26
votes
New law in Sweden that makes it illegal to buy custom adult content will take effect on July 1 – content creators say it makes their profession more dangerous
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- Title
- Adult content creators warn new Swedish law 'takes away safest option'
- Published
- Jun 22 2025
- Word count
- 805 words
I do not understand people who spend a single cent on OnlyFans, and I think it's ultimately not exactly healthy for the content creators either in most cases, but this still seems like unacceptable government overreach. It's a voluntary interaction between adults that's at the least not hurting anyone else.
Imagine every fantasy you had as a young adult and through your life available not through regular fantasy plastic porn but by (sometimes) the actual people or regular types of people you dream of. You can talk to them and interact and it’s as close to being there as it gets without physical contact.
Take me for example. I spend years on instagram following random people a liked through music, hobbies, politics and social issues. Nothing thirtstrappy at all. Now suddenly I find out that this pretty outspoken feminist and general bad ass in my book has an OF. I’ve never been there but it peaks my interest and I pay for a couple of videos. Nothing wild just self pleasure. Also here she outspoken about why she’s doing it what she’s doing and she okay with it, having clear boundaries and a general healthy attitude towards it all in my opinion. All that packed together made her content infinitely more pleasurable too me compared to say regular porn. I don’t have an account anymore and never bought anything else or tried webcamming but I get the idea.
Now I know just like everywhere else there’s people on OF who shouldn’t be there because of their mental health or just shouldn’t because it’s bad for them and will have unforeseen consequences. But to me it’s the ultimate dream come true for my own self pleasure if what they’re doing is because they want to and enjoy it.
I think there are systemic issues that need addressing in order to address the reasons behind why so many people spend money on Onlyfans and why so many people feel the need to become Onlyfans creators.
For the subscribers(mostly men) it's the social factors, for the content creators(mostly women) it's the economic factors. We should be addressing both of these factors.
As always just banning shit won't fix anything, just force it into de-regulation, which then becomes even more dangerous going both ways.
Edit: Clarified the gendering, as there are consumers and creators of all genders involved.
What social factors? Isn't paying for porn socially negative and at best neutral?
I think what needs a crack down is the selling of sex to minors. People that stream borderline sexual content on Twitch knowing full-well their audience includes a lot of underage viewers and then also have outright pornography for sale elsewhere. Coupled with the 2-way communication in Twitch chat I assume it causes a lot of unhealthy relationships. How many thousand children (or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands) will have their formative pubescent years spent experiencing a pedophilic parasocial relationship?
Paying for Onlyfans isn't like paying for porn in the traditional sense. Most men pay for onlyfans for the personalized part of it. Often you'll have creators sell packages that include personalized messages, or limited chat, exclusive/personalized videos, etc. It's the experience. And even without the personalized parts, it's still the fact that it's a person and not over-produced porn.
It's the same story as a lot of escorts say about their clients, it's because these men are lonely, they want attention, and don't really have luck dating.
So when I say social factors, I'm talking about what socially causes these men to seek out these experiences as opposed to real dating.
FYI I personally know a couple of people who have Onlyfans and dated a girl who had one. It's lucrative. They make a lot of money, and they're financially well off years before I was, so in this economy I can't fault them.
As far as the rest of your comment, I don't have kids so I don't follow that kind of thing, but it does sound like a big issue, however you could argue that parents need to monitor what their kids are doing on the internet better.
Just blaming the parents doesn’t seem like a real solution when their time and energy gets sucked away by work.
I mean a parent's job is to parent their children, if they can't do that effectively at the same time as having a job, then that's an issue that also needs to be addressed, societally or otherwise.
Not saying there shouldn't be rules and laws around Twitch and stuff, just saying you can't discount parental responsibility in the matter.
I think you should always have one parent available for the kids at all times. So in a two parent family either both work half time or one full one off. Or a solo parent doesn’t need to work at all. The transition from dual income meaning you’re financially boosted to meaning you can scrape by was a disaster. Now a lot of kids have no parents during the day and burnt out parents in the evenings.
What is voluntary anyway? One could argue that people are in an altered state of mind when they're sexually aroused or lonely. I think anyone who has ever been in a state of sexual arousal can attest to that.
Some people get addicted to OnlyFans porn and will spend unhealthy amounts, even their life savings. And we know that porn changes the brain. Porn use has become prevalent among young people now that personal smartphones are ubiquitous, and it's changing how they have sex: "rough sex" has rapidly risen among college students. Often we wag our fingers and say, "those men should do better!" but we allow them unfettered access to infinite hyperporn that's malforming their sexual psychology.
We regulate gambling, alcohol, and tobacco. Why not treat porn as the highly addictive substance it is to be regulated?
This seems like a very manipulative thing to say without clarifying what we know and how. As far as I know there's a lot of mostly worthless pseudoscience in this area and then some relatively solid research which showed that people who grow up watching a lot of porn tend to be more visually focused in their sexuality. So there is an effect, but that doesn't seem like a big issue.
