Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life / YMMV

Accidental Aesop:
- Don't forget to lock your bedroom door and store your porn in a secure location to prevent anyone from being accidentally exposed to it. Get antivirus software so your computer isn't borderline crippled by adware. And don't pound back the energy drinks in the middle of the night if you're a teen.
- Sometimes when someone tells you something your kids did wrong isn't that big of a deal, it isn't and trying to throw the book at your children over such things can cause as much harm as what they're doing in the first place.
Alternate Aesop Interpretation: While Justin's porn addiction causes him some issues on its own, most of the film's bigger conflicts stem from his mother's paranoid responses to it, and as a result their strained relationship drives Justin even further down his spiral. Although the film takes a blatant anti-porn stance, one could see the message that parents should be open and honest with their kids about sex, while treating it like some scary, shameful taboo subject will only make things worse in the long term.
Anvilicious: "Porn is bad and will ruin every aspect of your life!" is the main message. There are many words that could be used to describe it, but "subtle" is not one of them.
Ass Pull: Justin suddenly backing off having sex with Monica seems to have been intended as a moment of him coming to his senses, but comes off mostly as a sudden, inconsistent switch in behavior, when just earlier his porn addiction is portrayed as serious enough to make him more sexually aggressive with his girlfriend and storms off angrily when she refuses to go past kissing.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: A particularly bizarre moment in the film occurs when Justin walks in on his mother taking a swim in the school's pool, and seems to fantasize in an arousing moment about joining her. This just takes the "porn is bad" effect of Justin sexualizing the girls around him up to insane heights, but just afterwards the film acts like the scene never happened and it's never mentioned again.
Diagnosed by the Audience: Monica’s pursuit for attention solely through sexual means and extreme reaction to getting rejected by Justin are clear signs of mental trauma from years of sexual abuse, not to mention she’s an underage girl running her own porn website.
- Justin's mother has also been diagnosed as being a narcissist due to her controlling, overbearing personality and disregard for the opinions and feelings of others.
Don't Shoot the Message: Minors being exposed to porn (usually without additional education around sex and relationships) and porn addiction actually can be very detrimental to a person's well-being and intimate relationships. Even moreso in an age where a lot of parents give even their prepubescent children smartphones with unlimited internet access. Unfortunately, this film's hamfisted, overly-preachy, and narm-filled approach means the subject isn't even remotely dealt with in a nuanced, realistic, or mature way.
Informed Wrongness: The movie informs us so about Internet porn. It's something that's so wrong it causes Justin to suddenly suck at swimming, get rejected by the cool kids, get beaten up, feel suicidal, and get addicted to energy drinks. Justin's father does say that Justin looking at porn isn't that big of a deal given that he's a teenage boy, but being a man in a Lifetime movie makes him wrong by default.
Narm:
- The scene where Justin's parents find his "porn" collection on his computer and get bombarded with pop-ups is full of it, but what takes the cake is the Freeze-Frame Bonus of a single piece of anime art in a collection of photos of real-life women.
- The explicit material is near-exclusively referred to in dialogue as its full technical term of "pornography" rather than the shorter, far more commonly used "porn". It sounds completely unrealistic, especially when said by Justin and other teenage characters, and only furthers the impression that the film is toning down and censoring itself for the sake of the overly-sensitive parents watching.
- One scene involves a group of Justin's friends all deciding, out of the blue, to gather round a computer and surf the web for porn just for the hell of it and then reacting to the softcore, fully clothed pictures as if they were shock site content.
- At a later point in the film, The entire swim team starts to get on Justin's case for watching porn with one teammate even calling him "Kinky the Clown."
- Justin never actually masturbates to the porn, or has the film ever allude to masturbation. He just literally looks at it. All the time, completely motionless. He seems less sexually aroused by it and more intrigued at this fascinating new phenomenon he's discovered.
Narm Charm:
- Though intended to be disturbing, the porn titles/taglines have some pretty amusing gems, such as "Virgin Vaginas" and "A Lust For Bust". While sillier than the film intended, these fictional porn titles are still less over the top than real titles with similar content.
