What’s a Porn Bitch

BRAVO ran a headline that week about Justin Bieber catching an STD from what they called a porn bitch—and they meant it straightforwardly, not as buried copy but their actual framing for teenagers. The article itself was exactly what you’d expect: tabloid garbage, medically nonsensical, using casual slurs about sex workers like that was just normal magazine language.

I knew BRAVO from the edges—newsstands, cultural references, the basic awareness of it as a magazine that had once mattered. But even from a distance you could track the decline. It had standards once, or the pretense of them. By this point it was just thrashing.

Twitter pointed out the obvious. Sex addiction isn’t contagious. The premise was invented. Someone asked the magazine’s advice column to define what they meant by porn bitch, since apparently this was now a category of person. The usual online pile-on, but justified because the magazine had actually printed this.

What got me was what lay underneath. BRAVO was hemorrhaging readers to the internet and this was the move—get meaner, cruder, spray shame about sexuality at young people. They’d stopped pretending to have standards or purpose beyond moving copies off the newsstand.

There’s something depressing about watching a brand that once mattered become so hollow it’s willing to dehumanize sex workers for attention. Not evil exactly, just hollow. Just desperate. Just gone.