Thank you so much for the trauma-focused perspective on BANDAGE. It was very enlightened and valuable - a completely different perspective. It suspect it will have a positive impact on my family, and for that I'm grateful.

Seconding @1, this makes me think. I have a child who did heavy hospital time as an infant, and apparently bounced back well. I don't know that I see anything or will ever, but I'll keep an eye open to the possibility.

Who are these people who are shocked by incest porn? It doesn't merely "exist," it's one of the most common masturbation fantasies of all time. And yeah of course consent in a real life incest situation can be extremely questionable, so it's a good thing this is porn and not real life. Schoolgirl/teacher and employee/employer scenarios also involve questionable consent, but I don't see anyone complaining about those genres of porn.

@3: One of the most common masturbation fantasies of all time?? It has never even occurred to me to have an incest fantasy or even that other people had them until I read about it here. Oh wait I guess stepparent/stepchild is something I was familiar with, when it's a new stepparent and the kid isn't even a kid anymore. Also sibling-in-law hookups.

I wonder if MILF count as incest in the study. If so, I contribute to the search numbers. I wanted to see sexy petite women with small breasts, and the search results took that as code for young young young. I add MILF to my search terms to counteract it.

@4: I agree, I don't think it's *that* common of a fantasy. It's particularly popular online, I'd guess (without knowing) that it's just an easy custom sort of scenario for the actress that doesn't require much more taxing or costume-wise than an easy script.

Incest fantasies are the basis for a ton of old smut novels and classic porn films like "Taboo." They make up a decent chunk of erotica written online. Incest fantasy shows up in, like, every Nancy Friday book. Incest is a narrative driver in THE MOST POPULAR SHOW ON TELEVISION RIGHT NOW (and part of that is because it's titillating). "Daddy" has become so integrated into sex talk that mainstream culture barely blinks at it.

It's a pretty common fantasy. But almost nobody actually fantasizes about fucking one of their real family members — it's about the transgression and naughtiness of super-hot *pretend* family members having sex. It's also Freudian-ish (or at least I don't think it's coincidence that I was raised by an overbearing, often very angry, sex-negative mother, and that one of my most reliable fantasies is about being dominated by a MILF who says she's my mommy). It's really weird to me that Dan gets so squicked by it.

In response to the person who loves incest porn, I feel compelled to point out that data IS information. It's how you interpret the data that's subjective.

I wonder if "threesome with two sexy twins/siblings" is included in "incest fantasies"? That's about the only non-squicky variation on the theme I can think of.
Which would still be pretty squicky to most of us, in real life.

@8: Not squicky to you, BiDan. I can think of lots of variations on the incest theme that I find very hot. Then again, as a woman myself, I would never, ever want to have sex with a woman. And I don't call that desire, when other women have it, "squicky."

I also think that this comes back to one's definition of fantasy. To some people, a fantasy is an act they want to perform or involves a person they want to have sex with in real life. To others, a fantasy is an unreal, and unrealizable situation or condition or person that we like to imagine/pretend, but that not only might not be able to be realized in real life, but we might not want to realize in real life if we got the opportunity. I'm in that second group.
1. I don't want to actually experience many of the things I fantasize about.
2. I don't want to have sex with my own dad.
3. I am not someone else and a much younger person with a very different person as my dad, which is how my incest fantasy plays out, so I couldn't realize it if I wanted to--which is fine with me, because if I really was a totally different and much younger person with a very sexy dad who is nothing like nocutename's real dad, the odds are high I still wouldn't want to actually have sex with him. Because to me, that's not what a "fantasy" is.

If someone finds her dad's diary, in which he says, "I find myself thinking about my daughter and jacking off every day--she's so sexy," I can understand how she would be freaked out, even if her father never made an inappropriate move. But if someone finds generic "incest themed" porn among a parent's belongings, that response is inappropriate and to me it borders on narcissistic. It reminds me of the stance that I used to hear homophobes take when their attitude towards all gay men was that they were afraid that the gay man naturally wanted to have sex with them. I would say, "Wow, you think really highly of yourself, to imagine everyone you meet wants to have sex with you. And if even someone does think you're cute, does that automatically translate to him planning to jump you in the bushes or slip a roofie in your drink? You're not that irresistible."

