The Nordic Model

A Norwegian chap wrote to me this week, requesting details of my sessions and help with his transport arrangements, which I gave with typical ill grace. (“It’s all on my website. You know, the website where you found my email address. And do I look like a search engine to you?”) But he also asked whether spanking sessions were classified as prostitution in the UK, which gave me pause. I don’t know, I said. I’ll ask my colleagues. Then I hit a search engine myself.

 

Prostitution isn’t illegal in the UK, so in a sense it doesn’t much matter whether my services count as prostitution or not. Soliciting, pimping, kerb crawling, keeping a brothel, all illegal, but the actual act of exchanging sexual services for payment, fine. What I do is much more illegal, as I am hurting people, committing GBH, in fact: you cannot consent to being hurt in the UK, at least not for sexual gratification. You can choose to hurt people or be hurt in boxing matches or martial arts, if you’re one of those freaky athletic weirdos I’ve heard about. But if your hobby is bending over for the cane, or cracking a cane against meaty buttocks, you’re breaking the law. Of course, I’d have to be grassed up first, and the fact I write about my profession every week in this illustrious periodical suggests I’m not unduly worried. I assume the officers of the law have sufficient sense, combined with overloaded in-trays, to ignore my antics.

 

In Norway, however, visiting someone for sexual services, whether at home or abroad, is punishable by up to one year in prison. My potential punter would be risking jail time to see me. This is the famous “Nordic model” of prostitution, which assumes prostitutes are victims and their clients evil, so while it’s not illegal to sell sex, it is illegal to buy it. Unfortunately this makes zero sense. Imagine suggesting we don’t make it illegal to be a musician, we just criminalise people who download songs, buy CDs and go to gigs. The musicians are still going to suffer, I wager.

 

Unfortunately a great many feminists and lefties believe the Nordic model should be introduced in the UK, as the best, kindest way to stamp out prostitution, for they believe trading in women’s flesh is sickening, immoral and always exploitative. I disagree. But morals aside, the Nordic model has unfortunate practical consequences. You can’t stamp out prostitution, and when you try you merely send the practise underground, which tends to make women less safe. Cynthia Payne said it best: men like sex, women like money, and while that remains the case, the two will find some way to make the sexual act transactional. Good luck to them, say I.

 

(I am aware that many, many sex workers are male, and transgender, although the Norwegians don’t seem to be. It doesn’t fit into that men = evil, women = victims narrative they’re so keen to peddle).

 

I wrote a short reassuring version of that back to my Norwegian, but I haven’t heard back. Perhaps I didn’t reassure enough. In truth, he will be breaking the law if he visits me, both the punitive law of his own country and the more liberal law of mine. Which seems a shame. If a Norwegian wants to dress as a schoolboy and present his buttocks for a cane, a cane wielded by a happy, eager, experienced, disciplinarian, and pay her handsomely for her time and trouble, whose earthly business is it but theirs?