Dear E. Jean: I don’t watch porn, so I don’t know what’s considered “normal.” My partner is a cartoonist, and a sweet and gentle man. I found out he watches videos known as “facial abuse,” where women actually vomit during oral sex. I haven’t recovered from the shock. He’s promised to stop consuming the violent stuff. But I just discovered, by accidentally stumbling upon footage on his computer, that he filmed the two of us having sex without my knowledge. He apologized. He claims he did it because he wanted to avoid watching violent porn and figured that if he had a video of us, it would curb the impulse. This has traumatized me. He works from home and hardly ever leaves the house. We’ve been together for five years. How will I know if he’s telling the truth?—Caught on Camera
Miss Caught, My Kumquat: Consult a lawyer, and report him to the police. This might sound harsh, but in many states, nonconsensual taping of sex partners is a crime. You deserve better. The prosecutor’s office will decide whether you have a case depending on the evidence the police find when they seize his computer. (Don’t tip him off that you’ve filed a complaint.) Of course, if this happened to me, I’d simply take my four-pound sledge- hammer to the “gentle” man’s camera, computer, and phone. But I can’t tell you to do that. So I will just say: Get rid of him, pronto.
This article originally appeared in the February 2019 issue of ELLE.
I write the ASK E. JEAN column in ELLE magazine. Incredibly it's the longest, currently-running advice column in American publishing. I live in a little cabin on an island (it's about the size of a mattress) in upstate New York. I used to write for Saturday Night Live and was a contributing editor to Esquire and Outside. I have noticed one thing about writing: when I get stuck I find that walking into the kitchen sixty or seventy times to eat something really helps.
