Your Parents Didn’t Raise a Porn Addict
But understanding your relationship with them will help you leave your addiction behind.
Here’s one of my earliest memories as a child: my dad giving me a bath, reaching under the water, and forcefully stroking my penis while I cry for him to stop.
Now here’s another one.
Fast forward eight years. I’m a 13-year-old teenager watching a travel show with my parents. It’s set in Florence, Italy. As they venture into the Galleria dell’Accademia, a voiceover shares some trivia facts about Michelangelo’s famous statue: “Did you know that David was sculpted uncircumcised, despite being a Jew?”
That gets me thinking. Uncircumcised. I think I’ve heard that word before, but I’m not sure what it means, so I ask my parents. They both flinch. “It’s when they remove the foreskin from the penis,” my dad finally says. “They do it to prevent things like phimosis.”
Phimosis. That’s another word I don’t know, but I keep this one to myself. Once I realize the topic is sexual, I’ll be damned before I try to get any more answers from my parents.
As soon as I’m back in my room I google circumcision and phimosis. “Phimosis is a condition in which the foreskin of the penis cannot stretch to allow it to be pulled back past the glans,” says Wikipedia.
“Holy shit,” I remember thinking. “That’s exactly what I have!”
As long as I could recall, my foreskin hadn’t been able to retract all the way. I would usually pull it back just enough for the tip to poke out — so that I could pee without making a mess — but any more than that had always seemed unnecessary, and it never even crossed my mind that this could be an issue.
Now all of a sudden I have phimosis, and I’m reading on the Internet page after page of personal accounts and suggested treatments. “Gentle daily manual retraction,” recommends one of the websites. The words bring back a repressed memory: my dad, reaching under the water, trying to heal my phimosis when I was a kid.
“Well, whatever he did back then, it didn’t work for long,” I think to myself. So I keep on reading, and the more I read the more scared I get. “Surgical removal of the foreskin,” “your penis may swell and bruise for the first two days after the procedure,” “it is common to experience pain if an erection occurs during recovery.”
That night I have a hard time falling asleep. The next morning, I wake up dreading what’s to come. I know that telling my parents should be my next step. There’s no way around it. But the idea of having that conversation is somehow even more terrifying than penis surgery.
I remember hanging out near my dad, rehearsing the words over and over again. “Hey Dad, you know how I used to have phimosis as a kid? Well, I guess I never fully healed from it.” “Hey Dad, remember how we talked about circumcision last night? Well, I think I might need one.” “Hey Dad…”
I tell my dad a dozen times in my head, but in reality I keep my mouth shut. The awkwardness is just too much for me to handle. Instead, I retreat into the bathroom and try to force my skin down once again. It doesn’t work, but I decide to continue trying every day and see what happens.
Lucky me, a few weeks of that did the trick and I eventually managed to get rid of my phimosis in secret.
To this day, my foreskin remains attached to my penis — a testament to my relationship with my parents.
My parents and I never had the classic talk about sex.
As a teenager, I always saw it as impending doom. I thought that my parents would address it sooner or later because that seemed to be the way things worked… although I’m not sure why. When I think about it, none of my friends ever mentioned having that talk with their parents either, so my expectations probably came only from what I would watch in movies and TV shows.
Regardless, at the time I was more than happy to avoid the talk. Just thinking about it was enough to make me cringe. My parents must have felt the same way, I guess, and that’s why that conversation never took place.
Without guidance, like many other kids my age I turned to the worst possible teacher: porn. I watched a lot of it as a teenager — so much that my parents eventually caught on.
One day when I opened the browser, ready to begin another marathon, none of the websites I would usually visit were loading. The weird part was that every other normal website I would try worked just fine. The culprit, of course, was a parental control app. And given how my mom could barely hold a mouse, it was obvious who was behind this.
I normally would have never brought it up, but when the app started censoring other non-pornographic websites that I needed, I felt forced to confront my dad about it.
“Hey Dad, this blocker you installed on my computer is kind of faulty,” I told him. “It’s not letting me use a bunch of websites that I need for school.”