Some fantasies are inherently unrealizable: centaurs, 50-foot-tall women, mermaids. Some fantasies involve scenarios that are unrealizable. I have lots of fantasies that take place in different time periods and in which I am not me, but someone else entirely.

Not all people use visual porn to fantasize. Some of us just use our imaginations, and they can easily range pretty far. Some of us use erotica, and it's a lot easier to project yourself into a scene if you're reading about it. But if I found my dad's visual porn and it was incest-themed, and it clearly was neither me nor my dad in the video, I wouldn't come to the conclusion that he wanted to have sex with me. I'd come to the conclusion that he found the transgressive aspect of that cultural taboo hot.

Wow. that was a whole lot of TL;DR for a problem that could be solved with "have your 16-year-old buy and wash his own underwear."

No Cute, I agree with a lot of what you are saying in a practical way, but in real life grief and the loss of someone you know and then a discovery of new info about them- no matter how trivial it seems to us or someone who is not emotionally affected- can completely overthrow both your own emotions and your perspective of reality. There is a reason the standard advice for a person in mourning is to make no serious decisions for a year. Referring to your third paragraph- The use of "narcissistic" to describe all behavior in which a person is clouded by their own point of view for whatever reason is already being thrown around way too much just generally these days- but to apply it to a person in this situation just seems unempathetic to me. And to draw analogies with bigotry like homophobia just seems so far off that maybe I'm misunderstanding you?

Discussions of judgement about how to respond to the father's kinks and/or potential affairs are way premature in my opinion. Deal with them next year. Right now, the LW needs to mourn her dad. She is having trouble doing that because she has these questions about what sort of man her dad is. My advice is the same, and it was hard won myself. You only have to judge your dad as a dad. Nothing else. You don't have to judge him as a man or a lover or a partner, just as a dad. You don't have any responsibility to come to grips with anything other than that relationship between the two of you. Mourn him like this. Then later, when you are feeling better, consider the other info (the kink, the affairs) if you want to. You might find it doesnt matter anymore or you might find that you will be in a better place to think about it when the mourning is finished.

@11: EmmaLiz, I wasn't referring to the specific letter about finding the dead father's porn and letters which were part of the weekly column in my comment @9 in this comment thread--I was responding to BiDanFan @8, who I thought was speaking generally of the idea of incest-themed porn or incest-themed fantasies.

The topic has come up on Savage Love numerous times, not necessarily in relation to dead parents, as much as in finding one's parent's (usually father's) incest-themed porn. Generally a daughter find this and is freaked out and assumes it means that her father is interested in her sexually, and I feel like the same point has to get made over and over again: namely, that the incest theme is often more about power imbalance and/or transgressive-ness, both of which many people find erotic.

Again and again people write in to say that it's not their own parent or child that they are sexually interested in and many of us have said repeatedly that we're not even "ourselves" with our real relatives in our incest fantasies. And yet people still don't seem to get it: daughters continue to freak out and think that their fathers are jerking off to thoughts of them, and savvy, sex-positive, longtime regulars such as BiDanFan make statements that assume that "most of us" are squicked out by incest-themed fantasies.

Of course I have empathy for people making a discovery about a dead parent's sexual life that they don't like. But leaving the death aspect aside, I reiterate that if you (general, hypothetical, universal you) find your dad's incest-themed porn, unless he has photoshopped your face onto pornographic images, or you find actual photographs of yourself in his porn stash file, or you read a true confession in which he explicitly states that he is aroused by thoughts of you and jerks off to them, you shouldn't imagine yourself to be the object of your dad's fantasy.

@3 i dunno how "common" it is, then again, I'm an only child and there my female cousins are ~15 years older than me.

