Should incest be normalized?

[hairyone]

This conversation is confusing.  Is it "incest" (sex between close relatives) or "pedophilia" (psychiatric disorder of sex between an adult and minor)?  They are not the same thing. 

If it is pedophilia with a relative (incestuous pedophilia), the term pedophilia takes precedence because of the seriousness of the psychiatric illness.  THAT needs medical intervention at a minimum. 

Incest between adults is not necessarily a psychiatric disorder and can be a very interesting dialogue.  I'd be interested in reading more if the thread goes in this direction.  

[blackrobe]

3 hours ago, hairyone said:

This conversation is confusing.  Is it "incest" (sex between close relatives) or "pedophilia" (psychiatric disorder of sex between an adult and minor)?  They are not the same thing. 

If it is pedophilia with a relative (incestuous pedophilia), the term pedophilia takes precedence because of the seriousness of the psychiatric illness.  THAT needs medical intervention at a minimum. 

Incest between adults is not necessarily a psychiatric disorder and can be a very interesting dialogue.  I'd be interested in reading more if the thread goes in this direction.  

People are conflating the question of incest with preference for specific ages that is more broadly called chronophilia. I teased it apart in my earlier post for this reason. 

[ErosWired]

@BBArchangel - Thank you for your courage in sharing your experience.

To the OP - No. Incest should not be normalized, in either a heterosexual or homosexual context. Incest has been strongly held as a forbidden practice in cultures worldwide across history, for very good reasons, both biological and psychological. In the heterosexual context, the risk of genetic defects resulting from coupling within the family group is simply too great. But in all contexts, sexual interaction caused deeply powerful chemical and psychological effects between individuals, and is an area where power discrepancies are likely to be acted upon. Relationship trauma and traumatic bonding can be experienced in incestuous relationships, and dealing with the aftermath can be challenging. While thoughts of incest or acting on an incestuous impulse may not themselves be mental conditions, incest presents the psychiatric community a distinct and complicated set of problems to deal with. Here’s an article on the Ramifications of Incest in terms of psychiatry:

[think before following links] https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/ramifications-incest
 

[RawUK]

10 hours ago, LeatherScorpionFF said:

Goodness me. That is quite some intense experience @BBArchangel, thank you for sharing such a traumatic string of events in your life around one situation. 😗

 

10 hours ago, TaKinGDeePanal said:

@BBArchangel - I’d give you a hug react if it was available. 

 

10 hours ago, LeatherScorpionFF said:

@TaKinGDeePanal.... I would have done so too! 

@BBArchangel - Can only echo @LeatherScorpionFF and @TaKinGDeePanal's sentiments here. I too would have loved to give you a massive hug, nobody should have to go through what you did.

[nate88]

6 hours ago, hairyone said:

This conversation is confusing.  Is it "incest" (sex between close relatives) or "pedophilia" (psychiatric disorder of sex between an adult and minor)?  They are not the same thing. 

Likewise, incest and rape are not the same thing. What happened to BBArchangel is horrible but that's because it was rape - the offender being his brother doesn't make it any better or worse.

I only know one person who has experienced incest and he considers it a positive experience - not everybody's experiences are the same and that doesn't mean every experience will be positive, but the same can be said for literally every other type of relationship or sexual experience. I don't know if incest should be normalised but we shouldn't be demonising it as broadly as we do just because some people haven't had positive experiences with it.

[Blkmuscbreeder]

Incest between consenting adults? Yes 

It's none of my business who a grown person wants to love or have sex with.

[blackrobe]

3 hours ago, ErosWired said:

Here’s an article on the Ramifications of Incest in terms of psychiatry:

[think before following links] [think before following links] https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/ramifications-incest

One big caveat when reading research in this area: Male survivors of child sexual abuse (incestuous or not) are not well studied or understood in the research literature. For that reason, research of this vintage (2011) and older has a strong slant towards male perpetrators and female victims, tending to erase female perpetrators and male victims. For decades the definition of rape in many jurisdictions meant that legally males could not be raped or sexually assaulted. With recent changes to the law in some jurisdictions and the addition of a "forced to penetrate" category of sexual assault, the numbers of female perpetrators and male victims are beginning to be better understood.

"The Assessment of Forced Penetration: A Necessary and Further Step Toward Understanding Men’s Sexual Victimization and Women’s Perpetration" by RaeAnn E. Anderson, Erica L. Goodman, and  Sidney S. Thimm

In the US, the FBI only changed its definition of rape to be more inclusive of men as victims and women as perpetrators taking effect in 2013. This affects the statistical data that the FBI collects for the annual Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). Note: "The FBI's change does not affect any criminal laws; it adjusts the definition only for statistical purposes, so that crimes under existing state laws will now be acknowledged, and counted by, the federal government."

It can be re-traumatizing for male survivors to see the language in research failing to acknowledge their lived experience. 

