Is Buying OnlyFans Content Now Illegal in Sweden?
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.”
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 worke
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