The role of my parents in my addiction to porn

One of my early memories as a kid is taking a bath as a 6-year-old and having my dad reach for my penis and forcefully stroke it to pull its foreskin back. No, I wasn't being abused, my backstory is not that fucked up. I had been diagnosed with phimosis, and the doctor recommended a somewhat rudimentary method to deal with it — in the US, circumcision is a common procedure, but we like to keep our hoods where I'm from. Sadly, that moment was probably the closest I have ever shared with my dad regarding my sexuality.

Fast forward seven years and I’m a 13-year-old teenager watching TV with my parents. A travel show is on, and it’s set in Florence, Italy. As they venture into the Accademia Gallery Museum, the show’s voiceover shares some trivia facts about Michelangelo’s famous David. “Did you know that he was sculptured uncircumcised, despite being a Jew?”. The word rings a bell but I’m not sure what it is, so I throw out the question: “Circumcised, what’s that?”. I can see my parents stir nervously as they give me a brief answer. “Mm, it’s when they remove the foreskin of your penis, don’t you remember how we dealt with your phimosis as a kid?”. “Phimosis? That’s another word I don’t know”, I think to myself, but I hold on to that second question. Once I know the topic is sexual, I am more comfortable not continuing the conversation with my parents.

As soon as I get back to my room, I google for “circumcision” and “phimosis”. “Phimosis is a condition in which the foreskin can’t be retracted (pulled back) from around the tip of the penis”. “Oh shit, this is exactly what I have”. Whatever my parents achieved when I was a kid had reverted back to its original position, and I had not been pulling my foreskin back for years, unaware that was a problem at all. Now suddenly I realize I have this issue, and from what I’m reading it requires a medical procedure. Well fuck, surgery on my penis. How am I supposed to go about this? It sounds like the first step should be telling my parents, but there is nothing I fear more at this moment.

The awkwardness was too much to handle. I remember hanging out in the living room the following morning while my mom swept the floor around me. The most intense internal debate was happening within myself, trying to gather up the courage to open my mouth and say it. “Mom, remember that we talked yesterday about phimosis? Well, I actually still have it, I just wasn’t aware of it. I think I should get surgery”. I rehearsed these words over and over in my head as my mom wandered around. I made a huge effort to spit it out, but in the end the fear of talking about anything sexual with my parents was too big, and I watched in silence as my mom finished cleaning and headed out of the room. I never tried telling them again, and I keep my foreskin to this day.

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My parents and I never had the classic talk about sex. As a teenager, I felt it as impending doom. I always thought my parents would address it sooner or later, because that seemed to be the way things worked. When I think about it, I reckon that presumption was based more on Hollywood and TV than on reality, because I don’t think most of my friends ever had the conversation either. Needless to say, back then it was something that I absolutely did not want to go through. The mere idea of it made me cringe. I guess my parents felt the same way, because the talk never happened and we all continued to live happily in avoidance.

Sex was never discussed at school either. Other than your basic lesson on the biology of genitals, I do not remember receiving any lecture on sexuality. That’s what you get for going to a religious school. Without guidance nor anything close to it, I, like many other kids my age, turned to the worst teacher possible: porn.

I started watching porn as an early teenager and soon developed an addictive behavior towards it. One day, as I opened the browser to watch some porn, I noticed that I could not navigate to any porn site, while normal sites would still load without any issues. Someone had installed a filtering application on the computer. My mom being absolutely technology illiterate, it was clearly the work of my dad. When the filter started getting in the way of actual, non-erotic websites, I reached out to him. “Dad, this filter that you installed is blocking me from a bunch of websites that do not even have adult content”. His reply? “I don’t know what filter you are talking about”. So that was the way it was. When confronted about it, my dad doubled down on his strategy of avoidance. I walked away quietly and eventually figured out how to remove the filtering software from my computer. He never mentioned anything about it nor reinstalled it.

Soon after, I found out where the whole filter thing had come from. One day I randomly noticed an icon on my taskbar that had been there for some time but I had never really paid attention to. When I googled the name of it, it turned out to be a piece of software that allows you to remotely log in to a computer and access its screen. Essentially, my dad was running software on my computer to spy on me as I used it. He must have seen me watching porn and decided he had to do something about it, hence the filter.

