Savage Love: father views incest porn

[vass]

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.

Comments

[synecdochic]

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".

[vass]

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".

[synecdochic]

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.