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Dear Caligula: We apologize! Yours, America

This story, which I found via Sullivan, is one of the saddest and most dispiriting things I’ve seen in a long, long time. It’s a profile of a male porn star, James Deen, who has become a hit among teenage girls. Excerpt below the jump: Emily was sitting in her fourth-grade classroom when she was first […]

This story, which I found via Sullivan, is one of the saddest and most dispiriting things I’ve seen in a long, long time. It’s a profile of a male porn star, James Deen, who has become a hit among teenage girls. Excerpt below the jump:

Emily was sitting in her fourth-grade classroom when she was first introduced to porn. “These boys were sitting next to me, talking about boobs,” she says. Emily asked one of them what that meant, and “he stared at me like I was crazy.” In school the next day, the boy slipped her a piece of paper with a URL written on it.

She caught “like five seconds’ worth of humping” before closing the page. Now 17, Emily is distributing porn links of her own—this time, to other teenage girls across the United States. Emily runs a Tumblr blog dedicated to her two obsessions: Twilight and James Deen. Thanks to Deen, Emily is no longer watching porn for the generalized humping. “When I watch his videos, I don’t really pay attention to the sex,” Emily says. “I watch his videos for his reaction. It amazes me.”

Deen is not supposed to be the star of his scenes—his sex partners are. But on Tumblr, a network of teenage bloggers has emerged to turn the focus on him. The young women trade Deen videos, post candid photographs, and pluck out all the minute details that turn them on: the way he looks at a woman, touches her, stares into her eyes, whispers in her ear. “There was just something about the way he moved,” Emily says of her first exposure to Deen. He seemed to be “speaking to the girl, but not with his mouth, with his hand over the girl’s throat, and with his eyes.” Now, Emily says it doesn’t matter if Deen is having intimate sex with a woman on a bed or shoving her into the trunk of his car: “I go for just about anything.”

Deen’s young fans gush over the sight of him thrusting into a woman while holding her hand. They sigh over a private photo of a clothed Deen commuting by plane. They create animated GIFs of Deen’s greatest moves so they can watch him execute them again and again and again without rewinding. They pepper their Deen fantasies with Harry Potter jokes and circulate them to other girls. Several propose marriage.

Deen, who is 25, observes that no matter how much older he gets, his fan base stays 17.

I have nothing to say about this, except that we deserve whatever judgment we get.

 

 

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