Differentiating Between Internet Safety Advice And Fear-Mongering Propaganda

I never thought that I would need to publish an article like this again in a long time, but YouTube is overflowing with videos about juvenile-justice-related topics that are best described as fear-mongering propaganda disguised as good, sound Internet safety advice. Below is a video that fits that same description quite well.

The name of the YouTube influencer is Dr. Lonna Denny. Her YouTube channel is named BulletProofBabes.

Dr. Lonna Denny Insists That All Older Men Are Out To Get Your Teenage Daughter In Bed With Them And Ravish Her

Dr. Denny looks like another out-of-touch baby boomer. However, there is some information on the Internet to suggest that she may only be in her early fifties. If she is, she certainly doesn't look as youthful as Jennie Gage does. Anyhow, her video above appears to be well-meaning in its content. The problem I'm having with it is that there are so many flaws in it that indicate that it is fear-mongering propaganda disguised as Internet safety advice.

It is bad enough that the mainstream media peddles this same kind of propaganda. Individual influencers on YouTube should at least attempt to hold themselves up to a higher standard than mainstream-media journalists do. Dr. Denny clearly has a number of people fooled into believing everything that she says, and you only have to read all the posts in the comments section to her video to know this for a fact.

Now, if Dr. Denny is warning the public about pubescent and adolescent girls falling into similar circumstances as the late Amanda Todd did, then I say, "More power to her." However, even if she does take her arguments down that same road, she should still keep in mind that it was not only an older adult man who victimized the late Ms. Todd but also minors in her peer group that did so too in that they were the main perpetrator's accomplices.

The main problem that I'm having with Dr. Denny's video above is that she indirectly implies that adult men, particularly older ones, are to blame for all of teenage girls' problems, and that misconception is simply not true. Many of the YouTubers that commented in the comments section to her video above were intellectually bankrupt in what they posted.

For example, this one YouTuber complained that a 20-year-old man was being friendly with her 14-year-old daughter out in public and that she believed that this man had dishonorable intentions for her daughter. My response to her post is that if her 14-year-old daughter wants to date a 20-year-old man, she is likely going to attempt to pass him off as a 15- or 16-year-old boy to get around her mother's obvious paranoia about age-gap relationships. Dr. Denny's video above only adds heat to the fire.

Moreover, every time a college sophomore takes a 13- or 14-year-old girl to a frat house party, everyone gets up in arms about it; whereas peer-on-peer rape of teenage girls seldom ever gets talked about among Americans. Why is this?

If you search hard enough for a story online about a teenage girl falling victim to a peer-on-peer rape, you'll eventually come across a true story about a 15-year-old girl who attended a party with her friends and accepted a ride home from the high-school hunk who also happened to be her school’s football quarterback; and after doing so, he took her to some isolated parking lot to forcibly rape her before he took her home. Also, many female teenage minors fall victim to date rapes at the hands of boys their own age or close to them in age.

As you probably realize by now, I’m not denying that pubescent and adolescent girls fall victim to sex crimes. However, it is mostly boys their own age that are committing these same crimes, because they have the most access to these young girls and the most opportunities to get them alone and corner them.

It's not mostly middle-aged or elderly men that are raping these female teenage minors. Although the Internet has made it easier for adult men to gain access to teenage female minors, middle-school and high-school boys are seldom ever getting monitored for possibly planning on sexually victimizing one of their female classmates.

Somehow in the eyes of our society, whenever it comes to teenage sex, underage boys can do no wrong. By the same token, somehow in the eyes of our society, an adult man who develops non-Platonic feelings for a teenage girl can never have honorable intentions for her. For those same reasons, our war against sexual predation is failing and way too many innocent people are getting locked up behind bars.

1.  The Elephant In The Room Here

First of all, I would like to emphasize that the press and the media, especially the mainstream media, like to blow stories about sexual misconduct between adult men and teenage girls way, way out of proportion. They will exaggerate details of such stories insofar as they will mislead people into believing things that never happened.

The fact alone that Dr. Lonna Denny appears to have a blind faith in the press and the media sets alarms off in my head about how reliable her ability to judge situations and to get all her facts straight is. Although Dr. Denny never injected the proverbial pedophile card anywhere into her video above, her fear-mongering tactics bring her close to doing so.

Dr. Denny? If you are talking about a teenage girl being coerced into a situation she doesn’t want to be in, then you have my vote of support. However, if you are trying to misconstrue every adult man who has ever fallen in love with a teenage girl or has had at least some kind of non-Platonic feelings for her as being a sexual predator, then I have to dismiss your video above as fear-mongering propaganda.

I agree with Dr. Denny that human trafficking is a tragedy. However, we do not need to be overcrowding our prisons with people that don’t belong there because of frivolous and malicious statutory-rape cases that find their way into American courtrooms either.

Second of all, in her video above, Dr. Denny’s picture of a prepubescent girl having a conversation with an adult man is sensationalistic in nature. The little girl there looks no older than 7 or 8 years old. Conventional wisdom holds that teenage girls do not look or act that young.

Are teenage girls really as naïve and fragile as Dr. Denny believes they are? When I was in high school, a classmate of mine that was a year younger than me and whose name was Elsie could have fooled me. Back when I was 15 years old and this girl was 14 years old, she quickly developed a reputation as the school prostitute.

Back when I was 16 years old and Elsie was 15 years old, I caught her getting into a car with a 30-something-year-old man in a parking lot outside the building where I took my driver's education courses. It didn't surprise me. In light of all the teenage boys whom Elsie had harmed, everyone would have been better off if the statutory age of consent were 13 or 14 years old in our state jurisdiction, because then she would have been so busy getting involved with older men that she wouldn't have had time to harm any boys at our local high school.