[blackrobe]

1 hour ago, nate88 said:

I only know one person who has experienced incest and he considers it a positive experience - not everybody's experiences are the same and that doesn't mean every experience will be positive, but the same can be said for literally every other type of relationship or sexual experience. I don't know if incest should be normalised but we shouldn't be demonising it as broadly as we do just because some people haven't had positive experiences with it.

I acknowledge that many incest survivors, like child sexual abuse (CSA) survivors, may consider what happened to them a positive experience. It's worth pointing out, however, that reframing and reconciling their experiences is part of the adaptation that incest and CSA survivors can make to live with and integrate their experience and its lasting effects. That doesn't mean it wasn't traumatic or damaging, or that the impact of the trauma is gone.

I'm not a clinician, but I'm willing to bet that if you controlled for individual resilience factors and other traumatic incidents, and put these incest survivors with a positive view of their experience though evaluations for negative outcomes and behaviors over their lifetime, you'd see evidence that they were, and likely still are, negatively affected.

[BootmanLA]

45 minutes ago, blackrobe said:

I acknowledge that many incest survivors, like child sexual abuse (CSA) survivors, may consider what happened to them a positive experience. It's worth pointing out, however, that reframing and reconciling their experiences is part of the adaptation that incest and CSA survivors can make to live with and integrate their experience and its lasting effects. That doesn't mean it wasn't traumatic or damaging, or that the impact of the trauma is gone.

I'm not a clinician, but I'm willing to bet that if you controlled for individual resilience factors and other traumatic incidents, and put these incest survivors with a positive view of their experience though evaluations for negative outcomes and behaviors over their lifetime, you'd see evidence that they were, and likely still are, negatively affected.

The problem with this approach, even assuming there are negative effects for the person, is causality.

From the moment psychiatrists and psychologists started studying human sexuality, for instance, there was an assumption that same-sex behaviors were disordered. That created an environment where people with same-sex attractions WERE affected negatively; not because having sex with someone of the same sex was inherently disordering, but because society imposed so much shame and guilt (and criminal penalties) for that behavior that anyone who did it naturally thought they were sick in the head. And that inevitably caused all sorts of problems that "negatively affected" them.

But it wasn't the same-sex activities that caused those issues; it was society's rules (which were inherited from religious underpinnings) that caused the issues.

The same *could* be true of consensual incest, particularly if we're talking same-generation (ie brothers or cousins) as opposed to intergenerational (dad/uncle/grandfather-son/nephew/grandson), which can introduce more power/control issues that could be problematic.

[blackrobe]

4 minutes ago, BootmanLA said:

The problem with this approach, even assuming there are negative effects for the person, is causality.

From the moment psychiatrists and psychologists started studying human sexuality, for instance, there was an assumption that same-sex behaviors were disordered. That created an environment where people with same-sex attractions WERE affected negatively; not because having sex with someone of the same sex was inherently disordering, but because society imposed so much shame and guilt (and criminal penalties) for that behavior that anyone who did it naturally thought they were sick in the head. And that inevitably caused all sorts of problems that "negatively affected" them.

But it wasn't the same-sex activities that caused those issues; it was society's rules (which were inherited from religious underpinnings) that caused the issues.

The same *could* be true of consensual incest, particularly if we're talking same-generation (ie brothers or cousins) as opposed to intergenerational (dad/uncle/grandfather-son/nephew/grandson), which can introduce more power/control issues that could be problematic.

I understand the point you're making, it's implicit that you'd need to control for other causal factors. My calling out just two doesn't obviate the need to do sound science and control for anything that looks contributory in the statistical models. 

My main point is that what appears to be an initial positive read on an experience, can instead be an adaptation that's been arrived at over time. I've been in groups with men claiming what happened to them was positive, but along the way you hear all the classic negative outcomes that result as well. That reads as an adaptation to me, not as a case of zero negative outcomes resulting from their experience.

[BootmanLA]

18 minutes ago, blackrobe said:

I understand the point you're making, it's implicit that you'd need to control for other causal factors. My calling out just two doesn't obviate the need to do sound science and control for anything that looks contributory in the statistical models. 

My main point is that what appears to be an initial positive read on an experience, can instead be an adaptation that's been arrived at over time. I've been in groups with men claiming what happened to them was positive, but along the way you hear all the classic negative outcomes that result as well. That reads as an adaptation to me, not as a case of zero negative outcomes resulting from their experience.

But again, the question remains: is the negative outcome a result of the action itself, or of society's treatment of the action as something shameful or dirty?

Gay sex - ALL gay sex - was treated that way in my lifetime. We've come to realize that the problem isn't the sex itself, but the way society treated people who had it.

So I'm not taking about adaptation - there may well be negative effects for people who've had incestual experiences. The question remains, though: is that because of the incest, or because society makes people ashamed of incest? Those are two very different things.

[Incognito91]

If no one is harmed and everyone consents (and of legal age to consent), it really isn't any of my business. And I honestly don't really care (though thought of sex with any family member makes me want to vomit but so does the idea of sex with women).

