why was gay sex between siblings illegal?
Was it ever illegal where gay sex wasn't illegal regardless? (I'm asking. I don't know.)
I assume gay sex has been legal in Germany for a while.
SEE, I TOLD YOU SO!!
I'm pretty much OK with legalizing incest. I'm against all "crimes against nature" laws, and I don't buy the birth defect argument. For one thing it's only an increased risk, not a guarantee, and for another there's always birth control.
I guess I'll start this thread out right by noting that I don't think sex between siblings should be that much of a social taboo. There is a power differential that exists with other types of incest (parent and, assuming full consent, grown child) but between siblings close to the same age, eh, I don't think it's really that big of a deal. There is probably way more friskiness going on between teenage siblings than anyone cares to admit.
If you don't want to get into the weeds of fighting the senate battles just give to the DCCC and they'll apportion the money in a well-informed way so as to do the most good as far as hanging on to the Senate goes.
To be pedantic, I think you want the DSCC for the Senate.
5: Wouldn't it make for awkward Thanksgivings?
5.1: I think having a social taboo against it is probably a good thing. Make it like poop eating in terms of sexual proclivities. I'm having a hard time coming up with a good formulation for why I think this. It's partly stuff going on along Haidt's 'purity' axis, but I think there is harm too in sibling incest. Even between relatively close siblings there can be a significant power differential, for one thing. For another there's the issue of fucking up a unique and good kind of relationship by injecting sex into it.
There is probably way more friskiness going on between teenage siblings than anyone cares to admit.
Greater than or less than the canonical dog masturbation rate?
There is probably way more friskiness going on between teenage siblings than anyone cares to admit.
Greater than or less than the canonical dog masturbation rate?
1, 2: Presumably because all gay sex used to be illegal, and then once it wasn't, nobody (or at least not a majority) wanted to be the politician to vote for legalising incest.
There are power differentials in a lot of sexual relationships and there are a lot of siblings who do not have uniquely close relationships. I do think there should be a social taboo against it but only a mild one. Rather than poop eating it should be more akin to enjoying a golden shower.
8: Right - the DSCC is the Senate side. I'm easily confused because I'm deluged with emails from both begging for money.
15: Now that eating poop is a medical treatment, you may be going in the wrong direction there.
I was not expecting this detailed a metric to arise in the thread.
I think the German suggestion is a good one and am generally in favor of consensual adult relationships. That said, I know of several cases where someone who was sexually abusing a child ended up with that crime being taken more seriously because it was "corroborated" by incest between that adult and another adult and I feel squeamish about this sort of thing because it's not far down a slippery slope from analogies I wouldn't think are appropriate, and yet all the cases I know of are ones where I truly believe the abuse happened and I'm glad it was dealt with and stopped, so....
That said, I know of several cases where someone who was sexually abusing a child ended up with that crime being taken more seriously because it was "corroborated" by incest between that adult and another adult and I feel squeamish about this sort of thing because it's not far down a slippery slope from analogies I wouldn't think are appropriate
Like "homosexual pedophile" being synonymous with "homosexual" in the minds of... most people until very recently?
15: Maybe we can compromise on sheep fucking.
I hope this turns into a 300 comment thread concerning the precise ordering of social taboos.
The taboo against incest should be weaker than the one against reporting your neighbors for putting their garbage cans out too early.
15: Good point. To tie things up with a nice bow, let's just say that sibling sex is on the same level as being pleasured by the family dog.
I don't think there should be a taboo on tying things up with a bow.
20: Exactly. I feel very guilty about being relieved that the adult consensual(ish; it's complicated and I'm not going to talk about details because thank goodness they are my stories) incest making people squeamish but I'm sort of glad it did. I'm not sure how ashamed to be of that.
What if the bow is on a poop that someone's about to eat?
I don't buy the birth defect argument.
Have you actually researched it?
27: Not in any detail. Is there something I should know?
We seem to have converged on some form of bestiality as the appropriate level of taboo. That seems reasonable to me.
Consensual bestiality, nothing in the grey area.
What if the bow is on a poop that someone's about to eat?
32: Only animals large enough to seriously maim if they get pissed off.
As grandma always said "you can't have gray rape with a great ape."
Is there something I should know?
Kind of a bad idea! Seriously, the birth defect and child mortality rate really do spike like crazy.
Lumping these topics will activate blocking software, shutting down the second topic.
I gave to Grimes last night. I do not have that much trust for the democratic establishment to make great choices. LB suggested local legislature races instead in the other thread, food for thought, but not appealing this year in my state.
Marriage between first cousins used to be a wealth preservation and clan strengthening tactic in Europe, still is in south asia.
There's a bunch of human genetics that's basically done by looking for unusual problems in consanguinous families there.
Consanguinity is a risk factor for diabetes and developmental disabilities at least, though these are multilocus traits, so poverty and other environmental factors are relevant also.
