Making your way through this cruel, confounding, ever-changing world is difficult. Potential for pain, embarrassment, and heartbreak lurks around every corner. It's hard to do it on your own, and sometimes you need a fresh perspective. Got a question about relationships, sex, family, culture, fashion, really anything other than math? Lay it on me at askdaveholmes@gmail.com. I'm here to help you minimize the damage you will necessarily inflict on the world just by being alive.
So, what's your problem?
Dear Dave,
This is really uncomfortable for me, but I kind of happened across incest porn the other day, and I was turned on by it. To be really clear, I don't have incestuous thoughts about my sister. It's just this one video. I feel dirty about it. Why is this a thing? Do I need help?
-D. S., Indiana
First and foremost, a warm Esquire welcome to everyone brought here by a Google search for "incest porn." May tonight bring you nearly everything you wish for.
As long as everyone involved is a consenting adult, I'm pretty laissez-faire when it comes to porn. Porn is actually now harder to avoid than it is to access. Anyone under 38 has spent their horniest years with the ability to crack open a laptop and see whatever their freaky little minds can dream up. What are they going to do but search for the most taboo thing and watch it?
The great thing about porn is that it's a way to scratch your hardest-to-reach itch without actually doing anything. (Well, anything that involves a second person.) Observing how a certain pornographic video makes you feel is a healthy thing to do. Just remember: You will probably get turned on—there are naked people and orgasms and bass-heavy film scores, which tend to arouse—but that doesn't automatically mean you want any of these things in real life. It just means you're watching porn. Satisfy your curiosity in the realm of fantasy, and move on.
And don't feel dirty for responding to incest. Brother-on-sister action, at the least, is a thing with which our culture has long had a fascination. I mean, Prince's "Sister?" The Royal Tenenbaums? That Bertolucci movie where un frère et soeur do le freak pretty graphiquement, an unedited version of which was the actual in-flight movie on a trip I took to Paris about 12 years ago? Star Wars, for Pete's sake? You're not the first person to let your mind go down this road. If you need help, so does George Lucas.
Please also consider this nightmare of a Coors Light commercial from 2003. Listen closely to the way the singer sings the word "twins."
Gross, right? Not so much salacious as venereal. Can you draw from his vocal delivery any other conclusion than "this guy thinks he's going to have a three-way with those twins?" That this aired during football games illustrates two important facts: 1) our culture was on a first-and-middle-name basis with Gena Lee Nolin in the early 21st Century, and 2) sib-on-sib action is a concept common enough to be hinted at on daytime network television. So go easy on yourself.
And you needn't worry: Most of the people on camera in porn aren't actually related. It's role-playing, and it's harmless.
Okay, now may I tell you my porn story? Good.
Long ago, I had a friend of a friend who I bumped into once in a while. We'll call him Shawn. Shawn did sound for films and commercials and spent a lot of time in the gym. Good looking guy, this Shawn. (You know where this is going. Stay with me.)
Once, after I hadn't seen him in a while, we ran into each other and caught up over drinks. Toward the end of the night, a little drunk, he said, "I should tell you how I've been making a living lately." I said, "Spill it."
He said that he had been the boom operator on a porn film recently, and after wrap, the director pulled him aside and said, "Shawn, let me see your dick." Shawn obliged, and he was on camera doing his first scene the very next day. That was how he'd been making a living lately.
I said, "How long have you been at this?"
He said, "About seven months."
I said, "How many movies have you made?"
He said, "Two hundred and seventy-five."
I thanked him for telling me, and then I rushed home and set a Google Alert for him. Since that night, he's won numerous AVN awards (both for fucking and for acting), he's directed, he's formed a porn-themed rock band, he's had an altercation with a director that got caught on a cellphone camera and posted to the porn version of TMZ, he's had a kid with a co-star and moved to France to escape the business, he's come roaring back to the business, he's done literally thousands more films, and now I think he's stripping in Vegas. He has, in short, blackened every square on about five different Dirk Diggler Bingo cards. We have coffee every couple of years, and I watch him closely, because I am fascinated, and you know what? He seems genuinely satisfied with his life. Happy, even.
The ideas we have about porn—and the people who make it, and the naughty, noxious notions it will burn into our heads—are vestigial remnants of our Puritan past. I say watch whatever you want. It's all in good fun.
If you need help, so does George Lucas.Dear Dave,
I went on a date with a girl, and the date went well, but it turns out she was recently divorced. Despite having feelings for each other, she says she's not ready for a relationship. What's my next move?
-C. M., Parts Unkown
You are out of moves. I'm sorry.
