Hi y'all. The plan today was to edit this WIP in between a morning brunch (which, as Ms. Holt kindly pointed out, is not brunch but fucking BREAKFAST) and afternoon yoga. However, having spent the last hour plus trying to find an independent coffee shop which is not too cool for me, I've decided not to bother editing and to write about James Deen instead.

Last night ABC's Nightline aired a piece on the porn actor James Deen. The territory was familiar to anyone who'd read Amanda Hess' awesome profile of him in Good, or the 100 Interviews piece — some might even say a pretty much verbatim copy of those two.

Now, even though I'm not cool enough for artsy coffee shops, I'm probably slighty more hip and in the know than the Nightline demographic: seniors, parents, really, anyone who still views network news as their main source of information. I spend enough time on the curious corners of the internet — especially on Tumblr — to know that teenage girls are rabidly sexual. The tags on a picture of any object of teen affection would make your head spin.

Nightline warns that there are approximately 370 million porn sites on the internet. This in and of itself, perhaps, is not cause for concern, but the idea that one skinny Jewish boy might appeal to women, and young women in particular, is enough to set off a moral panic. The piece attempts to portray him as a sexual predator who is luring the under-18 set to his blog with the promise of casual sex, as the Salon.com analysis points out:

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.

I mean, look, I'm of an age where we didn't have the internet growing up. We had smutty magazines, and dog-eared pages of novels that we passed around, and zines, and fantasies. I was thirteen when I read the word 'cunt' for the first time (in Silence of the Lambs), and the word had a shocking short of power that it no longer holds. Kids who have grown up on the internet know that word, in addition to a range of sexual practices that go far beyond the vanilla.

Spend some time in a kinkmeme or a fandom community and it becomes hard to sustain this fantasy that girls aren't into sex. You'll find fourteen year-olds a plenty who are into D/s, rimming, fisting, tentacle porn, comeplay, multiple partners, bondage, you name it. The power of the word 'cunt' is likewise sapped by the fact that with a few clicks of a mouse not only can you see the aforementioned in all its hairless glory, but see it being penetrated by a variety of objects and penises.

Young women's exposure to sex predates the internet — hell, we live in a world where Toddlers and Tiaras is on television, and girls are sexualized from a disturbingly young age — and to pretend that tech-savvy youth don't know how to get around age limits or parental controls is completely fucking ludicrous. Curiosity will find a way, as Deen himself says:

"If there was a 15-year-old girl, an underage girl, an underage guy, an underage person that is viewing a scene that I'm in or any sort of porn, chances are they're doing that because either they're curious. They're horny, whatever it is. They're sexual enough that it is something that they desire, that they crave, that they want, and it's not necessarily a bad thing," he said. "I would like to think that I'm opening up their sexual experience, and being able to, they'll be able to take their boyfriends and say, 'hey, I saw this in a porno, I want to try this.'"

Do I wish that we had better sex education for adolescents? Obviously. Are the standards of porn what girls should try to enact in the bedroom? Well, yes and no. I myself love Deen's porn, and while I don't get off to it, I think it's generally pretty awesome. Why? Because while from the waist down, everything he's doing is for the camera (i.e. the viewer), from the waist up, by God he is fucking that girl. He's talking to her, often so quietly that the sound doesn't transmit, he's looking her in the eye, he's giving her pleasure. The reason young women like to watch Deen is that he's getting his partner off, and he is super into doing so, in a variety of scenarios.

My supposition here is that the fear of Deen goes deeper than mainstream media's utterly predictable gender bias — the unspoken assumption that those other 370 million porn sites are for men and teen boys, and that of course, that's okay. Because they're supposed to be rabidly sexual, whereas women are objects, disposable, detachable parts that can be flashed, ranked, rated, and forgotten.

But a women who has agency, who is learning to articulate her own desires, who watches porn of a guy who is on record as saying "I love to eat girls out" and "Watching girls have orgasms is rad" — and who might insist on these same things in her own sexual life rather than unreciprocated oral and unfufilling vaginal penetration…well, no wonder people are frightened.

Why can't all porn premises be this ridiculously transparent?