agonyaunt | Savage Love: father views incest porn

Savage Love: father views incest porn

I am a 22-year-old college grad who has been living at home for the last year. My parents are divorced, so I’ve gone back and forth from one place to the other. The other day, I was using my father’s computer, and the history came up on the search engine. It turns out that while I am in the house, my father views pornography that involves incest fantasies. I felt quite disturbed by what I saw—it made me physically sick—and I’m wondering if I should continue to have a relationship with my father.

In a week, I start a new job in another country—so I can get away from him for a while and think about my options. What should I do? Should I tell him that I know about it and I’m not interested in having a relationship with him anymore? Do I tell my friends or family? Should I trust what my gut is telling me and pack up, jump in a cab, and never talk to him again?
Disturbed And Distressed

Dan's reply:
There are people who are turned on by incest scenarios—hypothetical dads seducing hypothetical daughters, fictional moms seducing fictional sons—who are nevertheless revolted by the idea of actual incest, i.e., non-hypothetical fuck sessions with their own non-fictional family members. Many of these incest fetishists have sent me letters over the years, DAD, wondering what’s wrong with them. Or wondering what’s right with what’s wrong with them, I should say, as they’re turned on by incest fantasies, but not, as they’re invariably relieved to add, by incest realities. So what gives?

It’s the thrill of violating a taboo, not a child; it’s the power dynamics that have been eroticized, not the parental dynamics—but that’s for another column. You wrote, DAD, because you don’t know what to do about your dad.

Unless your father has given you reason to suspect that he actually wants to fuck you—unless finding your dad’s porn helped you to identify a pattern of inappropriate behaviors on your father’s part with but one possible interpretation (he actually wants to fuck you)—let’s give your father the benefit of the doubt, shall we? Let’s assume that one of the many letters I’ve received from incest fetishists was written by your dad.

I’m operating under an assumption: again, that your father has never done anything that made you feel unsafe. If your discovery had led you to connect a bunch of deeply creepy dots, DAD, that’s surely something you would’ve mentioned in your letter. Which is why I’m not just urging you to give your father the benefit of the doubt, however revolting his taste in porn might be, but also to take what you found out about him and stuff it down the memory hole.

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I think that Dan is ignoring the circumstances under which DAD found out about the porn. He was viewing that porn using a computer she was also using, at a time when she was living with him (i.e. recent browsing history) and not wiping the history or using separate accounts.

The way I see it, there are three possibilities:
1. He is too stupid to be entrusted with a computer at all.

2. He has a very serious porn problem, to the extent that he's taking risks because he can't control his habit. (It's also typical of people with porn addictions, as opposed to people who just like porn, that they may end up consuming more and more extreme types of porn to get off. Maybe he didn't start out with an incest fetish, but more innocent stuff wasn't doing it for him any more.)

3. He wanted her to see it. This is the one that concerns me.

It also seems significant to me that this woman's gut is telling her to get out of there. She's the one in the situation, she's the one who knows her father, and she has a bad feeling about this. I think she should listen to her gut.

Dan is right that she didn't mention previous bad experiences with him, but unlike Dan, I don't think that proves anything. Sometimes it takes a long time to join those dots, even after an experience like that. Sometimes people minimise things like that, or are unsure what counts. Particularly when it's more subtle than a physical act.

I think that at very least she should put some distance between her and her father, to give herself time to recover from the shock and consider her options. And I certainly don't think that burying it in the memory hole is an option. By leaving those sites in the internet history where he knew she'd see it, he involved her in a sexual act. That is not neutral or innocent. If she needs to put it behind her in her best interests, that's another thing, but she certainly shouldn't be pretending it didn't happen for his sake.

Edited 2011-09-21 15:21 (UTC)

Everything you mention is a good thing to consider, but the LW said the history showed up on the *search engine*, not on the computer -- by that I took to mean, the father left himself logged in on his Google account and the LW clicked on the Google search history. A lot of people don't know Google saves your searches like that (and are shocked to find out), and it doesn't get cleared when you clear cookies/browser history. So, it's possible that your #1 can be extended to "does not understand Google's extreme disregard for privacy".

Okay, I missed that. So she went snooping? In that case, I'm less worried about him deliberately involving her in his sex life.

I knew Google both saved my searches and permanently identified them with my email account (or cookie or IP address) and used that to modify what results it returns, but I didn't know you could actually view the previous searches like that. It figures that you can, it just hadn't occurred to me.

Although that would still depend on whether the LW knew the difference between "web browser" and "search engine". I imagine some people might use those interchangeably, in the same way that there are people who will call Firefox, or even the Firefox icon on their desktop, "my internet".

Yeah, ultimately it's hard to figure out exactly what the LW meant by finding the information on his computer. And yeah, I think it does affect what I think about the situation :/

I think this is one of the situations where we can't have enough information to know what the "right answer" is. I just hope that Dan's answer will help give her a new lens through which to evaluate the situation.

My reaction is mostly that we don't have enough info to make much more of a judgement than Dan did; he qualifies what he says sufficiently that it didn't bother me, in that he repeats himself with the "I am assuming that this is the ONLY thing, and there are not other patterns" (in which I would include "general feeling of skeeziness OUTSIDE of this").