@6 I've always assumed the 'Daddy' thing was a loan from latin americans, where calling your partner 'mami' or 'papi' isn't unusual. Although I find it to be used very casually any not in a sexual way either (my burrito truck guy calls me papi just like my halal truck guy calls me boss). But anywho.

I'd probably rate it as "not uncommon" but also not super popular. And I think incest porn would still be shocking because, compared to most other sex fantasies we have, we can't actually watch incest on pornhub

@13: There is a ton of "incest" porn on Pornhub, where people are pretending to be family members, and I'm sure what the letter writer found was the same type of thing, but older.

My ex had a threesome with two twins (models at that). She said she 'just wanted to get off' but was kind of weirded out because she felt like the two had the whole process down to a science.

@14 this is correct, but it's plainly not actual incest porn, it's just plain old porn retitled to "Girl fucks her stepdad!!!!".

@16: I hate to break it to you, but that "pizza delivery guy" is not really a pizza delivery guy and the sorority girls are just actresses. Some of the people having sex aren't really into each other. Women's orgasms are usually faked, and sometimes men's are, as well. The reason you can see the action is because there is special lighting.
Porn is entertainment made for commercial consumption. Even, often, "amateur"porn.

Barring identical twins, how would you know that anyone in a porn video is actually committing incest? Your mind, aided by the title and any exposition, allows you to tell yourself that this woman and man are siblings or a mother and son. Voila: incest porn!
This is only one of many, many reasons I can't watch visual porn.

Seriously, do you understand the concept of "imagination?" How about "willing suspension of disbelief?"

@17 I think, my Suspension of Disbelief Bar is higher than just a title and some shoddy acting. Or are you the same person who replies to every spam e-mail you get and is busy sending off your publishers clearing house entry? How many millions have you help for Nigerian politicians and dignitaries? If so, then I can see how 'visual porn' could be quite upsetting to you.

To be fair - a good pron actress can convince me that she's there because she enjoys being watched, enjoys the sex acts she's into, etc. I'm not super into the s&m/bondage/etc porn at kink.com but one thing I do enjoy is that everyone seems to be there willingly and eagerly and like they do this stuff off camera for no money but are happy to do so on camera for money; but for all I know that's just as fake as the "we were just driving around and we happened to pick up this smoking hot 19 year old who's completely dtf". Who cares? The point isn't that it's "real".

The key is, most porn is "what do you want to see" - do you want see asian girls? look, here's actual asian women. Like watching blowjobs? That penis is actually in that mouth. Like group sex? Heck, even in a studio, under the lights, they're still having a group sex. Big breast fan? Implanted or not, those videos feature actual large breasts.

I don't know, Sportlandia; I don't watch porn.

Nocute @9: I think a word like "squicky" is by definition subjective.
Re the homophobes who imagine every gay man wants to have sex with them, I'm not sure whether that's narcissism or simple projection. Perhaps these are the straight men who DO want to have sex with every woman they see, so they imagine for gay men it's no different.
And I don't think we can conclude PARENT is squicked by her dad's incest porn because she assumes it means he wanted to have sex with her. As these comments -- and Dan's words -- show, a lot of people are squicked by the very concept of incest, and can't envision it being a turn-on in the abstract. Remember, PARENT was also troubled by the "violent sexual acts" depicted in Dad's stash. Your own inner fantasy life makes this easy to accept, but if PARENT's own fantasies run to the vanilla, no wonder it's a bit more difficult for her to wrap her head around.

Nocute @12: "I was responding to BiDanFan @8, who I thought was speaking generally of the idea of incest-themed porn or incest-themed fantasies."

Talk of narcissism? My comment @8 didn't refer to anything you'd said. (Winkyface emoticon for good-natured ribbing.) And no, I don't think that people who have incest fantasies literally want to fuck their own relatives. I just think that for most people, the idea of fucking their own relatives would bleed over into the concept of "incest porn" and make it a turn-off mentally. I'm not judging those who do like it; I just don't get it, just as I don't expect the average person would share my turn-ons.

