Teen Vogue wants you to know that when you grow up, you can be anything you want to be — even a prostitute.
Imagine your daughter scrolling through an article from a teen website and coming across this line: “I am a doctor, an expert in sexual health, but when you think about it, aren’t I a sex worker? And in some ways, aren’t we all?”
The perennially misfiring Teen Vogue is facing controversy again this week, this time for publishing an article titled, “Why Sex Work Is Real Work.” In it, a doctor argues not only that prostitution should be legalized, but also that it’s just like any other career. Author Tlaleng Mofokeng writes:
It’s one thing to argue for the decriminalization of prostitution. It’s another thing to do so on a teen website, and to argue that sex work carries with it no more baggage than any other job. To say that selling sex is the same as becoming a doctor who treats sexual issues is disingenuous at best, and dangerous at worst.
[I’m not dismissing the debate, but that maybe Teen Vogue isn’t the place to have it. The article also wasn’t a debate but all pro]
— Shoshana Weissmann, Sloth Committee Chair ? (@senatorshoshana) June 17, 2019
Was there not ONE editor at Teen Vogue that thought, “hey, maybe this article isn’t appropriate for our audience?” TEEN Vogue. https://t.co/nNpuuoMvLH
— Carol Roth (@caroljsroth) June 17, 2019
Give it time. In a few years the high school guidance counciler will recommend sex work as a career option to school children. https://t.co/bmW2jX9hWQ
— Partisangirl ?? (@Partisangirl) June 17, 2019
The website has been no stranger to controversy for some time, after it asked Hillary Clinton to guest edit the magazine, pulled its print issue due to flagging sales, and started pushing online content such as “A Guide to Anal Sex.”
According to publisher Condé Nast, “Teen Vogue is the young person’s guide to saving the world.” But most of its audience, it appears, isn’t even young people. As my colleague Tiana Lowe reported last fall:
The website is no longer about fashion, and it’s barely even gathering traffic from teens anymore. That last detail makes it less foul for it to publish what it does: If it gets clicks from middle-aged feminists — “sex work and sex worker rights are … the litmus test for intersectional feminism,” after all — then Teen Vogue has found, finally, some success.
The problem with its pro-prostitution article then, is not necessarily that young girls will feel empowered to pursue careers in sex work. Few teens will be reading the website, anyway. The trouble with “Why Sex Work Is Real Work” is its dishonesty.
Mofokeng writes, “Evidence, not morality, should guide law reforms and sex work policy for full sex work decriminalization.” Yet the evidence suggests that Mofokeng is wrong. Sex work is nothing like other work. As feminist Julie Bindel argued in the Guardian, prostitution is an “exploitative exchange.” She wrote:
To ignore the rampant abuse in the industry of sex work is to harm women, not to empower them. To promote sex work by ignoring its realities is damaging to the women who participate in it, as well as misleading to the intersectional feminists who are eager to support other women in what Mofokeng markets as simply part of “women’s rights, health rights, [and] labor rights.”
Teen Vogue may not be that influential for teens, but it’s still wasting its platform.