Lowering the statutory age of consent to 13 or 14 years old would keep these sexually promiscuous teenage girls away from boys their own age that they harm and abuse. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if Elsie had driven boys her own age into committing suicide back when she and I were both in high school. She was that kind of girl as a teenager.

In her video above, Dr. Denny argues that most teenagers have never had anyone manipulate them. I beg to differ. I went through many horrendous experiences with peers when I was in middle school and high school, especially girls looking to play games with my heart.

Also, in contrary to what Dr. Denny states in her video above, I disbelieve that all adults have more experience with love and romance than teenagers do. In light of all the adult male spinsters out there, teenage girls don’t necessarily have less life experience than adult men in this day and age. That is more or less a generalization.

I’m not denying that some age-gap relationships between adult men and teenage girls can be toxic. However, I don’t appreciate radical feminists misusing scare tactics to absorb Americans into their make-believe world of age-appropriate perfection and wholesome purity.

Radical feminists will flap their jaws aggressively about getting tougher statutory-rape laws in our nation; but if their 15-year-old son gets every 12-year-old girl in their neighborhood pregnant and even goes as far as raping these same 12-year-old girls, these same women always have the perfectly lame excuse to defend them. As you can see, our society reeks of hypocrisy whenever it comes to the topic of teenage sex and the likes.

What particularly stands out about Dr. Denny's video above is that what she describes as an adult “predator’s” tactics mirror those of deadbeat teenage fathers. Therefore, we need to get out of this mindset that whenever a 14-year-old girl gets pregnant with a 15-year-old boy's baby, then “Why is it always the boy’s fault?” If the underage boy bullies her afterwards and then goes as far as bailing on her, you cannot help but to place blame on him.

2.  The Flip Side To Dr. Lonna Denny's Arguments

In contradiction to Dr. Lonna Denny's video above, I would like for you to watch two different videos from Norman Michael Achin that touch upon the same subject matter that Dr. Denny does in her video. In the first one below, Mr. Achin makes a point about 13-year-old girls not actively seeking out sexual intimacy with older men on adult dating sites.

Norman Michael Achin Points Out That A Seemingly 13-Year-Old Girl Seeking Sexual Intimacy With An Older Man Online Is Likely A Cop

Mr. Achin's statements make perfect sense. In response to his video above, most middle-school and high-school girls have their rejection techniques down to a fine art no matter how old their suitors are. Mr. Achin is right about a 13-year-old girl not necessarily chasing after a middle-aged man or an elderly man. You never see girls that young in a shopping mall, looking to buy posters of Mitch McConnell and Joe Biden to put on their bedroom walls.

Then again, Barry Manilow would be the exception to the rule. One Fourth of July that was televised from Washington, D.C., a 15-year-old girl walked up to Mr. Manilow in the audience after he had walked out into the audience, and she smiled, sang, and danced with him as though she wanted to have his baby. I guess her mother would have had no concern about it, because he was openly gay and had a husband.

Mr. Achin does elaborate on age-gap relationships between adults and teenagers in his video below. He warns his viewers of how these "predator" catchers refuse to differentiate those types of relationships from adults actually molesting small children.

Norman Michael Achin Describes A Disagreement He Had With A Troll Over What Is And Is Not Child Molestation

I agree with Mr. Achin's assertion that we all have had at least one Loretta Lynn in our ancestry. Even Dr. Denny likely has a female ancestor that married a significantly older man when she was 14 years old and lived happily ever after with him as his wife.

As far as I'm concerned, every "predator" catcher in the Dads Against Predators group is a domestic terrorist at best. My feelings are that if our nation is to allow "predator" catchers to conduct their so-called law-enforcement activities in any state jurisdiction, there should be stringent requirements for them in place.

Before anyone can conduct a private online sex-sting operation, they should be required to obtain a private investigator's license. In doing so, they should be obligated to read Heather Corinna's online article titled "Rage of Consent" and the online publication titled The Paradox of Statutory Rape by Russell Christopher and Kathryn Hope Christopher. Then they should be quizzed on both publications so that the people that test them know that they read the material.

It is one thing for you to attend a family reunion and find out from your 79-year-old aunt or great-aunt that she married her 101-year-old husband when she was 14 years old. It is a completely different thing when a 72-year-old man snatches a toddler into his car and takes that toddler off somewhere to do unspeakable things to him or her. Equating both scenarios to each other is comparing apples and oranges. At the end of the day, both scenarios are unrelated to each other no matter what the law or society have to say about them.

American statutory-rape laws ruin families. When I lived in California, I watched a television interview with a 28-year-old African-American woman and her middle-aged German husband. Her husband met her when she was only 16 and he was 28, and they became an item. Her parents had the young man arrested and tried for statutory rape. To make a long story short, the woman eventually married him and severed all contact with her parents. So much for the American system of justice.

3.  Final Thoughts

Nobody opposes the Internet being kept a safe place for everyone, including teenagers. I don't deny that Dr. Lonna Denny has well-meaning intentions. However, how she brings those well-meaning intentions to fruition is what concerns me.

Saying that an adult is into sex with kids is an ambiguous statement that doesn't tell the whole story. In the American culture, parents are going to become alarmed if they discover that their 14-year-old daughter has a 20-year-old boyfriend. If the couple has sex, the criminal justice system is not going to give that couple a fair shake in the way that it approaches their situation.

If someone wishes to provide Internet safety tips, I'm all in favor of it. However, please do not dress it up to look that way if you're really looking to feed fear-mongering propaganda to the public at large only to serve your own agenda. Such a tactic brings more harm than good to the American people.

The definition of grooming needs to be narrowed down to exactly what it is rather than what people would like for it to be. Bogus conspiracy theories about grooming are everywhere, and we need to put a stop to them once and for all. Dr. Denny is seeing this entire issue with tunnel vision.

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