I'm ambivalent on the sibling incest front. Mostly, I think the social taboo is a good thing, because usually (where do I get my sense of the probabilities from? I have no idea!) incestuous sex is going to involve unhealthy power dynamics in a way that makes it similar to molestation, even if both parties are adult at the time it comes to anyone's attention (and the idea of adult siblings who start having sex as adults, rather than having started as teens, seems implausible to me barring situations where they grew up separately). On the other hand, I don't know if making it illegal actually does any good, and it is hard on whatever percentage of incestuous siblings actually aren't doing each other any harm.
So, I have no idea. Germany can do what it likes.
My favorite assignment in library school involved finding out about St. Augustine's views on brother-sister incest -- or rather how he dealt with the question of who Adam and Eve's children married.
Germany can do what it likes.
That attitude didn't work well for me.
Consensual bestiality, nothing in the grey area.
I don't think most animals are in a position to provide enthusiastic consent. Or if they are, the whole pet, pet-owner power differential makes it problematic. I don't think the family dog could be considered as giving consent, because he also knows where the Alpo is coming from. Maybe with smart, wild animals it there could be consent. Like dolphins, maybe. I'm willing to put sibling sex at a similar social taboo level as consensual dolphin sex.
On the electoral front, I've been slacking. A little googling gives me the following for New York State Senate races:
A particularly noteworthy race to watch for is District 46, where there is a rematch from a peculiarly close 2012 race. In that race, former state senator George Amedore (R) was officially sworn in, but county election officials opened new ballots that gave Cecilia Tkaczyk (D) the win by 18 votes. Amedore is trying to win back the seat he held for just a few days.[3]
Another race, according to political analyst Bob Davis, could be the one that tips the scales in favor of the Republicans. In District 60, Kevin T. Stocker defeated incumbent Mark Grisanti in the Republican primary and will now face Timothy D. Gallagher (D) in the general election. The district leans more Democratic than Republican, but is considered to be anyone's game.[4]
The source is Ballotpedia, which I know nothing about, but I'm going to go look up Tkaczyk and Gallagher, and if they don't seem to suck I'll give them money. As a bonus, if you get Tkaczyk to say her name backwards, she has to return to the fifth dimension.
Step-siblings, on the other hand, should be free to get it on. Like that brother-sister couple in LOST. That was hot.
The Yanomamo, who have a chronic deficit of women (due to their habit of killing girl babies born to a mother who hasn't had a son already, so, really, they have only themselves to blame) have a custom that the only man that another man is allowed to trust is his brother in law. All other men, even brothers, are untrustworthy, because they're potential competitors for women. Really, it's a good job they have an incest taboo because otherwise they wouldn't have any friends at all.
Tkaczyk appears to be not obviously loathsome. I'm sending her some money.
I gave to Grimes last night.
'Visions' is a pretty good album, but I don't know if I'd donate.
Done, for Tkaczyk. Now to look up Gallagher.
47, she needs the money more than Tune-Yards or St. Vincent.
Just to be clear, I don't care much about incest taboos at a societal level but I've been very clear about instilling them in the girls both between each other (for normal age-related "When I grow up, YOU can be my partner!" stuff) and within their biological families, though that's not the reason I'm in favor of open adoption, though some adoptive parents use that reasoning. On that front, though, I really need Mara's dad to pin down the names of as many of his grandchildren as he can because the odds are pretty high that at least a few of her nieces and nephews go to school with her.
In this particular incest case, the siblings were raised apart and met as adults. I haven't investigated fully, but this may be the full Lone Star situation, where the people meet, fall in love, and then discover they are siblings. This is very important, because it negates the whole power dynamic argument.
It is also interesting because of the actual psychological mechanisms behind the incest taboo. The Westermarck effect is the tendenency for people raised as siblings not to feel sexual attraction to one another, regardless of whether they are blood relatives. Reunion mediated genetic sexual attradtion is the tendency for people who are related by blood to find each other sexually attractive if the meet as adults. All this says to me that the incest taboo is based on an instinct with an environmental trigger and the environmental trigger actually covers up a completely opposed instinct.
One way to develop incest laws is to actually take this into account, and treat the relevant factor in incest to be how people are raised, and not actual genetics.
At what age would "raised together" kick in? Express your answer in terms of Brady kids.
Huh. Gallagher isn't the Democrat in the Senate District 60 race, he's running on the Conservative Party line (minor NYS party, I don't even think they have a ballot line any more). The Democrat in that race is Marc Panepinto. He's got labor endorsements front and center on his website, which looks promising.
53: Based on the kibbutz study, I would say it could only possibly affect Bobby and Cindy.
The 52.1 situation is quite common, I believe.
In that, people who are related but don't meet until adulthood, often find each other very attractive.
