I’ve been looking for some reliable information on a sensitive topic: incest.
What I’m trying to determine is, how prevalent is consentual sex between either siblings or parent and child. Everything on incest that I can find on the net falls into one of the following categories:
-Survivors of incest, mainly women who were raped and exploited by their fathers or other male family members.
-Incest as the ultimate family dysfunction, usually associated with substance abuse and other pathological behavior.
-Wack-off stories ('nuff said.)
-Anectdotes of rural degeneracy.
-Royal incest, such as practiced by the ancient Egyptians.
None of these is particularly helpful for my inquiry. What I’m trying to get an honest answer to is, is incest inherently aberrant or do some people truly maintain incestuous relationships that are healthy?
As a related topic, can the degree of consanguity that a society permits be correlated with any other feature of that society? In some societies, you aren’t supposed to marry someone who was even born in the same village as you were. In others, first-cousin marriage is not only permitted but actively encouraged. Why the difference?
When I was in college living in a dorm we used to talk about this all of the time. There were many long and taudry discussions which sometimes lasted until sunrise. Usally when our forums lasted this long we would somke alot of pot…Burning incest all the while we smoked :o
Look, this was a seriuos question, I don’t think this friviolity is called for. As my sister, Mrs John said the otherday, Do you think I should get a present for Aunt Jennies birthday or just wait 'till mothers day. Seriously, the last time I tried to have an incestual relationship I got beestung.
I would guess that sexual indifference (or even abhorance) toward family members is largely a product of natural selection. Those with incestuous proclivities were for the most part weeded out of the gene pool through the degenerative combining of recessive genes.
Perhaps I should give some background on my original question:
I got in an extremely heated argument with an acquaintance of mine who is gay over comparing homosexual sex to incest. If gay sex used to be considered sick or immoral, and now isn’t, then couldn’t incest eventually “come out of the closet” as well?
To put it mildly, he resented the comparison. His position basicly boiled down to “there’s no such thing as ‘healthy’ incest, and anyone who says there is is a liar”. Not being able to cite any evidence to the contrary, I had to give up at that point.
I still wonder though if the situation is similar to where gay people were before the 1960’s, when what little public discussion there was of homosexuality invariably portrayed gays as sick, degenerate or in need of psychiatric treatment.
According to one book, the issue of “close order relationships,” even sister-brother, father-daughter, or mother-son is not invariably genetically defective: The genetic traits of the parents are intensified, for better OR worse. The queen we know as Cleopatra was the product of seven generations of brother-sister marriages and she was not a “horseradish with a lisp”; also, Manco Ccapac, the founder of the Inca empire, was married to his sister.
I gather the original poster here did not particularly wish to bring in the reproductive component of the issue, but rather to concentrate on the copulative behavior considered in a context of no allowance of survival of offspring. I believe rejection of incest is more driven by environmental development than direct genetics, whereas homosexuality is probably, on average, of the opposite nature. Siblings not known by either of same to be related probably mate at the same rate as those unrelated – in proportion to the relative number of each category that exist.
Some intelligent entity has taken over nanos brain. There is also a socio-antrhopological connection, having to do with heirarchy,and passing on ones own genes.In most groups(bands ,troops,etc) of primates when the males begin to mature the dominant male, who is usually the father of them all,makes sure they don’t mate with ANY female.( every body in the band is probably related anyway) The young males best chance is to head off to some other band and try to dump the dominant male there. That is sorta like that marrying outside the village. when we became more settled down living in smaller families it certainly led to a more peaceful existence if Papa didn’t have to worry about Jr bumping him off to marry maw and take over the family farm.So they came up with the rules of sanguininity as they apply to inheritence of property.And then lots of incest rules to protect those. BTW any Navahos here? I understand that certain families can’t marry certain other families, and certain clans other clans unless they are in a certain family or another one of the certain families but another clan.but members of this clan can NEVER marry that clan unless the family…Real complicated. AND that all this is traced from the mothers side but the fathers clan influences and…for as many generations as the oldest one can remember.
