My son reads porn. I should have aborted him

I don't have the whole story, but I first read about this internet post at Trinity's place via a comment at Renegade Evolution's blog. The presence of the post on Heart's blog has led to all kinds of crazy actions and reactions, one of which was an organized attack that shut down Heart's blog for a while. Meanwhile, discussions occurred in several places about the original post and various reactions to that post.

Heart's blog is back, although I can't find the source thread, so maybe she removed it. I don't know. But the post has been reposted all over the place. I googled a couple of phrases and found comments on all kinds of places, including a web site for Chicago Cubs fans. Huh?

So, I missed all the discussions. Those that I did find missed something I recoznied in the original post. So here's the post, copied from Trin's, followed by my own thoughts.

I have three sons, ages 16, 15, and 12. I was also in an abusive marriage for ten years in which my 15 year old was a frequent target of my x husband. These boys had a rough time of it, as did we all.

After I left my husband my children acted out for a short time, we all spoke of feeling relief and feeling safe yet there were still some rough spots as I got the hang of trying to do it alone.

Several years ago my accountability program found that the computer had been accessing pornography. Turns out it was my middle son. To date he has been 'caught' accessing pornography many times since then. He was 13 I think when this started.

I banned him from the computer, but after a few months I would allow him to be on it for short periods of time. Each and every single time my son would access pornography within days (and sometimes hours) of being allowed back online. He was aware that he would be caught because the computers are monitored but he chose to do it anyway.

Most recently my youngest son allowed my middle son to play with his PSP. Brandon (the middle child) used it to immediately access pornography online. The child is now banned from computers, video games and so forth. I've talked until I'm blue in the face, I've grown angry and yelled, I've cried when I was alone and when I was in front of him. I've had him read Dworkin, my site, and other places (namely OAG's site) and I still can't unseat this problem. He can recite feminist literature all day long, he can understand the tenets, the ideas behind it, how it links together but he will not allow this knowledge to stand in the way of his porn use.

I don't think I'm looking for advice (I've tried everything I could think of so far) but more a place to simply be sad. I can clearly see why he's looking at pornography, I've figured all that out readily enough, but I can't seem to make it stop.

I know, that as soon as my child leaves my home and moves into his own place that he will be looking at porn immediately. I know that I am raising a problem for women. I know that this child will one day grow and will fully absorb the messages that porn sends to men. I know that my child masturbates to degradation of my people (when I use that phrase I mean womyn) and that with every orgasm he will further solidify his own hatred of and superiority over, women.

I know that there will likely come a day where my son coerces a young woman into sex (rape) and there isn't a damned thing I can do about it. I look into the eyes of my son and they still sparkle like they did when he was a baby, but he's not a baby anymore, he's growing into a man and that man will have trained himself to degrade women before he leaves my home.

As a radical feminist who puts women first I cannot begin to determine what I should do with regards to this issue. My heart breaks because there is nothing I can do to protect the womyn he will come into contact with.

I have three boys. One of them is lost to me and as a mother and a radical womyn this breaks my heart in a way I can scarcely express. I don't know if it says something terrible about me, but you know what haunts me late at night? More than anything else? I know, in my heart of hearts that, knowing what I know now, if I had it to do over again I would have had that abortion.

I also find myself blaming myself over and over again, even though that radical womyn inside of me stands up and yells that I'm placing blame in the wrong place. I'm not sure what I intended to say with this message. I began writing it this morning and put it away again and finally decided to finish it this evening. I think that maybe I just wanted to share, I keep trying with Brandon and I keep failing. He simply doesn't care. When he wants to jerk off, everything goes right out the window.

Here's the deal: I have no idea what kind of reaction this poster received at Heart's space. Maybe the thread disappeared in the blog attack.

I can tell you that one year of abuse, much less 10 years of abuse, does a lot to fuck up one's head and can lead one to believe all kinds of strange ideas. I know that I did. So I have a lot of sympathy for this woman and for that fact that she's trying to find answers and failing rather spectacularly.

Which is, ffs, totally to be expected. You've been abused, your family dynamics have been fucked over. Of course your life is gonna be screwed up in ways beyond understanding

Somebody needs to tell this woman and her son that they're lives are fucked up for a reason and that they aren't likely to find solutions on their own.

Now I realize there are a lot of fucked up service agencies and head doctors in the world. I met quite a few of them myself. The thing is, the sole responsibility survivors have at this stage in recovery is to keep going until they find help that is useful and leads to a better life. Everything else is beside the point.

I remember myself at that stage. I spent a whole lot of time concentrating on how I was going to handle myself the next time I saw my father. After the abuse, after the stalking, after the attempts to subborn purgery, after the gun shots, it was all I could think about.

Until one day I met a decent shrink who said the following: "The only time you ever need to be alone in a room with your father again is if he is in a coffin and you want to be there to confirm the diagnosis."

That made a world of difference to me.

And I think that this woman, if the post is for real and not some kind of horrible parody, needs to be told that she cannot be the solution to her son's problem. That's going to have to be somebody else's job and the best she can do is help him find a useful mentor or therapist.

But our society doesn't allow for that kind of solution. There is so much pressure on parents to provide all the answers for their children. Even though it's perfectly clear that sometimes parents just aren't equipped to do that.

This whole discussion reminds me of talking to my ex-boyfriend's son in law blathering on about how the Jews should have fought back more during WW II and that he knows for damn sure he would have done that.*

I tried to tell him that, until you've got a gun to your head being weilded by a fucking nut job, you can't know what your response will be. In my book, no matter what you do, you get a pass. I'm not going to stand in judgment of anyone else in that situation. You're an idiot if you think you'd do any different.

*And yes, I do know that many Jews did fight back, which this dude was clueless about -- along with everything else.