I have a friend who is adopted, who met his half-sisters when he was, I think, 19 or 20, and they were 17 and 18.* He was quite freaked out by just quite how hard they made a play for him [can't remember if it was one or both]. Nothing happened. He found the whole thing really unsettling.
* his Mum had him, while she was travelling in the UK and got pregnant after a fling. Went back to her home country and married childhood sweetheart, had babies soon after.
I should read 52 more thoroughly.
Panepinto does have a conviction for election fraud. Minor -- back in 2001, he was responsible for collecting signatures on nominating petitions, and attested that he had seen the signatures made on some pages where he had not actually witnessed them, and some of the signatures were fraudulent. Not sure how I feel about giving him money. Someone talk me into or out of it?
Supporting Panepinto is the moral equivalent of a golden shower.
I think I now understand the reason for the analogy ban on a deeper level.
And I'm still not sure if 59 is an attempt to talk me into or out of supporting him.
Which is to say, I don't even know.
The attraction to people who look like you thing is odd -- when they were dating, my parents were apparently mistaken for siblings a number of times (both tall and broadshouldered with pretty much the same coloring).
On the one hand, the issue of forging signatures is something that actually bothers me because of the potential for astroturfing and some of the stuff I recall from Republican-backed Ralph Nader ballot petitions. On the other hand, thirteen years seems long enough past unless there are more recent hints.
Hints of further corrupt practices, that is.
And my sense of the NYS ballot petition laws is that they're absurdly burdensome, to the point that cutting corners is, while still not okay, the kind of thing that you could see happening.
The fact that he got caught suggests ineptness. Unless he was taking the fall for someone higher up -- in that case, he's a team player, and that's good.
In this particular incest case, the siblings were raised apart and met as adults. I haven't investigated fully, but this may be the full Lone Star situation, where the people meet, fall in love, and then discover they are siblings. This is very important, because it negates the whole power dynamic argument.
Reading The Half Has Never Been Told, apparently this was a stock trope in slave narratives. (Baptist doesn't really say whether he thinks it actually happened, or whether it just came up repeatedly because it was a stark way of demonstrating just how destructive slavery was of black families.)
Ah, this settles it. Cuomo didn't endorse Panepinto as against the Republican incumbent. I'm giving him money.
I can't help on Panepinto, but I'll testify from a local POV that Tkaczyk is worth supporting (and that her opponent is affirmatively undesirable, which you were probably presuming).
A few years ago, the U.S. version of the Big Brother reality show threw together a half-brother and half-sister who did not know each other and did not know of each other's existence. (For non TV viewers, the premise of the show is that about 20 strangers live together in a house that they can't leave for a few months.) Sadly for the ratings, they didn't emotionally or physically connect either before or after they figured out their connection. If they had done the deed, they probably wouldn't have committed a crime due to lack of knowledge, but the producers who put them together arguably could be liable for conspiracy to cause a felony or something like that. Would have been a fascinating law school hypothetical.
73: Oh, good. Do you have a local sense of how the race is going?
77: That's a more-than-fair question ... but I actually don't. I spoke up based on an awareness of Tkaczyk's behavior during her term, and a few conversations with activist friends, but I haven't got current/day-by-day information that'd beat what you got from your original online clearinghouse. Sorry!
(You have made it much more likely that I'll ask around, though.)
Not actually important, but now that I've given her money I feel a certain sense of affiliation.
The attraction to people who look like you thing is odd
Racist.
80, 81: Actually Lee and I have been asked several times if we're sisters, back in the days before kids. Apparently being about the same height and both wearing glasses trumps the considerations you mention.
I think you live close enough to Ohio that we can rule out it having been asked by people with very dry senses of humor.
52 makes sense. I'm pretty sure if I had a sister but didn't know it, I'd be really attracted to her if I met her.
This is sort of related to the sex-with-your-clone discussions isn't it.
But T&L could be half sisters, look as different as they do, and call each other sister, to make the answer "yes."
Sincere guesses, Moby, admittedly mostly by little old ladies. Though when we did meet Lee's previously unknown half-sister, she was similar in height and had glasses and is much closer to my skin tone than Lee's, so perhaps they do see something I don't. It was sort of freaky (both with her and with Lee's biological mom, who didn't raise Lee) to see the similarities in their interests and just how they'd hold their bodies. There were several times they'd unconsciously make the same small hand movement or tilt of the head, and maybe that's what always happens and I was just noticing it because I was paying attention, but it was striking. And none of them were attracted to each other.
Crossed with 86. Two of Lee's half-siblings are biracial. I don't think anyone black would think I'm black at all, which makes sense since to my knowledge I'm not, but the marginal cases are harder for white people to figure out.
Van and Ada may have been okay but let's not forget poor Lucette.
people who are related but don't meet until adulthood, often find each other very attractive
The attraction to people who look like you thing
"Assortative mating," that all is.
