The Biting Beaver Memory Hole…

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.

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BB, I am sorry your son is so intractable in his use of pornography. Have you tried telling him that if he treats women that way he will earn their hatred?

***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 don’t think it says anything terrible about you. I find it curious that women always think that wishing their sons hadn’t been born is “terrible”, but from my point of view, terrible would be if you knew what you knew about him but *still* placed him and his existence over and above the lives and well-being of women.

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Yes, I’ve told him everything I can think to tell him. I’ve been honest with him, told him how it makes me feel, showed him the stories of women who are hurt at every level of porn and so forth. The only thing I have found that controls his porn ‘habit’ is completely removing his access to a computer.

The thing is that his existence is never, has never, and will never be, more important than the safety and well being of anyone else. Full stop. I know this, I know it and I believe it with all of my heart and soul yet, there is still that place inside of me that feels tremendous guilt over feeling it.

Societally we, as mothers and womyn, are expected to have this sort of unconditional love for our offspring. We’re expected to martyr ourselves, our values and everyone ar
ound us for the sake of our children. And you know, I DO love my children, I love them big bunches, but I continue to wish that I could either get through to this kid or warn future womyn about his dangerous ideals.

I also find myself blaming myself for his habits and that horrifies, shames, and angers me. Brandon was the product of marital rape (something he doesn’t know and I will very likely never tell him). Brandons father raped me a mere month after my first son was born it was a violent rape that ended up with me being yelled at by my doctor at my 6 week checkup for ‘not being able to wait’.

However, when I knew I was pregnant I fell into a horrible depression. I didn’t know what to do and, being young and scared, I ultimatly just pretended that I didn’t know that I was pregnant. I guess I thought that if I ignored it long enough I might just wake up from the nightmare.

I knew my husband wouldn’t let me abort so that was out of the question, but I knew I didn’t want to be pregnant either. His birth was followed by severe post-pardum depression, during which time I could scarcely stand to touch him let alone feel anything for him.

Eventually that faded and I began to feel genuine emotion for him (around 4-6 months or so I think) but I’ve always feel intense guilt over that time period and wondered if this affected him in any tangible way.

Of course, there is always the guilt tied into staying in my abusive marriage and I find that I question myself or chide myself with “What if” scenarios. You know, “What if I had left my x earlier, would he still feel so powerless that he felt he had to oppress women?”, “What if I had stood up to my x more often and taken the abuse for Brandon, would that have changed anything?”

I find myself feeling horrible guilt over not getting between my x and Brandon more often than I did. I frequently ‘took’ the abuse that was leveled at my son, (he was by far the most frequent target as far as the children were concerned) but sometimes I simply couldn’t do it. Sometimes I just couldn’t bring myself to make myself a target to spare him. I feel intense shame over this, even though I understand completely the dynamics of abuse.

I suppose it just goes to prove that no matter how much we understand what abuse does, trying to overcome those societal messages takes so much more than a simple understanding of the problem.

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((( BB )))

There are limits to what you or anybody else can possibly do to change this young man’s current and future behaviour.

*Your* well-being is *my* primary consideration when I contemplate the tough situation that you are in.

It may very well be that there *is* no way to protect womyn from his possible future behaviours. From the outside, it appears to me that the pornocracy has claimed your son. In a different way than it has claimed so many of our daughters, but still.

Thank you for sharing your own strength with us. You have my admiration.

Mary

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Watching the decline in Brandon has been both eye opening and incredibly sad and trying. I know precisely what is happening psychologically since I watched it from the beginning.

Of all my children Brandon is the one who was always the most ‘sensitive’. He seemed to have a very open soft spot that my x (as well as his own father, my first husband) exploited at every available opportunity.

From a young age they stole his sense of self, his self-esteem and his self-worth with violence and brutality. But, as a young man in this society he had a singular place where he could ‘steal back’ his sense of power. Not from the men who did this to him of course, but rather from the scapegoats of the world, women.

Because he belongs to the privileged group he was able to turn around and kick women who are the culturally acceptable repositories for all male violence. Through women Brandon was able to feel better about himself the easy way, by kicking someone lower than he was. At the moment, it all comes back to Brandon’s own self-loathing and feelings of inadequacy. Through porn he is told that males (and by extension him) are inherently more worthy than at least one other group of people.

Of course, as he ages the hatred will (and has) become more embedded, at this point Brandon is so terrified of all things female that he literally would not even carry a flat of flowers for me in the store. This hatred of all things he perceives as ‘female’ is all about being terrified of being completely powerless again. Afterall, he knows quite well what happens to women and he sure as hell doesn’t want to be in THAT group.

