The Social Stigma Argument Against Some Couples

The BBQ Pit
41

You know something? Worrying about how the world will view YOUR OWN situation is very draining and mostly unproductive.

My child was 16 mths old when his father killed himself. For YEARS I was wracked with the guilt of what would happen to my child at school when “they” found out. Would the teachers think that meant I was horrible? Would all the kids tease him because he didn’t have a father (not just an absent father)? Would kids ask him what happened to his father? Would he feel different to everyone else?

He’s 16 now. None of those questions ever came up. His best mates know why he doesn’t have a dad…it has never been an issue.

The situation these children are in is not ideal BUT theyappear to come from a loving family and they seem to have had an honest explanation of the situation. Who is hurting?

42

[QUOTE=Farmwoman]
Does anyone know how the incest taboo plays out in cultures where immediate family includes aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins?
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The Bible does…apparently it all works out in the end.

43

What if in 20 years time Daddy/Grandpop wants to have a child with his daughter/granddaughter? Do we draw the line there?

44

[QUOTE=Annie-Xmas]
What if in 20 years time Daddy/Grandpop wants to have a child with his daughter/granddaughter? Do we draw the line there?
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Again it’s arbitary but for me? Yes. The difference? He was not only a biological father but an emotional father to his daughter. To his “partner” he was only a biological father.

45

[QUOTE=calm kiwi]
You know something? Worrying about how the world will view YOUR OWN situation is very draining and mostly unproductive.

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I disagree, unless you plan to totally duck out of it, how your community perceives you is likely to have a huge impact on your emotional health. You may not like it, but to pretend it’s not true is dishonest. To pretend it’s not true for your children is dishonest and, IMO irresponsible. I’m glad your son never had to deal with social trauma as a result of his father’s suicide, but you were completely right and showed qualities of responsible parenting to be concerned about it.

46

[QUOTE=AuntiePam]
Interracial and gay couples are a good comparison, but I don’t think those taboos were ever as prevalent as the incest taboo. There were places where you could go and be accepted (or at least tolerated) as a mixed or gay couple, but where in the world has it ever been acceptable to marry a parent or have a sexual relationship with your children?
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Ancient Egypt, for one.

47

[QUOTE=psychonaut]
Ancient Egypt, for one.
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I thought that was only brother/sister?

48

[QUOTE=Farmwoman]
I disagree, unless you plan to totally duck out of it, how your community perceives you is likely to have a huge impact on your emotional health. You may not like it, but to pretend it’s not true is dishonest. To pretend it’s not true for your children is dishonest and, IMO irresponsible. I’m glad your son never had to deal with social trauma as a result of his father’s suicide, but you were completely right and showed qualities of responsible parenting to be concerned about it.
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Absolutely! I totally agree with you and have (unfortunately) lived my life by that mantra! My point is that while being a responsible, caring, loving parent you are constantly waiting for things to happen/ things to be said, but in actuality we live in societies with soooooooooooo many diverse stories that children are just so much more accepting of differerences.

It really is parents that enforce the… “Don’t talk to Bobby his parents are related” thing. Left to their own device children are incredibly unjudgmental.

I say that as a teacher (ex primary, currently preschool)

49

The real issue is this: ‘should people make an exception and not disprove of a singular instance of apparent uncoercion in a type of relationship that in the vast majority of cases is psychologically damaging and based on manipulation and abuse, and leads to all sorts of genetic problems for children (in this particular case the happy couple had one child die of genetic problems) and where the kid is going to live with a stigma’?

The answer may be ‘yes’ for some, but it will not I think be a slam-dunk.

While it is all very enlighened to say that this case is an exception and should not be bound to the rule, it is nonsense to say that this will have no effect on the child going forward - all her life, she is going to have to deal with it.

An argument can be made that this price is worth the freedom to have sex with whomsoever one wants, regardless of circumstances, so long as coercion is not present. To my mind, no freedom is so absolute that a weighing of consequences should not be made - and in this case, it cannot be ignored that some of the consequences are to a third party who hasn’t made the choice.

The difference between the case of parent-child incest and gay and interracial marriage is that in both cases there may be prejudice to children, but in the latter case the prejudice is irrational and even morally wrong. The point is that “social disapproval” or “stigma” regarding a particular sort of relationship isn’t always totally irrational prejudice - in the case of parent-child incest it has arisen for a very valid and compelling reason: because in the overwhelmingly vast majority of cases, it is the outcome of the worst sort of abuse and breach of trust. This is emphatically not the case with gays or interracial marriage.

So while the children of gays or interracial couples may suffer prejudice, they can at the same time take pride in the fact that they are combatting irrational bigotry - and an irrational bigotry that is in the Western world on the wane in any event. All the children of incest can do is claim that their parent’s incest wasn’t, really, all that bad.

50

[QUOTE=DianaG]
You know, I think incest is wrong. I’m completely grossed out by it. And yet I can’t come up with a single *rational * argument as to why it’s more wrong than homosexual or interracial relationships.

