Last night's "Nightline" segment on porn star James Deen and his legions of underage female fans is the finest piece of parental scaremongering that I've seen in some time. (Well, at least since Caitlin Flanagan's Sunday New York Times article on the scourge of "hysteria" among adolescent girls.)
ABC's Terry Moran introduced the segment by warning, "For any parent concerned about what their teen does online, the huge popularity of the young man you're about to meet may be deeply disturbing." We're then introduced to a handful of young women – all well over 18 – who think 25-year-old Deen is totally hot and, like, "the Ryan Gosling of porn." Then reporter Cecilia Vega announces that the adult business "has now targeted and reached a new demographic: teenage girls."
That's right, pornographers are "targeting" your little girls with the help of young porn hunks like Deen and luring them into watching Internet smut! YouPorn must be advertising on Justin Bieber message boards now, I guess? At one point, Vega grills Deen about his teenage fans: "Are you encouraging them in any way to watch your films or read your blog?" It's not like teenage girls would ever happen across this X-rated material because they want to watch porn -- there must be some cute "boy next door" tricking them into it.
It isn't that parents have no good reason to be concerned about their kids -- male or female -- using porn as sex-ed. It's not even that the segment is a total rip-off of Amanda Hess' piece about Deen and his female teenage fans in GOOD magazine (and it is). My real criticism is that even while reporting on teenage girls who admittedly like porn and seek it out, "Nightline" manages to make it sound like they're being taken advantage of by porn the predator.
I would embed the video below, except ABC has disabled embedding. Maybe they distrust how their fear-mongering will be received in the the wild west of the Internet. You can find the clip here.
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