Incest. It’s an icky term. Defined as the sexual relations between immediate family, incest takes place when say a brother and sister or a father and daughter have sex.
And it seems consensual incest is on the rise.
Just this year we’ve reported on a mother who wants to have a child with her son, a daughter who fell in and out of love with her father, and a daughter who lost her virginity to her once estranged father, now fiance.
Last year Josh Duggar, the eldest child of the clan from now-defunct show 19 Kids & Counting was suspected of incest after being accused of ‘fondling three young girls’, two of them his sisters when he was a teenager. This was also before he was one of the men outed as a user of Ashley Maddison, a dating website for people looking to have affairs.
There was even an uproar after Lena Dunham released her memoir/bounded book of essays Not That Kind Of Girl in 2014, with some commenters accusing the Girls star of incest with her kid sister, after she described the time she 'examined' her sister’s vagina and discovered pebbles buried within.
While the latter example was a bunch of overzealous adults responding to a child's curiosity (Dunham was 7 at the time the 'incident' took place), the others are cause for concern.
It seems many consensual incest relationships go a little like this: parent or family member is separated from their child at a young age. Parent or family member reconnect with said child later in life. Both parties 'fall in love' disregarding the obvious implication of genetics.
My first question is how? How do you fall in love with someone you know you're biologically related too? Sure you get along really well and probably think they're beautiful, but that's because they're family. They are a part of you. Heck, they even probably look like you.
Top Comments
You find incest wrong? Thats perfectly fine, stay away from it. Someone else is in an consensual incest relationship? Thats none of ur business. So instead of talking about punishing them, just get a life for urself...
Nothing is "just plain wrong". There's either a principle at work or you're just as uncomfortable as everyone else and condemning out of emotion rather than logic
1. Psychologically, there's nothing wrong going on. GSA is not a condition, it's a product of a properly functioning psyche. People who experience GSA do not have attraction to their adopted families whom they grew up around
2. Genetically, incest rates need to be between 0.5-2.5% for a population to remain healthy and avoid extinction. Incest must exist and be rare or a species becomes too well mixed, eventually leading to poor immune health, loss of adaptivity and overall genetic stagnation
3. Additionally, risks are not empirical only statistical. Risks do not always exist in specific individuals, there is simply increased probability of both providing a recessive gene associated with a negative health trait. Two close relatives could potentially mate producing better offspring than otherwise possible. This is used in animal breeding and plant cultivation to the benefit of species.
4. Health risks within single-generation reproduction even among close relatives are less than many other conditions for which we do not prevent people from having children
5. Religiously, the topic is very poorly studied. At least in the Abrahamic faiths, morale arguments against incest are specifically and explicitly only applied to the Jews and even then only specific pairings are considered "sins unto death"
6. Genetic therapy now exists
7. Any genetic complications introduced into offspring are quickly corrected by the population naturally. Any useful strong genetic traits remain. Thus a long term benefit to society
For all these reasons, there is no moral, social or biological justification to taking away the freedoms of consenting adults. You have no position other than, you don't like it. There are many things people do which I don't like; that doesn't matter.
Republicans: If government should be small and accountable to the people; it has no place in the bedroom. If freedom matters then you should be free to simply express your disapproval rather than take away others' freedoms. Otherwise your stance is inconsistent and your arguments are not principled.
Democrats: If you're going to go in for the LGBT crowd, then you should understand that consenting adults have a right to choose. Otherwise your stance is inconsistent and your arguments are not principled.