Film / Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life

Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life is a Lifetime Movie of the Week released in 2005.

Justin is a promising high school student and swimmer with a girlfriend, Amy. His life starts to fall apart when he becomes addicted to internet pornography.

This being a Lifetime Original Movie, however, the subject of a teenage boy becoming addicted to computer porn is handled about as subtly as a brick to the face and the film has found its way into many a So Bad, It's Good movie list as a result.

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This film provides examples of:

• Adults Are Useless: Inverted. All the adults in Justin's life are a little too emotionally invested in "helping" him.
• All Anime Is Naughty Tentacles: If you look closely, there's at least one piece of anime art in the spam pop-ups.
• Alliterative Title: Justin burns a porn CD called Virgin Vaginas.
• Artistic License – Biology: Although pornography addiction virtually always involves some form of masturbation or other sexual activity, the film never implies Justin is as much as touching himself while binging on internet porn.
• Betty and Veronica: Justin is torn between the virtuous church-going Amy and their promiscuous older classmate Monica.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Monica acts like Justin's secondary Love Interest, but as soon as he turns her down sexually, she throws him under the bus with his bullying classmates.
• Bondage Is Bad: Justin's descent into unpopularity begins when he shows his friends S&M porn, the closest thing in the entire film to resemble pornography that would be considered extreme (and even then it's still quite tame for the genre) and not just women in their underwear.
• Break the Cutie: Justin is hounded and harassed to the breaking point by everyone, including his own family, for his excessive and public viewing of porn.
• Casting Gag: Diane screams at her teenage son for looking at internet pornography and desperately tries to get him to stop. She's played by Kelly Lynch, who's done quite a few nude scenes throughout her career. Then again, the fear of her son masturbating while accidentally coming across naked pictures of her online would explain her behavior a bit...
• Clueless Aesop: Because of television content standards, the most the movie can actually show of Justin's internet pornography addiction is him blankly staring at garden variety pictures of scantily-clad women, rather than him actively touching himself to any form of hardcore pornography - or, heck, any nudity at all. This in turn undermines the film's message, since if something that mild is all it takes for him to spin out of control it becomes questionable whether he either has psychological problems already or if his mother's extreme overreaction had something to do with it. Some viewers have suggested that Justin's real addiction is late-night voyeurism mixed with throwing back energy drinks, the latter of which is enough to do a number on any growing adolescent's overall well-being. It veers into being an outright Broken Aesop as well because, save for those caused by his energy drink addiction (which he could have acquired through binging on them during any regular activity), none of the problems the film blames on his pornography addiction are even indirectly caused by it - if anything, most of his issues are because of Monica's violent offense at him turning down sex with her, which is only tangentially linked to his addiction because she produced and hosts a website with some of the porn he watched (and which, naturally, raises far-worse implications regarding her life that the film happily ignores).
• Corrupting Pornography:
  • Justin's life falls apart after he becomes addicted to Internet pornography.
  • When Justin's younger brother happens to stumble upon the porn that Justin consumes, he develops a fetish so disturbing that the film doesn't name it and becomes deeply, visibly traumatized.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • Justin binging on energy drinks while looking at porn is an obvious substitute for masturbation.
  • The fact that Justin didn't even try to make his activities discreet except for a select few times might give the impression that the script was originally written as a story about drug addiction, but later retooled into an anti-porn tract.
• Driven to Suicide: The film opens with Justin trying to drown himself at the pool after being harassed and bullied over his porn addiction. He ultimately manages to save himself in the end.
• Foil: Amy and Monica are polar opposites of each other - the former is a virginal religious Girl Next Door, while the latter is a morally bankrupt slut with her own porn website.
• Fully-Clothed Nudity: The pornography presented in the movie is far from anything titillating with it hardly being something that could cause serious parental concern... except that Sexy Discretion Shot is in full effect and it's very common that porn ads or sites has scantily clad figures to tempt potential viewers to pay to see the NSFW stuff.