My take on the OP (especially after OP followed up w/a clarifying post) question would be:
Is it conceivable that societal mores may evolve (if that’s what they’re doing, maybe I should say mutate) to the point that sanctions against incestuous relationships will relax or disappear?
dougie_monty’s post seems to indicate there have been widely separated instances in human history when incest has been considered ok. If you think about all the hillbilly sis/bro jokes you’ve heard, what they’re telling you is that there is yet one more instance of such relationships being tolerated by the local community.
As I’m sure everybody knows, homosexuality was pretty open in ancient Greece, and there’s other examples of societies that have condoned such. And then it wasn’t ok, and now it is again (depends who you ask).
It wasn’t very long ago that right here in the US 13 year old girls were considered prime rutting material; now such activity is prosecutable sexual deviancy (for that matter, from what I know of the gay community, checking ID’s is not a major pasttime there).
Abortion, which I would consider to be inextricably tied to sexual mores, has waxed and waned in its acceptability over the meanderings of history.
So, to try and answer Lumpy’s question, it seems conceivable that incest may lose it’s societal sanction at some point, somewhere, for a while. It also seems hilarious that your gay friend thought this abhorent. Doesn’t he know how to celebrate diversity?
I have a psychiatry textbook somewhere that says most incest occurs in Southern, complete (both parents) Protestant families. If the father is involved, the usual method is mutual oral sex. If the mother is involved, the typical method is nude “dry humping”. Of all cases, most involve father-daughter relations. This book didn’t address the subjct of inter-sibling sex (I seem to recall that’s classed as something else - not incest), but you probably heard enough already. - MC
Fans of the late Robert Heinlein will tell you that he (or his characters, which comes to the same thing) sees incest as an obsolete concept that should be dealt with primarily by drawing the shades. I quote from “Time Enough for Love,” his novel about character Lazarus Long (who winds up going back in time and sleeping with his mother):
(BTW, a sentient computer named Minerva says this in response to Lazarus’ request that she define incest)
I’m quoting the above from memory and it may not be word-for-word but the gist is there.
The theme of incest is present in “Time Enough for Love,” “The Number of the Beast” and “To Sail Beyond the Sunset.” (I may have missed others.) “To Sail Beyond the Sunset” is the only one to show negative consequences to the act, and even that is due more to the sexual obsession that results than to the incest itself. Heinlein, through his characters, espoused the viewpoint that incest should be defined only in terms of genetic hazard. The geneticists of his “future history” might approve the union of a brother and sister with clean gene charts but forbid two strangers to marry if their DNA was incompatible.
i think the chef’s post pretty much provides an answer to the original post. if we develop the necessary genetic testing (and we’ll have that genome sequenced any day now, boys. i’m just wondering who’s going to be holding the patent on it…) it should be possible for incest to “come out of the closet” - if the child of the union isn’t going to suffer negative reinforcement of recessive genes, why keep a boy from his sis?
I kinda doubt that genetic testing will do much to advance the cause of making incest socially acceptible. Whether a child is produced or not is irrelevant; the act itself is the offense because it is an act which can lead to producing offspring. - I think eventually it won’t have much stigma attached to it; I hear stories of grade schoolers now getting caught “in the act” with unrelated participants. No successful society ever worshipped primitivism. - MC
In Nabokov’s Lolita Humbert Humbert (the narrator) relates that father-daughter relations are condoned in Sicily (somewhere in the beginning of part II…don’t have the book with me). Can anyone verify this (the fact, not the reference?)
Also, slightly off topic (sorry, OP), I’ve heard that (South) Koreans have to get special gov’t permission to marry someone with the same last name from the same village for fear of “inbreeding” (insert correct term here).
I don’t accept the “hierarchy” concept; I am not quick to ascribe any rules of society to some power conspiracy.
In Corpus Juris Secundum (available in law libraries), one basis for the incest taboo is how incest would undermine parental authority–and, God knows, that’s been undermined badly enough as it is! Also according to CJS, only Illinois and Pennsylvania prohibit first-cousin relationships.