83 was just me trolling the Ohioans.
Unless you are actually in the full Lone Star unknowing incest category, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you are routinely having sex with your adult sibling you are likely also a creep who's up to various other horrible acts (or someone who has been seriously abused).
Maybe you just don't have hot siblings.
I'm also going to go way out on a limb and state that upholding the incest taboo should probably be a permissible function of a legal system designed by humans.
Just dropping into this thread to report that the geek sphere has a notable lack of speculation about what the midi-chlorian count of a hypothetical Luke and Leia baby would have been.
92: How do you feel about bestiality?
About the same. Doubt there are many sheep-rapers out there who have sex-positive, affirmatively consensual, Jezebel-approved intimate relations with humans.
Since I just learned about the Pocohontas Exception to Virginia's old miscegenation laws, and combining that with the various Romeo and Juliet laws, I'm now imagining a Skywalker Exception being added to incest laws.
92: That does not fit with what I have read about genetic sexual attraction, which sometimes hits otherwise normal people when the meet a relative they previously did not know about.
100 -- isn't that the full Lone Star? Or do you mean people where it's like "here's your long lost sister" and the first thought, with knowledge of the sibling relationship, is "let's bone."
If my wife knows that a movie has a twist at the end, she figures it out early in the movie. It's infuriating. The worst was Lone Star, where she figured out the twist like 20 minutes into the movie. I was so annoyed when she guessed it, I lied and told her she had it wrong.
I thought Lone Star was a Space Balls reference.
100: How can that actually be validated, though? I'm not sure how researchers could construct a sample of relatives who don't know they're related, to bring together vs. a control group that's not related.
How can love be validated? If you've got to ask, you're already lost.
106: Yes. If I haven't seen the movie, she keeps it to herself until the end, and then gloats.
The power relations between siblings are such that I'd be pretty skeptical of "consent" in such a relationship. As in the consent thread earlier this week, it could certainly happen but my guess is it doesn't. (Lone Star exception aside, I guess.)
It hasn't worked out all that well for Jaime and Cersei, so far.
110: And then you wouldn't let her watch the rest of the movie, so she wouldn't know you were lying?
Can siblings have sex in a porn movie?
What is the sound of one sibling having sex?
112: It was like hitting the snooze button. Lying gave me an hour and a half before I had to admit she was right.
113: Actual siblings or fictional siblings?
113: I say this purely on the basis of second-hand references, but aren't twins a thing?
115: Well, not like it was the first time she caught you lying. And of course she knew all along, right?
aren't twins a thing?
I've only heard of actual twins being naked in something like Playboy. No idea if actual twins have been in porn. I'm curious whether the "making art" exception would hold in the case of incest.
I don't know of any twins that had sex in porn, though my knowledge is not encyclopedic. There were various sets of twins that posed nude together. I'd imagine that the distinction is like that strictly abided to in porn scenes in straight porn with two men and one woman -- the men can both be having sex with the woman at the same time, but are not allowed to touch each other at all, much less have sex with each other.
118: No, she believed me. I should have saved my lie for a more useful situation.
I knew some twins that were totally up the same woman's vagina at the same time. For like nine months.
The worst was Lone Star, where she figured out the twist like 20 minutes into the movie.
I work very hard to figure out movie endings, and I'm horrible at it. Any movie that makes a minimal effort at misdirection is going to fool me.
I loved, loved, loved Lone Star, in part because the surprise ending was such a surprise, and in part because I thought it was really profound.
Ogged, here you go. The link is to Salon.com but I am scared to read the article at work. Apparently there's a gay porn twin incest niche.
Years ago, we sat down to watch The Usual Suspects. My future F-i-L walked in and watched for about five minutes before saying, "The gimp did it."
Great abs! But since they're not in America, it doesn't quite answer my question (which I wasn't clear about).
126: My sister hasn't responded to my request.
126: Have you worked in a professional setting with your sister, IYKWIM?
knecht's and Moby's sisters both responded to my requests.
Is anyone here a twin? You'd think someone would be but I can't think of anyone.
52.last: unless the shared genetics are the actual problem and "raised as siblings" is the close-enough-and-easy-to-implement check of the sort that evolution loves to come up with.
119: a friend tells me that there's at least one set of female twins that does hardcore porn, and that they are sufficiently below normal porn attractiveness standards that their claim to twin-ness is plausible.
I infer from the last sentence of this that it seems that you can't even legally distribute, let alone film, pornography with actual twin sex in the U.S. and U.K.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incest_pornography
123: At this point I can see how she does it, though she's still better at it. When she watched a movie or reads a book, she never, ever forgets she's reading something that was created by a person for a purpose, so each time there's a new element introduced, she asks herself why. The rules of good storytelling, like Chekov's maxim about the gun, are the very thing that lets her figure it out.
