Gender Equity and Prostitution: An Investigation of Attitudes in Norway and Sweden

Abstract

This contribution assesses attitudes toward prostitution in Norway and Sweden, where it is illegal to buy sex. Sweden's law was put into place in 1999, and Norway followed in 2009. These laws were embedded in different market structures and discourses when enacted. This study uses a 2008 Internet survey to shed light on attitudes toward various aspects of prostitution while controlling for other socio-demographic factors. Findings include that men and sexual liberals of either gender are more likely positive toward prostitution and men and women who are conservative or support gender equality are more negative. Holding anti-immigration views correlates with more positive attitudes toward buying, but not selling, sex. Norwegians are more positive than Swedes toward prostitution. Supporting gender equality has more explanatory power in Sweden than in Norway, which may be due to the use of gender equality to frame the Swedish debate.

Keywords:

• Attitudes
• norms
• prostitution
• JEL Codes: I28, J88, K14

Acknowledgments

The paper has benefited from comments by seminar participants at Norwegian Social Research. We also thank Katarina Nordblom, Olof Johansson Stenman, Lennart Flood, Viggo Nordvik, Dominique Anxo, and three anonymous referees for useful comments. Funding from the Nordic Centre of Excellence: Reassessing the Nordic Welfare Model (REASSESS) is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

¹ We use the terms “prostitution” and “buying/selling sex” interchangeably. We do not intend to take a stance in the debates on this issue via our choice of labels.

² In April 2009, Iceland also criminalized buying, but not selling, sex (ProCon.org 2009).

³ Radical feminism centers around the proposition that men dominate women and that this power relation must be eliminated, and liberal feminism focuses on changing individual female behavior to advance gender equality (Teigen and Wängnerud 2009).

⁴ All personal information that would allow the identification of any person or person(s) described in the article has been removed.

⁵ The results are available upon request.

⁶ The results are available upon request.

⁷ Gender equality is more important for men's attitudes toward buying sex, and being sexually liberal has a more positive association for women than for men regarding buying and selling sex. Low-income women (as compared to middle-income women) think that selling sex is more morally unacceptable while low-income men (as compared to middle-income men) think it is more morally acceptable. These results are available upon request.

⁸ The results are available upon request.

⁹ In fact, this is driven solely by the Sexual liberal variable and, as shown later, this variable has more explanatory power in Norway than in Sweden.

¹⁰ Excluding Public sector makes the coefficient on Right larger and more statistically significant in the buying case.

¹¹ Results are available upon request.

¹² The results are similar using logit regressions (available upon request).

¹³ Also, when examining attitudes toward the law, we tested the interaction terms Right*Religious and Right*Public sector ⁻¹, and they pointed in the expected directions (but Right*Religious was not statistically significant).

¹⁴ Again, running ordered logit regressions yields qualitatively the same results (available upon request).

¹⁵ All the tests concerning difference in coefficients (in Tables 5 and 6) in the different samples are performed using a pooled sample estimation with all explanatory variables interacted with Sweden. The results are available upon request.

¹⁶ Pro Sentret is an NGO that works with prostitutes and provides information on prostitution.