Here is this perfect family -- nice Mom and Dad, clean-cut kids. The 13-year-old boy is not only a good student but a star of his high school swimming team. He's got a girl friend, Amy, who is as cute as a button, and moral too, since she won't go all the way with him. He does a lot of homework and things on the PC in his bedroom.
Enter pornography.
The boy discovers he can find pornography on the internet and meet girls of questionable values too. He arranges a date with one of them, who happens to be a fellow student, and five minutes after their first meeting -- no, LESS than five minutes -- she moves from her side of the drug store booth to sit next to him, presses his hand against her breast, and asks, "Why don't we go to my place? My parents aren't home." Well, I'll tell you. Things just go from bad to worse. This clean-cut, polite, industrious 13-year-old kid becomes "addicted to porn," as his Mum puts it. He can't stop. He neglects his clean-cut moral girl friend, he puts off studying and lies about it, his swimming deteriorates, he gets up in the middle of the night to creep with a demonic smile into the family room where his parents have moved his PC.
He somehow gets his friends' names on some email lists and they get snotty with him, slap him a little, and call him a "twisted freak" and complain that they get a lot of Spam now. He begins -- and I know this is difficult for us perfectly normal adolescent boys to believe -- he begins to dream of beautiful half-naked girls swimming around him in the pool. It gets even worse. He swipes him Mum's credit card and begins charging porn-site membership fees to her account.
Not that he's all bad, though. He finally winds up in the bedroom of this high-class slut from his high school. She jumps him on her parents bed and begins tearing at his clothes. "Can we go a little slower?" he begs. "Sure. We can go as SLOW as you like," the nubile nympho hisses. But it's no use. "This isn't how I imagined it would be," he says, disappointed and awed by the too-frank advances of this Jezebel. She throws him out, his virtue intact. I don't know how it ends. I couldn't sit through it. But anyone who is able to take "Reefer Madness" as a serious description of a social problem ought to enjoy "Cyberseduction."
As for criticisms, I wouldn't really know where to begin. I guess we could start with the generalization that every 13-year-old boy who has ever lived on the planet Earth loves to look at dirty pictures and masturbate. Also a goodly but undetermined portion of females of all ages and mature, happily married men.
It's not even arguable. I've asked everyone I've met, "Do you masturbate"? First, lots of total strangers on the street, then the nice police officers, now the other patients here at the Institute. They all say, "Sure." If that isn't "normal" I don't know what is.
When I was a kid we didn't have PCs, just the bra ads in a Sears and Roebuck's catalog. A classmate of mine was caught using one of the photos in such an add for an unintended purpose and was punished by being made to memorize Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" -- every line of it. That kid is a doctor today.
Theoretically, I suppose, it's possible to take any normal activity too far, so that it becomes an obsession. (This could be a movie about a kid who decides to eat nothing but rib eye steak -- and lots of it. He can't stop because he's "addicted to steak.") The media have been doing their level best to turn the internet into a social problem -- just as they tried to do with Satanism, hypodermic syringes in cans of Pepsi, and missing children on milk cartons.
I don't know why it hasn't taken off yet. It would seem to be fertile ground. Here we have this complicated machine which maybe the parents don't understand much about. Mum and Dad probably know there are "chat rooms" hanging around in the box somewhere, although who knows what goes on in them. Then too they must be aware of internet pornography. All they have to do is watch a movie like this, and there are a couple of them floating around.
There's no point in going on about it. It's a meretricious piece of trash designed to add to the worries of parents who are already stressed out over second-hand smoke, peanut allergies, and trans-fatty acids. I'd start to think about it, though, if my kid did nothing but watch slasher movies and play video games in which over-muscled behemoths made each other's heads explode in a shower of glee, gore and glia.