125: She also figured out The Usual Suspects pretty early, but that wasn't as infuriating. The way Gabriel Byrne says "Keyser Sose" at the beginning is a big hint as to what the twist would be about. Lone Star there's no hint until more than half-way through, unless you have superhuman powers of deduction.
If the question is legality in the US, the state can make (and has made) the act of incest illegal and prosecutable. No exception for porn actors there. In terms of possession or distribution of material showing incest on film, while I don't know offhand of the specific statute that would apply, you almost certainly could make distribution of video showing acts of actual incest illegal under similar reasoning to the child pornography laws. You couldn't, of course, ban distribution of material that imitates or pretends to be incest.
Thank you, researchers of Unfogged.
she never, ever forgets she's reading something that was created by a person for a purpose
You think it's all real, don't you? Bless your heart.
Next thing you know it's going to turn out that some of the women in porn cast as mothers don't even have children!
I've had so many movies ruined by walking in at the wrong time right at the reveal. Oh, Shawshank Redemption- it's a prison escape movie, what happened in the earlier parts?
I thought SCOTUS said simulated child porn was just was illegal- photoshopping a kids face onto adult nude, wouldn't the same apply to other simulated illegal to distribute material?
It's kind of annoying how the Wikipedia page for The Usual Suspects has the name of Kevin Spacey's character in quotes consistently throughout the article. It's even more annoying because somebody surely used the fact that he's referred to by a nickname ("Verbal") as justification for doing so.
142 -- it's a little more complicated. "Simulated" child sex means a depiction of children having sex, using camera tricks or something to depict a sexual act, not just a suggestion of sexual conduct. The act of producing such "simulated" child pornography is something that's just flat out illegal under federal law (very properly!) and distributing it is also illegal under Supreme Court caselaw. The Court used is, basically, that it's got to be illegal to offer to buy, sell, or distribute something that's illegal and contraband anyway. In the case of incest, I don't know of any statutory prohibition on the act of pretending to have incest (i.e., two adult actors who are not in fact related pretend to be related on the camera), and such a ban would probably, at least for adult actors, raise constitutional problems. So, as long as the underlying sexual act isn't illegal, you probably couldn't ban distribution of fake-incest porn under the First Amendment.
"the rationale the Court used." Goddamn phone!
131: I think Robert Halford and TRobert Halford are, but I'm not sure which one's the evil one.
146: The goatee is the give away.
118,120: Teenage Twins or Teenage Tarts, 1976, Brooke and Taylor Young. They did a few other movies. At IMDB. Some external reviews have images
There was a Swedish movie where a Lesbian woman who is engaged to a man falls for the daughter of her father's new wife. They met as adults. Not blood relatives and gay, so?
I'm also going to go way out on a limb and state that upholding the incest taboo should probably be a permissible function of a legal system designed by humans.
I'm way out there on the same limb. It would be different if we were robots, of course.
Where's gswift? I think he's the only other person who listened to Lovelines and might remember Adam Carolla singing the theme song to some weird 70s incest porno. He sang it often; I still know the tune.
I remember. The porno was called Taboo, or maybe Tabu.
I agree with Halford and Just Plain Jane about the incest taboo and the law. I'm not a true liberal like the rest of you folks. Non-coercive consent isn't always enough in my book.
Lizardbreath in 66: "The attraction to people who look like you thing is odd -- when they were dating, my parents were apparently mistaken for siblings a number of times (both tall and broadshouldered with pretty much the same coloring)."
This reminds me of something I heard early in my marriage:
Narcissism: Personality disorder or marital aid?
unless the shared genetics are the actual problem and "raised as siblings" is the close-enough-and-easy-to-implement check of the sort that evolution loves to come up with
It seems like that is exactly what evolution did, but the law doesn't have to follow evolution. In particular, the actual risk of genetic impairments due to inbreeding are small and don't apply in many cases, like the gay one, so that can't be the motivation for the law.
Basically, I'm with Halford and JPJ that the state can have a role here. I'm just suggesting that the state only ban the behavior that is unlikely to happen except in really fucked up situations.
isn't that the full Lone Star? Or do you mean people where it's like "here's your long lost sister" and the first thought, with knowledge of the sibling relationship, is "let's bone."
The latter. It seems to happen to otherwise normal people.
Really there are all sorts of sequences that are possible.
Meet---fall in love---bone--find out you are related
Meet---fall in love--find out you are related--bone anyway
Meet---find out your are related---fall in love---bone anyway.
etc.
151: Taboo 2!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiSCu8yb0iU
And the original story of how it came up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCWqPv6wVZw
Oh my god, that theme song is weirder than I remembered.
So that's Dr. Drew participating in this? How could anyone ever think he was anything but a sleazeball quack?