Sure, there’s the danger of genetic abnormalities in the children. But it’s not as though we prevent people with diseases that they are almost sure to pass on to their offspring from reproducing. And yeah, there’s the cultural issues with the children, but if I disregard them in relation to homosexual and interracial relationships, I have a hard time justifying not doing the same in this case.

There are the “imbalance of power” issues, but I’m not sure that they don’t apply to a whole lot of relationships. In fact, there are plenty of people who would argue that the balance of power in an interracial relationship is always tilted towards the caucasian, and for that matter that the balance of power in any heterosexual relationship is always tilted toward the man. I don’t *agree * with those people, and I also can’t bring myself to assume that the balance of power in a parent/child relationship is automatically tilted toward the parent.

So, in closing… ew. I think it’s wrong, I think it’s icky beyond belief, I’m judging you very, *very * badly. But it’s not my place to interfere.
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You must be joking. :eek: In the vast, overwhelmingly vast number of cases, a father and daughter relationship have far more issues relating to “imbalance of power” that any ordinary relationship between racially different partners or any ordinary hetero relationship.

The case that sparked this debate was highly unusual in that the parent had no contact with the kid until she was an adult.

But speaking as a parent myself - when yopu raise a child, they are totally under your control for many years.

51

I’m not. Speaking as a former child, my father is not the boss of me anymore. Yes, he was the boss of me for eighteen years, but that was half a lifetime ago, and we’re pretty much over it. Speaking as a parent, I expect to be not the boss of my daughter at some point in the near future. We will, at some point, relate as equals.

Again, I’m not saying that I think that’s *always * the case (because of course I think that there are so many power issues involved that I can’t even conceive of, let alone anticipate all of them), and I literally could not be more freaked out by the idea of incest in general, but I think that, for the most part, it’s not my place to tell consenting adults what they can and can’t do with their bodies.

52

[QUOTE=DianaG]
I’m not. Speaking as a former child, my father is not the boss of me anymore. Yes, he was the boss of me for eighteen years, but that was half a lifetime ago, and we’re pretty much over it. Speaking as a parent, I expect to be not the boss of my daughter at some point in the near future. We will, at some point, relate as equals.

Again, I’m not saying that I think that’s *always * the case (because of course I think that there are so many power issues involved that I can’t even conceive of, let alone anticipate all of them), and I literally could not be more freaked out by the idea of incest in general, but I think that, for the most part, it’s not my place to tell consenting adults what they can and can’t do with their bodies.
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And you are now totally free of all issues relating to your parents? :dubious: There are issues related to consent that go far beyond mere “bossing”. Lots of parents use levers other than physical coercion - such as manipulation of guilt and affection - to get their way; when that is combined with sexuality, it is hard to see how it could be entirely free and healthy, even where supposedly “free adults” are involved.

In any event, the vast majority of parent-child incest cases are not ones in which the happy couple hooks up later in life “as equals”. There are very good reasons to be dubious of such relationships.

Now, the last point has some validity - sure, freedom to mate with whomsoever you will may trump the concerns about incest. But it is foolish to argue backwards that, because you value such freedom, those concerns have small merit, particularly when the concerns go to the heart of whether a “consent” under such circumstances is valid, which is what I think is happening in this thread generally.

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[QUOTE=DianaG]
I’m not. Speaking as a former child, my father is not the boss of me anymore. Yes, he was the boss of me for eighteen years, but that was half a lifetime ago, and we’re pretty much over it. Speaking as a parent, I expect to be not the boss of my daughter at some point in the near future. We will, at some point, relate as equals.

Again, I’m not saying that I think that’s *always * the case (because of course I think that there are so many power issues involved that I can’t even conceive of, let alone anticipate all of them), and I literally could not be more freaked out by the idea of incest in general, but I think that, for the most part, it’s not my place to tell consenting adults what they can and can’t do with their bodies.
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I think the stumbling block for a lot of people (and I know it’s part of my own) is that the parent/child relationship is *by definition * one of power imbalance for at least part of its duration. Parents do have authority over their minor children - for a goodly chunk of childhood they have essentially absolute authority over them. That period of absolute authority embraces pretty much the entirety of one’s formative years. The part of life when you learn what is and is not acceptable and appropriate behavior.

My father hasn’t been in a position of authority with me for well over a decade - I’m an adult, have been legally one for 15 years and functionally one (as in, no longer beholden to my parents for financial support) for 11 years (since my graduation from my bachelor’s program). We’ve gotten (after some work) to the point where we’re friends as well as father and daughter, but if he tells me a behavoir is or is not appropriate, I’ll give his opinion vastly more weight than I’d give the opinion of some guy trying to pick me up in a bar.* His opinion of what is and isn’t correct behavior is what shaped my own sense of right and wrong in large part. I’ve got a lifetime pattern of respecting his viewpoint on such matters - I don’t always agree now that I’m an adult,** but I’m still more inclined to trust his judgment than average.

Generally, a person’s parents enjoy a special level of trust. Parent-child incest just absolutely reeks of abuse of that trust. It also warps the hell out of the other family bonds just by it’s nature. How can it not warp the bond (taking the case in question as our model) between the daughter/wife and her mother? Between herself and her other siblings? Between the father/husband and* his * other children? If your dad is fucking your sister (even if she was fully adult when the relationship moved to that phase), how does that not affect your relationship with the both of them in a bad, bad way?

