In My Secret Life: Stigma, Moral Work, and Intimacy Among Swedish Men Who Pay for Sex

This dissertation examines how Swedish men who pay for sex make sense of their actions and orient themselves within a moral landscape marked by criminalization, stigma, and public condemnation. Drawing on anthropological approaches to morality, stigma, and secrecy, the study conceptualizes the men’s accounts as forms of “moral work”: the ongoing, situated labor through which individuals seek to sustain themselves as ethically intelligible persons within worlds that define them as deviant. Following Korsby and Vigh’s (2025) call for a “non-moralizing anthropology” of transgression, the dissertation approaches these men not as moral outliers but as actors embedded in shared normative frameworks, revealing how responsibility, care, and legitimacy are negotiated under conditions of secrecy and moral scrutiny.
Empirically, the dissertation consists of four interrelated studies. The first introduces the “stigma engagement strategy,” an interview approach that brings condemning media portrayals of paid sex into the interview encounter, rendering processes of stigma negotiation visible in real time. The second study analyzes how men classify paid sexual encounters as “good” or “bad,” showing how moral work unfolds through affective attunement, uncertainty, and self-scrutiny. The third examines how men narrate intimacy, using the concept of “relational authenticity” to capture how closeness in paid sex is achieved, maintained, or undone from the men’s perspectives. The fourth study broadens the analysis through a comparative examination of public attitudes toward paid sex across the Nordic countries, demonstrating Sweden’s distinctive moral consensus against the practice.
Methodologically, the project combines in-depth interviews and long-term ethnographic engagement with a quantitative analysis of survey data from the European Values Study (2017) and the World Values Survey (2020). This mixed-methods design traces moral reasoning across intimate and collective domains, linking individual accounts of lived practice to broader Nordic societal climates.
The dissertation argues that Sweden’s criminalization of paid sex operates not only as a legal prohibition but as a powerful moral condition that reshapes intimate life. A pronounced tension between public moral representations of paid sex and the men’s experiences renders moral work particularly visible. Within this space, the men engage in secrecy, boundary-work, and repair to defend integrity, articulate care, and sustain coherent selves under condemnation. By foregrounding these everyday ethical negotiations, the dissertation contributes to the anthropology of morality by showing how moral life is maintained and negotiated under regimes of public condemnation, illuminating the entanglements of intimacy, law, and ethical self-formation in contemporary Sweden.