Not Your Mama’s Feminism: The Policy in Practice - The Magical Thinking of Nordic Model Interventions

Alex Andrews
2 days ago
5 min read

The Pitch Everyone Applauds

On paper, buyer criminalization is sold as a feminist compromise. Sex workers won’t be punished, the story goes. Only buyers will be targeted. Demand will shrink.

Exploitation will end. Everyone claps. Grants are written. Panels are booked. The theory is neat, morally satisfying, and endlessly fundable.

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On the ground, that story collapses almost immediately.

What Actually Happens Instead

In cities and states that implement buyer-focused enforcement, the first real outcome isn’t safety - it’s displacement. When clients fear arrest, transactions don’t stop. They move. To darker locations. More isolated spaces. Faster negotiations. Less screening. More risk. Sex workers absorb the pressure created by enforcement, recalibrating their behavior to keep income flowing while trying not to get hurt.

Because rent still exists.
Groceries still cost money.
Survival does not pause for feminist theory.

Third-party criminalization makes everything worse. Drivers, roommates, security, website hosts - anyone connected to the work becomes a legal liability. Safety strategies rooted in shared resources, indoor work, and community accountability are dismantled under threat of prosecution. The law claims to target buyers, but the blast radius lands squarely on workers.

Police operations tell a very different story than the policy pitch. Stings still rely on surveillance of sex workers. Workers are questioned, detained, photographed, monitored.

Their income is disrupted. Their routines scrutinized. Even without charges, the message is clear: visibility equals risk.

The promised outcome - buyers punished, workers protected - rarely materializes.

Instead, sex workers shoulder the enforcement burden while institutions collect the political win.

Arrest statistics are celebrated.
Funding continues.
Press releases flow.

The lived reality becomes more dangerous, not less.

Buyer criminalization doesn’t eliminate harm. It redistributes it - downward.

The Feminist Exception Clause

There is a strange carve-out in modern feminist policy - one place where everything we know about economics, labor, and human behavior is suspended and replaced with moral certainty and wishful thinking.

That place is sex work.

In every other arena, we accept a basic truth of supply-and-demand economics: criminalizing one side of a transaction doesn’t eliminate the market. It makes it more expensive, more dangerous, and less transparent. Risk gets priced in. Power concentrates. Workers absorb the fallout. But when it comes to sex work, anti–sex worker organizations insist this rule of reality suddenly stops applying.

The Nordic Model - often branded as a feminist “end demand” intervention - rests on the claim that criminalizing buyers will reduce exploitation without harming workers or restricting access to services.

It sounds clean.
It feels righteous.

And it collapses the second you apply it anywhere else.

When You Try This Logic Anywhere Else

Imagine applying Nordic Model logic to other everyday services.

Criminalize hiring plumbers after 6 p.m. Plumbing emergencies still happen; the service just becomes more expensive, less visible, and accessible only to those with money.
Criminalize paying babysitters on weekends. Families still need childcare; transactions go underground, rates rise, and safety declines.
Ban paying for sandwiches but not making or eating them. Demand doesn’t disappear - it just becomes riskier and more unequal.

Absurd? Yes. Economically identical? Also yes.

No one calls this feminism. Yet the logic is treated as progressive when applied to sex work.

A Moral Narrative in Scientific Drag

So why does this still pass for feminist policy?

Because the Nordic Model isn’t an economic theory. It’s a moral narrative wearing a lab coat.

It survives not because it works, but because it flatters power.

Sex work is the last market people are allowed to lie about. Most people understand that prohibition raises prices and pushes risk onto workers. They accept this for drugs, alcohol, abortion, undocumented labor, and housing. Sex work is treated differently. Magical thinking is rewarded. Saying “criminalizing buyers will end prostitution” is considered enlightened in spaces where any other market analysis would be laughed out of the room.

This exception isn’t accidental. It’s stigma - fully institutionalized.

The Emotional Payoff

The Nordic Model allows advocates to hold three comfortable beliefs at once:

I’m feminist.
I oppose violence.
I don’t have to listen to sex workers.

It reframes punishment as protection and allows policing to masquerade as care. That emotional payoff keeps the theory alive long after the evidence has buried it.

Survivors, Curated for Compliance

Anti–sex worker organizations platform survivors selectively. Survivors who support criminalization are elevated. Survivors who support decriminalization are dismissed as confused, coerced, or “not ready yet.” This isn’t survivor-centered policy. It’s ideological gatekeeping with a trauma aesthetic.

What buyer-criminalization rhetoric avoids saying out loud is simple: sex workers do not quit sex work because “demand dries up.”

And pimps or traffickers don’t stop exploiting people because a market becomes riskier.

Financial pressure doesn’t evaporate when laws change. Rent, debt, child support, addiction, immigration status, and survival costs remain.

When income becomes unstable, people don’t disappear—they become more desperate.

For sex workers, that desperation means taking clients they would normally refuse, agreeing to faster negotiations, working in more isolated conditions, or staying in unsafe situations because saying no carries higher consequences.

For exploitative third parties, reduced demand doesn’t end abuse - it intensifies it.

Control tightens.
Violence escalates.
When margins shrink, exploitation deepens.

This isn’t a moral argument. It’s basic economic behavior.

Scarcity under coercion doesn’t liberate. It escalates harm.

Old Carceral Thinking, New Feminist Packaging

Nordic Model logic is stuck in the 1990s: War on Drugs thinking, “broken woman” narratives, and the belief that safety comes from removal rather than resources. These ideas weren’t dismantled - they were rebranded with softer language and folded back into feminist spaces. What looks like theory is often just recycled carceral instinct with better branding.

Entire institutions depend on believing this. If the Nordic Model were acknowledged as harmful, funding streams would collapse - police task forces, rescue nonprofits, court-mandated diversion programs, professional advocacy careers. For many institutions, disbelief would be financially inconvenient.

Who Pays the Price

The Nordic Model persists because the harm it causes is absorbed by people society has already decided are disposable. The damage happens quietly. It can be reframed as necessary. And it rarely reaches the people writing the policy. If these outcomes were imposed on nurses, teachers, or mothers, the policy would be politically impossible.

The Bottom Line

People don’t believe in Nordic Model interventions because they work. They believe because stigma makes contradiction easy, power stays protected, advocates feel virtuous, and sex workers are not expected to survive policy decisions intact.

That isn’t feminism. It’s moral theater with a police budget.

At SWOP Behind Bars, we believe feminist policy must be grounded in evidence, lived experience, and harm reduction—not magical thinking that only works if you refuse to look at the consequences.