Well, that's what made the show irresistible. Corolla is super funny and dr. Drew is super infuriating.
re donations--if you care about national security/civil liberties: Mark Udall. dead heat. thoroughly decent guy. Wonderful staff. Stands up for other people's wonderful staffers (cough Feinstein cough) better than they do. Second to Wyden as most valuable player on surveillance; went further out on a limb than Wyden re torture and drone memos. Don't know record on other issues as well but seems to generally run to Obama's left on e.g. immigration, in the sort of race that tends to make other Democratic senators forget all their principles. And his opponent's a schmuck.
(Tom Udall is not bad either but not in nearly as much jeopardy and I don't know his record as well.)
159: God, it's been too long since I sang that song. I'm pouring out some more booze and re-committing it to memory. Here it is in isolation. You should have your kids learn it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_9peBUo8VM
Since now we've moved onto Taboo 2, has the time for this thread finally come?
Most on-topic comment from the ostensibly non-porn part of the linked thread (that proposed the thread that gswift is referring to as "this thread" but is not in fact "this thread"):
162
158: I distinctly remember thinking that four boys to a room would be more fun than one or two. I think that that was the general opinion. My two sisters shared a room until the older graduated.
Posted by: John Emerson
163
162: orgy party!
Posted by: Sifu Tweety
As I understand it, the original impetus to outlaw incest in Western countries was as part of a larger eugenics movement, so I can see why Germans more willing than others to overturn the ban. Since most Western countries have abandoned the other parts of their dysgenics legislation as morally problematic, I'm not sure what the grounds for keeping incest illegal are, other than a sort of sense of visceral disgust (which I share, having siblings). I do share the concern about coercion and that legalizing incest might make it harder to prosecute child abuse, but I also thinking that in general consenting adults should be allowed to have the relationships they want. Maybe what I think should really happen is that everything stays as it is and the unicorn relationships of siblings who meet as adults and have fulfilling consensual relationships just kind of be left alone, but I'm not sure how strongly I believe this.
Also, I know someone who met his wife at a family reunion when they were both adults. They're something like 7th cousins, which is well into genetic stranger territory, but it makes for a very awkward "how we met" story.
Also, I am a little surprised that China doesn't outlaw sibling sex. Maybe it's a way to encourage families to have girls?
I'm not sure what the grounds for keeping incest illegal are, other than a sort of sense of visceral disgust
You're like the third person in this thread to hand wave away the genetic issues here. Google around you fuckers.
I've mentioned before that my mother's great grandfather was the son of parents who were each the product of first cousin marriages. (Ms. Mead was the daughter of Mr. Mead and his first cousin Miss Mead; her husband Mr. Hobby was the son of Mr. Hobby and his first cousin Miss Hobby.) One of my mom's first cousins (also a descendant of the above mentioned great grandfather) is himself married to a first cousin. They live in KY, but were married in NC.
Anyway, the great grandfather was kind of nutty on the subject of the taboo, thinking it silly etc.
And then he ended up addicted to opium.
170.2: That's not quite as nutty a thought for first cousins where coefficient of relationship is 12.5. Siblings are 50. Kind of a big difference.
He was a nut, though.
His father -- son of first cousins -- was a member of a circus troupe. I'd love to learn a little more about that, what his event was etc, but I've never figured out a good way to research circus performers from the 1840s.
The living one is a really nice guy, and the first cousin marriage was a second for both (he was a widower, I'm not sure about her) well beyond child bearing years.
And "they live in KY" is like the most natural ending of the story in 170 ever, right? Or is West Virginia giving them a run for the money?
The bulk of 170 involved families from Greenwich Connecticut, who migrated to Westchester Co. NY. Not exactly Appalachia.
169
No, I know that there are real issues, but since we no longer disallow people with disabilities or hereditary genetic disorders from procreating, it seems hypocritical to disallow siblings from procreating. I also think the social harms of disallowing people from procreating because we think their offspring will be damaged is greater than the social cost of looking after any possibly disabled offspring. I doubt that many siblings really actually want to reproduce, so on a public health scale, it doesn't seem like a big deal to me.
the social harms of disallowing people from procreating
I think I'd be down for throwing libertarians into that mix.
There's a reason H. P. Lovecraft set so many of his stories about inbred degenerates in New England.
167.1 is wrong. Laws restricting consanguineous marriages predate the eugenics movement by literally centuries. Canon law was incredibly strict on this - in fact an easy way to annul an undesired marriage for a mediaeval noble was to produce evodence that it was within the forbidden degrees of consanguinity, which was IIRC anything out to seven generations at times.
Centuries? Sorry, millennia. Roman law.
179
Looking back, my phrasing was overly strong, as you're right that there are other prohibitions against incest that go back millennia, but there's a strong link between eugenics and anti-incest laws in the 20th century, which is a particularly sensitive topic in Germany.
181: ah, that's interesting. You mean the laws actually got stronger in the 20th century than they were in the 19th?
