I'm a faithful reader of your column and really value your advice. I'm a 46-year-old woman and the mother of a young daughter. I'm married to an addict (alcohol and porn). I've stood by my husband for 17 years, through many difficult times (caused mostly by alcohol) the hopes he'd find a way to sobriety. I'm open minded about porn, view it myself, and it has been a part of past healthy sexual relationships.
I don't mind my husband looking at age appropriate porn but have recently become aware (yes, I spied) that he was looking at images (clothed, from FB) of my best friend's 15-year-old daughter. Correspondingly, his online viewing has been teen porn (purported legal age) and now recently incest porn and a porn star who shares our young daughter's name (she has a very uncommon name).
When I confronted him about viewing of my best friend's daughter, he confessed (under duress) and apologized (with clear resentment and anger at being found out) and said this was caused by anger he felt towards me in other areas of our relationship. He continues to view teen porn online since this confrontation and I recently saw he has been looking at my best friend's daughter again in spite of promising never to do it again.
I'm fit, healthy and open sexually and this feels like an incredible betrayal. It also worries my re: having a daughter and his viewing of incest porn. He refuses to seek counseling for either the sex or alcohol addiction. I feel trapped by the hope that things could change and our family would not have to be torn apart but don't know what to do if he still seeks this type of online viewing.
Will It Finally End
Wait—your husband told you he was only jerking off to (clothed) pics of your best friend's daughter because you did something that pissed him off? Unhappiness in "other areas" of your relationship left him with no choice but to jerk off to pictures of a particular teenage girl he happens to know?
That's such offensive blame-shifting, responsibility-avoiding bullshit that I'm surprised you didn't DTMFA him on the spot. That's what I would've done, WIFE.
As for the incest porn in your husband's browser history... he's unfortunately not the only one out there.
"When I first got access to PornHub data," Seth Stephens-Davidowitz writes in his new book Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Tells Us About Who We Really Are, "I found a revelation there that struck me as at least somewhat Freudian. In fact, this is among the most surprising thing I have found yet during my data investigations: a shocking number of people visiting mainstream porn sites are looking for portrayals of incest."
Of the top hundred searches by men on PornHub, one of the most popular porn sites, sixteen are looking for incest-themed videos. Fair warning—this is going to get a little graphicL they include "brother and sister," step mom fucks son,""mom and son," and "real brother and sister." The plurality of male incestuous searches are for scenes featuring mothers and sons. And women? Nine of the top hundred searches by women on PornHub are for incest-themed videos, and they feature similar imagery—though with the gender of any parent and child who is mentioned usually reversed. Thus the plurality of incestuous searches made by women are for scenes featuring fathers and daughters.
In defense of all those people looking all that incest porn (in defense of some, at any rate), not everyone who fantasizes about incest scenarios and/or watches incest-themed videos is interested in or turned on by the thought of having sex with their actual moms, dads, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, grandparents, etc. People into incest porn often say they're aroused by the transgression and the violation of taboos, not by the thought of sex with actual members of their immediate families.
Stephens-Davidowitz, however, has some goddamned data on that too:
Of course, PornHub data can't tell us for certain who people are fantasizing about when watching such videos. Are they actually imagining having sex with their own parents? Google searches can give some more clues that there are plenty of people with such desires. Consider all the searches of the form "I want to have sex with my..." The number one way to complete this search is "mom."
Plenty of people ≠ all the people. But it looks like I'll have to retract or somehow correct a recent answer to a question in my column:
Incest porn—what is the reason behind why it's so hot?
I reject the premise of your question. There's nothing hot about incest porn.
While I find nothing hot about incest porn, lots of other people find something hot about it. Thanks, Big Data, for letting us know who we really are on that score.
As for the jerking-off-to-porn-stars-with-the-same-name-as-our-young-daughter issue, WIFE, that might be a strange coincidence—and names aren't something people tend to fetishize. (I was into Andy Gibb when I was 13 years old, WIFE, but Andy Rooney never did a thing for me.) So I'm not comfortable sprinting to the conclusion that your drunk, loud, avoidant, counseling-averse husband wants to fuck your kid and might decide to do just that—and blame you for it—the next time he feels unhappy about the state of your relationship. But you seem to be jumping to the conclusion that your hubby is secretly dying to fuck your kid, WIFE, and you know him better than I do. And if you think it's either true or that it might fall somewhere on the possible-to-likely spectrum—with his judgement and impulse control damaged by all that booze—then my advice can be summarized with three handy abbreviations: DTMFA GTFO ASAP.
Setting aside his taste in porn and his bullshit rationalizations, WIFE, seventeen years is a long time to wait for someone to get his shit together and get sober. If he won't get help, and if that help doesn't prompt him to take some responsibility for his choices and his desires, err on the side of protecting your daughter.
Listen to my podcast, the Savage Lovecast, at www.savagelovecast.com.
Impeach the motherfucker already! Get your ITMFA buttons, t-shirts, hats and lapel pins and coffee mugs at www.ITMFA.org!