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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35514 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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I did a little search up on James Deen, it's a pretty sad story.

Deen was born in Los Angeles County, California and raised in Pasadena.[5][9][10][11] His father is a mechanical engineer and his mother is a computer electronic engineer,[12] and one of them worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.[13]

According to Deen, performing in pornographic films was his ambition since he was in kindergarten.[14] Around age 15, he left high school and spent two years homeless.[15] He graduated from La Cañada High School in 2004.

After entering the pornography industry in 2004,

He's got two parents in engineering, one fairly prestigious and goes for pornography straight after high school, as soon as he can. Probably some serious conflict with his parents.

I don't see anything sad about this story.

Besides the "kid knowing about porn at a really young age" thing mentioned below, Deen was accused some time ago of sexual abuse or something along those lines.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, that 2012 article:

With minutes to go until go time, the cast talks shop. In response to a conversation starter I do not catch, Allie relates a childhood memory, the gist of which is that when she was 9 years old, hanging out with her brothers, she was encouraged to perform sexual acts for their friends in exchange for marijuana.

Now Deen looks up from his telephone for the first time in quite a while.

"And you were cool with it?"

"Oh, _yeah," _says Allie James.

Deen hoists his eyebrows. "As long as you were cool with it," he says.

Shit like this does a lot more to push me towards the hardcore feminist viewpoint that all porn is exploitative; even a high-end company that does vanilla porn is hiring a 19 year old 'actress' who should probably be in therapy and not posing for pics of her sucking a guy's dick that they then send to her mother:

While the crew is dragging lighting rigs and attending to last-minute particulars, James takes a seat at the poker table with Allie and Steve. Allie perches on Steve's engorged lap. Steve gets an idea: Wouldn't it be diverting if Allie James were to pose for a photograph with Steve's penis in her mouth, which Steve could text to Allie's mother?

She kneels. He snaps. "He's gonna send it to my mom!" Allie cries with apparent delight.

Expansion on that kindergarten bit, hard to know if it's true or if it's a crafted answer to fit in with the porn actor image of 'this stuff is great and I always wanted to do it':

Q: So when did you decide to do porn?

A: Kindergarten. I remember I was walking home one day, and I found this magazine, I don't know, a _Hustler _or something, with people banging in it. I was enamored by it. I was like, I want to do this. I actually got in trouble in third or fourth grade. They were asking everybody what they wanted to be when they grew up, and I said I wanted to be a porn star. They didn't like that. They thought I was being a dick. I was like, "I'm not being a dick, it's just what I want to be."

That sounds so odd. You're six or so, you find this magazine with adults doing weird stuff in it, and you decide "this is great, I want to do this when I'm grown up" rather than "what is this, what is going on here?" Yeah, that does sound more like "somebody got to little James and taught him things he shouldn't know about at that age". There's a contradiction there between "I got in trouble for saying I wanted to do porn" and what he claims happened when he was that same age:

Deen, contrary to our notion of porn stars as survivors of sexual trauma, does not recall any sexual abuse or destructive misadventures, other than a teacher who Deen says tried to molest him when he was 8 or 9, but Deen "punched his testicles a lot" and made good his escape.

The teacher tried doing what the magazine was imaging, so why did Deen try to get away? I think there is more going on there. This entire story is depressing:

Though you could not hire a lobbyist to boost for the porn industry more enthusiastically than James Deen, he does acknowledge that the life has its pitfalls. On our ride north, I mention what will be, for me, the least forgettable or pleasant image of the week I spend with him: that of Allie James posed with Steve Holmes's organ in a photo for her mother.

"Yeah, obviously she's damaged. I'm, like, getting pimped out when you were 9 so your brothers could smoke weed? That's not healthy. She's like Rick Santorum's wet dream, the poster child for how people in porn are damaged," Deen says. "But for every person like her, there's someone like, I'd like to say, me. I had a great childhood. My parents and I get along. I just like sex, and I like porn, and I think it's fun. I'm always terrified that someday I'm going to come to the realization that I've got some deep, dark secret, some terrifying, horrible experience where I'm going to be like, ‘I'm actually not normal. I'm a crazy person!' But it just doesn't seem to be the case."

And yet. The company still hires her. She still gets work. Maybe she'll be chewed up and spat out in a few years, if she isn't resilient and a good actress. This isn't selling me on "porn is just great". But maybe I'm just a prude.

I'm more curious how a kindergartener knows what a pornographic actor is.

When I took state mandatory reporter training, young children being oddly familiar with sexual acts or pornography was mentioned as the most common sign of child sexual abuse which should always be reported to CPS. We can probably assume that this was more true in 1991(so before internet porn was incredibly ubiquitous) than it is today.

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