I imagine other people DO want to sleep with your sister.
But I’d have to see a pic to be sure.
The major objection I have to adult incestuous relationships - besides the power issues involved - is that you can’t really “leave” a family member (except in special circumstances) unless you want to leave your entire family. So if you split up/get divorced, you get extra drama in your life because your ex-inlaws are your own family.
That doesn’t apply quite so much to this circumstance because of the adoption, but obviously finding a biological parent holds a lot of meaning to many adoptees, even as an adult. If he held a lot of meaning for her as her “Real Father” and he paid her money to further foster this “father-daughter” relationship, I’m not surprised if she might have been put in a very vulnerable, child-like relationship to him.
I wouldn’t have any moral objections to two (adopted, sperm-donored, etc.) people who had started a relationship and only later found out by chance that they were close family (though they might want to avoid reproducing then), but going into it knowing that they are family is quite an issue.
I’d still be pretty squicked out by the age difference.
On what basis do you believe “many of us” would respond with critiscism? It’s been mentioned in this thread that someone finds two men going at it icky, but I don’t as of yet see the hordes of Dopers rushing in to attack him.
Really? That’s a little odd…almost like the reporter was trying to inject some sort of commentary or extra squickiness into the story, as if it weren’t squicky already.
There are plenty of heterosexual relationships that are pretty unhealthy and disturbing, even if the parties are unrelated and relatively close in age. These relationships could involve abuse, manipulation, co-dependancy, or simply be between two neurotics whose dysfunctions so mirror and exacerbate each other you might think their marriage was arranged by Satan himself. But surely that wouldn’t mean we’d say heterosexual realationships are as a rule icky.
The same thing applies with homosexual relationships. I don’t think there’s a gay person on this board who wouldn’t cheerfully admit that some gay relationships are pretty messed up. But that doesn’t mean gay relationships have to be messed up.
As a human being coming from a long line of humans and who’s interacted with humans for 44 years now, I feel confident in saying that a father-daughter sexual relationship is almost certainly going to be unhealthy and destructive. There are just too many issues of trust and boundaries to be overcome.
Of course I don’t have perfect knowledge, and there may be a father and an adult daughter out there who can make a sexual relationship work. I really really doubt it, but I can’t rule it out. But the relationship in the OP ain’t working. It’s a pretty twisted affair, where the Dad seems like a manipulative creep and the daughter seems pretty vulnerable and damaged.
The point is any conceivable class of relations is going to contain some messed up individual cases. The question is whether a class can contain healthy relationships. Homosexual relationships can certainly be healthy. Incestous relationships, I don’t think so.
However if the participants are adults I don’t think the law should get involved. Unless the pair have kids. Then I think CPS should get on the case immediately. But we certainly have the right to point at the messed up weirdness in the OP and say “Man, that’s messed up.” Just as we would in the case of an ordinary marriage involving an alchoholic wife-beater.
Just like they did when that Anna Smith girl got married.
No one paid any attention to that.
But is that a fair comparison to make?
This particular case garners people’s interest precisely because it has all the things you mention, plus the added taboos of incest and large age difference. It seems rather pointless to argue that, if it was merely about control and money and adultery, people would be uninterested. That’s true, largely because these things seem to be factors in so many relationships. It’s funny that so many of the people pointing to gay marriage as symbol of the downfall of the family don’t spend similar attention on prevalent problems like adultery and simple lack of respect in relationships.
This relationship, in terms of the interest it draws on this board, is like so many other topics that we discuss—of little interest except in some prurient or gossipy way. Same with all the threads expressing outrage at this or that crime or other scandal. If we truly restricted ourselves to topics and incidents of great moment and significance, the baord wouldn’t have any of its recurring bandwidth or storage problems, because there’d be far fewer threads.
You might be right about this. I know, for example, that if someone came in here and described this relationship as “gross,” then i’d probably have no trouble with it, but if they came into a thread about gay marriage and described gay couples as gross, i would probably have a more negative reaction, maybe even telling them to piss off. It would depend on the context, and how they phrased their opinion.
