Cory Booker Politely DM'ed a Stripper Once, Yielding BuzzFeed Article

I wanted to title this Idiotic BuzzFeed Article Makes You Scroll Through Sea of NSFW Photos and Also Gifs of Buzzfeed Contributors, All in Order to See Utterly Innocuous Conversation — but, ugh, that wouldn’t fit.

BuzzFeed recently published something titled “NSFW: Cory Booker’s Interesting DMs With A Portland Stripper.” NSFW! That sounds scandalous! Okay, but the only thing NSFW about these direct messages are the five (5) (I counted) exposed nipples you must scroll past in order to see the DM in question.

To save you years untold of scrolling, here is an abridged version of the story: Lynsie Lee, a stripper who works at the world’s first vegan strip club, follows Newark Mayor Cory Booker on Twitter, and he follows her back. This is because they were in a documentary about Twitter together. As people who have met and seem to get along, they sometimes exchange friendly Tweets. One time, Cory Booker even wrote her two — TWO! — affable DMs.

“He was just flattering me. It began with me sending an actual tweet saying that the west coast loved him, especially me. So he replied with that just to flatter me :),” Linsey Lee explained to BuzzFeed. “That’s boring,” thought BuzzFeed, deciding to place photographs of five nipples above that explanation.

There’s nothing wrong with stripping, nor is there anything unsavory or immoral or bad about posting nude photos of yourself online; I take absolutely no issue with the fact that Lynsie Lee “posts some rather NSFW photos” and “has some explicit tweets,” as noted by the BuzzFeed image heap. However, there is something gross — not to mention unnecessarily stigmatizing — about using those images to craft a falsely tawdry narrative about a politician and giving it a very misleading headline. Everything a sex worker does is not automatically scandalous. A stripper sending private messages to a politician she’s worked with is totally banal. It doesn’t have to be a whole fucking article.

The only positive takeaway from this experience is my newfound knowledge of the world’s first vegan strip club. Their logo is a sexy devil eating a carrot!!! Wow, you learn something new every day. Thanks, BuzzFeed!

“NSFW: Cory Booker’s Interesting DMs With A Portland Stripper” [BuzzFeed]
Image via Getty.