Justin Barry is not a victim. Justin Barry is a very smart, very clever, very manipulative young business man. He manipulated and exploited the adults around him when he was running his prostitution business and he's STILL DOING IT! He's now playing off the American hand-wringing and hysteria over sex, particularly with adolescents. Justin Berry was not a child, he was an adolescent. This article, like the NYTimes article, is just another brick in the wall conflating what happened with Justin Barry with truly egregious behavior like sex with pre-pubscent, genuine children. When politicians get involved the hysteria gets rabid 'cause as Steve Barack pointed out, everyone starts playing these sex stories for political gain. The self-righteousness and moral hypocrisy get hard to stomach. The people of Kansas have gone off the deep end about sex, making it a crime for adolescents to have sex, even with each other. The state of Oregon jailed a 15 year old boy for having consensual sex with a 13 year old girl. The result of adults gone crazy.

Justin Barry knew exactly what he was doing when he was 13 and 14 and 15, etc. He wasn't "enticed" into anything he didn't already want, nor led anywhere he didn't already want to go. It was rather Justin Barry who enticed adult men into his sly adolescent game. And like lemmings, they went for it. That most Americans have come to believe that adolescents are either not ready for sex or are damaged or hurt by it is a very recent, very weird, utterly unnatural idea. Age limits about sex are arbitrary and culturally defined. (For most of their history, the Sambians and other indigenous peoples of Micronesia engaged their seven and eight year old boys in sexual relations as part of their religious and parenting practices to no detrimental effect.) At puberty or thereabouts, nature, which is bigger and more powerful than any human system of thought or laws, says that you're ready of sex. No one needs to "introduce" you to the urge and desire to have sex. For most of human history in various cultures around the world, including this one, it has been more or less accepted that the age of consent was sometime shortly after the onset of puberty, not four or five or even seven or eight years afterward. Many young girls were married by the time they were 14 or 15, not all of them against their will. This is still fairly common throughout the world. Most adolescent boys have always found ways to have sex, if not with a girl, then with each other or with an adult or with themselves. (At 14 I ached to have sex with an adult male. I never did.) The Europeans, for the most part, scratch their heads at Americans over our fear-mongering obsession about adolescent sexuality. All adolescents have sexual urges. Justin Barry was no "innocent" in that sense and he "knew" what he was doing. Now that he's quit the sex business (his father got into it with him at one point, so you gotta wonder about that dynamic. And it wasn‘t just gay teen sex. From the NYTimes story, he also was paid to have sex with females.), he's turned on his clients. It isn’t enough that he wants to stop what he’s been doing and live his sexuality in a different way, he also intends to destroy other people’s lives in the process because he “gets it.“ He understands his culture very well and sees how much sympathy he can get from playing the “victim” from the adults around him. He also gets to continue his “celebrity” status as a “victim” of child sexual abuse rather than an Internet porn star! He’s had a long career as a star on the internet, then a NYTimes article written about his life and now testimony before the U.S. Congress. What a terrifically clever young man. His lawyers aren't too dumb either. Preachers, politicians, parents AGAIN get to whine and preach and grandstand about "sexual perversion" and "pedophiles" and "sex offenders" and blah, blah, blah, and wring their hands and titillate each other over the descriptions of the sex acts as if adult men, men beyond the age of puberty, have not always, in every place, at every age in history, fairly predictably been desirous of virginal flesh, male or female. It's genetic. Sexual relations between adults and adolescents need not be by definition exploitative, anymore than sexual relations at any age can be. Some of the greatest love stories in history have been intergenerational. Adolescents are not some sexually naive class of "children". The word "child" is culturally defined. Nature cares for none of it.

What does Justin Berry now hope to accomplish? So what if they arrest and jail all of the men who paid Justin Berry to take his shirt off or to have sex in front of the camera or to have sex with them or someone else. There will be another boy and another cadre of men sooner or later who will do the same thing. Was he made to return all the money he took from his clients? Did he file a tax return on his business dealings? Where was his mother while he was busy making all that money? Didn’t she like NOTICE!?!? I don’t condone or advocate, support or promote what happened between Justin Berry and his victims. None of it, including the exploitation of Justin Berry by his lawyers. It’s another one of those timeless, tireless sex scandals that Americans just love and can’t get enough of. Americans love a good scandal, it gives us the chance to feel superior, which is a national need. Again, no one but the lawyers and politicians will get anything out of this.