The Dear Lydia column that Vice magazine has been running on Snapchat’s Discover feature is a prime example of how the mass media glamorizes the sex trade. Snapchat, an app that allows users to send short photos and videos to their contacts, posts approximately ten “stories” from news and entertainment sources per day. These stories change every 24 hours, just like a personal user’s story. In the past few months, Vice’s story has featured its Dear Lydia column several times.
Dear Lydia is also published on Vice’s website on the “Ask a Hooker” page and features an article entitled “A Sex Worker Explains Why She Never Fakes an Orgasm with a Client.” The column is structured to mimic a Dear Abby or similar advice column. Readers are permitted to submit questions on any topic; however, Lydia’s questions seem to be mainly sexual in nature, and deal mainly with heterosexual romantic or physical intimacy issues.
The problem with the mass production of a column of this nature arises from the different topic headings and imagery used by Vice. First, in the Snapchat stories, the woman depicted appears beautiful, happy, fully engaged and present, dressed in fancy lingerie, and posing for a hidden onlooker. This romanticizes prostituted persons and sex trafficking victims and portrays them as enjoying the commercial sex experience. However, trafficking victims are, in fact, suffering. Abuse, exploitation, and danger are constant aspects of their reality–during and beyond commercial sex encounters.
Second, the articles online appear under the “Ask a Hooker” heading and the Snapchat Discover articles appear under “Ask a Sex Worker.” Neither of these labels are appropriate terms to refer to a prostituted person. In fact, labels and euphemisms only serve to advance the culture of sexual exploitation. Both “hooker” and “sex worker” instantly distance Lydia from all other women and individuals capable of giving advice. (After all, Dear Abby is very different from Dear Old Maid). The resulting “othering” effect confirms Lydia is wholly capable of all things sex-related and not capable of much more.
It seems as though Vice aims to profit from the romanticized image of Lydia’s experiences as a prostituted person. Prostituted persons, like most groups, cannot be easily generalized. In fact, there is a dearth of empirical data on victims of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking due to the clandestine nature of those crimes. However, several studies[1] have shown that drug addiction and childhood sexual abuse are common among the majority of prostituted persons. To profit off of a trade that over-sexualizes women and girls and incites violence against them is a disturbing way to make money and sell articles. It is extremely irresponsible of an influential social media platform like Snapchat to provide a fast way to access “news” that glamorizes such a detrimental, exploitive industry.
When a person is able to purchase another human being for sex in place of having a loving, reciprocal, consensual relationship, it desensitizes both the buyer and the prostituted person to the inherently fragile and personal nature of sex. The buyer wants sex and the seller needs money. The promise of a monetary exchange coupled with trauma and desensitization lead to a power differential between exploiter and exploited. Instead of two consenting adults, the transaction becomes one of a consenting buyer and a seller, whose consent is merely assumed. But the reality is – consent cannot be bought.
Women (and men) are forced into sex trafficking every day and when the media sensationalizes, glorifies, and romanticizes the commercial sex industry, it stalls the efforts of activists, lobbyists, and academics working to end the trade. Unfortunately, the Dear Lydia column is only one example of a highly-marketed and highly-available article being shared with teens and young adults on an extremely popular social media platform. The easy access to this and other articles like it that teens are exposed to is extremely detrimental to those prostituted persons suffering in the industry as well as the teens themselves.
Social media platforms that are widely available to youth seeking a fast, easy and efficient way to gain access to the “news” should force these apps to be more responsible in the articles that they promote. If readers fail to do their own research about the topics and articles they are reading, their perceptions about serious issues such as the sex industry will be forever negatively impacted by articles such as Dear Lydia. Snapchat owes a responsibility to its users to provide honest, well-researched articles that do not continue the exploitation of prostituted people. The CSE Institute encourages popular media platforms, like Snapchat, to be cognizant of their audiences and abstain from perpetuating false images that are harmful to victims of commercial sexual exploitation.
[1] Kurtz et. al. (2004). Sex Work and “Date” Violence. Violence against Women 10(4): 357-385; Martin et. al. (2010). Meaningful Differences: Comparison of Adult Women Who First Traded Sex as a Juvenile Versus as an Adult. Violence against Women 16 (11): 1252-1269; Nadon et. al. (1998). Antecedents to Prostitution: Childhood Victimization. Journal of Interpersonal Violence 13 (2(: 206-221.
Anna Boyd is currently a first-year law student at Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law. Anna is from Camp Hill, Pennsylvania and received a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from Villanova University. After graduation, Anna hopes to become a corporate attorney specializing in transactional law.
