A functioning police state needs no police. – William Burroughs
One year ago today I published “Something Rotten in Sweden”, which explored the way in which “Swedish Model” rhetoric is increasingly being employed in American police departments to disguise their war on women’s sexual autonomy by concentrating on “busting as many men as possible so as to scare the rest and decimate prostitutes’ business, thereby forcing many of those without an established client base out of the profession without having to arrest a single one and thereby demonstrating their outrageous sexism.” As we have seen, the practice doesn’t work any more than the “War on Drugs” does, and for the same reason: it’s impossible to stop people from engaging in mutually-satisfactory private arrangements. It does, however, give the government an excuse to harass and terrorize innocent men and to infantilize women, thus setting the precedents necessary to eventually revoke all the gains we’ve made in the past century.
The easiest way to predict the effects any proposed law might have is to examine another country which has already implemented such legislation; the best example for our purposes is Iceland, which implemented the “Swedish Model” later but much more broadly. Also, it has no less-oppressive neighbors to which men can travel for commercial sex, and its small population has allowed the course of the Swedish Disease to progress with frightening rapidity. As I stated in my column of February 4th,
Iceland infantilizes its female citizens to an even greater degree than Norway and Sweden do, and in the pretense that prostitution and stripping are the selling of women themselves rather than services they freely choose to provide, Iceland essentially declares that women (except for lesbian politicians, of course) have no value other than their sexual characteristics…and so sale of those characteristics is seen as sale of the entire woman (since she has nothing else of value to offer). And because the government of Iceland is unwilling to cede control over women to anyone (including the women themselves), any activities which offend the sensibilities of the rulers must be prohibited, even if it results in their country having almost twice the rape rate of any other country in Europe.
But to Reykjavík’s chagrin, a group of misandrist vigilantes is now using the law to attack men the government wasn’t really interested in prosecuting, as reported in this October 19th article from Iceland Review called to my attention by Deep Geek:
A new underground movement called “Stóra systir” (“Big Sister”) has handed over a list to the Reykjavík Metropolitan Police containing 56 names, 117 telephone numbers and 29 emails of men who expressed interest in purchasing the services of prostitutes through…websites…and classified ads…The movement made its intention known, that Icelandic legislation on prostitution and human trafficking are followed (where the buyer of prostitution but not the prostitute can be prosecuted), at a press conference at Idnó in Reykjavík yesterday where its spokespersons wore cloaks, hoods and masks to remain anonymous…The Big Sisters said the list is the result of three weeks of investigative work. They decided to take matters into their own hands after police authorities claimed they neither had the funds nor the manpower to fight prostitution which they conclude is clearly thriving in Iceland in spite of it being illegal…“We advertised [online] and in the massage columns of the papers and in the beginning it was just to check the reaction,” one spokesperson said…One night a few of the movement’s members all…asked their respondents to meet them outside an ATM…They were supposed to identify themselves by carrying a [newspaper]…
The Big Sisters say that even though the buyers of prostitution try to hide their identities their computer skills vary and it is usually easy to find out who they are. “We are good at what we do and we have assistants, for example women who have been involved in prostitution,” they said, explaining that they teach them the industry’s lingo. At the press conference a few conversations between the movement’s members and buyers of prostitutions [sic] were played. One was between a 48-year-old man and a woman whom he took to be 15, which made him all the more interested in buying her services. The movement is demanding various actions, first and foremost that laws are complied with, but also shutting down [websites]…porn clubs…and…ads for prostitution in the media in all forms be stopped. No one is safe now, Big Sister is everywhere, one spokesperson warned.
Behold what lies at the bottom of the slippery slope. When consensual adult behavior is criminalized and civil rights suspended, other rights inevitably follow. When the men of Iceland ceded control over their sexuality (and that of women) to lesbian neofeminists, they handed them a weapon which, predictably, they are now employing in furtherance of their own twisted personal vendetta against the male population. Prostitution and stripping are already illegal, and it seems that porn will be next, followed by censorship of print media and the internet. I don’t know if the neuter gender of the pronoun in the last sentence was intentional or just a Freudian slip, but it’s the absolute truth; thanks to the predictable results of these evil laws, no one in Iceland is safe now.
