh, that poor thing, how sad,” and do nothing else. Pity is beyond useless, it is degrading.
If sex workers truly are the victims of their institution, how is punishing them going to help anything? Sweden might do well to examine how the laws can be made more effective, as long as by “effective” they mean “actually benefiting society instead of perpetuating stigma and unemployment/homelessness/abusive situations”.