Nocute @17: I think Sportlandia's post ("it's just plain old porn retitled to "Girl fucks her stepdad!!!!") indicated that he knows full well that it's two actors playing a girl and a stepdad.

Amendment -- Sorry Nocute, I misread your @12 as "who thought I was speaking generally..." And yes, I was speaking generally. I thought "two sexy siblings" would be a more popular fantasy than "one's own sibling." Whether one had any interest in realising such a fantasy or not.

BiDan @20, responding to my comment @17 to Sportlandia's @16:
First of all, I assumed Sportlandia knew that the Girl and the Stepdad were actors. I was trying to make a point about porn and I guess it didn't come through. I don't watch porn, so I'm probably way off base, because I really don't know the motivation that inspires people to watch the kind of porn they watch. (I mean, yes, I know what the motivation is, but I don't know what people are looking for.)

Criterion 1.) Some people apparently just care that the bodies in the porn have certain specific attributes: big breasts, big dicks, big asses, hairy chests, fat women, people with lots of tattoos, whatever. Some people I guess just look for specific sex acts: positions or multi-person events, or whatever. I guess that some people look for markers like race or age. If you do that, and only care about that, it wouldn't matter to you if you didn't know that the two people having sex on screen were siblings in reality. It might freak you out a little bit or a whole lot to know that they were siblings. Some people might be too freaked out to continue wanking to that porn, and others might be a bit put off, but no so much that they couldn't enjoy the porn for whatever attributes the people have or for whatever act they're performing.

Criterion 2.) I don't think there's a lot of porn being made today that has any kind of narrative in it, like 1970s-1990s porn used to always have. Maybe there's still an audience for it. But that would be where the incest-themed porn's niche would lie, right? It's a scenario, it's part of what's erotic to the people who seek it out. But I don't believe that most porn these days bothers with trying to tell a story, no matter how quickly that set-up story devolves into closeups of body parts fucking. It's my understanding (again, I don't watch porn) that most porn nowadays is short loops of specialized acts or body types, with no pretense of a reason for these people to be together at this moment.

Criterion 3.) Then there are apparently people for whom the main criterion is choosing porn is its veracity. It's not professional, but amateur-produced. Everything you see is real. The breasts are real; the tans and long nails--or rather, the lack of them--are real; the women's orgasms are real; and apparently, one of the other things that matters is that the relationship between the people be real, too. They're either real strangers who've never met but have agreed to do this gang-bang, or a real couple, or a real pair of siblings.

I guess there can be some crossover between criteria 1 and 2 and 1 and 3; it's really 2 and 3 which are generally incompatible. If what you require in your porn is story and most amateurs are just filming themselves having sex, you're going to have to turn to professional porn for your narrative needs. And even then, most professionally produced porn isn't narrative focused any more, is it? (Or maybe it is. For my purposes, it's not going to matter, as I'll try to address in a later paragraph.)

So I would imagine that Sportlandia's number 1 criterion is #3: realness. It therefore matters to him that if the people in the video are calling themselves a girl and her stepdad, they should be an actual girl and her actual stepdad, and Sportlandia's smart enough to know that there's no way to really know that and that incest being such a taboo and so frowned upon, the chances are very low that the people having sex are really who they're billed as being. I'm not suggesting that Sportlandia's got an erotic interest in incest; just that he's aware that if he did, he'd have no way of making sure that the quality that's important to him when he chooses his porn was really there.

Whereas to me, who finds only certain specific iterations of the incest theme erotic, and only under particular narrative circumstances, if I were to watch visual porn to prime my erotic pump, what would matter to me would be less the veracity than the evocative power to make me feel some shared sense of what the characters are supposed to be feeling: i.e. the wrongness of what they're doing. The fact that the stepdad and girl were really a girl and her stepfather in real life would, in fact, freak me out, because to me, "fantasy" is by definition something I find very arousing but don't want to do in real life, even if I were to get the chance (see my comment @9). That extends, in all incest cases, to thinking of it being done by anyone in real life. The realness of the relationship between the fuckers offscreen would not be what would give that video its erotic power. What would give it its value, to me, would be the strength of the sense of attraction between the characters as they play a scene of extreme power imbalance and transgress bounds of propriety.