His reply? “I don’t know what you are talking about, I didn’t install anything on your computer.”
And that was the way things were.
When confronted about it, my dad just doubled down on avoidance.
So I went back to my room, and by the end of the day I had already figured out a way to get rid of that fucking app. My dad never mentioned anything about it, and he never tried to reinstall it either.
A few weeks later, I found out where the whole thing had come from.
I was in the middle of another porn binge when I noticed this icon blinking on my taskbar. It had shown up before, I just had never paid any attention to it. This time, however, I decided to google the name and, lo and behold, it turned out to be a remote desktop app.
My dad had installed that blocker because he knew for a fact that I was watching porn. And he knew because he had been spying on me all along, watching my screen as I used the computer, a silent witness to my growing addiction.
You can imagine the embarrassment. I felt betrayed and humiliated. God knows how much my dad had seen. All those weird categories, the sheer amount of videos, my specific searches. Had my dad been online? Had he watched me do it all?
For whatever reason, I never asked him.
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 was occupied by my parents’ stuff, and they would often come in and out without even knocking on the door.
This naturally led to a couple of close calls through the years. Fortunately, it was never too explicit — my ninja reflexes would kick in just in time to minimize my browser and pull my hand out of my pants before they stepped in.
It didn’t take a genius to realize what was going on though. Imagine you walk into your teenage son’s bedroom and you see him scrambling in his seat, beads of sweat on his forehead, clicking things away from the screen in a panicked frenzy… And yet I guess for my parents it was good enough not to see my actual dick, because they just continued doing this over and over again, keeping me constantly on my toes.
In their defense, having a teenager home sounds like a nightmare. My sexual energy back then was through the roof. I masturbated anytime and anywhere, like a goddamn chimpanzee. I could be in the living room watching TV and, if a nice cleavage came up, I’d just start jerking it right there in the open.
I don’t know how many times either of my parents walked in on me in situations like these, but I know that they never acknowledged it. Not when it happened, not any time afterward. Their response was always the same: silence.
I only remember one occasion when my parents and I discussed something related to sex. I was in my mid-twenties, and I had just introduced them to my girlfriend. That day, my dad pulled me aside and said, “Hey son, now that you are in a relationship, you have to be responsible.” Then he added, visibly uncomfortable, “I hope that you are wearing protection.”
“A little too late for this,” I thought. “But I appreciate the effort, Dad.”
I sometimes wonder what it was like for my parents during all those years.
Were they aware of the gravity of my situation? Did they ever discuss it among themselves? Were they worried about me? Did they ever consider reaching out?
I try to remind myself that my parents belong to a very different generation. That in the small towns where they grew up, sex used to be something sinful and shrouded in shame. I understand that the sex education that my parents received was even worse than the one they gave me.
So this is not to say I blame them for all my problems — I would hate to be one of those guys. At the end of the day, I know that they love me and that they dealt with me as best they could.
My parents didn’t raise a porn addict, I became one myself.
But at the same time, I realize that if I want to get better, I need to identify all the factors that played into my addiction, and my relationship with my parents was surely one of them.
Exactly how much it contributed, I’ll never know, but I know this: I’ll be the one to break the cycle.
I will educate my future children better, and I’ll do that by educating myself first. By overcoming my addiction to porn and building a healthy sex life that sets a good example for them. I will treat sex not as a taboo, but as something to be openly discussed. I will share my advice with them while respecting their privacy.
And who knows, maybe one day, when they are ready, I will send them a link to this story.
What’s in your math folder?
What role did your relationship with your parents play in your addiction to porn? Was porn an answer to the wall of repression and guilt that your family built around sex? Was it your escape from a problematic household?
Understanding your relationship with your parents sheds light on many aspects of your identity, and your problems with porn are no exception.
Learning how your family environment affected you in your childhood and teenage years is key to understanding your porn addiction, and therefore a necessary step to overcome it.
Share your insights in the comments below, on social media, or in your favorite porn addiction community, and if you know others that are struggling with porn, help them by sharing a link to this story.
Let’s start a conversation!
Hi, this is James! Thank you for reading!
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