*** Warning — long read ***
So the EU and many governments want to embrace the Swedish model for the regulation of prostitution do they?
Buying and selling sex is not currently illegal in the UK but soliciting, pimping, brothel-keeping and kerb-crawling are all criminal activities. By contrast the Swedish model says that it is legal to sell sexual services but it is illegal to buy them.
The Swedish model is a complete nonsense, for a number of reasons …
1. It is totally illogical. Making the selling of sex legal, but the buying of it illegal just does not make sense. It is like saying that Tesco may sell me a Mars Bar but it is illegal for me to buy one. If we applied this logic to any commodity other than sex the proposal would be laughed out of court as being totally ridiculous.
Moreover, I suggest, It may also be a restraint of trade: I’m legitimately allowed to trade in a commodity but no-one is permitted to engage with me to buy it so I am restrained from carrying on my legitimate business.
2. By criminalising the buying and selling of sex government is attempting to legislate morality and exercise control over private sexual behaviour — which I submit are basically none of their business. Sex workers are human beings and selling sex is their trade. As such sex workers must surely be entitled to the same labour rights as other workers and the same human rights as other people. It is vulnerability, not sex work, which creates victims.(And let us not forget that not all sex workers are prostitutes and not all are female, although the majority probably are.)
No wonder the English Collective of Prostitutes (the nearest UK sex workers have to a trade union) has said:

We are appalled that at a time when benefit cuts and sanctions, lowering wages, increased homelessness and debt are forcing more women, particularly mothers, into prostitution, the best that MPs can come up with is to increase criminalisation. These proposals will further divert police time and resources from investigating rape, trafficking and other violent crimes to policing consenting sex.

3. It doesn’t work. All the criminalisation of either sex workers or clients is going to do is to push sex work further underground, where it becomes prey to abuse and criminal activity.
The argument for the Swedish model is that by attacking the demand to buy sex the sex industry in general, and trafficking in particular, are reduced. However there is no credible research to support the idea that the Swedish Model reduces selling, buying or trafficking. However there is significant research to show that conflating sex work and trafficking is a conscious attempt to prevent people from voluntarily migrating to do sex work. The argument about the reduction in trafficking doesn’t hold water. Evidence shows that the vast majority of the UK’s sex workers are there voluntarily, have not been trafficked, and are not being controlled.
Instead of improving things, a Swedish National Police Board report shows that the policy has driven sex work underground and made sex workers even more vulnerable. It has also lead to an expansion of indoor sex work (OK taking girls off the streets is arguably a good thing): for example, apparently Thai massage parlours offering sexual services in Stockholm increased almost three-fold between 2009 and 2012.
Yes, of course UK law needs to be changed to improve safety for sex workers. In the UK sex workers are forced to work alone because working with anyone else constitutes running a brothel. Working alone dramatically increases the risk of them being subjected to rape, violence, robbery and even murder. Given that 80% of the UK’s female sex workers work indoors, decriminalisation would enable these women to work from premises in teams of two or more which would be safer for them. And the same has to be true for male sex workers as well.
Moreover decriminalising the sale of sex empowers sex workers to use the justice system to seek redress for abuse, violence and discrimination. Removing the threat of criminal penalties would also enable sex workers to work with police to facilitate the enforcement of anti-trafficking laws.
Decriminalisation would also encourage sex workers to have more open access to health, legal and social services. Indeed following the Dutch model licensing of sex workers could go even further by making regular medical check-ups a condition of the licence. And healthier sex workers has to be good for them as well as good for the punters.
4. You can’t regulate an intangible commodity like sex. Basically it is bad law because it is unenforceable.
You can licence the sex workers, but without doing that you cannot regulate sex. People will have sex, even if they aren’t supposed to. And where they’re having sex as a commodity there will be a trade in it. Any two people can go off and have sex and who can tell if money (or other tangible payment) changes hands? The deal doesn’t have to be done in the open; it will happen in a private room somewhere well out of sight of law enforcement’s prying eyes and the tax man. Basically the buying and selling goes underground.
This is no different from the way in which any (black) market works: A is willing to sell commodity Z to B who will pay for it; if this is illegal then it just gets done “under the counter”. This happens in every country; you cannot stop it. The UK currently has a thriving trade in illegally imported (cheap) alcohol and tobacco as well as drugs; during WWII rationing coupons were illegally traded; during the beef crisis, meat was still sold on the bone, but out of sight. They are tangible commodities and the trade can be restricted by confiscating the commodity when discovered. But how do you confiscate sex? It’s like saying that consultancy is illegal — it cannot be enforced. Anyone can talk to (have sex with) anyone and who can tell if money changes hands along the way?
So unless you are prepared to licence sex workers, basically it is a free for all and open to exploitation by any petty (and not so petty) criminal. And ultimately that is bad for everyone. The girls are exploited (or worse) by pimps and open to abuse from the punters; and they can’t do anything about it as they can’t report the abuse. The punters are vulnerable too; they can be fleeced of their money and they have no clue about the health status of the girls. Everyone loses.
5. But it is even wider than this. Sex work challenges our current social and cultural norms — just as homosexuality, illegitimacy, anal sex and even masturbation have done in the not so distant past. As a result we changed the way we thought about those issues. Isn’t it about time that we changed the way we think about sex work too?