However, I have never seen a porn video that can come anywhere close to conveying those elements that I find erotic. I find the staging uncomfortable, the lighting frightening, the script atrocious and the acting even more so. What I find sexy are all the things that 99.9% of visual pornography can't deliver to me, but which a well-written piece of erotica can. And the fact that the two characters written on the page aren't really father and daughter is a moot one, given the medium.
It's a good thing that my preferred erotic medium is print, because I like my imaginary daughter-self to be under 18, too. Not much under; not a child. But a 16 year-old or so, and if my erotica delivery system was visual porn, and my most important criterion was that #3--veracity thing, I'd be in big trouble. So once again, the only legal and ethical way I could get that part of the fantasy addressed would be in most-likely commercially-made porn that was using actors, including young-looking adult women to play teenagers. And again, see my response to the undesirability of commercial porn.

I guess in a way, I value realness in my chosen auto-erotic (or shared) inspiring medium, too. What's important to me is the realness of the experience The "emotional reality" is maybe the best way I can describe it. And the kind of reality I want is impossible, unethical, and illegal to achieve in a video format. I also find the relationship between the writer and the reader of erotica to be a real and arousing one. It's a shared act: the writer writes his or her thoughts, something that comes from his own self, and somewhere, another person, a stranger, understands exactly the thoughts that original person was having and feels the same way or the way that the original person wanted to make the second person feels. That's a kind of reciprocal sharing that affects erotica writers as much as it does porn actors or directors, who also get off knowing that what they're doing is getting people off.

There are so many fewer restrictions put on our minds.

If I were a much more articulate person, I would have written something quite similar to nocute's posts on this topic. As it is, I'll just say "ditto!"

@22 I don't precisely see a question, but it'll give it a go:

"what would matter to me would be less the veracity than the evocative power to make me feel some shared sense of what the characters are supposed to be feeling" - where, for you, does that evocative power come from? I sometimes think about the real people behind the porn facades. I like to imagine they have a cavalier attitude about sex and deal with it as casually as I might offer someone a hand with their luggage while they're going up and down the stairs at my local subway stop.

This of course points to the concept that many men feel deeply ashamed about almost every aspect of their sexuality, and porn is the only place where you aren't asked to feel quite as ashamed (of course, please, never EVER acknowledge you look at it or enjoy and if if you do enjoy make sure to get a forensics degree so you can hide from society that you enjoy it and my god do not let your wife or mother find out or they'll literally stop loving you and if that isn't enough, and you still look at porn, make sure you are hidden away as much as possible - but let's not kid, no matter how hard you hide it from the rest of the world, you'll go blind, you'll get hairy palms, and God will literally strike you down). Neatly summarized in the infamous Onion Headline "Ironic Porn Purchase Leads to Earnest Ejaculation".

@24: Well, I'm not going to address your point that many men feel deeply ashamed about almost every aspect of their sexuality, because
a) so do most women
and
b) I would never stop writing!

I just had made a lot of suppositions about porn and what people who consume it look for when they decide what porn is worthy, and I thought it might not be a bad idea to see if I was totally off base.

But you ask where, for me, that evocative power comes from, and I would say that I have never found it in hardcore porn, though sometimes I have in sexy, softcore, "R" rated movies' sex scenes. I mostly find it in well-written erotica (I don't think all, or even most erotica is well-written, by the way, but I am an English professor who also writes erotica, so I'm no doubt biased). I use literary erotica as my medium for wank-fodder, or I like to read it aloud or have it read to me by lovers as foreplay (fortunately, I have dated men who also appreciate it, though they also like visual porn).
Good erotica lets me feel the feelings--the desire; the almost unbearable lust; the thrill mixed with the fear of getting caught having sex in a public place; the excitement of sex with a total stranger; the beauty in submission; the transgression--of everyone involved. I'm a straight woman, but if the erotica is well-written enough, I can be anyone--male or female, straight, gay, or bi, in the story. I'm generally everyone at once. I think the feelings of desire and arousal are universal, and a good writer lets me tap into someone else's in a way that I find very hot, even if in real life, I wouldn't be with that person or do that act--or want to.