- The fact that nearly all the pornography displayed in the movie is fully clothed, softcore pinups makes everyone's reactions to it come off as comically overblown with one example being Justin's little brother Alex being traumatized into a Thousand-Yard Stare at the dinner table after walking in on Justin looking at the porn followed by Justin trying to explain it away by saying that he's just excited about killing a drug dealer in Grand Theft Auto-which is somehow supposed to be any better.
So Bad, It's Good: One of the crowning examples of a Lifetime Original Movie which can be watched for unintentional comedy value. It's even been called the new generation's Reefer Madness by Rotten Tomatoes.
Spiritual Successor: This film is a double whammy to both The Sinister Urge, a 1961 film by Ed Wood that focuses on the "evils" of pornography and Reefer Madness, an infamous 1936 anti-marijuana propaganda film that used a similar melodramatic and hysterical approach to illustrate the evils of smoking weed.
Strawman Has a Point: Justin's father states early on that, since he's a teenager, it shouldn't really be a huge deal for someone his age to get into porn. Which is true, since in real life many teens do tend to get into porn as well. Not to mention the fact that they'll end up learning about sex and the safeties of it in health classes. On the other hand, how teenagers get negatively affected by porn just depends on how mature they really are.
Suspiciously Similar Song: One scene uses a very poor imitation of Linkin Park.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Justin's dad is of the belief early on in the film that it's normal for his teenage son to be looking up scantily-clad women on the internet at his age and that he'll eventually grow out of it. This makes him the total opposite of Justin's overbearing hysterical mother who treats her son with wide amounts of disdain for his "porn addiction", and having some middle ground in the film through the dad character would have likely helped Justin's developing mind deal with his raging hormones better - but unfortunately, this is a Lifetime original movie, so by default Justin's dad is wrong about his stance on porn by virtue of being a guy and ends up taking his wife's militant anti-porn stance later on in the film.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
- Monica is an underage girl who runs an illegal porn site featuring pictures of herself, and shows signs of severe mental trauma, likely stemming from childhood sexual abuse. If the goal of this film was to show the evils of pornography, then it seems like exploring her life would make for a far more convincing argument than the ridiculous glurge that the film gives instead. It’s truly bizarre and confusing watching a Lifetime movie, where women are routinely portrayed as victimized martyrs, vaguely tease us with her deeply unsettling and dramatic issues, only to then completely gloss them over and dismiss her as a worthless, evil whore.
- Justin's awkward grasp on sexuality, evident with his interaction with either of the two girls, could have easily worked as his main conflict, and even served as the catalyst for his eventual porn addiction. Instead, this occurs after he is first exposed to the material, and the porn itself is implicated to be the root cause of it.
- Justin's much younger brother is apparently into Grand Theft Auto, which given the film's release timeline is most likely Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas of Hot Coffee infamy. Given the movie's subject matter of underage children being exposed to inappropriate material, the game could have easily been worked into the plot, but is simply brushed off in a throwaway line.
- The sequence where Monica is ready to have sex with Justin, but he's not sure. This could have been used to show that porn doesn't do a thing to prepare you for a real-life relationship, or how to handle the heavy emotional reaction to having sex for the first time.
Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Diane. We're meant to side with her for being concerned for her teenage son Justin's porn addiction. Problem is, Justin's "porn" doesn't even come off as explicit to begin with, yet Diane allows her 10-year-old son to play Grand Theft Auto. She also acts disappointed with Justin just for winning third place in a swimming competition instead of first. Not to mention that she shows absolutely no sympathy for Justin when he gets severely bullied and becomes suicidal. All of this makes Diane come off as a controlling, emotionally Abusive Parent who is uncaring towards Justin, and nearly all of his issues seem to have come from her rather than his so-called "problem".

YMMV / Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life

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