Is Buying OnlyFans Content Now Illegal in Sweden?
Swedish authorities voted to criminalize the purchase or procurement of online sex acts, in a move targeting customers of webcam platforms and sites like OnlyFans.
Swedish authorities have voted to criminalize the purchase of remote sexual services—things like paying someone for pictures and videos through platforms such as OnlyFans or paying someone for a live erotic webcam show.
"Sweden says this model 'decriminalises the seller.' But when you criminalise the buyer, you destroy the income, safety, and autonomy of the person selling," the European Sex Workers Rights' Alliance (ESWA) posted on X. "The same thing happens online. This will push workers further into the shadows, not protect them."
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New Frontiers for the Nordic Model
Sweden is the originator of the Nordic Model of sex work regulation (which is also sometimes called the Swedish Model). In this scheme, sex customers are criminalized but folks selling sex are not. The Nordic Model operates under the notion that all prostitution is exploitation, anyone being paid for sex is a victim, and anyone paying for sex is a perpetrator of sexual abuse.
Now, Sweden is applying these same ideas to online sex work. Under a proposal adopted by the Swedish Parliament on May 20, working for an online sex business (such as a webcamming platform) or selling sexy pics directly to online customers will still be legal. But patronizing such businesses and individuals will not.
The new scheme rechristens the crime of purchasing sexual services to purchasing a sexual act and expands the prohibition against it to include acts carried out remotely and without physical contact.
In analyzing the new proposal, authorities make a distinction between purchasing pornography generally and purchasing online sexual content or performances in a way that induces someone to undertake or tolerate a sex act or allows the buyer to participate. So the new plan would not strictly ban the sale of pornographic images or videos in Sweden. But it's unclear where and how exactly lines would be drawn and seems destined to have the most disruptive effect on the direct-to-consumer sales model that tends to benefit individual sex workers rather than porn or tech companies.
The new plan also covers procuring, which is currently illegal if there is physical contact between buyer and provider. This, too, will now include acts carried out remotely—and could render any website or entity that brokers the provision of erotic webcam shows or direct-to-consumer porn sales guilty of the crime of procuring a sex act.
Ignoring Sex Workers and Human Rights Groups
"Let us be clear: this law is not protection. It is repression," say the ESWA and the sex-worker rights group Red Umbrella Sweden in a statement, pointing out all the human rights groups and other Nordic Model opponents that lawmakers ignored:
Despite receiving overwhelming opposition from civil society, academic experts, sex workers, the Swedish government has once again demonstrated its unwillingness to listen. Swedish Parliament has ignored the 1,600 civil rights organisations (including Human Rights Watch (HRW), European Digital Rights (EDRi), Access Now, and several feminist and women's rights organisations), academic researchers, digital rights advocates and legal scholars and individual supporters - many of them Swedes - who signed our joint statement calling for the rejection of this proposal. In doing so, Swedish lawmakers have chosen to ignore decades of research, including recommendations from the World Health Organisation (WHO), Amnesty International, UNAIDS, and countless peer-reviewed scientific studies, which have consistently shown that the so-called "Swedish model" of client criminalisation deeply harms sex workers, drives the industry underground, increases stigma and reduces access to health, safety and justice.
Swedish lawmakers also ignored sex workers, with one—the Left Party's Gudrun Nordborg—suggesting that emails from sex workers opposed to the bill were possibly fraudulent, since they were "too articulate to be written by sex workers."
"The debate showed that the Swedish Parliament did not just ignore research, it actively rejected the idea that sex workers are capable of knowing what's best for themselves," say ESWA and Red Umbrella Sweden in their statement:
In doing so, Sweden has failed not only its sex workers, but its democratic ideals. We are familiar with such tactics. No matter how we speak, our voices are used against us. When we speak simply, we are dismissed as uneducated or uninformed. When we speak with clarity and eloquence, we are accused of being pimps. In both cases, the goal is the same: to silence us.
And while Sweden might not have the First Amendment, "the proposal introduces inconsistencies with Sweden's own Freedom of Expression Act," as ESWA suggested in April. "Sweden's constitutional protection of free speech and media is a cornerstone of its democratic identity. Expanding criminal law into this space, without careful legal distinction, proportionality and protection for lawful expression, undermines that foundation. If sex workers and digital creators can be criminalised for engaging in or facilitating constitutionally protected expression, no one's rights are safe in Sweden."
Repression, Not Protection
Spreading the Nordic Model of prostitution regulation to other forms of sex work is bad news, and not just for people in Sweden. Remember, this is the country that started the Nordic Model idea, and it's a model now in place in countries throughout Europe and starting to spread to the United States. It seems unlikely that expanding its provisions to cover online and remote sex work is a policy that will stay confined to Sweden. And wherever it spreads, it's likely to harm women.
The new law "places Sweden among countries willing to sacrifice human rights in the name of paternalistic ideology that has proven to be harmful time and again," said ESWA on X.
Whether applied only to in-person acts or to online services too, criminalizing sex work customers is often pushed by people who often claim they're helping and protecting sex workers and, therefore, helping and protecting women. But taking away sex workers' livelihoods or driving their work underground doesn't seem terribly helpful or protective. At best, it will force women who willingly choose sex work to find a new occupation—something they clearly don't want to or can't do, or else they would already be doing it.
At worst, it will leave many sex workers more vulnerable to exploitation, by forcing them to work in a black market where they have less power and less control. This may mean more dangerous working conditions, having to put up with more demanding or less scrupulous customers, having to rely on pimps to find work, and so on. It may mean having to give up the relative safety of selling sexuality from behind a computer or phone screen to interacting in person with customers and encountering more risk.
It seems Sweden's government is intent on ignoring the actual needs and wants of sex workers in favor of a savior fantasy in which all sex workers, no matter how independently and safely they're working, are in need of rescue. Or perhaps protection is just a pretense for banning services some find distasteful or offensive—after all, Nordic Model campaigners often suggest that prostitution doesn't just harm individuals in it but that it's bad for "society" or for women more generally.
Expanding prostitution laws to cover online sex work could also be a pretense for increasing surveillance of the digital sphere. "Under the guise of protecting vulnerable individuals, this proposal risks intensifying state surveillance, expanding unaccountable policing of digital platforms, and reinforcing a legal regime that systematically erases the consent, autonomy and voices of sex workers themselves," said ESWA in its April statement.
There are so many practical reasons to oppose expanding the Nordic Model to remote sex work that it almost seems silly to lodge a more philosophical complaint. But I can't resist pointing out how offensive all of this is from a feminist standpoint. Tthe Nordic Model, at its core, suggests women's assessments about their own lives can't be trusted and likens them, legally speaking, to the status of children. It essentially says, sure, some women say they're happy doing sex work, or at least that they prefer it to any alternatives, but the state knows better than them. And the state says women who do any form of sex work are victims, whether these women agree or not.
To subscribe to this theory, you have to believe that men are morally culpable for their actions and should be held legally responsible when they do things the state disapproves of, like engaging in any form of sex work, but women are not morally culpable for participating in the same activity. It renders women as legally equivalent to minors, unable to give consent. There is nothing feminist or liberating about that, no matter how many campaigners for Nordic Model laws say otherwise.
This is just another way of controlling women's bodies, sexuality, and economic liberty, wrapped up in progressive rather than conservative language.
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