Sweden's sex law tough on johnsGOTEBORG, Sweden
If the Swedes didn't exactly invent sex, they certainly act as if they perfected it.
This land of the blond and the bland is largely credited with launching the sexual revolution of the '60s with their liberal attitudes toward loving and lusting. Groundbreaking blue cinema, erotic literature and live sex shows in Stockholm stoked a "Swedish Sin" culture of permissiveness teetering – to the morally outraged – on promiscuous.
But nearly a half-century on, there are precious few prostitutes left in the country. That's what the police claim, anyway, though reliable statistics are hard to come by.
Somewhere along the line, Swedes apparently got to feeling a bit abashed about their society's carnal excess. This is still, after all, a country that has long appointed itself as "moral guardian" to the world, superior about its political neutrality and inventor of cradle-to-grave state welfare.
It is also vigorously gender-neutral, with alliances in government – and ideology – between the family-values right and feminist-grim left. Thus was born the view, accepted now by all parties, that prostitutes are always victims of a societal order that makes women subordinate to men.
This sounds nearly like Andrea Dworkin cant – a radical concept, heavy on the lesbian tilt, whereby intercourse is always and innately invasive to the female, intrinsically unequal.
Sweden hasn't gone quite that far, as the sexual pendulum swings back. They remain, as far as a visitor can tell, hardy and unrestrained in their attitudes toward delights of the human body, while progressive and non-judgmental about most personal choices, 50 per cent of children born outside marriage, gays allowed to adopt.
But you can't buy a sex-trade worker anymore, as even a Supreme Court judge found out a couple of years ago, when he was charged with purchasing the services of a male prostitute.
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