On a related topic, I wikied consanguinity and found this little shocker: "marriage with aunts and uncles (avunculate marriage) is legal in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, France, Malaysia, and Russia, among other places in the world."
179. Then the protestants dropped all that. Permitted consanguinity in the CoE is first cousins, the very degree of relationship that gets well intentioned liberals all fired up when they're talking about marriage customs in Kashmir, for example.
I'm not sure if the reformers did this because they didn't understand the risks, or because they were determined to do the opposite of what the Pope said, or what. I'd like to read a discussion of it, if one exists.
183: my vague impression is that the Catholic or "Kevin Bacon" position was pretty much impossible to enforce in either small communities or aristocratic society, and so was widely ignored or dispensed against. Probably that's why the Protestants decided to get rid of it altogether.
Darwin married his own cousin (Emma Wedgwood) - later becoming alarmed at the figures on birth defects, which he blamed for the early death of his daughter Annie (I think it was Annie).
The legal position in Ireland was the "Protestant" position, but AFAIK the modernish Catholic religious position was that first cousins would have to get a dispensation from the bishop.
Noticeable issues from much intermarrying occur here among Protestants (in areas where they are a minority and perhaps more so sixty years ago than now) and, increasingly now, among the travelling community (where apparently nearly every, large, family has at least one sick child).
185.1 is interesting; I wouldn't have thought that the population had been reproductively isolated for long enough. Some inherited disorders are very common in Ireland in general, http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/20764508?uid=3738032&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21104786088877 but I'd be interested to read stuff about the Protestant population in particular.
Definitely the taboo against cousin marriage has gotten stronger in the US since the beginning of the 20th century, and I'm pretty sure Buttercup's right that it was the eugenics movement that inspired laws against cousin-marriage where they exist. Marrying first cousins is mentioned in 19th century novel all the time as not even a little sketchy. (See, e.g, Lousia May Alcott's Eight Cousins, where the whole plot of the book (with its sequel) turns on which of her seven cousins the protagonist is going to marry.)
Siblings, on the other hand, have I think been off limits consistently everywhere but a couple of royal families.
This is totally anecdotal stuff, there may be research but i don't know of it. The reason I say sixty or more years ago is that you probably had the perfect storm combo of decline in actual Protestant population post-independence plus still strict adherence to no intermarrying (maybe even stricter than in 19thC, Ne Temere was 1907) plus still fairly limited likely partner pool distance-wise (whereas bicycles had probably already expanded the Catholic pool. Not in a Third Policeman sense).
Not in a Third Policeman sense
Glad you clarified that.
Certainly my father in law was cycling all over Ireland 60 years ago, so I suppose he could have met someone anywhere in the country. This hadn't occurred to me, but it's a good point.
[As luck would have it he met an American tourist, from which I infer that Irish women could spot him a mile off and run for cover.]
I think the underlying population genetics could be the same as the overall population, just that once you increase consanguineous marriage then the chances are upped of having the same bad genes as opposed to different ones.
To go even further out on an unsupported limb, the anecdotal stuff would be in regard to rural Protestants of modest means rather than elites and would include a perceived general "won't set the world on fire" level of academic intelligence as well as whatever increase in actual health problems. Personally I'd say the endogamy has declined again ine the last fee decades and there's unlikely to be any noticeable higher incidence in whatever.
I see that galactosemia, one of the disorders mentioned in that JSTOR paper, is found in about 1 in 60,000 people of European descent, one in 30,000 of the general Irish population and 1 in 480 Irish Travellers. I suspect that would be a historically more isolated population, folk songs notwithstanding.
People thought nothing of cycling 20 miles to a dance after a hard day's work, which meant that you might meet someone from 20 miles the other side of the town where the dance was held; so maybe 40 miles range of potentials. Before that I think the likely range was more like 10 miles.
174.1: KY forbids anything closer than second cousins for marriage, but I have no idea how long that's been the case. And they generally trust you to self-report, though a coworker recounts the clerk telling her and her now-husband, "You know, that means are y'all kin?" in case they hadn't understood.
Well, Kentucky is pretty mountainous. Not great bicycling territory.
I am sensing that emir is subconsciously writing a first draft of "Instability and Forward Momentum: The Socio-Cultural Impact Of The Bicycle In Rural Ireland, 1851-1979".
182, 187
Yes, I was going to say that. Most anti-incest laws in the US come directly out of the eugenics movement in the early 20th century.
I wonder if this might be a Catholic/Protestant country divide, where Catholic countries originally outlawed incest for religious reasons, and Protestant countries originally outlawed incest for eugenics reasons. Looking at current European laws on wikipedia incest is legal in France, Benelux, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and kind of Russia and Italy ("Incest is illegal in Italy if it causes a "public scandal"" which sounds about right.) I wonder if those are the same Catholic countries which allow abortion?