In relation to conflating the issue with pedo - it happens with other topics too. I noticed this was also conflated when we were voting for same sex marriage in Australia - like "vote no to pedo parenting" or legalising same sex marriage is 1 step to legalising pedo. 

Now,  whether I would campaign to normalise incest? Unlikely - I feel quite apathetic towards the cause. It seems like a terribly terribly small minority to put much effort into - I say this knowing i'm a hypocrite in minority groups /shrug

 

Edited January 11 by Incognito91

[ErosWired]

2 minutes ago, BootmanLA said:

The question remains, though: is that because of the incest, or because society makes people ashamed of incest? Those are two very different things.

Incest occurs first, and has its first impacts, in the context of the relationship between individuals, not in the context of the consideration of society. Sexual contact has its immediate effect on the limbic system, which powerfully colors subsequent perception of the individuals involved toward each other. The sexual dynamic is not consistent with the dynamic of relationships within the functional support structure of immediate family, and we sense this integrally.

If the shame associated with incest were merely an imposed societal condition and not an inherent one, we would expect the sanction to be limited to some cultures and not others, but instead the prohibition against incest is strikingly uniform globally. The variations are relatively in the details, but the general prohibition is consistent.

Historically, the notable exceptions have been in the service of consolidating power in certain ruling dynasties (the Egyptians in particular), but culturally, it was still a no-no in antiquity. Even the Romans forbade it, and they fucked everything. (Caligula doesn’t count. He was batshit crazy.)

It seems to me that if the global human society has decided that there is something shameful about incest, it’s probably because people have always inherently understood that it was wrong to do, on the basis of original experience.

It must be pointed out that at some point at the dawn of human origins, regardless of whether you subcribe to scripture or science, that incest was the only option available; the population of original Homo sapiens was a handful of individuals. It is likely that our species, over 50,000 years of copulating, figured out that incest wasn’t a survival strategy, and learned not to do it because it caused problems. The prohibition didn’t just suddenly emerge as someone’s dogma - it’s always been with us.

I live in Kentucky - we Appalachian hillfolk are supposedly as incestuous as fuck, and to be fair there have been cases of isolated remote families w-a-a-a-y deep in the mountains, in times past, where the gene pool wasn’t deep enough to wade in. But we don’t really commit incest any more than anyone else, for the same reasons. They’re family.

Can we all be clear that although we’re discussing this question as though it were serious, it’s actually just an expression of someone’s sexual paraphilia? Should incest be normalized? Of course not. Everybody knows it shouldn’t, and everybody understands why.

[BootmanLA]

25 minutes ago, ErosWired said:

Historically, the notable exceptions have been in the service of consolidating power in certain ruling dynasties (the Egyptians in particular), but culturally, it was still a no-no in antiquity. Even the Romans forbade it, and they fucked everything. (Caligula doesn’t count. He was batshit crazy.)

Caligula was far from alone among the Roman imperials in committing incest. Agrippina, Nero's mother and sister to Caligula, married her paternal uncle Claudius. Rumors (possibly spread by opponents of the family) alleged Nero and his mother Agrippina had a relationship. But then those rumors wouldn't have had much effect were there not, as you noted, a general prohibition on incest.

Note, too, that "incest" is a matter of degree; obviously it applies to parent/child or sibling relationships, but what about cousins? In researching our family tree, my mother found numerous records of church dispensations for first cousins marrying. And in the latter part of the 19th century and into the early 20th, cousin marriage was almost universal among European royals, because most of them prohibited (if not by law, then by custom) a member of the royal family marrying a non-royal. In Great Britain, it was only after George V expressly okayed royals marrying noble-but-not-royal individuals that the future George VI was freed to marry his love, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (who most of us would know as the Queen Mother). Prior to that, especially since Victoria's progeny had married into almost every major royal family in Europe, any suitable marriage candidate was almost certainly a relative.

[ktopper]

I came close to having sex with a female cousin. I was around 18 at the time, maybe not quite 18 or just turned 18, I can't remember exactly. She was a couple years younger. She told me years later that if I had been persistent she would have probably gone for it. I'm hesitant to impose my morality on others since I don't like the moral squad trying to tell me what to do or how to live. But my personal feeling is that it should not occur if it involves a minor. When I was around 10 or 11 my younger brother and I hung around with a a couple of other kids who were brothers. They played around sexually together, I don't think fully anal but BJs and frottage, that kind of stuff. They once invited me and my brother to play. We declined. We thought they were "queers". Neither of them grew up to be gay, they were just experimenting. Another brother/sister pair we used to hang out with, around 13 or 14, were fucking each other. The sister was older and initiated it. The sister wanted to fuck me in front of my brother and her brother. I nervously noped out of that. They also grew up normal, no apparent psychological damage to either. My point is that kids will fuck around with each other regardless of the laws. But I don't think it should be encouraged. And when it involves children and older relatives it is a huge NO!