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

[eleanorjane]

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.)

[recessional]

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"

[vass]

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.