Is Justin Berry the new Traci Lords?

Justin Berry


Vintage Traci Lords

This kid is so controversial.

First off, I found the article in The Times amazing.

And it was very balanced.

Yes, Justin was a victim in that manipulation and gifts and money took him down the road, but he was also treating it like a business. For lack of a better word, he was a prostitute.

It annoyed me a little bit that they kept referring to his trysts as "molestations." That might technically be what they were, but he knew that beforehand and was compensated.

I think two villains here are his mother and father.

His father because his father could have put a stop to it and instead wanted a piece of the action. And his mother because the dumb twat was a family therapist and should have know better. Letting her son fly all over the country when he was 15! Give me a break.

I've been reading some good stuff about "Millenials." That is the term social observers and marketers are using to describe kids born between 1982 and 2002. It is all about how they have had all of their life scheduled, have been protected and have been "yes'd" to death. It is about how these kids will expect a workforce that has structure and strong mentors and lots of hand holding and praise. The whole generation makes me feel like vomiting.

Anyway, I think these very parents help create Justin Berrys by letting them have so much stuff and being so permissive and giving them all this privacy and being afraid to confront their kids. I think a lot of parents are afraid of their kids, I see it all the time.

But back to Oprah.

Justin is commendable and disingenuous at once. I think he needs to own up to his own role in this before he can grow emotionally.

He claimed he gave up a $250,000 book deal to appear on Oprah because he wants to help kids and I believe that, but I think the way to help kids is not to just warn parents about a demi-monde they were previously unaware of (because parents have been taking away bad things for years and kids still find a way to get them) but to analyze the emotional needs that were fulfilled by camming and prostitution.

Justin reminds me a bit of Traci Lords who embraced her victimhood wholeheartedly when the underage porn thing broke. Traci knew she was 15 and legal age was 18 and she deliberatly got a fake ID. Then Traci made sure she had the rights to the one and only legal (over 18) Traci Lords flick as all the others (under 18) would be detroyed and she knew there would be incredible demand for her videos.

But don't misunderstand me, I think Justin is mostly a fucked up kid and not some devious marketer. But I do think that he needs to own up to what he did to make more money and to keep his business going. I know how adult cam performers operate: it's all about keeping you on as long as possible and there are all sorts of tricks of the trade.

Justin was definitely chewed up and spit out, but I think the unspoken flip-side to all of this are the more cynical, savvy kids who do this to make money.

This story is just going to get bigger as the weeks go by. As far as I understand it, there is an absolutley enormous, long-term federal investigation into Internet porn going on at the moment.