Nothing is Wrong With People Who Enjoy Sex

Yasmin Sattarzadeh wrote about incest, including both consanguinamory (consensual sex) and rape/assault/molestation under that label. The negativity expressed towards the consensual sex sounds very familiar.

There is one word that is almost always linked with the urge to run and hide: incest.

That is why I like the term “consanguinamory” for consensual relationships.

But what does incest entail and why do some people engage in interfamilial relationships?

For many of the same reasons people have sex in general. Because they’re in love, because it feels good, because they’re curious, because they want to strengthen a bond…

The origin of incestuous behavior and its ongoing practice remains a puzzle; its beginning is ancient and has been touched on in many religious texts around the world. It doesn’t help that talks about incest, especially in the West, have been tabooed and avoided.

No, that certainly doesn’t help.

In legal terminology, incest often includes unions between non-biological and biological relatives. According to a 1995 study by Maddock and Larson, sibling-to-sibling unions appear to be the most common form of consanguineous, or common ancestral, mating. This may still be the case today, but as far as the majority of Western society is concerned, individuals who engage in incest are usually considered sex offenders.

They shouldn’t be, if we’re talking about consensual sex.

Perhaps the lack of public and consensual incestuous relationships leads many people to conclude that all incestuous relationships are forced.

There’s a catch there. People don’t go public because they fear prosecution, bullying, and discrimination. Since they don’t go public, others don’t because they feel isolated. Thus, there is a lack of pressure to chance the laws.

If not out of force, or simple malevolent wrongdoing, incest may be a symptom of neurological deficit.

That’s what uptight people have said in the past about everything from masturbation to oral sex to gay sex to naturism to interracial relationships.

Five Torontonian researchers published a 1998 article in the journal Annals of Sex Research containing various studies that found a relationship between brain defects and unusual sexual behaviour. At that time, “the most interesting and best controlled study to date” was a blind study which found that 22 per cent of 86 patients with unusual sexual tendencies demonstrated sexual irregularities associated with specific patterns found in the temporal lobes of the brain.

How is it a defect that different activities are associated with different parts of the brain? That isn’t a defect.

In addition, 25 per cent of the incestuous individuals were pedophiles — a particular pattern of brain pathology was found in the left temporal frontal areas of the pedophilic brain.

This is exactly the same kind of nonsense used to slur gays for so many years. Guess what? Who is going to be an easier target for a rapist or molester than their own child? It is terrible to insinuate that consensual sex between adults is like raping or molesting.

This is pure conjecture, but the sheer resistance to the idea makes you wonder whether or not there are more people out there that have these desires or wishes.

If Internet traffic is any indication, a whole lot.

But the infamous psychoanalyst Carl Jung explored the incestuous fantasies in families in his book, Psychology of the Unconscious. In it, Jung describes this phenomenon as “kinship libido,” which is necessary in achieving good experiences in early life. “Incest fueled desire” is said to be a part of normal human love that healthy families cannot do without.

Interesting.

Some people develop an aversion to consanguineous sex (the cited Westermarck effect), some don't. Then there's Genetic Sexual Attraction, when close biological relatives reunite after being separated and after the younger one has also gone through puberty; absent the Westermarck effect, there is a strong attraction.

Consensual consanguineous sex has been a part of humanity all along, from royals to peasants, rich to poor, urban to rural, everything from youthful experimentation to lifelong relationships.

The fact is, there are healthy, well-adjusted, well-rounded, attractive, otherwise law-abiding people in consanguinamorous relationships, even with healthy children together. Most will not come out of the closet for fear of prosecution or persecution, but there is no good reason to keep laws or taboos against consensual consanguineous relationships. Personal disgust or religion is why any one person might not want to be in such a relationship, but that should not be binding on others.