Not Your Mama’s Feminism: The Nordic Model’s Feminist Sales Pitch

Alex Andrews
7 days ago
4 min read

The Nordic Model is often introduced to feminist audiences as a kind of political relief valve.

Not full criminalization, they say.

Not decriminalization either - but a principled compromise.

A way to oppose exploitation without “punishing women.” A policy rooted in gender equality, sold as modern, humane, and feminist.

It sounds "reasonable". That’s the pitch.

But like most good sales pitches, it relies on what’s emphasized - and what’s quietly left out.

The Equality Frame

In feminist policy spaces, the Nordic Model is framed less as criminal law and more as moral stance. The story goes like this: sex work is inherently unequal, shaped by patriarchy and economic coercion. Therefore, the state should criminalize the demand while protecting those who sell sex.

Buyers are punished.
Sex workers are not.
Equality is restored.

This framing is powerful because it shifts the conversation away from outcomes and toward intention. The policy doesn’t have to work particularly well if it can be described as symbolically feminist.

Harm becomes a side effect, not a failure.

And any critique can be brushed aside as missing the moral point.

But policy isn’t symbolism. It’s practice.

And equality, if it exists at all, has to show up in people’s lives - not just in legislation.

The Research You’re Told to Trust

Supporters of the Nordic Model often cite a familiar set of studies, reports, and government evaluations. These sources are treated as settled science in many feminist circles - proof that buyer criminalization reduces harm and discourages trafficking.

What’s rarely discussed is how narrow this evidence base actually is.

Many of the most frequently cited reports rely on police data, arrest statistics, or government self-evaluations. Success is measured by reduced visibility, fewer street-based workers, or fewer reported buyers - not by safety, stability, or autonomy for sex workers themselves.

Research that centers sex workers’ lived experiences - especially those documenting increased violence, displacement, and isolation under Nordic-style laws - is often dismissed as biased or anecdotal. Studies from public health bodies, human rights organizations, and sex worker–led groups are treated as politically inconvenient rather than empirically valuable.

The result is a hierarchy of evidence where state data is trusted by default, and the people most impacted by the policy are treated as unreliable narrators of their own lives.

The Convenient Conflation

At the heart of the Nordic Model’s appeal is a familiar move: the conflation of sex work and trafficking.

By framing all sex work as a form of exploitation, the model sidesteps the need to distinguish between consensual adult labor and coercion. This simplifies the moral landscape. It allows policymakers to speak in absolutes. And it keeps the focus on enforcement rather than prevention.

But this conflation comes at a cost.

When sex work and trafficking are treated as interchangeable, policies designed to “end demand” inevitably target the conditions of sex workers’ lives - where they work, how they screen clients, who they rely on for safety. The model may claim not to criminalize sex workers, but it criminalizes the environment around them, making safety harder to maintain and violence harder to report.

Trafficking does not disappear in this framework. It becomes harder to identify, buried beneath a broad enforcement strategy that prioritizes moral clarity over practical distinction.

Whose Voices Count as “Survivor Voices”

The Nordic Model is often defended in the name of survivors. Survivor testimony is invoked as moral proof, a way to shut down debate before it begins.

But not all survivors are heard equally.

Survivors who support criminalization are elevated and platformed. Their stories are treated as representative. Survivors who critique policing, who name harm caused by buyer criminalization, or who identify as sex workers are quietly excluded from the conversation. Their experiences are framed as controversial, compromised, or irrelevant.

This selective amplification creates the illusion of consensus where none exists. It allows feminist spaces to claim survivor leadership while filtering out voices that complicate the narrative.

What’s presented as survivor-centered policy is often survivor-curated policy - shaped by what institutions are willing to hear.

What the Pitch Can’t Admit

The Nordic Model’s greatest strength as a sales pitch is also its greatest weakness as policy: it promises protection without grappling with power.

It does not ask what happens when police become the primary tool of gender equality.
It does not account for how surveillance, displacement, and third-party criminalization affect safety on the ground.
It does not meaningfully engage with evidence that sex workers face increased risk under end-demand regimes.

And it does not seriously contend with the possibility that criminal law - no matter how selectively applied - may be the wrong tool for addressing gendered harm.

This post isn’t meant to settle the debate. It’s meant to open it.

Before we accept the Nordic Model as feminism’s ethical answer to sex work, we have to be willing to look beyond the pitch - to the evidence that’s ignored, the voices that are filtered out, and the realities that don’t fit neatly into a grant proposal or a talking point.