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You fell in love with someone and yall married and were together for so long and then you found out suddenly that you two are actually related. Would you be able to turn your back on your partner after decades of love?
| Yes | 6 | |
| No | 21 |
As we would both be asexual and have no desire to be parents Mrs/Mr Skulls and I would probably just keep quiet about it and carry on. The real problems of incest arise when people insist on breeding with their close relatives.
How close a relative did you have in mind, out of interest?
Absolutely not. This is probably going to be an extremely unpopular answer and I've found that in the past, people are so innately repulsed by incest that they automatically tune out any argument whatsoever, won't even hear it out without seething in disgust.
I'm just going to say it. While it weirds me out personally, and while I have the innate repulsion most do, the truth of the matter is... incest actually isn't _wrong_ in and of itself. I said what I said.
Hear me out. Child abuse is wrong. Grooming is wrong. Molestation and all that is obviously wrong. But if, say, two siblings get together, as grown adults, it's their business and calling it wrong is no different than calling homosexuality wrong because it repulses you. It's exactly the same sort of thing. Incest repulses us. That doesn't make it morally wrong. There's no moral argument against the relationship _itself_ if it's between two consenting adults. I said it. I literally once lost a friend just for saying that, like I said rape was okay or something, and it's ridiculous. There's no moral argument against it. I'm sorry. There's not.
As for having kids, that's another issue. I tend to be against the idea of them having children, but honestly even that has been shaken up a bit and I'll explain why. The risks to children born of incest are _greatly_ exaggerated precisely due to the aforementioned repulsion, but it is true they have a technically greater risk of certain conditions. This is actually the reason for the repulsion in the first place. Natural selection created the moral-like repulsion despite no real moral wrongdoing so that humans would travel to find mates instead of selecting those closest to them. This was beneficial. It _is_ beneficial that children are born from a more diverse gene pool. That said, we have always traditionally seen it as immoral to forbid anyone from having children. We allow people with various conditions that will almost _certainly_ be passed on to have children even. There are heaps of people allowed to have children despite this while in all likelihood a child born of incest won't even have anything wrong. There's just a slightly higher risk of it than normal. I'm going to leave this half of the argument alone though for now and assume we're talking about couples who will not be having children.
Again, incest does leave me with a repulsed feeling when thinking of family I already know. I'd rather have a limb severed than have to sleep with a sister I know. It's just so horrible to imagine. But no, if I was some woman's husband for decades and madly in love with her before learning she was my long lost sister or something, I absolutely wouldn't abandon her because society thinks "ew". She wouldn't even be my sister to me, never having thought of her like that. She would be my wife of decades. It would just be an unfortunate genetic fact that we would keep secret thereafter. After that long married we'd also likely already have any children we were ever going to so there's nothing to say there. Leaving her would be childish and ridiculous.
And if anyone wants to hate on me for this, I implore you: Tell me one moral argument against it if they're consenting adults, no abuse was involved, and kids aren't an issue. Name one. You can't do it, can you? It's because there isn't one. I was shocked when I realized this too. Surely there had to be something. It just feels wrong right? It's not. You feel this way because natural selection made you. It's the same reason so many are naturally repulsed by homosexuality. It was also genetically advantageous to not engage in relationships that didn't lead to children. You now know exactly how homophobes feel, so sure it's wrong but unable to articulate a valid reason whatsoever beyond their disgust. Accept this fact. Just like homosexuality, we don't have to participate in it ourselves.
Same, I could never go with a family member especially if I grew up with them like that and knew them so well. But if I found out years later when it's already my wife I'd probably just say fuck it.
They've done studies on this. The repulsion starts in childhood. The body has no way to actually know who it's genetically related to so it makes an assumption about those who are around constantly growing up.
They've found that unrelated children who are constantly exposed to one another generally always develop the sexual repulsion. I've experienced this first hand. I was raised constantly around a girl who I now call my cousin even though we're not related at all. We played together constantly. She's now an objectively rather attractive woman although she does nothing for me and we have heaps in common but the thought of sleeping with her makes me want to vomit. I'm sure she feels the same.
Natural selection is good at what it does. We're not even _related_ and it still just somehow feels _wrong_. Even though in reality we're just two people who actually have a lot in common and there wouldn't be a thing wrong in the world with it. We'll always be "cousins".
Conversely, when siblings or a child and parent are separated at an early age and they then meet as adult strangers, there is often intense attraction on the part of one or both people.
From what I've read, it's common for people in this situation to almost instantly feel a powerful sense of connection and identification, and this frequently includes intense sexual attraction.
Researchers have confirmed what many people have noticed, and it is the case that heterosexual women tend to be attracted to men who resemble their father, and heterosexual men tend to go for women who are similar to their mother. This isn't (most likely) a Freudian thing, but more about us being most comfortable with those who resemble others who have made us feel comfortable.
If you put together two people who resemble each other strongly and the normal aversion to sex with a close relative never had the chance to develop during childhood, then it's very likely that sparks are going to fly.
I would like to hear your research boojum. In a vacuum I suppose, but is there actual evidence of people when given the freedom of selection, people really meet up with family? In actual modern times Oedipus and electra concepts withstanding. It seems terribly anty gene sharing from an evolutionarily stand point.
For the nothing it's worth, I agree with everything you say.
I don't recall ever feeling any sort of sexual interest in either my mother or my five younger sisters. But if I do a thought experiment and imagine that I did indeed do something sexual with my mother and/or my sisters at some point in the past, that idea does not fill me with disgust. I do remember being curious about my sisters in the way teenage boys are about girls, but not so curious that I did shit like trying to spy on them in the shower (unlike my step-father, who did just that).
As far as I'm concerned, mentally competent adults should be free to decide to have consensual sex with whomever they please. I see no logical reason why the number of genes they have in common should matter to anyone other than themselves.
My most serious concern about incest is that family power dynamics can be pretty screwed up. I can see how that could result in what feels like consent actually being the result of very subtle manipulation.
It is the commonly accepted wisdom that incest inevitably and invariably has negative consequences, but I have wondered if that's actually true. We regularly hear horror stories, so it's undeniably true that it can seriously mess up people's lives and screw up how they deal with sex. But it's such a huge taboo that nobody with any sense is going to publicly state that their experience with incest was positive, since doing so would screw up their life as well as that of their relative(s).
For all we know, there could be therapists out there who have managed to overcome their personal cultural conditioning and have come to believe from their conversations with patients that incest isn't always terrible, but they're not going to even whisper this, because they know that the result would be a total shit-storm landing on their head. And, of course, if incest doesn't always have dire consequences, therapists are unlikely to see those people in the first place.
The way some people respond to even talking about incest (including, it must be said, the admins of this site) does strike me as very odd. It seems to me very similar to phobias of snakes, spiders or the dark: not totally irrational, but atavistic and immune to logical refutation. I also wonder how often there's another parallel to the homophobia you mention. In many cases, homophobia is actually about someone feeling urges that they refuse to acknowledge for one reason or another, and dealing with that by exaggerated displays of disgust.
Knowing we are related would disgust the hell out of me to the point, I would lose all interest and best believe my ass is OUT.