NEW YORK—Emily Shire has penned a somewhat awkward article for the Daily Beast titled My Bizarre Night With James Deen, Libertarian Porn Star, which, political leanings aside, opens with an incident during dinner in New York, when she says he turned to her without warning and said, “You’re pretty and nice, but I wouldn’t have sex with you.” The comment, she says, was an answer to a question she had not asked.
She writes, “… but it still stings a bit. He then backpedals, qualifying his answer to make it seem less personal. ‘I feel that would be unprofessional,’ he says, which is deeply ironic coming from a man who’s made his living over the past decade shtupping women on camera. He proceeds to tease me, asking if our interview is ‘secretly a date?’ I am both mortified and irritated.”
Only toward the middle-to-end of the piece does Shire explore Deen’s libertarian leanings in comments that by that point seem totally irrelevant to the piece, which opens and closes with Deen staring into her eyes. It may be for this reason that most of the comments question why the thing was written in the first place, but the answer is actually simple. Shire was destined to do it. It was on her bucket list.
And indeed, she does, in full professional “disclosure,” state, “I have been fascinated by Deen ever since I first came across a photo of him on the set of The Canyons, the 2013 Bret Easton Ellis film that was supposed to be Lindsay Lohan’s comeback but, in the most generous terms, received highly mixed reviews (though Deen’s performance wasn’t the chief area of disapproval) and bombed at the box office.”
Man, that’s a mouthful, but it also works to somewhat obscure the disclosure, which does not come with a link to her 2012 article for The Sisterhood blog (“where Jewish women converse”) titled My First (Jewish) Porno, a porno starring (surprise, surprise) a “5'8”, 145 pound, witty and curly-haired Jewish porn star” named James Deen, about whom she had already developed a serious crush that, as she wrote at the time, “led me down the path of pornographic depravity.”
Her first flirtation with porn (even starring Deen) was not particularly erotic, however, but she had also decided to make a party out of it with her girlfriends. “I feel pretty confident speaking for my friends when I say that none of us was especially turned on,” she writes. “I was a little frustrated and disappointed that I wasn’t. At first, I worried that I was too prudish or immature to enjoy the scenes, but I realized that my infatuation with Deen had been just that, a fairly innocent crush rather than a gateway into some adult world of pornography.” She was 22 at the time.
The 2012 article ends with a lesson learned about life and Deen. “I don’t think I’ll organize another James Deen Shabbat," she says, "but I still read Deen’s blog religiously. I’ve accepted that I prefer him clothed and tweeting than naked and banging a MILF with too much makeup. And I’m comfortable with that.”
A few years later, and Shire gets to test that comfort with Deen in person, and fails to even entertain the idea that her longstanding interest in him—born in the first place because he was “the cute guy in all the photos with Lindsay Lohan on the set of The Canyons.”—was not somehow still in play, and that Deen may not have made that comment out of thin air, or, as she put it, as a “sign of frat-boy cockiness veiled in jokes,” but as an acknowledgment of unspoken sexual tension, a way of putting the subject to rest, or maybe opening a door to something more. After all, as she relates it, the moment reads as though his objection to sleeping with her could have been silenced with a butter knife. Instead, oddly, she pretends he’s serious, and takes faux offense, and spends the rest of the piece on a libertarian theme that seems like something she grabbed onto for dear life. One feels a little sorry for her, and you kind of wish she had bucked up and taken him up on his rejection!
In the end, the quality of Shire’s writing drives the piece, Deen is engaging (despite the cell) and even though the media archives are replete with articles and interviews that feature this consistently popular performer—some that capture him doing things, some in foreign media, some in Jewish journals, others on television, sometimes covering a whole week, other times focused on workout regimes, and yet others written by his own hand (oh look, in the Daily Beast!)—you always learn something when you read one of them, even if they wind up being more about the writer than the subject.
