PARIS — The French National Assembly has backed off from a proposal to criminalize the purchase, and/or facilitation by online platforms, of sexual services performed remotely by streamers and custom content creators.
As XBIZ reported last month, French criminal law punishes clients of prostitutes as well as anyone who profits financially from prostitution. However, France’s highest court has ruled that online services such as camming do not fall under the definition of prostitution.
In the original version of Bill 3106, which is aimed at addressing sexual and gender-based violence against women and children, Article 25 would have broadened the definition of prostitution to include the online purchase of sexual acts, treating online platforms that facilitate streaming and custom content as “pimps,” and users who tip streamers or commission customs as “johns.”
Such a ban could have led to enforcement against fan and webcam platforms, their users, and conceivably even against creators who collaborate together. A similar ban was enacted in Sweden last year.
After review by a special committee assembled to review its provisions, the bill entered debate in the full National Assembly last week. On Wednesday, legislators debated Article 25, sometimes heatedly. Several members spoke out against the article’s provisions, cautioning that instead of protecting sex workers, the proposed law would make them more vulnerable.
Assembly member Sarah Legrain told legislators, “We are not talking about platforms that allow clients and people engaged in prostitution to meet in person, but rather about acts carried out behind a camera … a customer at a strip club can pay to physically attend a striptease; however, someone who requests footage of a striptease from a consenting individual, filmed at home—in a setting likely more protective than that of a strip club—could be prosecuted, as could the landlord of the apartment and the platform that hosted the content. Similarly, it is perfectly legal to buy a pornographic film in which two adults have had physical sexual relations in a film studio … however, it would become illegal to watch someone, alone behind their camera, at home, caressing their feet.”
Another legislator, Guillaume Kasbarian, declared: “It’s not my place to judge individuals’ freedom to do what they want with their bodies, including videos, as long as they are free, adults, informed, and not under the control of a pimp.”
Supporters of Article 25 asserted that online platforms have become a gateway to physical prostitution and exploitation of minors. Others raised moral objections to what they view as objectionable sexual content.
Legislator Émilie Bonnivard argued that “a woman who sleeps with 100 men, then with 1,000 men in 24 hours on OnlyFans” is not actually acting freely, “because she’s earning millions of euros.”
“It’s degrading that people watch this and consider it normal,” Bonnivard said.
Deputy Ségolène Amiot urged members to consider the issue carefully.
“We are prohibiting an entire population from engaging in practices they carry out in spaces they consider sufficiently safe, at a distance, and without direct contact with the client,” she observed. “What will we tell these people who have made this choice? That they will have only one option left to earn a living: to physically meet clients on the street, in far less safe spaces, on more predatory platforms. We will therefore expose them to prostitution, and even push some people into prostitution when they don’t currently do so.”
Proposed amendments to delete Article 25 were defeated. However, the Assembly did pass an amendment to narrow the scope of Article 25 so that it does not prevent consenting adults from sharing sexually explicit videos.
Instead, Article 25 now criminalizes the purchase of remote sexual services only if the buyer is aware that a performer or model is a victim of online sexual exploitation, defined as “the act of recruiting a person, transporting them, transferring them, hosting them or receiving them … for the purpose of making that person available to oneself or to a third party, even unidentified, in order to allow the production and distribution of sexually explicit images or videos of that same person.”
