Ack, mysterious pronoun! does “he” mean me, or what?
And, really, are you arguing, DLuxN8R-13, that parents and their children can have healthy, meaningful sexual relationships beginning when the child is 18? How about 17? You realize that, in many respects, age 18 is a relatively capricious age standard. How about 16? Actually, yeah, I’d like you to draw the line. Where, exactly, on the parent-child scale, is it acceptable for the parent to start banging the child? In your opinion?
I agree. Assuming everyone in this thread is an adult I expect most of us have parent / child realtionships with our parents.
No matter how old you get mother and father still look after you, still worry about you. They never stop being your parents.
A sexual relationship just can’t fit into how we expect our parents to behave.
I’ll draw the line at the same place that it’s acceptable for a person to engage in otherwise consentual, “normal” sex. For some people, that’s 16. For some, it’s never. We’ve just happened to draw that line arbitrarily at 18.
Let me firstly state the obvious… IT IS NEVER EVEN VAGUELY OK FOR AN ADULT TO TAKE SEXUAL ADVANTAGE OF A CHILD.
Also, IT IS IDEAL TO NEVER, EVER, NEVER FUCK A FAMILY MEMBER.
That said, where did the whole ‘concept of do not lie with your mother/sister/brother/father’ come from? The bible. While the bible is busy telling us not to eat shellfish, wear buttons, mix crops, have homosexual sex it is full of examples of incest, though it declares it is wrong.
Though the mere idea of incest is squicky (that’s a technical term!) these people were both fully grown adults and her children seemed to be able to explain the relationship in the same brutal honest way that children of same sex relationships do.
Is dad/daughter love a societal ideal? NO! In this case is it wrong? Well I’m not about to tell anyone who feels their relationship is great (and they are both consenting adults) that the relationship is wrong…in my experience that is the fastest way to make a relationship stronger.
Parents should not hump their offspring…pure and simple. Our world is no longer pure and simple.
AGAIN CHILDREN DO NOT ENTER THE EQUATION! THIS IS ABOUT ADULTS MAKING SOME WHAT STRANGE DECISIONS.
But when they are ONLY a biological parent they already don’t fit into the “how parents behave” mode. Perhaps this is the first time this “parent” looked after/worried about his child.
Yeah, but what if there isn’t any emotional/psychological damage? Are you fine with it then?
Don’t answer that.
Anyway, this story reminds me of an article in the New York Times magazine from a few months ago.
The article proposed that there were “fundamentals” of morality, if you will. . .that across cultures, there were common ideas of “harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity”. Different cultures and people weighted these fundamentals differently (e.g. democrats were more apt to be heavy on “harm” and “fairness” whereas republicans had more of a respect for “authority” and “purity”. ) but laws and attitudes were formed because we all have inherent notions of those things.
One made-up example they gave was of a brother and sister who decide to have sex.
They were both comfortable with it – so that takes away the psychological argument.
They used protection – so that takes away the genetic argument.
No one knew about it – so that takes away the social stigma argument.
Etc.
So, the author claimed that the idea just offends people’s “Purity Sensor” (my term). We’ve tried to construct logical arguments about why it is wrong by arguing backwards from the gut feeling that it is wrong.
Now, this story differs because you can’t take away the baby argument. I think we’d all admit that’s a pretty bad choice.
As to the wrongness of the incest itself. . .that article would say (in my interpretation) that you are either morally repulsed by it, or you’re not (or you’re somewhere on a scale from 0-100). But no one’s argument is going to sway you one way or the other because you’re not arguing from a logical base, even if you think you are.
Link to an article which has really altered my perspective on many matters.
I vaguely recall reading some fascinating information on this topic in Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works, about how we seem to have a “replace sexual desire with an icky feeling” function that activates for kids we grow up with and for parents and children we grow up with – but if you don’t meet until after a certain age, the suppressing function doesn’t get activated and sexual relationships are much more common between parents and children, or brothers and sisters, who meet after a certain age.
