The Swedish government wants to make paying for sexual services online a criminal offense. The law could have global implications for online services and put creators at risk, warns Yigit Aydin. He fights for the rights of sex workers on behalf of the association ESWA.
Gonna have an unpopular take here, but pornography and sex work under our current system shouldn’t be celebrated as a “bastion of freedom”, given how it’s selling access to one’s body and sexuality as a product. Even if they agree to it consensually, the choice happens in a world where money decides what people can or can’t do, if one is going to survive or not. This makes the concept of “real consent” complicated, because the need of money, much like the need of food or essential goods can force people into doings they wouldn’t freely choose if survival wasn’t on the line.
Given this, one could definitely consider it commodified rape - it’s not necessarily violent like forced rape, but it’s still shaped by money, power, and pressure in a system where people’s bodies get turned into things to be bought.
The law does suck ass and shouldn’t be supported though, the issue stems with a system where our survival depends on money (with selling your body being a way to get by) and not individual morals. I fully agree with Yidit when he says that it’ll just cause sex work to become more dangerous by moving it underground.
I wholeheartedly agree. Especially with the problems of objectification of people, in particular women, having gotten worse again, we should be very careful to assume everything involving a person of legal age to undress for someone else without direct physical threat to be automatically good or liberating.
On the contrary being able to maintain privacy over your body can be an expression of much more freedom as you liberated yourself from objectification.
Irrespective of that these aren’t issues that can be tackled through laws like this. Better legal avenues would be banning of sexualized ads, banning of advertisment for cosmetics, cosmetic surgery and the like to minors and the like.
Gonna have an unpopular take here, but pornography and sex work under our current system shouldn’t be celebrated as a “bastion of freedom”, given how it’s selling access to one’s body and sexuality as a product. Even if they agree to it consensually, the choice happens in a world where money decides what people can or can’t do, if one is going to survive or not. This makes the concept of “real consent” complicated, because the need of money, much like the need of food or essential goods can force people into doings they wouldn’t freely choose if survival wasn’t on the line.
Given this, one could definitely consider it commodified rape - it’s not necessarily violent like forced rape, but it’s still shaped by money, power, and pressure in a system where people’s bodies get turned into things to be bought.
The law does suck ass and shouldn’t be supported though, the issue stems with a system where our survival depends on money (with selling your body being a way to get by) and not individual morals. I fully agree with Yidit when he says that it’ll just cause sex work to become more dangerous by moving it underground.
I wholeheartedly agree. Especially with the problems of objectification of people, in particular women, having gotten worse again, we should be very careful to assume everything involving a person of legal age to undress for someone else without direct physical threat to be automatically good or liberating.
On the contrary being able to maintain privacy over your body can be an expression of much more freedom as you liberated yourself from objectification.
Irrespective of that these aren’t issues that can be tackled through laws like this. Better legal avenues would be banning of sexualized ads, banning of advertisment for cosmetics, cosmetic surgery and the like to minors and the like.