I USA har överlevare lämnat in stämningar mot Pornhub. Den svenska sexköpslagen erbjuder en unik möjlighet att kunna åtala också Onlyfans ägare för koppleri, eftersom uppsåt inte behöver bevisas. Även prenumeranterna kan åtalas för sexköp. Max Waltman förklarar hur lagen kan användas.

This book offers a cutting-edge, cross-disciplinary analysis of how the explosive spread of pornography contributes to violence against women, including prostitution, while presenting a political and legal theory on how to stop it effectively. It guides the reader through fifty years of significant empirical research on the harms, including a vast array of different studies illuminating pornography’s powerful impact on men, a majority of whom consume it. A comparative analysis of legal challenges in Canada, Sweden, and the United States demonstrates why civil rights, not criminal laws, can empower those hurt, subordinated, and exploited while efficiently dismantling the sex industry, consistent with free speech guarantees.

Pornography has long proven a polarizing and vexing subject in legal and feminist debates. Women's social movements have fought ferociously against pornography since the 1970s, emphasizing its contribution to violence against women. At least two to four of ten young men consume it three times or more per week. The pornography industry exploits poor populations, who are multiply and intersectionally disadvantaged based on gender, race, or other vulnerabilities. A thorough analytical review is made of empirical studies that use complementing methods, demonstrating that using pornography substantially contributes to consumers becoming more sexually aggressive, on average desensitizing them and contributing to a demand for more subordinating, aggressive, and degrading materials. Consumers are also often found wishing to imitate pornography with unwilling partners; many demand sex from prostituted people, who have few or no alternatives. While the supporting scientific evidence of harm is growing exponentially, the politics of legal challenges to pornography still constitutes an amalgam of some of the most intractable, thorny, and adversarial obstacles to change.

This book assesses American, Canadian, and Swedish legal challenges to the explosive spread of pornography within their significantly different democratic systems and constructs a political and legal theory for effectively challenging the sex industry under law. The obstacles to this challenge are exposed as more ideological and political than strictly legal, although they often play out in the legal arena. Legal challenges to the harms are shown to be more effective under legal systems that promote equality and when the laws empower those most harmed, in contrast to state-enforced regulations (e.g., criminal obscenity laws). Drawing on feminist and intersectional theory, among others, this book argues that pornography is among the linchpins of sex inequality, contending that civil rights legislation and a civil society forum can empower those harmed with representatives who have more substantial incentives to address them.

This book explains why democracies fail to address the harms of pornography and offers a political and legal theory for changing the status quo. These insights can be applied to other intractable problems associated with hierarchies and will appeal profoundly to political theorists and those invested in civil and human rights.

Pornography production exploits social disadvantages, often while using prostituted people who have endured poverty, childhood sexual abuse, race and/or sex discrimination. Over time, consumers become more sexually aggressive, adopt more attitudes supporting gender-based violence, and buy more sex than non-consumers. This study finds that challenges to pornography’s harms will be more successful in democracies that better recognize substantive equality, and where the harmed groups’ perspectives and interests are centered in law. Civil rights appear more responsive and remedial than state-implemented criminal laws, with similar implications for other problems disproportionately affecting disadvantaged populations.

The philosophical, political, and legal impact of Catharine MacKinnon's groundbreaking work Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989) is discussed, specifically the merging of consciousness-raising of subordinated groups with critically informed scholarship, producing a problem-driven approach engaging in informed policy-making. As a comprehensive political theory of the relationship between male dominance and the state, one of Toward's central features was to draw from consciousness-raising as a feminist research method to further ground its approach to equality, particularly in its prescription for substantive equality laws. The article illustrates how such central concepts have influenced real changes in the world, specifically using legal challenges to pornography and prostitution as examples.

Parts I and II demonstrates how Toward departed from conventional epistemologies, in part explaining its revolutionary appeal to students, practitioners, and scholars. Part III continues the analysis by using real world applications of its approach to pornography and prostitution, beginning with the anti-pornography civil rights ordinances drafted by Catharine A. MacKinnon and writer Andrea Dworkin in 1983, six years before the publication of Toward. Part III illustrates how the ordinances mobilized MacKinnon’s same cutting-edge approach to advancing women’s legal substantive equality about which she later theorized. A similar approach was instrumental in grounding a substantive equality prostitution law, proposed by MacKinnon in a public speech in Stockholm, Sweden, November 2, 1990, situating that law within her broader approach to equality. The Swedish national umbrella organization for women’s shelters, ROKS, lobbied for the law and rallied other actors to support it, precipitating its passing in Parliament in 1998, with the law taking effect in 1999. Similar laws have now been adopted by many more countries (attesting to MacKinnon’s extraordinary influence as a legal and social theorist), although not until ten years or more after Sweden’s law, which makes Sweden’s unique data availability a “revelatory case.” Part III concludes by analyzing its comparative impact in terms of reducing sexual exploitation and abuse and offering an exit for people in prostitution, thus promoting substantive equality.

Pornography is a deeply polarizing issue. Its critics raise concerns of sex inequality, sexual violence and exploitation – in other words, that pornography causes harms of discrimination, in particular against women. Its defenders invoke freedom of expression and sexual freedoms, focusing on the dangers of regulation. Differences in opinion are particularly strong if we compare men and women as groups. Opinion surveys in countries such as Sweden and the United States have long shown that at least half of all women want to see stronger regulation to limit pornography – not infrequently a “total ban.” By contrast, significantly fewer men share that view, even if around 35–40% may similarly wish to see stronger regulation.