I felt betrayed, my privacy completely violated. I felt embarrassed and humiliated. How much had he seen? In my head, I went over all those awkward things I had been doing on the Internet: pretending I was a lesbian on chats, trying to persuade cam girls to strip naked for free, and, of course, hours and hours of watching porn. Had my dad been a witness to all of that? As you can imagine, I never asked him.

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Lack of privacy was a constant when living with my parents. My room was never a private space. It wasn’t even fully mine. A third of the storage space was occupied by both my mom and my dad’s things, and they would often come in and out of it to grab stuff without even knocking on my door.

This naturally resulted in them catching me red-handed on multiple occasions. Fortunately, it was never too explicit, as I usually had just enough time to minimize my browser and take my hand out of my pants before they came in. It must have been quite obvious, nonetheless. What would you think if, as you walk into your teenage son’s room, you notice him jumping a little bit out of his desk chair in front of the computer, nervously clicking things away as he switches positions? Yeah, exactly. I guess they settled for not seeing me actually jerk off though, because they continued to do this forever, leaving me in a constant state of alert whenever I watched porn with them at home.

Porn was only one of many ways in which they bumped into my most private moments. When I was entering puberty, my sexual energy was off the roof. I would masturbate like a freaking chimpanzee, whenever and wherever I got the chance. My parents would show up as I was watching TV on the couch in the living room, jerking off under the blanket, the pounding movement in the crotch area suddenly coming to a stop as they walked in. At one point, I’m pretty sure that my mom discovered a very embarrassing erotic drawing that I made as she was going through my stuff to clean my room. And yet, they never acknowledged any of these incidents, not at the moment when they happened nor afterward. Their response was always the same: silence.

I can only remember one instance where my parents talked sex to me, and it only came recently, in my mid-to-late twenties. After I revealed to them I was in my first long-term relationship, my dad took the opportunity as soon as we had some time alone to tell me: “Hey son, now that you are in a committed relationship, you know what you have to do, right? Wear protection. I know you don’t like me talking about these things, but you guys have to be careful”. “A little too late for that” — I thought — “but I appreciate the effort, dad”.

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I sometimes wonder what it was like for them during all those years. How aware were they of my habits? Did they have any idea I watched porn for so many hours? Did they ever discuss this among themselves? Were they worried about me? Did they ever consider reaching out to me?

I know my parents love me and their policy of silence was just the only way they knew how to handle the situation. I think I can understand where they come from. Currently in their early sixties, they obviously belong to a very different generation. It was a much more repressed society, particularly in small towns such as those where my parents grew up. Knowing my grandparents, I can only imagine that they never received any kind of sex education themselves. Religion tainted sex as something sinful and loaded with shame. These now-outdated views and the hateful dynamics that little towns often have, where everybody keeps track of your movements and talks behind your back, built a solid wall of secrecy around the topic of sex. My parents remained virgins until marriage and to this day are scarce in how they show affection to each other. They seem to have never gotten rid of the taboo mentality.

Certainly, sometimes this is just a façade, the image that you intentionally project to the outside. My parents do not necessarily have to be prudes or repressed just because they seem so. I’m sure they’ve done stuff. I even “caught” my dad watching porn once —or rather, saw a porn site in his browser’s history as he typed something into the address bar— like father, like son. It would be nothing but a pleasant surprise to find out that my parents have always enjoyed a happy and active sex life in the privacy of their room. However, knowing them as I do, it is hard to conceive them having sex more than twice in their life: one to have my sister and one to have me.

Now I don’t want to fall into the trap of blaming my parents for all of my problems, because that would take away from me blaming society as well. All joking aside, I do take responsibility for my issues, but at the same time understand how it can be helpful to analyze some of the different factors that are involved in them. And what you learn about sex and intimacy as you grow up is necessarily one of those factors. How much a poor sex education influenced my problems with porn, I do not know, but I know this: it is my intention to work hard to break the cycle of ignorance and avoidance and educate my future children better about sex. And, in order to do that, I will start by educating myself, overcoming my problems, and reaching a healthy sex life that sets me as a good example for them. Only from that place will I be able to truly provide guidance, to give sound advice and information without being judgmental, and to respect my children’s privacy while allowing them to make their own decisions.

Who knows, maybe someday, when they look ready, I will even send them a link to this post.

 

We didn't really get much sex education at school, only your basic biology lesson of what a penis/vulva is.
It's just the way it was back then and there (for the record, I'm not from the US). It's probably better nowadays, or at least I hope so.