He is also frequently harrassed by his father who taunts him and calls him ‘Gay boy’ when he engages in any activity that is even remotely female. Brandon is terrified of losing favor with any male, and so the logical conclusion of his behavior is to put as much distance as himself between the lowest of the low (female) and himself. This includes masturbating to their pain as a reinforcer of his own higher (and thus safer) status.

Obviously I’ve thought a great deal about this and I know, in theory, how to ‘fix’ it, but I fear that it’s just too late. Praise that comes from me that is designed to give him back some of his self-worth is, at this point, not even close to enough. Any praise from my lips is valued at precisely the level that women in general are valued. And so it becomes a viscious circle, one that I can’t, for the life of me, figure out how to curtail.

I rarely have time to worry about how teh menz are affected by pornocracy but in this case it hits a bit closer to home and I see the beginning, end and middle of all of it. Feeling like I’ve lost one of my own to this system is both enraging and saddening.

This whole situation has really gotten me thinking about the intaersections between my feminism, seperatism and males in general. Sometimes I just want to get him out of my house, other times I find that I just want to hold the kid and beg him to hear me. It’s all very painful and hard accept.

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LAST

The only thing I can think of to ask about, which I don’t see mentioned: would you consider asking Stan Goff or Robert Jensen to e-mail your son, talk about it with him. Say a couple or several e-mail exchanges. Lame, and fraught with privacy issues I know. Or meet your son (don’t know if that’s geographically possible).

Other than that, I hear you and experience it to the opposite with a daughter who will be any kind of woman but the kind her mother is. She tried so hard to please a father who demanded that, but he died rejecting her utterly for the last five years of his life. Refusing to see her, or even let her know where he lived, and left her out of his will. His last, final rejection. She is inconsolable.

I know why the lioness keeps her cubs away from the male lion. The male will kill its young.

This daughter is your age. I don’t know what to do either, but I echo Mary’s sentiments. I am concerned for you, and I thank you so much for sharing this here. Perhaps, a series of columns in that woman’s website I posted?

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(((((((((((((((((((((bb)))))))))))))))))))))))))

I am having similar issues with the male person I brought into this world. He was also the more sensitive and compassionate of my children and I hate to say it, but in many ways my “favourite”, who was much more emotionally close to me than my self-contained and confident young daughter.

Well do I know the guilt for not being strong enough to move heaven and earth and somehow counteract all of the negative forces that pulled my child away from the values he was brought up with. Well do i know the shame of knowing that our society blames his problems on me, blames me for not “fighting harder” for him. The fact is that the corrupt police in this town will not enforce my custody order and that the therapist I paid for out of pocket could only do so much. I have lost my Christopher and grieved for him just as surely as if he had died. In many ways he is dead to me.

But he is not and the way he treats his girlfriend, his sister, his grandmother, and myself make me hate myself for not pouring him down the sink at Planned Parenthood or grabbing a rusty coathanger and doing the job myself even if it killed me.

I am so afraid of having another son to raise in a few months and also on some level aware that it shouldn’t matter so much to me that this one is a girl. I know that if I wait to find out until after the birth, the hormones will kick in and within a minute of his birth, I would be willing to die for him and within an hour I will forget ever wishing that he had been a daughter.

But whether or not he follows in the footsteps oif his older brother or your Brandon is not something I have but so much control over. We do our best and we hope that it will be enough and yes, we do martyr ourselves, because we are biologically hardwired to do so.

But we do not always succeed.

Please take care of yourself and stay in a supportive enviornment as much as you can and try to focus on the wonderful job you ha
ve done with your other boys. It’s not too late for Brandon and Christopher to turn around, but we simply don’t have but som much control over it.

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General thought about the dynamics of porn use/nonuse: If porn makes men feel so worthy and superior to women, the only way to break them of it might be to conceptualize males who want to be “superior” to women as ridiculous, laughable freaks. Then I am pretty sure they would stay away from it like the plague.

Appealing to their sense of “decency” and how much it hurts women does not seem to have any effect. Not only talking about Brandon, but porn users in general. If Brandon has felt humiliated by his father and thinks porn offers him dignity (at the expense of women), but finds out otherwise, he may be *motivated* to stop his cowardly scapegoating of women and confront the real source of his pain, his father. Standing up to this man would give Brandon more of a sense of dignity and self worth than *any* amount of porn use ever could. His porn use seems to go to motivation and be a form of escapism from his real problems.

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anonymom you sound so hurt. I’m very glad you will have a new child soon. How do these things happen to us? We need to hear it does, because truly, I think we each think we’re the only one. Do you think it’s just you, even when you read that other feminists have had this happen?

I never wanted to h
ave children. I was just listening to Edith Piaf regretting nothing. I regret.

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LAST

This post deleted; poster with the screen name of “Gwaihir” is banned. He was male and runs a pornographic website.

So, back to more careful vetting.

