In her dissertation, “In My Secret Life: Stigma, Moral Work, and Intimacy Among Swedish Men Who Pay for Sex”, Isabelle Johansson explores how these men make sense of their actions within a moral and legal landscape marked by criminalisation and public censure. Drawing on anthropological perspectives on morality, stigma and secrecy, she interprets the men’s accounts as a form of “moral work” – the ongoing effort required to maintain a sense of ethical coherence in a world that regards them as deviant.
Sweden stands out in the nordic region
The project consists of four interconnected studies. The first introduces a new interview method that, by bringing media portrayals of paid sex into the interview setting, makes negotiations around stigma visible in the moment. The second study examines how the men classify sexual encounters as “good” or “bad”, showing how moral work takes shape through uncertainty, emotional attunement and self-scrutiny. The third explores how the men speak about authenticity and connection in paid sexual contexts. The fourth broadens the perspective by using survey data to situate the findings within a Nordic context, revealing Sweden’s unusually strong moral consensus on the issue.
Law as a moral framework
Combining long-term ethnographic fieldwork with quantitative analysis of survey material, the thesis links individual experiences to the wider moral climate of Swedish society. It shows that the country’s sex purchase ban functions not only as a legal regulation but also as a moral framework that profoundly shapes how individuals navigate secrecy, self-understanding and their encounters with others. The thesis contributes to the anthropology of morality by highlighting how ethical life is shaped and negotiated under conditions of public condemnation.
About the thesis
Isabelle Johansson has written a thesis entitled “In My Secret Life: Stigma, Moral Work, and Intimacy Among Swedish Men Who Pay for Sex”. Supervisors were Malin Åkerström and David Sausdal.