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:



I find it interesting that as a medical doctor, I exchange payment in the form of money with people to provide them with advice and treatment for sex-related problems; therapy for sexual performance, counseling and therapy for relationship problems, and treatment of sexually transmitted infection. Isn't this basically sex work?



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:



According to data from ComScore, TeenVogue.com had 8,341,000 unique visitors in May 2017. One year later, they had barely half that, at 4,476,000. Most damningly, just 1.7 percent of their May 2018 audience was 17 or younger. Only 2.6 percent were 18 to 24 years old. At the absolute most generous estimate, in Teen Vogue's digital audience — the only audience they still have after they shelved their print edition with a final copy featuring Hillary Clinton on the cover — 1 in 20 readers is an actual teenager.



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:



The opposite, abolitionist position – favoured by feminists including myself, and every sex trade survivor I have interviewed – is: prostitution is inherently abusive, and a cause and a consequence of women’s inequality. There is no way to make it safe, and it should be possible to eradicate it. Abolitionists reject the sanitising description of 'sex worker', and regard prostitution as a form of violence in a neoliberal world in which human flesh has come to be viewed as a commodity, like a burger.



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.