The Withdrawal Method - How the Italian state expands by pretending to pull out
An Italian OnlyFans creator opens a letter from the Agenzia delle Entrate. She owes a 25 percent surcharge on her earnings, not for any ordinary fiscal reason, but because the state has judged her work morally suspect and priced the sin accordingly. She is a small freelancer in a flat-rate regime, exactly the kind of micro-entrepreneur a “small government” is meant to leave in peace. Instead, she has met the central paradox of the modern state: when it claims to be shrinking, it is usually just changing rooms. Sexuality is not merely an object of governance here; it is a field through which the state performs and renews its authority, on the most private ground a person owns.
Italy is no libertarian paradise, but it is a state that constantly insists it has less room to act. Across the democratic world, governments have lost much of their old room to grow: globalisation, central-bank discipline, EU budget rules and tax-weary publics have walled off the familiar routes to expansion, from spending freely to nationalising and steering the economy at will. Denied those frontiers, the state does not simply shrink. It looks for territory it can still claim, and the most intimate ground - the body, the bed, the family - are the easiest left to take. That is where the sexual state is born: it is what a government builds when the other paths to growth have closed.
There is no single “the state.” It is plural and contradictory: a tax office, a criminal code, a registry, a clinic, a classroom. Through each, sexuality is recast as disorder, danger or contamination, and every act of naming licenses the next intervention. Three cases show the method at work.
The first instrument is fiscal. The tassa etica, a 25 percent surcharge on income from pornographic content under Law 266/2005, was confirmed by the tax authority in late 2025 to reach small OnlyFans creators in the flat-rate regime. The state does not ban the market; it taxes the sin, and one vague word, “pornographic,” hands officials the discretion to decide who counts as a sinner.
The second is penal. In October 2024 surrogacy became a “universal crime,” letting Italy prosecute its own citizens even for arrangements made lawfully abroad, with up to two years in prison and fines of up to €1 million. The law speaks the language of protecting women, yet it falls hardest on gay couples, who cannot fold a new child quietly into an existing marriage, and who now come home from a foreign maternity ward as suspects.
The third is recognitional. Italy granted civil unions in 2016 but withheld marriage and adoptive parity, and Law 76/2016 was careful to call a same-sex partnership a “specific social formation” rather than a family. The consequences reach into the nursery. In Padua, a public prosecutor moved to strike the non-biological mother from thirty-three children’s birth certificates, some of the children already at school, so that a parent they had known all their lives could no longer collect them at the gate or consent to their medical care. The state rations recognition, and hands out belonging in instalments.
None of this is conjured from nothing. The vocabulary of protection, rescue and dignity is old, and in Italy it is confessional. The republic that surrounds the Vatican still governs intimate life in a moral idiom inherited from the Church, whose concordat with the state, first signed in 1929 and renewed as recently as 1984, remains woven into the constitutional order. It was fitting, then, that Pope Francis opened 2024 by urging the world’s governments to prohibit surrogacy “universally,” and that Italy answered within the year by making it a “universal crime.” The Church supplies the language of virtue; the state supplies the handcuffs.
Italy is a clear specimen, not an exception, because the underlying pressure is global. The pattern travels in three moves: profess economic restraint; locate a moral panic (sex work, surrogacy, “gender ideology,” falling birth rates); then re-enter through protection, rescue and public order, words that sound like care rather than command. Call it statism rebranded as virtue, and you can read it in Hungary’s natalism and in “family values” campaigns across parts of the United States. The warning for anyone who values liberty is specific: the threat now arrives dressed as compassion, which is exactly why it slips past the usual small-government defences. A tax rise is easy to resist. A rescue is not.
Even the rights that survive on paper are rationed in practice. More than 60 percent of Italian gynaecologists are registered conscientious objectors to abortion, with most refusing on the Catholic conscience that the 1978 law protects, and over 80 percent do so in Sicily and parts of the south, so that a woman with a lawful right can be turned away, doctor after doctor, until the clock defeats her. A 2024 measure opened public clinic doors to anti-abortion groups, placing a stranger’s disapproval between a frightened woman and her decision. The longer tail is censorship and flight: a 2024 government demand to close a University of Sassari course on gender and queer theory, families leaving quietly to have the children Italy will not let them raise at home, and emigration at its highest level this century.
The withdrawal method is famously unreliable, and so is the faith that a budget-conscious state has really pulled out of private life. Italy’s fertility rate fell to 1.18 in 2024, the lowest since unification in 1861, and provisional figures put it near 1.13 in 2025; criminalising desire and rationing recognition will not lift it, because no one was ever frightened into having a child. Liberty is not only a question of how much the state taxes or spends. It is a question of whether it may claim authority over the body, the bed and the family at all, whether a peaceful private life should need the state’s moral permission to exist. A genuinely liberal position cannot trade one freedom away to keep the other, because the modern state has learned to do just that: to look small in the ledger while growing everywhere else. The smallest government in your budget can still be the largest one in your bedroom.
Author: Vinayakan Sajeev Beena
References:
1 The tassa etica (“ethical tax”) was introduced by Law 266/2005 (2006 Finance Act, art. 1, para. 466) as a 25 percent surcharge on income from producing, distributing, selling or representing pornographic material or content inciting violence. In Response no. 285 of 4 November 2025, the Agenzia delle Entrate confirmed that taxpayers in the flat-rate regime (regime forfettario), including OnlyFans creators, are liable. Il Sole 24 Ore (Jan 2026); Wanted in Rome, “Italy’s porn tax hits digital creators” (Nov 2025).
2) Law no. 169/2024, amending Law no. 40/2004, approved by the Senate on 16 October 2024 (84 votes to 58). It designates surrogacy a “universal crime,” extending Italian jurisdiction to acts committed abroad by Italian citizens, with imprisonment of three months to two years and fines of €600,000 to €1,000,000. CNN, “Italy criminalizes surrogacy abroad” (19 Oct 2024).
3) Law no. 76/2016 (the “Cirinnà law”) established same-sex civil unions as a specifica formazione sociale (specific social formation) distinct from marriage, with joint and stepchild adoption omitted from the final text. The status of “family,” along with marriage and adoptive parity, remains reserved for opposite-sex couples
4) In 2023, after a government directive halting the registration of children of same-sex parents, the public prosecutor of Padua sought to annul 33 birth certificates of children of lesbian couples dating to 2017 and to remove the non-biological mothers. Such removal strips that parent of the right to perform ordinary tasks such as collecting the child from school or authorising medical care. Human Rights Watch (24 Jul 2023); CNN (21 Jul 2023); NBC News (21 Jun 2023).
5 Relations between Church and state in Italy are governed by the Lateran Pacts of 1929, revised by the Villa Madama accord of 1984 and recognised in Article 7 of the Constitution. The 1984 revision ended Catholicism’s status as the sole state religion but preserved a formal concordat, including provisions on religious education and the public financing of the Church.
6 In his annual “State of the World” address to diplomats accredited to the Holy See on 8 January 2024, Pope Francis called surrogacy “deplorable,” a “grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child,” and urged the international community to “prohibit this practice universally.” Reuters and CNN, 8 Jan 2024
This article was produced by a participant from the European Liberal Youth LYMEC with the financial support of the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe. The opinions expressed in this article are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the Council of Europe.
The Withdrawal Method - How the Italian state expands by pretending to pull out