I know plenty of very nice fen whose fic-reading habits and particular story-kinks would not stand up well to an outsider happening across them due to computer-carelessness. Some of them live in absolute terror of being "outed" because someone will discover that they like to read Lucius/Draco fic sometimes and take their children away.

I also know people who ended relationships or never spoke to their parents again simply because they discovered that the other person watched/consumed porn. Period.

So there's a lot of cultural and situational crap tied up here, and I'd say it's impossible to make any kind of judgement, and given Dan's mandate of (well, haphazardly and sometimes dickishly, but still) normalizing sexuality, I'd say there's really no other response for him to give.

Note that she also doesn't specify that this was a shared computer; just says that she was on her father's computer. No note as to whether this was with his permission or whether she just assumed she had permission to use his computer, or what. Which again, totally changes the situation - if we're talking she saw his laptop that happened to be on and open it's different from if this was The Shared Household Computer which is different from "I was snooping on my dad's computer and found this."

Edited 2011-09-21 17:09 (UTC)

This is all pretty much my reaction, plus a side order of "We also don't know what Dad finds appealing about the incest fantasies; for all we know he could be fantasising about being the younger/powerless person in the scenario." Or there may be something else (more obscure) about which he fantasises and he's found that incest-fantasy porn *tends* to feature the thing that also pushes his buttons. (In the same way that if you fantasise about, say, machine sex, you're more likely to find it in non-con fantasy porn rather than sorority threesome porn.)

I dunno; I can totally see why it's a difficult issue that needs a lot of careful consideration. But fantasy != reality and provided there's no other reason to feel that the father has crossed any boundaries, I think it's unfair to judge him based on the contents of his fantasy life.

I certainly wouldn't want anyone to judge me on the contents of mine.

(That said: the LW's wording about 'going with her gut instincts' did rather give me pause; that tends to raise concerns that she's subconsciously picking up on other ick she hasn't actively identified yet, or didn't outline in the letter. So Dan's caveats should definitely be considered, strongly.)

Yeah, I just really need more details. If we're talking he left this where she was BOUND to see it and there's other skeeze and, I dunno, the actors in the porn are questionably aged¹, etc, then it's a totally different situation than if we're talking stuff on his private computer that she never would have thought of him ever watching before and she's going WTF EW MY FATHER NOT ONLY HAS A SEXUALITY BUT IT'S ONE I FIND DISTURBING!

And everything in between, you know? So other than I'd probably elaborate on what else might be a connection of dots, etc, I can't see that I'd answer a lot differently.

¹I mean, it occurred to me just about when you replied that I could go back and note "if we are talking there are any underaged actors in this porn, TOTALLY DIFFERENT SCENARIO"

You know, it occurs to me now, having read other people's comments and calmed down a little, that she didn't say what sort of incest porn. If it was father/daughter, then I'd be just as upset in her place, whether or not he actually has sexual feelings for his own daughter. But it's possible that he's reading or watching, I don't know, brother/brother, and that she's generalised from that to "he must like incest in general!"? In which scenario I would say that it's none of her business.

But yeah, what you said about underaged porn actors. There's no way to make that right.

I had no trouble at ALL believing that DAD's dad could leave porn in his browser history or his Google history without knowing it or expecting that his kid would find it. My mother wouldn't know that, despite the patient years of tech support my sister and I have provided for her. (And she's not stupid, definitely. And it's not like we haven't told her. It's like there's a block in her head when it comes to using computers or knowing about them. I mean, there's a reason my sister and I made her get a Mac the last time she went looking for a laptop.) And I remember a board meeting I attended at one of my past jobs. It turned into an impromptu lecture on internet security from me and the webmaster, and all twelve board members were astonished to hear about things like browser history. They were uniformly wealthy people who had done or were doing very well in business. They weren't stupid. They used computers regularly. But they didn't know this stuff. I know lots of people like them. This is why phishing works so well, why that Nigerian prince keeps sending out his email: because most people just don't get it.

It's easy to believe that everyone would know this stuff, because we hang out in fandom and on DW. We spend so much time on computers, and we care about privacy and policy, and we actually read the Terms and Conditions, and so do most of our friends. But that isn't the norm, not at all. DAD's dad could very easily be a reasonably bright guy who uses his computer for email and porn and Facebook and has no idea his history is easily visible to anyone else who uses his computer, or how to clear his history, for that matter.

You have a point, particularly about the block in people's heads about computer stuff. I remember one time my parents were completely astonished that I fixed their internet connection without having to call a technician. All I did was power cycle the modem and the router. They'd never had to do that, because every single time their connection went down, they didn't even call their ISP helpline, they got someone from the company who does computer stuff for them to make an outcall.

So yeah, my parents are pretty clueless about computers (and yes, it's a good thing they're Mac users) but they both still password-protect their computers (in my mother's case, that's an ethical requirement of her job) and when I need to use a computer when I'm there, my father logs me into his guest account, not his personal account.

What fascinates me is that everyone is assuming DAD is a daughter. Nothing in the letter states the writer's gender.

Thank you!

I kept reading the letter over and over trying to figure out where people were getting that from.

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