Anybody else recall something along those lines. I can’t find my copy at the moment. If I am remembering correctly, it at least explains how these people are accomplishing this – they didn’t go through the same suppression of sexual desire thing that most of us did. All they have to rely on is their socialization telling them it’s wrong, which clearly wasn’t enough to overcome their … ugh … mutual attraction.
It’s really sad for that poor little girl – she’s going to be the one paying the price for their jackassery for the rest of her life. At best, she’s going to have to hear “That’s why parents and children shouldn’t marry, hyuk hyuk!” from a whole bunch of people every time she makes any kind of mistake or error.
Chorpler. . .funny enough, Pinker was the author of that article I linked to.
You are right. She is just lucky she didn’t have parents that left her the legacy of red hair, glasses, obesity, big ears, an odd name or even an efficient brain. If kids want to tease someone they will find a reason.
Hey, I knew something sounded familiar about what you said in your post when I saw your post after I posted my post. (So to speak.)
I honestly can’t comprehend how some of you people are seemingly okay with this (at least if you are keeping those poor kids out of the picture). I’m fine with gays. I’m fine with poly relationships as long as everybody’s adult and consenting. But I draw the line at parent/child incest, and I’m not feeling even vaguely guilty about that. Nope. This is too far. These people are messed up.
If it were me, I think I’d be way more upset about people assuming I must be stupid because my parents were father and daughter than I would be about people calling me “ginger” or “four-eyes” or “fatty” or “nerd.”
Hopefully the girl won’t suffer too badly, but I suspect that she won’t just have to put up with “kids being kids” teasing. I think that the stigma of being born to a father-and-daughter couple will follow her through her entire life and result in a huge amount of prejudice, discrimination, and constant reminders and assumptions that her parents are “sick” and “wrong” and “disgusting” and that she must be stupid and genetically feeble.
I hope I’m wrong, though.
It won’t be just kids, though. It’ll be everyone, for the rest of her life. Teachers, classmates, parents of classmates, the postman, the lady at the grocery store, the waitress, that cop over there… I’d hope that the adults managed to not tease her at least, but unless she’s particularly unable to read emotions, she’ll know there’s something up.
Courtesy of the media attention this whole thing got, she’ll have to change her name to get away from it. Even then, everytime anyone finds out, she’ll get to go through it all again. I stand by my opinion that those two are selfish fucks.
God help me, but I agree with **Two and a Half Inches ** (assuming he isn’t just trolling). I can’t envision myself fucking my mom or my child, but I refuse to tell other persons what they should and should not do. Other persons’ choices need not subscribe to my notions of decency so long as they not harming innocent third parties.
It’s the same principle as applied to homosexuals and polyamorists. Unless there is actual evidence that someone is being harmed or that someone is messed up … there are people who genuinely and unreservedly adhere to the principle “It might not be for me, but consenting adults should be free do what they want without interference or unnecessary censure.”
So you don’t want them to have kids because people will make fun of them…because they don’t want them to have kids :rolleyes:
I think you drastically underestimate the capacity of the media, and public fascination, to move along to the next scandal du jour.
And i still fail to understand why social stigma should, in and of itself, serve as the very rationale for arguing against the thing that it’s stigmatizing.
ETA: Exactly as Ludovic suggests, it’s circular reasoning of the worst kind.
There is nothing wrong with the principle, but there are legitimate questions as to whether, except in the oddest of cases such as this, parent-child incest is ever truly “consentual” in a meaningful way, and therefore whether censure of such a practice is “unnecessary”.
The difficulty this case raises is that it is a very unusual example of a habit that is almost invariably harmful and marked by lack of meaningful consent.
The prohibition and social stigma created by parent-child incest has been created for good reason. A case may be made that under these special circumstances it out to be relaxed. Problem is, when it comes to the child produced by this incestuous relationship, she is gonna have to explain these special circumstances to those around her for the rest of her life.
This may be an acceptable price to pay for freedom to mate with whomsoever you will - but in my opinion it adds to the cumulative negatives that weigh against ever condoning this sort of relationship.
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Is it just extreme disgust, or is there a logical reason (like genetic problems with children) that makes you feel differently about this, than about other non-standard sexual relationships?