• A Good Name for a Rock Band: When Diane discovers Justin's younger brother keeping a porno CD-ROM, her husband suggests there might be another explanation for the disc's title, to which she snarkily responds "Like what? Virgin Vaginas are a new band?", evidently unaware of bands like Barenaked Ladies, Butthole Surfers, The Slits, Perfect Pussy, Jack Off Jill...
• G-Rated Sex: At no point in the film does Justin touch himself while browsing the Internet for porn. He's just looking at it while binging on energy drinks.
• Harmful to Minors: Justin's younger brother happens to stumble onto the porn he views. The experience leaves him unable to talk, eat without prompting, or do anything other than stare blankly into the distance. A few scenes later, he's developed a fetish for something so terrible the film wouldn't even name it.
• Hormone-Addled Teenager: The movie goes out of its way to demonize teenage sexuality, offering no middle ground at any point throughout.
• How We Got Here: The film opens with the badly beaten Justin breaking into the school swimming pool to drown himself.
• Hypocrite:
  • Justin's mother completely freaks out about her teenage son looking at porn, yet it appears is perfectly fine with her other ten-year-old son playing Grand Theft Auto. You know, the one where you play as a criminal who can commit violent crimes and pick up prostitutes?
    • Even funnier when you consider the "Hot Coffee" mod scandal, where you can watch...you know...
  • The kids who bullied Justin for watching porn were the same people who introduced him to it. And, if that's not enough, one of them keeps goading Justin to make a move on Monica, only to beat him up later on because of his porn obsession. Granted, she lied about him attacking her, but what the hell did you think would happen, dude?!. Of course, it can be justified with how Justin taking things too far to the point that he can't stop looking for porn in public and even before a state competition!
• Idiot Ball: Justin's tech savviness is portrayed inconsistently, seemingly just to fit whatever point the narrative wants. He (and his younger brother) is apparently capable of getting around the parental controls his mother puts on their home internet, and also possess a magic USB that when plugged into a school computer allows him to look up porn. On the other hand, he never thinks to do something as basic as putting a password on his personal computer, and completely fails to delete his porn-filled browsing history on his girlfriend's PDA.
• The Internet Is for Porn: It's a story about a teenager who becomes addicted to internet porn and his life is destroyed because of it. As noted above, porn addiction is real and can ruin your life, but the film handles it like a nondenominational live-action Chick Tract about how New Media Are Evil. Just to make it confusing, he's only found out because he inexplicably makes hard copies and hides them poorly, (suggesting the writer was unclear on the concept or hastily adapted a script about dirty magazines), and not because he was caught with his pants down rubbing one out to something that would give his prudent overbearing mother a heart attack!
• Karma Houdini: Neither Monica nor Justin’s bullies face any kind of repercussions for their actions at the end of the film.
• Madonna-Whore Complex: Justin's Christian girlfriend Amy is firmly in the former camp and the slutty Monica squarely in the latter.
• A Man Is Always Eager: Justin is always pressuring Amy to have sex with him because he thinks he's ready. Subverted later in the film when Justin suddenly has second thoughts about having sex with Monica right as they are about to get into it even though the latter made it nakedly obvious she wanted to hook up with him.
• Nature Adores a Virgin: Amy is portrayed as the good Christian girlfriend of Justin who waits for marriage before having sex and helps rehabilitate Justin with her wholesome Christian values towards the end. Meanwhile, Monica is the sexually active senior high schooler who leads Justin astray, tries to cheat on her boyfriend, and runs her own illegal porn site and therefore indirectly helps kick off the movie's conflict.
• Not Good with Rejection: Monica doesn't take Justin's hesitance of having sex with her well, which leads to her physically throwing him out of her house, self-harming, and accusing him of hitting her.
• Porn Stash: Of CD-ROMs labeled by what kind of porn they are. Naturally, Justin's mother stumbles upon it.
• Skewed Priorities: The adults are far more concerned with Justin's porn browsing than the fact that his schoolmate Monica runs her own illegal porn website.
• Sexy Discretion Shot: Many of the worse pornography is presented to be this, to skirt around network rules against blatant nudity.
• Space Whale Aesop: Don't ever look at porn or else your girlfriend will dump you, you'll lose the state nationals swim competition, your own mother will treat you like a sex offender, a local high school slut will try to force herself on you, and the cool kids will then beat the shit out of you.
• Stunned Silence: Diane listens in horror as her coworker recounts leaving her husband over his porn habit.
• The Unfair Sex: Justin’s father isn’t terribly phased by him watching porn and says that it’s not an unusual thing for teenage boys to do. This is a fair point but, by virtue of being a man in a Lifetime movie, this is used to paint him as a useless Bumbling Dad.

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