Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life [2005]

This is a Lifetime movie about a teen boy who gets addicted to online porn. The fact that it's a Lifetime movie, and therefore needs to be pretty clean, really colors the perception of this film in hilarious ways. For one, all the porn he looks at is pretty covered up. At most we maybe see a brief shot of someone in lingerie or a full body latex onesie, but a lot of it is girls in tank tops with bras peeking out. Additionally, they never mention masturbation and at one point only slightly imply it just by having him look at porn without his shirt on. It seems like maybe he wouldn't have such a porn issue if he wasn't edging himself constantly, but that's just a suggestion.

The film starts with Justin, a champion swimmer, just looking at extremely tame porn on his computer, some of which is weirdly of a girl in his high school named Monica. Apparently she's a senior and just does this? It's a bit confusing. Justin has a girlfriend named Amy who loves Jesus and therefore won't let him sex her. At one point his mom catches him looking at porn at 1AM and tells his dad that he needs to have a talk with him about it. With no specific intent to this conversation specified, the conversation is vague and basically amounts to "sex isn't love but everyone looks at porn so whatever." We were similarly confused by the issue. Of course though, his porn consummation expands. He starts looking up porn on his girlfriend's PDA and emailing it to himself, he shows porn to his little brother, and at one point alienates a potential cool friend by showing him latex porn, which makes the kid call him a freak instead of doing the normal teen thing and going, "Yo, weird" and moving on. His mom is pretty ignorant of most of this outside of the little brother thing so she starts putting parental controls on the computer before disconnecting the internet entirely. Justin will not be stopped however and he steals his parent's credit cards to pay for both internet and porn. His girlfriend checks her PDA's search history and dumps him. Eventually he hits up Monica for some free sex but can't go through with it. Unfortunately Monica is insane so she beats herself up and claims it was Justin so a bunch of her high school fanboys beat him up. The film ends with a symbolic baptism as Justin jumps into a pool and decides to start a new life.

This film is mostly funny for the reasons I said in the beginning, the fundamental issue of Lifetime trying to make a movie on this topic, but there are also a couple over-the-top acting moments or insane zooms as well. 

To take the movie seriously for a second, the movie's thesis really hinges on a slippery slope argument rather than actually interrogating the ethics of pornography. There could have been an interesting film here about if there's a way to consume porn ethically given the way the industry works or whether there might be genuine concerns if someone is consuming a lot of porn that is specifically violent or genuinely aberrant like bestiality. But no. If you want something more like that Shame is a great movie about sex addiction and Pleasure is a great movie about the porn industry. What this film is really warning against isn't porn. It's
* Staying up so late that it starts to affect your performance at school and sports.
* Using your girlfriend's tech for things she wouldn't want you to use it for.
* Showing scandalous things to your younger sibling who isn't as careful as you.
* Not correctly reading a social situation before you decide to show your new friend weird stuff.
* Stealing
* Getting involved with crazies.
* Apparently, not actually masturbating so you can clear your mind of all the dirty thoughts and be a productive member of society.

The problem isn't the porn; it's the teenage lack of impulse control.

Spoon Rating: 4