I’m dipping into (“reading” is too organised a concept for my random excursions) This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful and Elegant Theories of How the World Works, edited by John Brockman. This is a collection of almost 150 short essays written in response to the Edge question of 2012: What is your favourite deep, elegant, or beautify explanation?
The answers cover the spectrum from particle physics through psychology to the social sciences. Authors include luminaries like Susan Blackmore, Leonard Susskind, Stephen Pinker, Carl Zimmer and Jared Diamond as well as a whole host of people I’ve never heard of.
One essay I read last evening stood out for me, and I am naughtily going to reprint it here in its entirety.

The Overdue Demise of Monogamy
Aubrey de Gray
Gerontologist; chief science officer, SENS Foundation; author, Ending Aging
There are many persuasive arguments from evolutionary biology explaining why various species, notably Homo sapiens, have adopted a lifestyle in which males and females pair up long-term. But my topic here is not one of those explanations. Instead, it is the explanation for why we are close — far closer than most people, even most readers of Edge, yet appreciate — to the greatest societal, as opposed to technological, advance in the history of civilization.
In 1971, the American philosopher John Rawls coined the term “reflective equilibrium” to denote “a state of balance or coherence among a set of beliefs arrived at by a process of deliberative mutual adjustment among general principles and particular judgments.”* In practical terms, reflective equilibrium is about how we identify and resolve logical inconsistencies in our prevailing moral compass. Examples such as the rejection of slavery and of innumerable “isms” (sexism, ageism, etc.) are quite clear: The arguments that worked best were those highlighting the hypocrisy of maintaining acceptance of existing attitudes in the face of already established contrasting attitudes in matters that were indisputably analogous.
Reflective equilibrium gets my vote tor the most elegant and beautiful explanation, because of its immense breadth of applicability and also its lack of dependence on other controversial positions. Most important, it rises above the question of cognitivism, the debate over whether there is any such thing as objective morality. Cognitivists assert that certain acts are inherently good or bad, regardless of the society in which they do or do not occur—very much as the laws of physics are generally believed to be independent of those observing their effects. Noncognitivists claim, by contrast, that no moral position is universal and that each (hypothetical) society makes its own moral rules unfettered, so that even acts we would view as unequivocally immoral could be morally unobjectionable in some other culture. But when we make actual decisions concerning whether such-and-such a view is morally acceptable or not, reflective equilibrium frees us from the need to take a view on the cognitivism question. In a nutshell, it explains why we don’t need to know whether morality is objective.
I highlight monogamy here because, of the many topics to which reflective equilibrium can be usefully applied, Western society’s position on monogamy is at the most critical juncture, Monogamy today compares with heterosexuality not too many decades ago, or tolerance of slavery 150 years ago. Quite a lot of people depart from it, a much smaller minority actively advocate the acceptance of departure from it, but most people advocate it and disparage the minority view. Why is this the “critical juncture”? Because it is the point at which enlightened thought-leaders can make the greatest difference to the speed with which the transition to the morally inescapable position occurs.
First let me make clear that I refer here to sex and not (necessarily, anyway) to deeper emotional attachments. Whatever one’s views or predilections concerning the acceptability or desirability of having deep emotional attachments with more than one partner, fulfillment of the responsibilities they entail tends to take a significant proportion of the twenty-four hours of everyone’s day. The complications arising from this inconvenient truth are a topic for another time. In this essay, I focus on liaisons casual enough (whether or not repeated) that availability of time is not a major issue.
An argument from reflective equilibrium always begins with identification of the conventional views, with which one then makes a parallel. In this case, it’s all about jealousy and possessiveness. Consider chess, or drinking. These are rarely solitary pursuits. Now, is it generally considered reasonable for a friend with whom one sometimes plays chess to feel aggrieved when one plays chess with someone else? Indeed, if someone exhibited possessiveness in such a matter, would they not be viewed as unacceptably overbearing and egotistical?
My claim is probably obvious by now. It is simply that there is nothing about sex that morally distinguishes it from other activities performed by two (or more) people collectively. In a world no longer driven by reproductive efficiency, and presuming that all parties are taking appropriate precautions in relation to pregnancy and disease, sex is overwhelmingly a recreational activity. What, then, can morally distinguish it from other recreational activities? Once we see that nothing does, reflective equilibrium forces us to one of two positions: Either we start to resent the temerity of our regular chess opponents playing others, or we cease to resent the equivalent in sex.
My prediction that monogamy’s end is extremely nigh arises from my reference to reproductive efficiency above. Every single society in history has seen a precipitous reduction in fertility following its achievement of a level of prosperity that allowed reasonable levels of female education and emancipation. Monogamy is virtually mandated when a woman spends her entire adult life with young children underfoot, because continuous financial support cannot otherwise be ensured. But when it is customary for those of both sexes to be financially independent, this logic collapses. This is especially so for the increasing proportion of men and women who choose to delay having children until middle age (if then).
I realize that rapid change in a society’s moral compass needs more than the removal of influences maintaining the status quo; it also needs an active impetus. What is the impetus in this case? It is simply the pain and suffering that arises when the possessiveness and jealousy inherent in the monogamous mind-set butt heads with the asynchronous shifts of affection and aspiration inherent in the response of human beings to their evolving social interactions. Gratuitous suffering is anathema to all. Thus, the realization that this particular category of suffering is wholly gratuitous has not only irresistible moral force (via the principle of reflective equilibrium) but also immense emotional utility.
The writing is on the wall.
____________________
* A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1971).

Friends with benefits. Or just friends. Or just benefits. Where’s the problem?
As one of my university friends used to observe: why should sex not just be an expression of friendship; we have sex just because we’re friends and feel like it; no more, no less? How is this actually different from having a drink, listening to records, or playing tennis together?
I’ve always struggled to see why anyone has a problem with this.