i’ve been asking this to my friends for about two years now, in hopes of finding a culturally “accepted” answer. don’t pretend like you haven’t considered the notion, either.
if you have sex with your own clone, is it incest, or just masturbation???
discuss.
We have discussed this before.
I realize that this is going to be difficult to believe, but until now I’d never even considered the notion of having my own clone in the first place.
In “Wolf Pack” by Robert Charette mention is made of somehow deleting the sex determining genes to make a female version of an existing male. I have no clue if something like this is theoretically possible but what a perfect SO!! As long as you don’t want kids :eek:
Heh, if I had a clone, I’d be ready to go at em regardless of whether it was male or female. Though I’d imagine I’d annoy the shit out of myself after a while.
Erek
Wow, and after reading the OP I thought I was the only one.
Jarrod, Elijah, what do you think about this pressing issue?
Jarrod: I want apple juice
Elijah: I’m not a clone, I’m Elijah.
Well there you have it folks, my 3 1/2 year old identical twin sons have summed it up nicely.
*if you have sex with your own clone, is it incest, or just masturbation??? *
Or © it’s the basis of a Pat Benetar song.
Glad you made this point. Also why would you want kids, when you could have clones*.
*Actually I think wanting to clone yourself is stupid, but I’m just going along to get along.
Truthfully, this one could go in General Questions. There is actually a factually correct answer to the OP.
For sex with a clone to constitute “masturbation”, your clone would have to be considered part of you. There is no basis for such an assumption. A clone is a separate person from you, genetically identical, but with different experiences, memories, thoughts, and a different (though likely similar) personality. A clone would be in some ways like a twin sibling, but a clone would be younger than you by however many years old you were at the time the clone was made–a clone of an adult would not, of course, be a full-sized identical copy of that adult; a clone would be a zygote which would develop into a baby. A clone formed from an adult could be seen, morally speaking, as more like a child of that adult than a sibling. If two clones were formed from an adult at the same time, they would be siblings of each other. In either case, clone sex would be a form of incest–a cross between sibling incest and parent-child incest in the first case; and incest between twin siblings in the second case. (Of course, barring some genetic manipulations even more complex than simple cloning, a clone will be of the same sex as the parent organism, so we’re not talking about the sort of incest which could result in inbred children.) If an adult had himself or herself cloned, sex with the clone might also constitute child molestation, if the clonee didn’t wait long enough before initiating the relationship.
Please see Time Enough for Love and two following novels by Robert A. Heinlein, and The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold. (To get technical, the latter book covers a man who uses a time machine to go back and have sex with himself, but the ethical question remains the same.)
No one else wants to have sex with me, so why would I want to? If I have all this cloning power and stuff, I’m going to make myself my very own Benjamin Bratt and do him instead.
L
Or The Phantom of Kansas by John Varley or Kiln People by David Brin.
As a clone, I think it would be incest (depening on what sort of societal taboos devop with cloning), and my clone says “eww.” She’s only 28 minutes older than me, though. The notion that it might be masturbation I find annoying. Clones have identity issues enough as it is. Leave us alone.
Do an internet search for “identical twin incest” and you’ll see clones going at it without lending a moment’s thought to the philosophical implications.
Incidentally, if your clone makes a pass at you and you’re so disgusted and incensed that you throw him/her out a window, is that making an obscene clone fall?
The question shows that the OPer doesn’t understand the nature of cloning. Cloning occasionally occurs NATURALLY. My sisters are clones of each other. They are both individual human beings. If one sister killed the other sister it wouldn’t be suicide, would it? They are not legally or morally considered the same person, they are considered two persons.
One you accept that identical twins are individual humans and not the same human, it therefore follows that clones will of course be individual humans and not the same person. And therefore the answer to the question is obvious.
I see sci-fi writer Donald Kingsbury every few months at our MonSFFA meetings. He mentioned (and I agree) that then title of the upcoming Star Wars: Atack of the Clones is stupid. Since clones are human beings, why not just say Attack of the Humans?