Yet the reason pornography is an important issue for women’s shelters and other organizations working to prevent and combat men’s violence against women is not primarily that it gives rise to differences in opinion between men and women. Historically, pornography has often played a part in the shelters’ work with clients; their experience shows that it acts as a catalyst and inspiration that contributes to men’s sexual aggression and negative attitudes toward women. These experiences are further corroborated today by a large number of international scholarly studies and public inquiries into pornography’s link to men’s violence against women that have been conducted in various countries since the 1970s.

Rapport om kopplingarna mellan pornografi och könsbaserat våld mot kvinnor, inklusive rättspolitiska förslag för Sverige med jämförelser med USA. Del I (s. 1-30) är skriven av Unizon (paraplyorganisation för svenska kvinnojourer m.m.) och baseras på primärdata från deras medlemsorganisationer. Del II (s. 31-108) är skriven av Max Waltman i samarbete med Unizon. De fyra kapitlen i del II baseras på Waltmans doktorsavhandling (2014) och presenterar en analytisk sammanfattning av existerande forskning som följs av rättspolitiska förslag. Genom ett problemdrivet teoretiskt angreppssätt analyseras pornografins reella skadeverkningar. Kunskap och evidens visar att dess produktion exploaterar existerande ojämställdhet och ojämlikhet bland personer som typiskt sett rekryteras från andra former av prostitution och som lider av en multipel problematik, t.ex. extrem fattigdom, sexuella övergrepp under barndomen samt ras- och könsdiskriminering som försvårar alternativa sätt att överleva. Konsumtionen är uppdelad på grundval av kön. En majoritet av unga män konsumerar ofta pornografi; kvinnor gör det sällan, såvida de inte initieras till det av andra. Efter konsumtion visar studier hur många normala män blir betydligt mer sexuellt aggressiva och i ökande utsträckning trivialiserar och främjar våld mot kvinnor. Utsatta grupper — t.ex. misshandlade, våldtagna och prostituerade kvinnor — blir som resultat mest skadade. Rapporten avslutas med ett kapitel som presenterar rättspolitiska förslag. Det analyserar deras såväl reella som imaginära hinder och potential i bemötandet av verkliga empiriska skador genom lag.

I huvudsak föreslås först börja tillämpa kopplerilagarna på produktion av pornografi då pornografer bokstavligen "främjar" och vanligtvis också "otillbörligt ekonomiskt utnyttjar" att personer har sex mot ersättning. Praxis visar att yttrandefriheten inte sätter upp hinder så länge en tillämpning av vanlig lag på brott utförda under produktionen inte direkt riktar in sig på spridning av annars yttrandefrihetsskyddat material (jfr domen mot Anna Odells konstaktion 2009 samt domar mot våldtäktsmän som systematiskt filmat övergrepp för att göra pornografi). I ytterligare led föreslås anamma lagstiftning mot spridning via liknande tillägg i den svenska grundlagen som för barnpornografi eller alkoholreklam, men baserade på en mer preciserad och snäv definition av den grafiskt sexuellt explicit underordnande, avhumaniserande och objektifierande pornografin som evidensbaserad forskning visar orsakar mer könsbaserat våld. Civilrättslig lagstiftning mot sådan könsdiskriminering rekommenderas bl.a. då studier av tillämpning av straffrättsliga pornografilagar visar på allvarliga brister alternativt frånvaro av aktivitet när initiativet inte ligger hos de drabbade -- ett angreppsätt som ej effektivt tillvaratar deras perspektiv och intressen. De senare kan företrädas av representanter med starkare incitament (t.ex. kvinnojoursorganisationer) än ointresserade, avtrubbade eller överbelastade poliser och åklagare.

Report in Swedish (English translation on its way) on the links between pornography and gender-based violence, including legal policy proposals for Sweden with US comparisons. Part I (pp. 1–30) is written by Unizon (Swedish women's shelter umbrella NGO) and based on primary data from their member organizations. Part II (pp. 31–108) is written by Max Waltman in collaboration with Unizon. The four chapters in part II is based on Waltman's PhD dissertation (2014), making an analytical summary of the existing research, then followed by legal policy proposals. Adopting a problem-driven theoretical approach, the reality of pornography’s harms is analyzed. Evidence shows its production exploits existing inequalities among persons typically drawn from other forms of prostitution who suffer multiple disadvantages, such as extreme poverty, childhood sexual abuse, and race and gender discrimination, making survival alternatives remote. Consumption is divided by sex. A majority of young adult men consumes pornography frequently; women rarely do, usually not unless initiated by others. After consumption, studies show many normal men become substantially more sexually aggressive and increasingly trivialize and support violence against women. Vulnerable populations — including among others battered, raped, or prostituted women — are most harmed as a result. The report concludes with a chapter outlining legal policy proposals. It analyzes their real and imagined obstacles and potential to address real empirically documented harms with law.

First, a proposal for applying existing procuring provisions on production of pornography is made since pornographers literally "promote," and typically also "improperly economically exploit" that persons have sex for remuneration. Case law shows that freedom of expression is not an obstacle, so long as an application of general law on offenses committed during production does not directly target the dissemination of otherwise constitutionally protected expressive materials (cf. conviction of Anna Odell's Art Activism 2009, and convictions of rapists who systematically filmed their offenses to make pornography). Second, a legislation against dissemination via similar amendments in the Swedish basic law as for child pornography or alcohol commercials is proposed, but based on a more precise and narrowly tailored definition of the graphic sexually explicit subordinating, and dehumanizing and objectifying pornography that evidence-based research show causes more gender-based violence. Civil rights legislation against such sex discrimination is recommended, among other things since studies of the application of criminal pornography laws show serious deficiencies or non-enforcement when the initiative does not lie among those affected -- an approach that does not account effectively for their perspectives and interests. The latter can be represented by actors with stronger incentives (e.g., women’s shelter organizations) than disinterested, desensitized, or over-worked police officers and prosecutors.