But i’m not sure what you want me (or anyone else) to say about this. Despite my earlier arguments about removing legal obstacles to relationships between consenting adults, i still feel that homosexual relationships are more natural and unproblematic than incestual ones. Maybe this is merely a product of experience. I know a lot of gay people, and i’ve known plenty of gay people in stable, healthy, productive relationships. On the other hand, i’ve never (to my knowledge) met anyone in an incestuous relationship, and every time i read about one in the press it seems to involve a whole bunch of other fucked up issues.
I guess it’s possible that there are a whole lot of stable, healthy, productive incestuous relationships out there, but i’m not especially sanguine about the chances of that being true. If someone showed me it was, in fact, true, then i’d probably try my best to rid myself of the “ick” factor and reassess my prejudices against incest.
I’m not sure if that’s what you’re looking for. I get the feeling here that i’m inching ever closer to one of those Bricker “gotcha” moments, when you tally up the responses and present your evidence to show how inconsistent or hypocritical liberals are about something or other.
Call it a hunch.
It seems to have been in the past. Members of the Egyptian royalty were expected to marry their brothers or sisters in order to keep their bloodline pure. It was so pervasive in Egyptian culture that “sister” was a term of endearment for a beloved wife. IIRC, Hawaiian royalty did the same. Ritualized incest also existed. In some African cultres, a hunter slept with his daughter before heading out to ensure success.
I’m sure you’re right, and that it’s possible.
I would still question whether those incestuous relationships, involving as they do certain elements of ritual and connections to issues of hereditary authority, would be considered stable, healthy, and productive in our own society. And i have to wonder, in the African case especially, whether the daughter was always a willing participant, and if she did acquiesce, whether it was because she wanted to or because she was told that it was her duty.
Your examples all point to ways in which incestuous relationship maintained stability and regimes of authority; none of your examples—at least not as you’ve presented them so far—show evidence of the level of informed consent that i would consider essential for an incestuous relationship to be acceptable.
The Sambia people of the Papua New Guinea highlands practice ritualized ingestion of semen as part of the rites of attaining manhood. I’m still not sure that i’d advocate forcing minors to give blowjobs in order to become men. Of course, here i begin to run into the battle (in my own mind) between cultural relativism and universalism.
Strictly philosophically, I don’t care if someone thinks gays are disgusting, so long as they don’t hurt gay people, or vote to restrict gay rights. Practically speaking, if a guy comes up to me and says, “You’re gay? That’s disgusting!” I’m probably going to be pissed, because he’s just insulted me to my face. I’m only human, and I respond to agression just like anyone else. If I encountered these people in real life, I wouldn’t make a big deal about them being wierdo freaks. Not because I don’t think they’re wierdo freaks, but because getting up in their face about their private business is unconscionably rude. Someone who gets all up in my face about my sex life is being similarly rude, and I’ll react to that rudeness, even if intellectually I don’t have a problem with the sentiment being expressed.
I don’t see her as vulnerable or victimized. She was an adult-one that had not even lacked a “father figure”. How messed up do you have to be to have sex with your biological father (who had also enacted several aspects of “father” for her)? How messed up do you have to be to have sex with your daughter?
I see them both as manipulative and lacking in boundaries. I cannot see her as a lesser player here. By the end of the story, I wasn’t sure who was lying and who wasn’t. The truth probably lies somewhere in between their two stories.
I have never dispassionately considered adult incest as a viable means of obtaining love, security and sexual fulfillment. I don’t see this as equating to gay sex or gay marriage (both of which I support, among adults that is). I would feel as icked out if this were an older, wealthy woman and her long lost biological son. It’s wrong, plain and simple. I feel it’s wrong because of the uber-complex relations it can produce, and the familial boundary issues it raises. See mhendo’s post for clarification.
Doubtless there are those here who will call me hidebound and reactionary to not be open-minded about it. I will take the blow and soldier forth.
It could be aruged that in the past, no woman ever had a choice when it came to any relationship. She was virtually property, legally a minor until the day she died. Her father had complete control over her until he chose a husband for her. She then became the husband’s property and could be used in any fashion he saw fit (short of killing her.) Iif her husband died, authority over her was transferred to her or next male relative.