There comes a certain point when one is piling constraints and limitations and conditionals on a certain behavior that a flat prohibition just becomes the sensible and reasonable course of action. I’m having to fight off the feeling that some of the people advocating we just live and let live for all sexual behaviors (because to do otherwise is just to be irrationally prejudicial) are just freaking rules-lawyering for the sheer fun of it. Not all social stigma are arbitrary and capricious - they’re not all irrational. Granted, some of them are, but not all of them. The incest taboo isn’t an irrational one - for a whole host of reasons. Even the incest defenders in the threads have (generally) essentially conceded that - they’re just arguing that in this case because of X and Y and Z seriously improbable circumstance we should just leave these people alone with their taboo-breaking kink.
*Assuming for puposes of this discussion I weren’t happily married and therefore immune to getting picked up by guys in bars :smiley:

**For example, he and I disagree on various political issues and he’s got a prejudice against a certain ethnic minority I do not share.

54

My husband’s uncle and sister were in a 20+ year relationship. You’d be surprised what a family will “accept” as opposed to disowning people they love. It caused unforgiveable grief for some members of both sides of the family, but others handled it just fine. It’s not my cup o’ tea, but it’s not the end of the world. A family can accept the relationship.

They didn’t have children, but they came close.

55

You put it better than I, Aangelica.

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[QUOTE=Kalhoun]
My husband’s uncle and sister were in a 20+ year relationship. You’d be surprised what a family will “accept” as opposed to disowning people they love. It caused unforgiveable grief for some members of both sides of the family, but others handled it just fine. It’s not my cup o’ tea, but it’s not the end of the world. A family can accept the relationship.

They didn’t have children, but they came close.
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I’d say that brother-sister incest raises different, and lesser, issues than parent-child incest.

57

[QUOTE=Frank]
I thought that was only brother/sister?
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Nah, some pharaohs married their mothers. I’m not sure how socially acceptable the practice would have been for commoners.

58

[QUOTE=kambuckta]
The parent/child relationship I am talking about is not about the younger children, but about the father/daughter in a sexual relationship, and how open and informed consent can never be a factor because of that initial relationship, regardless that the couple are well past the ‘age’ of consent so to speak.
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This is even more bizarre.

Are you not even aware of the particular and peculiar circumstances of this case? I know that you are, so i can only conclude that you’re being completely obtuse. The father and daughter were never around one another for any sort of time while she was a minor, so the “initial relationship,” as you call it, developed in a very different way from normal father-daughter relationships.

As i suggested earlier, if he had raised her and then hopped in the sack with her when she grew up, i’d have a lot more problem with it. But these two, as far as i can tell from piecing together the facts from various articles and the sentencing transcript, had no ongoing relationship when she was a child (he left when she was very young), saw each other for about a week when she was 15, and then saw each other on three or four other (indeterminate but short) visits before they got together permanently when she was about 30.

You keep assuming that, no matter what the facts of this actual case, the standard trajectory of father-daughter relationships still applies. It doesn’t, no matter how many times you wish it so.

59

[QUOTE=Malthus]
Lots of parents use levers other than physical coercion - such as manipulation of guilt and affection - to get their way; when that is combined with sexuality, it is hard to see how it could be entirely free and healthy, even where supposedly “free adults” are involved.
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Bolding mine.

Well, it’s ***not ** * healthy. Let’s face it, what keeps me from having sex with my father isn’t that I’m worried about the imbalance of power. It’s that he’s my father, and the idea is repulsive to me. Anyone who is inclined to have sex with their father probably has myriad issues that would present in any *other * sexual relationship they had as well. Should we prevent them from entering into other unions? Because I guarantee you that those relationships are going to be equally, if differently, fucked up.

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[QUOTE=DianaG]
Bolding mine.

Well, it’s ***not ** * healthy. Let’s face it, what keeps me from having sex with my father isn’t that I’m worried about the imbalance of power. It’s that he’s my father, and the idea is repulsive to me. Anyone who is inclined to have sex with their father probably has myriad issues that would present in any *other * sexual relationship they had as well. Should we prevent them from entering into other unions? Because I guarantee you that those relationships are going to be equally, if differently, fucked up.
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Certainly.

One prime difference between any old messed-up relationship and a parent-child incest one is the effect on any children of the union, both physically and mentally. Note that in this particular case, the couple already I believe had a child die as a result of genetic issues.

Now, one could certainly say that the mere risk of genetic problems isn’t sufficient to raise a barrier (after all, we do not screen for or prevent other people with genetic issues from mating); and as for stigma - well, one can brush that off as mere prejudice.

However, to my mind it is the cumulative effect of all these negatives combined into one package that raises alarms. They weigh against the overall presumption of freedom that everyone more or less agrees with. Whether they weigh enough against the presumption is a matter of individual choice, but to my mind there is no question that there is more to the story than “eeew that’s gross” vs. “high-minded freedom”.