Heart

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Sis,

I think you’re right. It’s important to ensure that we talk about these things. As mothers we are conditioned to love our children no matter what. These are harmful steretypes and harmful messages. Women are sacrificing everything for their kids and it’s wrong. I’ve seen Mothers of grown children who still do everything for their kids. I’ve watched as adult children steal from their parents, beg for money, speak horribly to their mothers and these moms, they’re so torn apart by this and they feel angry at these kids but they’re not really allowed to feel this way by societal rules.

We are expected, as women, to allow children to walk all over us and always continue to provide support, love, money and friendship to them. Women are denied the right to have real emotions and real
feelings and they are expected to martyr themselves for their children.

I think that talking about our real emotions, without prefacing them with the mandatory, “You know, I love my kids and I’d do it the same way if I could, but….” schtick can only helpful.

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BB, this is an awful story. I’m so sorry you are going through this. My heart goes out to you. I wish I could offer advice but I don’t have kids and I have no idea what I’d do in a situation like this except what you have already done. Know that you are not responsible for his actions either now, or in the future. You can only show him the alternative. It is up to him to take it.

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Hey bb I *hear* you. I have a son, who is 25 (and disabled now), but we had a lot of differences to your situation. The main difference in our case was he grew up from babyhood with no significant adult male influence. Just me and his sisters. I think that hurt him a lot, he often felt excluded, uncomfort
able and alone as a boy in a world of strong women. Having a disability with social cognition deficits, and behavioural problems, made it difficult for him to make friendships of his own too.

The porn thing for him was just a “stage” which he did grow out of -an attempt to connect with other boys his own age I guess – gain acceptance, but it didn’t work, he also got into drugs and hanging out with the wrong crowd. I got to know the local police juvenile squad pretty well — used to joke to friends that I knew them so well, I should invite them around for a barbecue

but being the only adult for all his life – I came down pretty hard on the ‘tough love’ approach on some behaviours like that, with all my kids — its *my* house, I *pay* all the farqin bills kid – blah, blah.. – and I will not tolerate it within MY home, no discussion will be entered into, no heart-to-heart, the judges decision is final… if you don’t like the rules, get the F out, you know where the door is… blah, blah..you get the picture?

Maybe I was too hard in setting boundaries — don’t know, I look back and cringe with shame at some scenes, though it wasn’t always like that bad – some great moments too. I was alone all those loooong years, raising 3 kids close in age on one salary (never received a cent in child support, property settlement etc) — was just too damned tired from working long hours, clinically depressed, PTSD’d and withdrawn to play the nice ‘Magic Momma’ very often. (although we’ve all come through the other side of the “bad times”, and are very close now – Go figure? )

But I *hear* you on the paradox of love and joy mixed with pain and grief with kids in general, but boys in specific particular.

Methinx motherhood is a real paradox, its in reverse to all other human relationships, in that its a long process of ‘letting go’ of the intimacy, rather than building it over time.

Unlike other relationships which start off distant and the intimacy grows as time goes by (in theory!), you start off with kids in a space of overwhelmingly intense intimacy and closeness from birthing -and then spend the next 20 years little-by-little letting go of that early bonding, and so much more so with sons, who are often torn from us by that privileged world out there that they were born to.

It could be just me and my random luck, but many of the feminist women I know with teen and young adult sons have had similar grief to you bb. A few have been lucky, but this has usually been where they have had a great support network – and their sons grew up with positive supportive menfolk in the picture.

I figured out when trying to deal with my own son’s pain when he was 11/12 (he was shattered by meeting his father for the first time since he was a baby), that the one thing I could never do for him, was teach him how to be a man.

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LAST

Thinking about it a little more, he’s obviously getting something out of it beyond sexual release, since he does it knowing that he’ll be caught. Rebellion coupled with forbidden fruit, perhaps, which from what I’ve heard isn’t that uncommon in teens of either gender.

Does he have a job or anything? Something that’s his, where he can feel in control and independent?

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Hi — I’m sorry and a little terrified to hear about what you are going through. My oldest son is only 10, and still about 95% sweetness.

Maybe I’m talking out my ass here, but I think when dealing with people who repeat destructive behaviors over and over again like that — its not adequate to just ‘forbid’ or ‘ban’ the behavior. You have to help them sort out what need they are trying to meet, and replace the behavior with something more constructive that addresses the same underlying need.

So the structure would be — “stay off the computer, and do THIS instead.” I’ve been thinking and thinking though, and can’t think of a good “instead.” Maybe because I don’t know his situation well enough. Miranda’s idea of a job is not a bad suggestion, IMO. Or volunteer work, maybe.

At anyrate, with some things — all the talk in the world gets you nowhere. And you’ve said all there is to say, it seems.

Hang in there though. You are doing a good job.

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