“Acceptable” is all in your socialization, and “normal” is what you see around you every day. It’s hard for me to pass judgement on other cultures or practices when I see the way that “acceptable” has varied over the course of human events.
Not sure how (or even if) that negates my point. I have just as much trouble with that type of relationship.
Well, there we delve into the issues raised in my last sentence, questions of cultural relativism. This is an area in which people tend to have very personal and subjective viewpoints.
For me, the question is one of informed consent, and of not forcing people to do things against their will. For that reason, the genital mutilation of young women for ritual purposes will always be anathema to me, no matter what culture it occurs in or what justifications are offered for it.
The problem with discussions such as this is that it is easy to categorize things at (what i consider) the good and bad extremes (for example, gay marriage = perfectly fine; female genital mutilation = unambiguously awful); it’s the stuff that falls in the middle that i get conflicted about.
Take the age question. On the one hand, i think a 50 year old man seducing a 16 year old girl is pretty icky, and will often involve unacceptable levels of psychological coercion or exertion of power and influence (e.g., a teacher and a student; a boos and a subordinate). On the other hand, i believe that 16 is a perfectly reasonable age of consent. The whole thing becomes a grey area, for me at least.
It doesn’t negate your point-- it merely adds to it the perspective of the fact that this whole “informed consent” thing is relatively new to humanity. We’re still working out the bugs.
Do you really think that young girls have to be* forced *to be circumcized? A few years ago, I read an article in a women’s magazine about this very subject. It included the story of a set of parents who had lived in the US and acquired American values. They moved back to the Middle East and had a child. They decided not to circumcize her. They weren’t prepared for their daughter to beg for it to be done.
The girl was being tormented by her peers. The other little girls in the neighborhood thought that having their genitals mutilated was a sign of womanhood, and any girl who hadn’t had it done was treated with disdain. The mother reported in the article that their daughter sobbed and begged for such a long time that they actually staged a fake mutilation. After that, the girl was very proud and felt like she fit in with the other girls.
I’m not saying that FGM is a good thing. I think it’s horrible for young girils to have to endure such agony and have their sexual lives stunted forever. However, it is a deeply engrained cultural practice which isn’t going to go away because of indignation on the part of foreigners who are, for the most part, considered morally depraved.
What do you mean by “informed?” We’re all “informed” about what our culture expects. Does this mean judging a practice in light of other cultures’ opinions on it-- especially modern American values? When I dress in the morning, I don’t pause before I put on my blouse and think, “Well, maybe I’ll go topless today because an Amazonian woman would say that having to cover my breasts is oppresive.” Nor would I disregard monogamy in light of knowledge of other cultures’ practice of polygamy.
So are you saying that consent is impossible unless both people hold equal power? For most of human history, this hasn’t been the case. Some feminists would argue that women in America *still *don’t have equal power with men. If I were married to a cop, would I be able to consent? After all, he would have the power to arrest me which is just about the greatest power an individual citizen has.
Please don’t take my comments as hostile challenges. I’m genuinely curious.
Sleep with your sister? Where do I apply? 
Yay! I correctly interpreted a classic subtle-Brick post.
Well, yeah, but I think it was pretty clear that mhendo was talking about “acceptable and normal” in the context of modern Western concepts of sex and gender relations. Sure, there are cultures where incest has been “normal and acceptable” in the context of cultures that places little-to-no value on the welfare of one of the participants in the marriage. Considering what our culture values in individuals of both sexes, and what is considered to be an admirable and desireable outcome of a romantic relationship, I think it is highly questionable wether an incestuous relationship can possibly match those values and outcomes.
As a bit of an aside, I think it’s possible to recognize that “acceptable” and “moral” are highly variable concepts, while still feeling that your own standards for both are superior, and ought to be emulated. Getting people in other cultures to see it your way is the trick, of course. It’s clearly not something you can force on other people.
What genetic effects would be most common in offspring from a parent-child mating?
Are we talking about seriously increased risks of birth defects or is it not a big deal genetically?