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'Nightline' Worries About Teenage Girls' Crush on the Porn Star Next Door
ABC's "Nightline" did a profile on James Deen, the porn star from Pasadena with a massive female fanbase.
Some have noticed that the Nightline's report bears a striking resemblance to a smart, amusing profile of Deen "What Women Want: Porn and the Frontier of Female Sexuality" by Amanda Hess at GOOD Magazine last November.
If the subject matter and the observations about Deen were similar—he's a relatively average guy in the world of porn with a female following—the tone couldn't be more different.
GOOD was interested in profiling Deen as the rare (if not the first) breakout male porn star to appeal to women. Male porn actors aren't supposed to be the star of any sex scene, so Deen's female fans—many of them on tumblr—re-edit his scenes to put the focus back on him. But Nightline seems freaked out that underage girls might be stumbling across porn on the internet...and actually enjoying it:
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Voiceover: Today the voracious, unstoppable American porn industry, by some estimates a $13 billion business, has now targeted and reached a new demographic: teenage girls. Evidence of that? Deen has become something of an internet sensation for fans much younger than 18, a fact that many parents may find disturbing.
Nightline reporter: You have this massive following of young women, some of them teenagers, what do you say to that?
Deen: If there's a 15-year-old girl, an underage girl, an underage guy, an underage person that is viewing a scene I'm in or some kind of porn, chances are 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. It's not necessarily a bad thing.
Nightline reporter: Parents might not think so.
Deen: Why? Everyone has sex.
Nightline spends a lot of time grilling Deen on this underage question, but it's worth a look if only to hear some of his fan-girls gush about the porn star they could imagine meeting at a coffee shop. Nightline attributes Deen's popularity to the porn industry trying to cater to women, but GOOD's piece makes the opposite point, saying that Deen has become popular in spite of the way porn is marketed: "It’s a well-worn cliche that women don’t experience sex visually. So why can’t they take their eyes off James Deen?"
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