Toward respectable masculinities? Sex buyers’ collective negotiations with stigma, criminality, and masculinity in the Nordic context

Drawing on an online ethnography of a Nordic, heterosexually oriented sex-buyer discussion forum, this article examines the relationship among masculinity, stigma, and criminality in the context of sex buying. In recent decades, stigma in commercial sex has shifted, with men who buy sex from women increasingly facing moral condemnation and legal consequences. The stigma is particularly visible in the Nordic region, where the criminalization of buying has led to the pathologization of sex buyers, perpetuating the violent stereotype and framing commercial sex as inherently exploitative and non-consensual. In this context, men need to construct new meanings and moralities for their practice of buying sex. By examining men’s negotiation and meaning-making in an online forum, the article shows how sex buyers collectively mobilize culturally legitimizing discourses, such as authenticity, mutual pleasure, romance, consumerism, and health and well-being, to build alternative moralities for their sexual practice. This collective negotiation is instrumental in the formation of positive self-understandings and what the article terms ‘respectable masculinities.’