I think the article sucks because the author has an opinion that she spends time rationalizing instead of exploring what's actually happening. I have choked women in the past too... because most of them asked me to. And in none of those cases was it strangulation, as the author calls it, because the point was not necessarily to restrict airflow or bloodflow, the point was a harmless dominance play through putting pressure on the partner, partially through their neck. As far as I know from my friends of both sexes, this is generally what is meant by choking.
Because there's no evidence that it's nearly as addictive as those other things.
I'm in the perfume hobby, I currently own 10 bottles of perfume, which is certainly more than I need, but most were very cheap (which is an exception), so whatever. But on the internet you can find numerous people who acquired a perfume shopping addiction and lost their savings or most of their income on buying literally hundreds of bottles of perfumes that they'll never use. It's a real issue that some perfume influencers openly talked about (and those at least got some return of their money, being influencers...). Yet I don't think we should regulate the sale of perfumes. It's up to adult people to take responsibility.
Potential too much information incoming:
I've had extremely unpleasant heart issues in the past, daily arrhythmias that took way too much time to get diagnosed, and one of the triggers was sexual activity, so I thought "what the hell, let's try NoFap and see what happens" - normally nofap means just avoiding porn (and it's a weird pseudoscientific culty thing, but whatever), and in my case also all other sexual activity. I did it for eight months, before we found proper heart medication. I also had a separate illness in the past that erased most of my libido pretty much overnight, also for quite some time.
Nothing about how I view porn, sex, women or my relationship towards any related things changed after completely abstaining from all porn-like content for 8 months. Nothing changed after I returned to it. And how much I seek it out is proportional to how high my libido is at that moment.
This confirms what in my opinion is in the actually plausible scientific data: porn addiction exists, but is not common, and usually it's a symptom of a bigger issue, like using it as an outlet when dealing with anxiety or past trauma. With healthy people affinity to porn is not addiction but just horniness and doesn't tend to affect their lives negatively. There is no basis for linking it to gambling or drugs.
While it might make sense to put regulations in place, I believe it’s worth digging into why people are more frequently reaching for porn in the first place and treating causes rather than symptoms.
A lot of guys start due to lack of outlets, which similar to arousal can induce an altered state of mind that can be a nuisance in daily life. Why would they not have outlets? Any number of reasons including not having time or opportunities to meet people, not knowing how to appeal to prospective partners, not feeling worthy of a partner, etc — those need addressing as much or more that addiction. Fix them and porn abuse will probably drop dramatically. By contrast, limiting access without addressing causes will likely drive these people into ever-darker corners.
Not sure if this is abnormal, but in my experience and from what my male friends have told me it’s the women that usually initiate BDSM.
I'll admit that when I did put some money towards it I was in a manic phase, but that aspect of the mania wasn't the concerning one and I only put in a meager amount. I didn't maintain subscriptions or follow a ton of folks.
You can think of it like going to Nebula or subscribing to a Patreon for a creator's content -- you like them in particular and want to support what they do. YouTube may have limitless dorks talking about their interests you can watch for free, but you probably have dorks you like best if you watch related videos regularly.
Or you can also think of it similarly to using Kagi, Nebula, or even Tildes to avoid The Algorithm. If you simply view your feed uncritically, you'll consume what it feeds you. An argument could be made that it may be more healthy to consider what sexual content you intake than letting PornHub tell you what's hot.
There can still be unhealthy situations arising from the consumer and creator, I simply wanted to highlight some reasons one might spend money on OnlyFans.
I tend to be against this kind of regulation (and am still probably in this case), but I wouldn't say OnlyFans hurts nobody. More than half the lasses in my main circle tried OF over covid, and the most consistent experience was:
A) being pushed hard by the algo early on
B) making a lot,
C) stretching a bit beyond the sort of content they'd originally intended,
D) algo pushes non-newbies less hard, so the demand growth curve tails off after a few months, the value proposition stopping looking so strong,
E) and now to this day playing whacamole online trying to get videos of themselves off the internet.
All this to simply say there is potential harm done to some of the creators, in that the industry is set up to incentivize decisions made quickly with consequences that endure.
I agree with you and what you say does not surprise me at all. But I vew this as something that clearly has to be your responsibility and not the responsibility of the government.
Yep. I'd say you're about right. Concurrence achieved.
Odd. The quote from the justice minister also feels kind of... disingenuous? It seems to imply that it being custom had anything to do with that in-contact sex acts were illegal and that online has been a loophole. That just doesn't feel to me like an accurate portrayal of reality though. I don't know Swedish law, but according to the Internet I could go to a strip club and pay for a unique performance for as long as it does not have sexual contact.
Swedish prostitution law allows for selling sex, but not for buying (the Nordic model). The theory is that custom online work is analogous to “buying” sex, in a way that non-custom content isn’t. A lot of sex workers are not fans of the original legislation to put it mildly.
I didn't know viewing a recorded naked person was sex. Why do people keep calling me a virgin in that case?
I'm not even sure if this really addresses anything. Modern OF models sends "custom DMs" but really they are to everyone subscribed and it's a paywall within a paywall.