It's also true that if inbreeding occurs for a long enough time, the most deleterious traits get bred out of the gene pool. As my evolutionary biology professor once put it, inbreeding is really only bad* if you don't do it for long enough.
*major caveat is that "bad" only means "affects fertility", so no worries about 6 fingers or being a sociopath or dropping dead at 50.
Oh, really belatedly, but as to the final question on part 1 the OP, it doesn't appear like gay incestual sex is illegal, because the German law explicitly bans vaginal sex:
"In Germany, incest is legally defined as vaginal intercourse between lineal ancestors and descendants (parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren) and between full and half siblings.[29] The penalty is a fine or up to 3 years of prison. Incest between relatives who are minors (below 18 years old) at the time of offence is not punishable but remains a crime, therefore aiding and abetting of incest between related minors is punishable.[30]"
-wikipedia
And, um, Benelux includes the Netherlands, so I don't know why I listed it twice.
195: I think you're confusing incest laws having been broadened in response to the eugenics movement with incest laws having been originally passed in response to the eugenics movement. Parents and siblings were, I am quite sure, always out of bounds in the US.
187: Piketty's real impact will be the mainstreaming of Argument From 19th Century Novel.
It has always been my primary source of information about the world.
But now it's respectable to be out of the closet* about it.
*Or "out of the wardrobe" in 18th century novel speak.
Out from behind the arras, in 17th century play speak.
198
That could definitely be the case. This is a completely speculative armchair theory of incest laws, so it's more than probably the initial hypothesis won't hold up. It's amazingly hard to find good information on the history or development of incest laws in various countries, and I'm currently only able to search using bing (Thanks, C----- Govt!). Not that earlier google was giving me better results, although I did find this gem:
I think my first book will also be "edited by [me] from high quality Wikipedia articles"
I'm currently only able to search using bing (Thanks, C----- Govt!)
This is continuing with the 19th century novel theme, isn't it?
"Buttercup, though an otherwise talkative person, found herself unaccountably unable to mention the events of the *th of J---, 19--, in T-------- S-----, or the current unrest in H--- K---."
More lazy speculation, what with being on my phone where looking things up is a hassle. Prohibited degrees of incest might easily have been a common-law matter before the 20thc -- while it is completely implausible that parent-child and sibling incest were permitted at any time throughout the history of the U.S., I'd certainly believe that the first state _statutes_ on the subject were passed in the 20th c.
If we want to go the literature route, in Defoe's Moll Flanders, in colonial America Moll gets one of her marriages dissolved after finding out her husband is actually her half-brother.
According to this article, incestuous marriages were explicitly outlawed in Mass in 1695, although earlier courts had dissolved some marriages as they were against "the Word of God & Statutes of England." England outlawed incest based on proscriptions in Leviticus, which IIRC are among direct descendents to the second generation. Interestingly, it appears Puritans were pretty broad in what counted as incestuous, forbidding both Levirate and Sororate marriages.
I know the Church of England at one time prohibited marriage to a man's deceased wife's sister, but only because people bring it up as funny fairly often.
206: sororate marriage was still a legal niggle in late 19th century England. One of the overdue reforms that Strephon promises on being elected to parliament (through the intervention of the Queen of the Fairies), along with opening up the House of Lords to selection by competitive examination, is:
"He shall prick that annual blister/ Marriage to Deceased Wife's Sister!"
That was actually supposed to be 19th not 18th in 201. I blame my phone.
Now on a computer trying to verify my version of the historical trajectory of "closet" and it's a bit complicated. "Closet" actually trends down from the 19th century to the middle of the twentieth. But "clothes closet"* pretty much follows the pattern I would expect. Presumably it's the more general "human"/dressing closet which drove 19th century usage. Which makes me wonder if "out of the closet" (also graphed on the second link) originated specifically from the "small, private room for humans" sense of the term.
Eh, probably a distinction without a difference.
There is a metaphorical sense of "closeted" meaning "locked away, private" which survived the transition of "closet" from "small private room for people" to "wardrobe", and which is almost certainly where you get "out of the closet" from, via "closet homosexual" (you also got "closet Catholic", "closet Communist" etc.)
There's a reason H. P. Lovecraft set so many of his stories about inbred degenerates in New England.
Because he was afraid of poor people and not just foreigners?
I was reminded of my favorite comment about H.P. Lovecraft, from Teresa Nielsen-Hayden:
While I appreciate HPL's finely calibrated descents into gibbering horror, his usual occasions for this--
foreigners
a tiny breach in natural law
the narrator's relatives
words with too many consonants
seafood
all of the above--have never struck me with the same kind of reason-oversetting terror they held for H. P. Lovecraft.
(whereas bicycles had probably already expanded the Catholic pool. Not in a Third Policeman sense).
How much of your DNA has to be shared with the bicycle before you can't marry it?