Dr. Sommer Would Be Ashamed
BRAVO has been teaching German teenagers about sex since 1956, mostly through the legendary Dr. Sommer column—frank, illustrated, non-judgmental answers to questions about bodies and desire, arriving in glossy format at a time when most kids had nowhere else to turn. Generations grew up with it. Whatever you think of the magazine, that column meant something real.
Which makes the December 2013 cover particularly hard to defend: "Justin Bieber—Fatal Sex Addiction! Shock! Did he get infected by a porn bitch?!" The peg was Bieber’s reported encounter with a sex worker in Brazil. The framing was medically illiterate, openly misogynistic, and aimed squarely at an audience of eleven-year-olds—a trifecta of bad judgment that takes genuine effort to achieve simultaneously.
Sex addiction is not a transmissible disease. Sex workers are not "bitches," porn-adjacent or otherwise. The idea that sexual activity is something you can "catch"—that it spreads like contagion, that the women involved are vectors of something dangerous—is exactly the shame-logic that half a century of Dr. Sommer columns had worked to undo. Whoever approved that cover either forgot what the magazine was supposed to be for or had stopped caring entirely.
Twitter lit up immediately. Someone pointed out they were already picturing their kid cousin telling everyone at school that Bieber had "caught something from a porn bitch." Another person redesigned the cover format around a different contagion: "Fatal eye cancer. Did we catch it from the Bravo cover page?" The joke worked because it was accurate.
I don’t expect much from tabloid celebrity journalism. But BRAVO wasn’t supposed to be that. It had a specific function, a specific audience, and a hard-won credibility with teenagers who actually needed the information it provided. The cover didn’t just fail those readers—it actively misled them about what sex is, who sex workers are, and what their own bodies are capable of. That’s a different kind of failure. RIP whatever BRAVO used to mean.