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

[thefourthvine]

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.

[vass]

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.