For the record, what this woman did is not a move, or a play in a game, or whatever kind of tactical maneuver you're trying to devise right now. She told you the truth about where she is emotionally, and now you have to respect that. Breakups are traumatic even when they're relatively casual, and a divorce is anything but. It involves lawyers and signatures and disappointed mothers. You have to decide who gets to hang out with which friends, and sometimes who gets to live with the kids. You're left with a dull ache every time you make pesto in the Magic Bullet Aunt Cathy gave you as a wedding gift. It's work, and it takes a long time to open yourself back up to the possibilities of pleasure and pain and pesto that relationships entail.
If an offer of friendship is on the table, take it. But take it as friendship, nothing more. To treat it as a long con to wear her down and win her hand is to suggest that you know what she needs better than she does. You don't.
If you must think about this situation in terms of strategy, then your next move is to give her the space she asked for, and the game you are trying to win is respecting women enough to believe them when they tell you what they want.
To treat it as a long con is to suggest that you know what she needs better than she does. You don't.Dear Dave,
My sister and I were very, very close. We lived together, and she was always my best friend.
Then she met her boyfriend last fall (who she was mentoring at work, but that's another letter). From that moment on, she stopped talking to me, probably because every waking moment was/is spent with him. I was basically rent money and a ride every now and then. She lied to my face on numerous occasions about dumb things.
I moved out of our apartment and out of state in April for a new job. In June, I got a text: "Mom and Dad wanted me to tell you that Boyfriend and I are engaged." That was it. A couple of weeks ago while I was visiting my parents, my father said, "You're going to be a nice girl and come to your sister's wedding." (It's in December.)
I'm tired of being treated like the a-hole in this situation. I'm not jealous, and I don't think I'm going. I still haven't gotten an official invitation. Honestly, I don't think I want to go and "be happy" for someone who's treated me like garbage for the last calendar year. I know, I know—"You'll regret it down the road, be the bigger person, blah blah blah." But she's never been held accountable for anything in her life. I've avoided family functions since this started, and I don't think anyone will really notice.
Can I keep standing up for myself and not go?
-B. V., Parts Unknown
I don't know you, B. V., but from the few words you've shared with me, I sense a wide streak of all-or-nothing thinking in your family: Situations that are uncomfortable are avoided entirely. Scenarios must have an a-hole in them, and only one. To attend a wedding is to utterly cease to stand up for yourself. A person can either be their sister's everything, or nothing. A person either avoids the entire concept of incest porn, or is an irredeemable pervert. (Sorry.)
All-or-nothing thinking leads us to judge people harshly. (Honestly: Is the fact that your sister was her boyfriend's mentor another letter? Is it your letter to write?) It makes us push people away when they stop making us the center of their world. It makes us run away from the ones we love when situations get difficult, to the point where we can't even text our sister about our engagement without a passive-aggressive prologue.
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These are toxic patterns of thought, and I don't think you or your sister chose them. They're usually handed down to us by our parents, who got them from theirs, who got them from theirs. They become parts of us without our consent, like eye color. Frankly, they're probably why you and your sister were best friends: Nobody outside your family sees the world exactly the way you've been taught to. (By the way, if your father really did assess this whole situation and then tell you to "be a nice girl," that is infantilizing, sexist, insulting, emblematic of a worldview that lacks nuance, and probably something he got from his dad.)
You didn't choose to engage with the world this way, but you can choose to leave it behind. I'm going to tell you something that I imagine you will think is 100 percent wrong, but that you need to hear: You should see a licensed therapist. I don't think you're crazy, I don't think you're broken, but I do think you (and your dad, and your sister, and who knows who else) are letting some unhealthy emotional habits poison your relationships.
Therapy is the way out. If we approach it with openness and candor, therapy allows us to see the narrative arc of our lives, and to observe the patterns and themes that emerge. It enables us to determine our own roles in the difficult situations that arise, and it presents us with choices: We can react the way we always have, and get what we've always gotten, or we can try something new. We can bring ourselves and our families and our friends into more open, intimate, honest, fulfilling relationships. We can evolve.
Honestly, I think everyone on Earth should be in therapy for at least one year. We could all stand to clean house. It isn't always comfortable, but if you give it a real try, it will pay dividends. Better times are ahead, I swear.
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For the record: Yes, I think you should go to the wedding. Attendance at a wedding ceremony isn't a concession of defeat or a full-throated endorsement of a relationship. It's a chance to catch up with friends and family, dance, take advantage of the open bar, and be present for an important day in the life of an imperfect person.
But this is about more than a wedding, and I think you know that. This is about pulling you out of a black-and-white existence into a world of rich and vibrant color that you don't even know you're not seeing.
It's beautiful on the other side of all this.
Send any and all questions (besides math questions) to askdaveholmes@gmail.com.
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