But I actually find the idea that most men reduce porn sex to a particular act crossed with a body type (Asian girl blows huge cock/brunette with big tits gets fucked in the ass) to be incredibly depressing. It makes me kind of never want to have sex with anyone ever again.

Sportlandia @24: So if I am to extrapolate from your post: If viewing of porn were more socially acceptable, there wouldn't be a need for "extreme" porn featuring acts most people would never want to try at home, for instance incest, because the interest in this sort of porn stems from the fact that (mainly) men already feel ashamed that they're looking at porn in the first place, so they may as well go for something horrifying since they're damned already?

In other words, thinking of today's SPH letter and humiliation as a kink, have men spent so much time associating porn viewing with shame that the shame itself becomes a turn-on, so they seek out porn that makes them feel as ashamed, and therefore aroused, as possible?

Or have I completely misread you again?

@25 There's some science as to why men are more turned on by visual rather than literate porn, right? In any case, I don't know what to tell you about porn being boiled down to certain physical categories. We live in a culture (and specifically, our professional/college-educated version of it) that generally degrades all physical work - be it cleaning, taking out trash, building, fucking, even playing sports - and hold it inherently inferior to intellectual pursuits, very Victorian of us. I'd encourage you to not consider experiencing different physical sensations (different bodies, races, etc) is inherently inferior/superior to the things you imagine when you erotica. That being said, you've enjoyed the ability to dial up whatever type of story you want when in reality, we play the cards we're dealt. So I don't see a huge gulf between the way you describe enjoying porn compared to the stereotypical man watches porn. There may be a gulf in your ability to describe how you feel, but probably not in the feelings themselves.

@Bi uhhh... I dunno. I don't think that extreme porn comes from repression necessarily. Thinking, most men who are in to humiliation porn (being humiliated) usually it's for their shortcomings - small cocks and such - not their porn viewing habits.

Sportlandia @27: I wasn't referring to "humiliation porn," but to the idea that men experience a feeling of humiliation -- or more accurately shame -- due to simply watching porn, and comparing this to what humiliation enthusiasts experience. As you say, "This of course points to the concept that many men feel deeply ashamed about almost every aspect of their sexuality, and porn is the only place where you aren't asked to feel quite as ashamed." Men are made to feel ashamed of their desire to view porn. If porn viewing weren't shamed by mothers, wives, feminists, clergy, if men felt they could look at it non-furtively, would they have the attitude "what I'm doing is shameful, and therefore hot, and therefore I'm going to seek out really shameful porn to enhance this feeling of shame and make it even more hot"?

Because really, as you say, it would be the same video whether it was titled "sister fucks her brother" or "husband and wife's hot date night." So why would the previous title get many more hits? If it's truly about the mechanics, the body parts involved, there shouldn't be any difference. So there's clearly more at play here, and the difference is that brother-and-sister is WRONG. The wrongness is the appeal. If porn viewing weren't "wrong," would there be a demand for "wrong" porn? (Mainly just musing, rather than asking you to speak for all porn viewers.)

@28 ah I see. The only way I can answer is, that for me, the furtiveness is definitely NOT hot and doesn't increase my enjoyment. I can understand the hotness of taboo-breaking to a limited extent, but as maybe you can tell, I'm not someone who accepts the default power of authority figures and therefore it doesn't seem especially subversive to discretely poke at their power.

W/R/T Wrong Porn... I guess to me it's just like... the creep - you gotta go bigger and badder all the time. action movie needs to have a 45 minute fight sequence instead of 30, it's not enough for a girl to fuck some guy for money, it's gotta be because they're desperate (the bang bus) or it's their dad or brother or her boss or something and maybe we'll start seeing videos of girls having sex while they get tattoos or some shit. Soon enough we'll bring back Gladitorial combat.